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’
Don’t let the poster mislead you! TU Delft’s U-Lab comes up with a daring conference breaking from its single-disciplinary conservatism. During 3 days from September 24th on mathematicians, physicists, urbanists and designers gather in Delft. They will explore the implications of complexity theories of cities to planning and urban design. Besides hotshot professors Juval Portugali, Bill Hillier, and Mike Batty, gonna-be’s, or maybe wanna-be’s like Egbert and me will take the floor.
The conference has a limited audience capacity, and is first-come, first served! For more information, you may see complexitytheoriesofcities.com, send an email to me and check out the other dates in our calendar of selected Rotterdam Architecture Events.
Three decades of research have established the field of complexity theories of cities as a dominant approach to cities. Now that the field has come of age, it is time to stop for a moment, look back at what has been achieved, with appreciation, but also with sober criticism and then look forward at potentials that have yet to be realized. Continue reading ‘Complexity Theory Conference @ TU Delft’
After a couple years without publishing, the latest issue of Hunch #12 will be relaunched in collaboration with NAi Publishers at the Berlage Institute, Rotterdam. The event takes place this coming Tuesday, the 31st March, at 19:00 within the school itself.
Continue reading ‘Hunch 12: Bureaucracy – Launch Event’
The website for this year’s 4th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam 2009 is fully online and operational. Rotterdam architect Kees Christiaanse will curate the program, and has developed the theme: Exploring Urban Futures. He will be working in association with a team in Zurich at the ETH, where he also teaches urban design. In Rotterdam, Christiaanse runs his own office, KCAP, which is recognized for work in both architecture and urban design. Being the 4th biennale, expectations are high following what many perceived as a decline in the scale and quality of the last, 3rd Biennale entitled “Power”.
Continue reading ’4th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam – Exploring Urban Futures’
Have a look at OMA’s most recent project for Prada, the ‘Prada Transformer‘. The project has it’s own proper website, featuring Rem presenting, plans and renderings as well as a construction time lapse in progress.
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’
Since the devastating fire that consumed the notorious architecture faculty at the TU Delft in 2008, the architectural community in the Netherlands has been holding their breadth to find out what their new faculty would look like. The open international ideas competition has recently closed, and the TU Delft is planning to launch the project winners at the NAi in the coming weeks.
On March 14th at the NAi, the award winners and mentions will be announced and a debate held to discuss the work. The museum will simultaneous open an exhibition documenting the work that will run until the 7th June 2009. In total 466 entries came from 50 countries, and the competition organizers will publish a monograph of the work this May.
From 4th to 8th February Las Palmas Rotterdam hosts the Object Rotterdam Fair for autonomous design. Check our calendar for more dates in Rotterdam.
A new exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Actions: What You Can Do With The City, explores the thousands of examples around the globe of people reclaiming urban space through Do-It-Yourself (DIY) actions in order to humanize the failed urban realities around them. While urban action has become a hot subject over the recent years, the CCA has approached the subject from a broad critique that mixes 99 Actions done by artists, architects, designers, politicians, activists, athletes and most importantly average citizens. In many cases the actual museum artifact didn’t exist, thus giving the museum the chance to create the work.
Montréal’s Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), in collaboration with the Cities Programme of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), will host this year’s James Stirling Memorial Lecture on The City this coming Thursday, 13 Nov. 2008 (7pm) at the museum; admission is free. In it’s 3rd year, the international competition intends to “promote innovative approaches to urban phenomena, and to reposition architecture at the centre of debates on the city of the 21st century.”
This year’s lecture is by Robert Mangurian and Mary-Ann Ray of Studio Works (Los Angeles) and will present Beijing Inside Out: Caochangdi.
Continue reading ‘James Stirling Lecture at the CCA’
Last week my friends Bob and Christian gave a new silhouette to cologne, by means of illuminating the television tower with a spectacular lighten moved dress.
Up to the 1980s the construction of a television tower was a matter of course for many German cities to underline their urban character. Cologne is no exception: The local Colonius was designed by Erwin Heinle and was finished in 1981. With a height of 266 meters it is not only the highest television tower in Nordrhine-Westfalia, but also a striking landmark that is visible from far. As such, it is an inherent part of Cologne’s skyline by day and night. Unfortunately its significance as a tourist destination has been lost since the closure of the observation platform several years ago.
The architects Christian Dieckmann and Robert Wetzels want to re-raise the awareness for the significance of the distinctive building for the cityscape of Cologne:
Continue reading ‘The sky is no limit’
I was also in Venice for the inauguration of the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale. Unlike the other members of Dysturb, this was the fourth time I have attended the opening of the biennale (in 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2008). So, for me, it was difficult not to compare Aaron Betsky’s work at the Arsenale to the work that had been done by the previous international curators (Burdett, Foster, or Sudjic) of the other biennales. On top of this, the Venice Biennale is the main case study for my PhD thesis: the 1st Venice Architecture Biennale.
I have to say that when I left the Arsenale after seeing the exhibition, my enthusiasm was lukewarm: on the one hand I thought, as Darrel did, that the theme chosen by Betsky was loaded with intellectual potential and openness of interpretation and that overall, the show was well curated due to the compactness of the manifesto format. (In the past years the Arsenale’s bombarded the visitors with an overload of images, information, texts, and so forth.) But at the same time, many of the installations and accompanying manifestos remained obscure and slightly too artistic for my own tastes, and likely for the taste of many architects.
But now I see the light…
Continue reading ’11th Venice Architecture Biennale: The Making of’
A small but fantastic exhibition, Re-Sampling Ornament, has just finished at the Schweiser Architecture Museum / Swiss Architecture Museum (SAM) in Basel. Curated by Oliver Domeisen and Francesca Ferguson, the show featured a selection of contemporary projects that integrate ornament into the design strategy in a fundamental way, rather than applied. Each of the projects are situated within the context of their ornamental typologies and shown next to historical examples considered as lineage. With the recent fascination with pattern, biology and morphologies in architecture, the exhibit is both timely and a smart addition to the current thinking about ornament as it confronts the still predominant attitude of reductionist modernism. The magazine-style catalogue, SAM #5: Re-Sampling Ornament, is equally as good. It’s also worth looking at the other SAM catalogues accompanying the previous exhibitions.
You can see a small selection of photos on either Dysturb.Net or FlickR.
Rotterdam’s Air Foundation has a promising lineup of debates as part of their Urban Meetings series of public dialogues. I would especially love to see the debate questioning, “Are cities more important than countries?”
Download the English Pamphlet (pdf).
Continue reading ‘Urban Meetings – The Air Foundation’
Upon arriving in Venice for this year’s 11th Venice Architecture Biennale, the Dysturb.Net team was so sick that we didn’t know what to do. But when we began to see this year’s freebie-hipster-cotton-bags that have become a standard give-away from the pavilions, we started to feel better. These bags are the absolute best way to self-promote the individual pavilions, other than offering free drinks, which we also support. On top of this, they can be beautiful, and a great reminder from year-to-year of the best pavilions and their graphic design campaigns. So we said to ourselves, let’s collect them and vote for the best bags…. what a great way to go “beyond building“! To all you future curators of your country’s pavilions, take note = give away some wickedly designed hipster bags and everyone will come!
Click on the photos for a complete high-res shot!
Please comment on which bag you think is the best, and if you have more to submit we would be happy to post them.
Continue reading ‘The Best Hipster Bags – Venice Biennale 2008!’
