As every 2 years, we have been attending the Venice Architecture Biennal. Find some first impressions below (if you’re reading the RSS feed, these images might not show):
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As mentioned below, EXD09 is going to kick off soon.
I am especially looking forward to the talks with Alejandro Aravena and Julien de Smedt on 9th September and Konstantin Grcic and Giulio Cappellini on the 12th. I’ll also have a closer look at the public space project at Jardim de Santos and the project towards a new criticism in design and architecture ‘Stop & Think’ – read more on that in the EXD’09 Detailed Program (pdf).
Perfectly in tune with my recent move from Rotterdam to Berlin* I can recommend the Bauhaus exhibition in the Martin Gropius Bau (where else?) in Berlin. The exhibition – the largest on Bauhaus in history – will be open until 4th of October 2009, and focuses on the period 1919 to 1933. It is refreshing and and overwhelming to see this wealth of utopian ideas, especially now.
ExperimentaDesign Lisboa has announced a call to submit a twenty second (20”) video for you to stand a chance to win special passes to EXD’09 Lisboa. More.
I like the idea of constrained design challenges, often leading to more interesting results as absolutely free choice of media. The demo scene comes to mind, with the inherent need to constrain the demos to minimal filesize (a good introduction would be this video), or artists experimenting with a minimal selection of tools: Steve Reich creating sounds by just cutting and looping (interesting enough performed live again by Peter Aidu in the video below), or Lars von Trier and the dogma movement, who banned effects and illusion, to get back to the essence of movie-making.
For more about the competition and Experimentadesign – Continue reading ’20 seconds’
The Berlage Institute is holding their final reviews for the first year studios today, from 10 to 21:30 (CEST). If you are quick, you can watch the live video stream here.
The first session is already over (When Economies Become Form: Micro-Economic Models as Spatial Prescriptions in Northeast Brazil, Tina DiCarlo and Markus Miessen). H2OBITAT (Freek Persyn, Laurence Tait, Nico Tillie) starts at 14:00 (CEST), and Bridging Untroubled Waters: The Ningbo Mall as a Quest for Alternative Strategies in Open Space Development (Rients Dijkstra, Thomas Stellmach) is scheduled for 18:30 (CEST). Teaching the latter studio has been one of the reason why it has been so quiet around here the during the last weeks…
The guest critics we’ve invited include Carson Chan, Director of Programs, Berlin; Filip Geerts, Assistant Professor of Architecture, TUDelft; Adrian Hornsby, editor, The Chinese Dream; Jorg Leeser, principal of BeL, Cologne; Hiroki Matsuura, architect, Maxwan, Rotterdam; Marc Ryan, architect, West8; Jan Nauta, researcher, nOffice, Berlin; Ralf Pflugfelder, partner of nOffice, Berlin; Caroline Rovers, Stadshavens Rotterdam; Jaap Wiedenhoff, principal, Arup, Amsterdam.
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The Rotterdam Design Award started its 2009 application period, deadline is 8 of May.
I have always been a sucker for consistent and smart graphical user interfaces, and work as such mostly on OS X. But I am even more of an efficiency, as in shortcuts, advocate. There are very few applications which balance the rather mouse oriented OS X interface with a smart shortcut system – Aperture being a positive example. Diametrically opposed to the Mac approach is Autodesk’s Autocad application, a technocratic and absurd mess of an application full of inconsistencies due to heritage, which still has a nerdy 1984 feel to it. Nonetheless, I love it. All comments are accessible via a command line, which enables you to just draw on a icon-free black canvas with the mouse hand, while the other hand rests on the keyboard typing out commands (we have discussed the notorious maxwan autocad shortcut system before). Purity. Zen.
This week Autodesk put up a survey on their site asking Acad/Mac users what features they would like to see most (and first) in a AutoCAD on OS X version. The survey is detailed enough to suggest that Autodesk really means it: Acad on OS X would eliminate one of the last reasons to ever boot into Windows again, and make me happy enough to jump around. It seems to be a chance to throw all that legacy ballast over board and give us a lean Autocad. But this will most probably stay a dream, and we’ll probably get another layer of weirdness added to Autocad. But we’re enthusiastic about Acad on a Mac nonetheless, and thus urge you all to participate in the survey to give it some momentum.
I’d like to point the german-speaking among you to the ChaosRadio Podcast Issue on Open Street Map. The Open Street Map (wikipedia entry) project is a collaborative effort to create maps without many of the licensing restrictions of other, proprietary, sources (OSM uses the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 license). Even though the map is the most visible feature of the project, it is mainly a data-collection effort. Additional information, as in the case of a road data like the amount of lanes, driving direction or speed limits can also be stored in the OSM database. This data can than be rendered in a multitude of ways and styles, like in other GIS systems. In contrast to these systems which cover the professional market, open street map has a more comprehensible interface. At this time about 70.000 people have registered at the project site.
The community is most active in central and northern Europe, and that is reflected in the amount of data and layers you have in the maps. Whereas in areas with an active community the data set is quite detailed, as for example in Berlin, other areas are blank – depending where the focus of the participating community lies. So in some spots you have information down to public phone booths, post boxes and bus stops, whereas in other regions even names of main streets are missing. In that respect the project is comparable to the early wikipedia, and might well grow to similar importance. Continue reading ‘Open Street Map’
Wonderland, a young architects network initiated by a group of former Berlagers, is now offering their Wonderland Magazine as a free PDF download. ‘Getting Started’, ‘Making Mistakes’, and now ‘Going Public’ – the titles of the first issues speak for themselves. The magazine is a refreshing hands on manual for young practices and gives some insight into the situation of architecture startups in Europe.
