In a few days - on the 20th of June - the London Festival of Architecture starts and will go on for a month. The program is overwhelming (including events/hubs/themes/tours/projects..), I will write more after I’ve seen it. Go and check their site: http://www.lfa2008.org!
Emap, a Business-to-Business media group (from their website), hosts the first World Architecture Festival in Barcelona. Architects are invited to put their buildings up for competition (entry fee a smacking 950€), and among the exhibited projects the best will be awarded. The interesting jury (to name a few: Will Alsop, Cecil Balmond, Stefan Behnisch, Richard Burdett, Luis M. Mansilla, Richard Meier, Sir Peter Cook, Neil Denari, Norman Foster, Massimiliano Fuksas, Zaha Hadid, Michel Rojkind, Michael Sorkin, Francine Houben, Robert Stern, Christoph Ingenhoven, Charles Jencks) might redeem the commercial/artificial flair the event exudes. We’ll keep our final judgement to ourselves until we know more about the event.
“The UN-system has accumulated over the past 60 years an impressive amount of information. UNdata, developed by the Statistics Division of DESA, is a new powerful tool, which will bring this unique and authoritative set of data not only to the desks of decision makers and analysts, but also to journalists, to students and to all citizens of the world, ” says Sha Zukang, Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs.
Since its foundation, the United Nations system has been collecting statistical information from member states on a variety of topics. The information thus collected constitutes a considerable information asset of the organization. However, these statistical data are often stored in proprietary databases, each with unique dissemination and access policies. As a result, users are often unaware of the full array of statistical information that the UN system has in its data libraries. The current arrangement also means that users are required to move from one database to another to access different types of information.
UNdata addresses this problem by pooling major UN databases and those of several international into one single internet environment. The innovative design allows a user to access a large number of UN databases either by browsing the data series or through a keyword search.
I love when major organisations understand that opening up their knowledge to the public is the way to the future. We’ve added the UN database to our our list of resources - scroll down to ‘data’.
The soulburn scripts by Neil Blevins have been updated. They are a useful and free collection of commands to be used with 3ds max or maya.
A little follow-up to the 010 publications: some Archinect editors share their favorite book titles of year of the pig: see their selection here.
We’ve been busy, and we’ve been hacked by medication spammers - which resulted in a broken site for a few days. But we kicked them out and the site is 95% up again. But now back to the architecture: expect a reinvigorated stream of posts!
My journey as a teacher to Syria is also a journey back to the architectural roots of modernism. The students here are innocent when it comes to history, so It was back to school for myself: I reverted to study Mies & Corbusier again, in order to pass on the knowledge. This is why I was excited by this find:
At auction house Jeschke, Hauff & Auvermann in Berlin, on November 13th 2007 is an auction of 123 photographs from the prewar ouevre of Mies van der Rohe. Now my understanding is that Mies was notoriously restrictrive about images of his work being distributed and published, so these are a real find. But their provenance is debatable, and their origins unknown.
Kosmograd tediously collected the auction’s images in a flickr-set. Among them pictures of the original (!) Barcelona Pavillion, The Weissenhof Siedlung and Haus Tugendhat. Thank you.
UN Studio and MVRDV (in collaboration with the spanish office GRAS) have recently sent us their competiton entries for the Ciudad del Motor in Spain, which has been won by the widely published, but less interesting fish-shaped design by Foster.
UN Studio’s design is a continuous dynamic form, a structure ducking to the ground with a motor-sport aesthetic, reminding of the visual language of an BMW ad. MVRDV’s proposal is a group of buildings - blocks breaking from the ground in a sandy desert, creating an ensemble of squares. Where UN Studio’s design is a new object in the landscape, MVRDV’s design forms part of it. More of a place, less of an object. You can download MVRDV’s project PDF, complete with sections and plans (Thank you, Oana!) here:
Mark Simonson was invited to talk about typography legend Adrian Frutiger last summer at TypeCon in Boston. He made his inspiring slides available as a PDF. Something you should miss in no circumstance, if you are ever so slightly interested in design! Read more on Simonson’s blog.
