Now in its 4th issue, PIN-UP: Magazine for Architectural Entertainment has proven to be a great magazine that has lasted past its first few issues to be a hopefully lasting review on architectural and design culture. Having first seen issue #2 back in the summer of 2007 at the Pro qm bookstore installation at Documenta in Kassel, the magazine has been notoriously hard-to-find throughout Europe and North America. Released by Bruil in the Netherlands, the magazine apparently shares similar roots as our other preferred review, Fantastic Man. Continue reading ‘PIN-UP: Enjoy Architectural Entertainment’
With the attention on Beijing, the New York Times has prepared a small but interesting interactive map showing the creation and destruction of Beijing over the recent years. Three sections of the map highlight the new Olympic venues, the urban change of Beijing as well as new architectural projects. Continue reading ‘This is happening to Beijing’
Exhibition of the Berlage Institute at the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale; FlickR photo: Darrel Ronald
The final presentations of the 1st and 2nd year Berlage Institute students are scheduled at the school this coming week and next. All of the presentations are open to the public, and are without entry cost. On the 24th June, the 1st year students will present two studios, Rethinking the All-Inclusive, and the Saemanquem Project; while on the 1st July two other studios, Associative Design: Urban Ecologies, and Capital Cities, The limits of the City: A Strategic Project for Seoul will be presented.
The latest exhibition in the temporary location for the Stedelijk Museum CS will be a show curated by Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968) which includes his own work situated amongst other artists. The show is entitled, Presence of Mind, and will run through June 20th – September 30th, 2008. While previous works will be included, the show will also include the museum’s recent acquisition, an installation by Tillmans titled, Stedelijk Room. Continue reading ‘Wolfgang Tillmans at the Stedelijk CS’
Fellow dysturber, Darrel Ronald, founded Open Form Architecture in Montréal (Canada) with colleagues Maxime Moreau and Maurice Martel. We were recently invited to participate in the Pecha Kucha Montréal as our first public presentation. Following our 20 slides / 20 seconds at the special edition of Pecha Kucha Montréal as part of the Portes Ouverts Design Montréal festival, we have made the slides, as well as video available online.
The title of our presentation is, Simple Rules, Complex Behaviour, and illustrates a limited selection of our work over the past years dealing with generative design, cellular automata, simple programming and complexity. We have been particularly influenced by the work of Steven Wolfram and his book, A New Kind of Science. Having participated in two of his NKS Summer Schools, we’ve been fortunate to collaborate with him and a team of mathematicians and programmers in the United States using Mathematica software.
The presentation is bilingual French and English, just like our favourite city! Unfortunately the first words are cut off, and they are: WE ARE OPEN FORM, and WE LOVE OPEN FORM! We hope you enjoy! Below are our 20 slides, that accompany the video. Continue reading ‘Open Form Architecture @ Pecha Kucha, Montreal’
A new documentary film, archiCULTURE, is in the works about the lives of student architects and the culture surrounding the daily life of design students. The film (trailer) is a grassroots project currently seeking money to finance the project. Continue reading ‘archiCULTURE: The Film’
I have been hearing more and more about VVVV. If you are a fan of Processing, then you’ll surely be a fan of VVVV. The results are amazing, both the screenshots and videos, it is worth a look for its inspiration alone. And if you’re interested in a visual programming interface for real-time video creation, this is a fascinating software: Continue reading ‘VVVV Real-Time Video Programming Toolkit’
If you’re the type to follow the latest developments in architectural software (read: CAD Geek), then you’ll be excited about this announcement. Bentley Systems has released it’s industry-leading software, Generative Components, as a free trial until May 2008. The software has been making waves, especially in London, over the past few years. I was especially taken by the Generative Components plug-in when I heard Robert Aish speak (director of researcher at Bentley Systems) at the Game, Set and Match conference at the NAi in Rotterdam, 2006. Continue reading ‘Free Trial Until May – Bentley’s Generative Components’
Ahhh, the Venice Architecture Biennale is coming again in 2008! The exhibition runs from the 14 September to the 24 November and I’m totally stoked for another visit to the magical city.