Apart from the burning building series, we observe a new trend on dysturb, architecture practices closing down. After the cuts at OMA and EEA’s bancruptcy, we received the link to the video below. It is filmed at Foster+Partners Berlin office on the day the announcement has been made to the team (Fri 13th), 3 days after it was announced to the press. Unfortunately, some of our friends have been working there. More a about the shutdown at bdonline.
TU Eindhoven invites to participate in the Workshop Advanced Architectural Structures, from 9-13 March. The workshop deals with generation and production of doubly curved surfaces and includes an introduction to Rhino as well as Processing. Registration closes tomorrow, participation fee for professionals is 300 Euros. Full program after the fold.
Continue reading ‘Workshop Advanced Architectural Structures’
I just found out that the office worked at in 2001 in Barcelona updated its website, finally (spanish architects often don’t consider it necessary to be present on the web).
Josep Mias (Mias Arquitectes) emerged as talented young architect from the school of Mirailles and founded his own office in 2001 after the death of Mirailles (see EMBT). I also made that transition from Mirailles to Mias while working there as an intern.
From 4th to 8th February Las Palmas Rotterdam hosts the Object Rotterdam Fair for autonomous design. Check our calendar for more dates in Rotterdam.
OMA announced on Tuesday that 50 of their 300 employees have to leave. Business Director van de Chijs comments that he expects OMA to survive the economical crisis as business is going well. But as they intend to be “terribly careful” the diceded on the lay-offs.
In related news OMA announces the same day that they won the competition to build the Taipei Performing Arts Centre (as widely reported). Have also a look at the very interesting runner-up by Abalos+Sentkiewicz.
Read on for more pictures and the press release of the OMA design. Continue reading ‘OMA fires 50, wins Taipei competition’
Every once in a while I am overcome by the feeling that I could have a glimpse of the future. Using Google Earth for the first time, or discovering screen sharing were such moments. As well as looking at Tineye today. Tineye is a web search service, you show it an image and it finds similar versions of it on the web – all the cropped, distorted, color-optimized, compressed, lower- and higher-resolution versions someone created and uploaded.
Read also what the always interesting things magazine has to say about it [excerpt]:
The site does a good job of pulling up a set of differently sized, coloured and scaled versions of the same painting. Maurice de Vlaminck’s Landscape with Red Trees (1906) gives the above set of thumbnails a ripple of difference – admittedly mostly very slight – but noticeable in terms of hue and crop. But what about paintings by the same artist? Or different versions of the same landscape? (Paul Cezanne painting Mont St Victoire, for example). Or even different views painted using the exact same combination of colours? Imagine if it could be set to find works by the same artist working in a similar way? TinEye could not only help research artistic movements, it could uncover potentially hidden works. It could create new movements.
EEA‘s law office announced today that Egeraat’s practice is bancrupt. EEA has offices in Rotterdam, Budapest, Prag and London and until now we considered the practice’s output mediocre but successful. Apparently the credit crisis arrived to show visible effects on architecture practices. Details, anyone?
Via cobouw.
Abu Dhabi’s Planning Council and the Dutch Architecture Institute agreed a few days ago to cooperate on delivering the second volume of Al Manakh. As in the last issue, OMA will be involved in the research work, as well as Pinktank and Archis.
The issue is scheduled for 2010 and will focus on actual and (what did you expect?) sustainable developments in the Gulf.
via: architectenweb.
Indeed, the ultimate aim of the European vision of the city is to make society, in other words to bring together people of all conditions and origins. However, the dominant trend towards individualisation, the quest for autonomy, cannot be ignored. This is precisely the contradiction that Europan addresses: on the one hand wanting the city – i.e animation, communal life, people – and on the other side wanting intimacy, privacy, home and the immediate circle.
Europan launched the tenth session of their young architects’ competition series yesterday. This year’s topic is inventing urbanity : regeneration, revitalization, colonization.
Whereas the subtopics make sense, the title appears to be far-fetched. Do we need to ‘invent’ urbanity? The principles of urban life are well understood since the first criticism of modern planning had been advanced.
On the other hand I welcome that the recent Europan sessions (‘European Urbanity: Sustainable City and New Public Space’) are much more concerned with density and the urban condition than earlier issues (‘New Housing Landscape’, ‘In-between Cities’). This year’s brief emphasizes equally social and ecological issues.
Participation is limited to the young (i. e. under 40) architect who has 62 competition sites to choose from – 12.000€ for the winner, 6.000€ for the runner-up. The sites are grouped into 3 subtopics –
those that must undergo a strong transformation (regeneration), those that must both keep their identity and redynamise their programme (revitalization) and those that must undergo a development (colonization).
UPDATE: I have put together an overview table of all the competition sites for easy comparison (pdf):
UPDATE II: Check out the hard-to-find page with the registration statistics. Typical diploma projects come out on top, as of 8th of march 101 registrations for Dunkerque, a harbour pier transformation.