Or download here:
For those who’ve missed the recent day of open doors, here are views from some of the highest of Rotterdam’s rooftops (all courtesy of dakvanrotterdam.nl, © 2006 - Roelof de Vries). Click on the images to get started (quicktime required, ctrl and shift to zoom). The overview map and more panoramic views can be found here.
I recently had the chance to visit the not very widely published OMA project “Dutch House” in Holten (NL), constructed in 1993.
It was a refreshing change to for once see an architectural masterpiece not in its virginal state (on OMA’s site) on topping out day nor dressed up for an exhibition - but after 14 years of living in it and using it. And the project kept it’s promise. This is also because it is one of the (few?) projects, where OMA cared a lot about the details, and the design comission extended to the choice of furniture and interior arrangements.
We recently found Taco Kuijers strangely familiar blog (5000 file requests - stealing all our source files - from the same IP within a few minutes don’t go unnoticed).
Neutelings won their first project overseas today. No pictures yet, the office informed us that they’ve been chosen due to “a creative proposal for the selection committee. We were selected because of this proposal and making a design is the next step in the process.”
Continue reading ‘Neutelings Riedijk wins Cincinnati Art Museum Expansion Competition’
The Delft School of Design PhD series ‘Architectural Engineering - Performance, Geometry and Materials’ has been launched. Themes are Complex Geometry Architecture and Performance Based Architecture. See our Calendar for allthe dates.
MIMOA (MI MOdern Architecture), the community driven architecture project database, has been launched officialy this weekend in Amsterdam. Architecture 2.0, I hear you say. But this time it is a useful, well-designed project. The overall contribution quality is high, and we can only hope that the word spreads and the database fills up - not only with the well-known and published, but also with obscure gems. Interesting in that respect is the collaboration with A10, an interesting projects on it’s own. A10 magazine will add projects they publish to the Mimoa database.
MIMOA about MIMOA:
What is MIMOA
It is the best source of information for your city trip in Europe with all Modern Architecture in one view. MIMOA shows Europe’s Modern Architecture on a map with the address and all additional information you need to actually find and visit interiors, parks, public places, buildings and bridges.
MIMOA is free and open for everyone to contribute: publish your projects, posts comments and ratings, define your personal favorites and keep track of the projects you’ve visited. All this personal information, reviews and opinions, define the current trends in architectural Europe.
MIMOA is intended for anyone interested in Modern Architecture, design, culture, photography, cities, Europe, travelling, visiting buildings, knowing how to get there, whether the project is public and what the opening hours are. You can make your own personal convenient architecture guide.
We proudly announce the dysturb podcast! Subscribe here
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Expect project presentations, event recordings, interviews in the form of movies, mp3s and pdfs. So far the Associative Design movie and the Al Manakh launch recording are included.
UPDATE: Our podcast has been added to the itunes podcast register!
Welcome to dysturb.net, nice to see you here.
What is this site about? It is about Architecture & Urbanism, Design and Art - all the bits and pieces we stumble upon in the epicentre of the architecture empire. Apart from the latest news in the magazine, you can check out our event calendar, browse the creme de la creme of architecture-related bookmarks or see our hand-picked photo collection, complete with pictures from monday’s Al-Manakh presentation at the NAi. You can always access these pages via the navigation at the top of the page.
This website is our way to reflect, propose, challenge, get excited about, and SHARE the architecture world around us. We’ve made all the web 2.0 goodness available to you: you can view our pictures via our flickr page, you can subscribe to our links via delicious, you can hook our dates into your google calendar or integrate it in your ical. And there are RSS feeds of all our content, be it the articles, the photos, or the calendar events.
But we’d love even more to hear what you think, so comment on our articles, send us that design that made you cry, or be a guest writer!
