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.

From the press release:

“Wednesday, the 21 July, the exhibition ‘Bauhaus. A Conceptual Model’ opened in Berlin’s Martin Gropius Bau. On the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the foundation of the Bauhaus and 20 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, the leading Bauhaus research institutions and museums in Germany – the Bauhaus Archive Berlin, the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar – are for the first time jointly presenting an exhibition. With about 1,000 objects it will be the largest Bauhaus exhibition ever. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, cooperating partner in the project, sent 25 objects to Berlin and will present its own exhibition ‘bauhaus 1919 – 1933. Workshops for Modernity’ beginning on 8 November in New York.

Supporting Programme for the Exhibition

A diverse programme of events will be offered to accompany ‘Bauhaus. A Conceptual Model’. It includes a five-day international conference ‘bauhaus global’ (21 – 26 September 2009) supported by the Stiftung Lotto/ Stiftung Deutsche Klassenlotterie Berlin, as well as a lecture series, cinema nights, workshops, architecture tours and book presentations (see overview of supporting events). Public tours are offered on Saturdays and Sundays at 12:00 and 2:00 pm.

The exhibition is supported by the German Federal Cultural Foundation. The primary supporters are HOCHTIEF and the Sparkassen-Kulturfond des Deutschen Sparkassen- und Giroverbands. The Stiftung Deutsche Klassenlotterie Berlin and the ART MENTOR FOUNDATION LUCERNE are sponsors of the exhibition. Media partners are the Radio Berlin-Brandenburg (rbb), the newspapers DIE WELT, and the Berliner Morgenpost, and the Wall AG. The installation in the Lichthof was generously supported by Eternit AG and Thonet GmbH.”

*we still have our man Martin in Rotterdam, though!

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 –

ExperimentaDesign is an international Biennale dedicated to design, architecture and creativity oscillating between Lisboa and Amsterdam. This year’s theme is “It’s About Time”, it starts on 9th September in Lisboa. EXD has invited me to cover their event as a media collaborator. See you there in September.

From the press release:

20″ EXD VIDEO COMPETITION – CALL FOR ENTRY

ExperimentaDesign launched a worldwide Call for Entry inviting design savvy individuals and groups to submit a twenty second (20”) video to stand a chance to win special passes to EXD’09 Lisboa.

EXD is looking for daring creative work for its first ever Video Competition. Submitted works must reflect the Biennale’s spirit and convey a particular vision of the theme for EXD’09: It’s About Time. The winning video would have also considered the look and feel of the communication for EXD’09 Lisboa created by Creative Director Ian Anderson. And will be featured as part of the EXD’09 communication campaign.

The author(s) of the winning video will be awarded all access passes to the Opening Week of EXD’09 in Lisbon including accommodation. EXD will also shortlist 5 runners-up who will receive all access passes to the biennale.

EXD is inclusive of various creative agents and disciplines presenting a bespoke programme for each edition. In this unique and inclusive spirit, the 20” Video Competition was established. To enhance international participation the competition is open worldwide to professionals and students over 18 years of age. The competition will be judged by Ian Anderson and members of the EXD communication team.

Submission deadline is 10 July 2009.
For detailed information, conditions and rules visit:

http://www.experimentadesign.pt/2009/_download/EXD09_20SEC_RULES.zip

http://www.experimentadesign.pt/2009/_download/EXD09_20SEC_TAGS.zip

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.

As for potentials yet to be realized, this conference will explore the implications of complexity theories of cities to planning and urban design. As examples to what we have in mind consider, firstly, Mike Batty’s (2008) recent observation that “In the past 25 years, our understanding of cities has slowly begun to reflect Jacobs’s message. Cities are no longer regarded as being disordered systems. Beneath the apparent chaos and diversity of physical form, there is strong order …”. Secondly, Portugali’s (2008) criticism that “in their search for statistical data to feed their models practitioners of USM tend to overlook the non-quantifiable urban phenomena” and as a consequence, some of the central questions of 21st Century cities and urbanism”. As for potentials yet to be realized we would like to emphasis in this workshop the implications of CTC to planning and urban design.

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.

After a two-year hiatus, this celebrates the relaunch of Hunch under a new publisher and editorial direction. The event will include introductory remarks by both Rob Docter, general director of the Berlage Institute and Eelco van Welie, director of NAi Publishers; and a presentation of the new editorial direction and the contents of Hunch 12 by Salomon Frausto, editor of Hunch and head of architectural broadcasting at the Berlage Institute.