If you busy creating 3D digital models and don’t know about the Netherlands-based CG Textures database, it is worth the look. Run by a friend, Marcel Vijfwinkel, he generously has an open source attitude to the content. You can read the license here. A lot of the material comes from Marcel himself from his work in the gaming industry, and the site now has many content contributors. If you or your office are able to pay for a year-long membership, it will support the site and give you multiple perks.
I had to laugh when I found this video linked from the OMA website. After OMA won the BNA Cube award in the Netherlands, this video was produced by Blue Eye Productions to portray the working atmosphere within the office. I really hope you guys (that work there) respond to this. I can tell that some things are true, but others are misleading, like the fact that the teams in the office “are not competitive.” Also linked from the Blue Eye Productions website are other videos and topics concerning architecture.
And if you get the urge to work for OMA, and haven’t applied all ready, they’re (always) looking for people.
For the last 25 years, Rotterdam’s 010 Publishers (Uitgeverij 010) has contributed to the larger debate about design both within and without the Netherlands. There are three books that stand out from the mix of forthcoming titles, to be published this spring and summer:
If you were thinking of applying to the Berlage Institute for the 2008-2009 school year (PDF), well, hopefully you’ve done it already. The deadline is for applications is the 29th February, 2008. The prospectus is as good as usual, and if you’re new to Berlage-Institute, it is the best place for post-graduate study in the Netherlands.
ACAD Options Interface – Notice the Shortcuts folder is at the top.
As we always try to make the world a better place, we bring you the ultimate Autocad shortcuts. Maxwan a+u (the office where Thomas and I work at) are notorious in the Dutch architecture scene for efficiency. The shortcut scripts have been developed since 1992 and have spread around dutch offices using Autocad. Started for Autocad 10 (when you still had to type ‘LINE’ to start drawing one) by Paul Hogendijk and Rients Dijkstra at OMA the shortcuts are at the moment developed by Harm te Velde over the past years. Continue reading ‘Postcardware: The Ultimate AutoCad Shortcuts’
There are countless conversations among architects about pay, and how architecture is (apparently) poorly paid. Now there’s some good proof. An awesome online survey and searchable database was shown to me today, assembled by Coroflot. You can view the datasets here, sort by country as well as occupation and job title. The few graphics are great too. It isn’t surprising that among the design professions (graphic, fashion, interactive media, and so forth), architecture has one of the lower ceilings.
Archinect has had a salary poll running for quite some time, and it has always been a fascinating read. But it has always been incomplete, has no sortable databases, and didn’t offer a comparative analysis. In comparison, the Coroflot survey boasts 4250 respondents from 73 countries. What is clear is that in most design fields the incomes are rising nicely. On top of this, you’re best paid as a consultant. Nonetheless there are some hard-to-explain anomolies that stick out. It turns out that designers in India are some of the worlds best-paid, up there with Americans and Australians. Hmm.
Dutch artist Liesbeth Touw and Spanish artist Zigor Barayazarra will exhibit their recent work at the Duende artist-run studios in Rotterdam. Both artists have been working at the studio in the artist’s residency program. The exhibition opening runs between 19.00 and 22.00, Thursday the 20 December at the Duende studios (map).
Back in 1992, the young and aggressive Dutch architects that we know so well today, came together to work on a large project in Amsterdam. The Ruimtelijk Scenario Y-Oevers Amsterdam (Translation: Spatial Scenarios for the Y-Waterfront Amsterdam) shows a long list of heavy-hitting architects and urbanists that now largely control the European architecture debate.
The project was carried out by the teams of: OMA, Neutelings, van Berkel & Bos (now UN Studio), Christiaanse (now KCAP) and West8. The model was built by De Rijk Parthesius (including Vincent de Rijk). Even more impressive was the line-up of the teams and to see where each of the members went on to. At times, they started their own offices, as with the case of Alejandro Zaera (Foreign Office Architects), Winy Maas (MVRDV) and Rients Dijkstra (Maxwan). The final booklet for the project reads as a whos-who of contemporary Dutch architecture, and the designs and presentation methods within are absolute precursors to the styles developed by each of the offices throughout the rest of the 1990s until today. You can almost tell which architects worked on which drawings, it’s an amazing period just prior to the launch of the many offices we see today in Rotterdam.