About Hunch #12: Bureaucracy
Architecture is contingent on the reality of satisfying a client, meeting building codes, acquiring funding, and gaining political support in order to be realized. Twelve thought-provoking contributions by leading and emerging architects, critics, and scholars that explore the role of bureaucracy in shaping contemporary architecture. Subjects range from governmental regulations and new organizational models for professional practice to contrasting forms of urbanism and divergent interpretations of economic value in relation to cultural capital. The authors focus on how select determinants affect the built environment. At the same time they offer architectural speculations, critical observations, and historical perspectives to rethink these processes in order to influence the buildings and cities of today and tomorrow. Along with these topical contributions—which are supplemented by marginalia of short stories, annotations, terminologies, and inventories—four 1,000-word texts and a visual essay complement the issue to reflect on broader theoretical aspects of architecture culture.

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”.

Many events are planned between now and throughout the exhibition, one of which just passed in Zurich at the ETH, The Open City symposium. The AIR Foundation will also be holding a series of Urban Meetings. Also to be exhibited are the results from the international competition, Gotong Royong City – Envisioning the Future of Jakarta, where the registration period is unfortunately already closed. There are lots of events to keep track of, and we will follow-up in the coming months, as well as integrate the events into our Dysturb.Net Calendar.

The Mission Statement from the curatorial team:

IABR Exploring Urban Futures
The International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) is an international urban research biennale founded in 2001 on the conviction that architecture is a public concern. It is an international festival of exhibitions, conferences, lectures and other activities devoted to themes in the field of architecture and urbanism.

Linking the contemporary Dutch agenda to the international context, the IABR invites the design disciplines to examine an urgent social issue in relation to a particular urban condition.

The IABR serves as a platform, a catalyst and a mediator between local and global cultures, thus advocating an international exchange of ideas and encouraging public discussion among designers, researchers, academics, artists, politicians, public authorities, real estate developers and other investors, social organizations and the public at large, at home and abroad.

Why Cities Matter
Our futures will unfold predominantly in cities. Urban dwellers now comprise more than half the world’s population. What we call the countryside will soon be home to less than a third of humanity. Urban regions are the hubs of the global economy and the producers of culture and welfare, yet they are also the source of immeasurable environmental damage. They are the locus of consumers and slum dwellers alike, of globally operating media and financial networks, of crime and tourism. As they absorb the growth of the world’s population, cities struggle to provide adequate and sustainable living conditions for their inhabitants. The most significant challenge for architecture therefore lies in addressing urban problems.

The curator’s biography – Kees Christiaanse:

Kees Christiaanse (1953) is internationally recognized among today’s foremost researchers and practitioners in the fields of urban design and architecture. He studied architecture and urban design at Delft University of Technology. From 1980-1989 he was a partner at OMA in Rotterdam and consequently founded KCAP Architects & Planners with offices in Rotterdam and Zürich.
From 1996-2003 he was Professor of Architecture & Urban Design at the Technical University Berlin; since 2003 he has been Head of the Institute of Urban Design at the Network City-Landscape of the ETH in Zürich. In addition he is a visiting Professor in the Cities Program of the London School of Economics.

Having successfully combined practical intervention and scientific research in diverse urban conditions, Christiaanse is highly qualified to curate the next Biennale, and to structure and intensify its network with research institutions. He is actively involved in concrete urban projects such as the revitalization of port-areas in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Hamburg. In addition, for the Olympic Legacy Masterplan in London, he is designing an “urban breeding grounds” with delicate systems of public spaces on which interactive cultures of mixed use can unfold, catalyzing the redevelopment of the surrounding city. Furthermore, Christiaanse is actively researching, lecturing, and publishing on the theme of the Open City, and has cultivated an impressive international network of colleagues working on similar conditions.

The biennale runs from the 24th September 2009 to the 10th January 2010. It takes place throughout Rotterdam, most notably at the NAi, but with smaller exhibitions at the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture and Urban Design and a tie-in exhibit in Amsterdam. The Berlage Institute will also be planning a Master Class linked to this year’s theme.

Further Information Link: PDF launch document.

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.

Monday 9 March (Room 5 auditorium) Membranes
12:00 – 13:00 Reception

13:00 – 13:15 Welcome (Jan Westra, Dean of the faculty of Architecture)

13:15 – 13:45 Opening, explanation of the workshop (Arno Pronk, TU/e)

13:45 – 14:30 Tensile structures in architectural design (Marijke Mollaert, VUB)

14:30 – 15:15 The detailing of Membrane structures (Rogier Houtman, TenTech)

15:15 – 15:45 Coffee

15:45 – 16:15 Instruction Rapid Prototyping (Bart van de Vorst, TNO)

16:15 – 17:15 Material behavior of membranes (Francoise Fourancier, Ferrari)

17:15 – 17:45 Climatic behavior of textile structures (Mark Cox, TU/e)

19:30 – 20:15 Research in membrane structures (Niels de Temmerman, VUB)

20:15 – 21:00 Research in membrane structures (Gerald Lindner, TU/e )

21:00 – 21:45 Textile projects by (Rogier Houtman, Tentech)

Tuesday 10 March (Room 2 auditorium) Design software
09:00 – 10:00 Tess3D Premier Introduction and overview (Erik Moncrieff, Kurvenbau)

10:00 – 10:30 Coffee

10:30 – 11:30 Rhino/Grasshopper Introduction and overview (Rinus Roelofs, Rhino)

11:30 – 12:30 “Processing”, introduction and overview (Axel Kilian, TUD)

12:00 – 13:30 Lunch

Parallel Workshop sessions: Matrix building

1) 13:30 – 17:00 Rhino/Grasshopper (Rinus Roelofs, Rhino)

2) 13:30 – 17:00 Tess 3D (Erik Moncrieff, Kurvenbau)

3) 13:30 – 17:00 “Processing” (Axel Kilian, TUD)

17:00 – 18:00 Drinks

Room 5 auditorium

19:30 – 20:15 Geometric art (Rinus Roelofs, Rhino)

20:15 – 21:00 scripting at NOX Architects (Thomas Wortmann)

21:00 – 21:45 Design exploration (Axel Kilian, TUD)

Wednesday 11 March (Room 5 auditorium) Tools
09:00 – 9:45 Shaping technology (Nedcam Erwin van Maaren)

9:45 – 10:30 Folding structures (Vinicius Raducanu)

10:30 – 11:00 Coffee

11:00 –11:45 Rapid prototyping and scanning (Bart van de Vorst, TNO)

11:45 –12:15 CNC laser cutter and workshop facilities (Ralf Brodruck, TU/e)

12:15 – 13:00 Mechanical behaviour of lightweight structures (Andrew Borgart, TUD)

13:00 – 14:00 Lunch

Parallel Workshop sessions: Matrix building

1) 14:00 – 17:00 Rhino/Grasshopper (Rinus Roelofs, Rhino)

2) 14:00 – 17:00 Tess 3D (Erik Moncrieff, Kurvenbau)

3) 14:00 – 17:00 Rhino drawing lessons (M.Dominicus / A.Mulderij, TU/e)

4) 14:00 – 15:30 Rapid Prototyping Instructions (Bart van de Vorst, TNO)

15:30 – 17:00 Excursion TNO, (Bart van de Vorst, TNO)

13:30 – 17:00 Workshop Lasercutter, Vertigo, (Ralf Brodruck, TU/e)

17:00 – 18:00 Drinks

Projects in practice Room 5 auditorium

19:30 – 20:15 Projects by Grohmann & Bollinger (Manfred Grohmann,)

20:15 – 21:00 The Works of Heinz Isler (John Chilton, Nottingham Trent)

Thursday 12 March (Room 5 auditorium) production technique and shell structures

9.00 Handing in your STL-file for Rapid prototyping. Only correct files handed in before 9.00 hr will be accepted

09:00 – 9:45 Exploform (H. Groeneveld)

09:45 – 10:30 Holland Composites – (Olivier Lauteslager)

10:30 – 11:00 Coffee

11:00 – 11:20 Adjustable mould (Sebastiaan Boers, TU/e)

11:20 – 11:45 Shell structures by BB-con (M. van der Ham)

11:45 – 12.30 Membrane Mould (Arno Pronk, TU/e)

12:30 – 13:30 Lunch

Parallel Workshop sessions: Matrix building

1) 13:30 – 17:00 Rhino/Grasshopper (Rinus Roelofs, Rhino)

2) 13:30 – 17:00 Tess 3D (Erik Moncrieff, Kurvenbau)

3) 13:30 – 15:30 Excursion to dome, (M van der Ham BB-con)

15:30 – 17:00 Excursion Bicycle cellar Eindhoven by Fuksas (Arno Pronk TU/e)

13:30 – 17:00 Workshop Lasercutter, Vertigo, (Ralf Brodruck, TU/e)

17:00 – 18:00 Drinks

Chamber of commerce

19:30 Banquet

Friday 13 March (Room 5 auditorium) workshop results and architectural experiments

09:00 – 9.30 Presentation of workshop results (Arno Pronk TU/e)

09:30 – 10:00 Formfinding of grid shell (Olivier Baverel)

10:00 – 10:30 Integration of software in architectural practice. (Erik Moncrieff Kurvenbau)

10:30 – 11:00 Coffee

11:00 – 11:45 Textile techniques/tectonics in architecture (Ivo Vrouwe, TU/e)

11:45 – 12:30 Slim building (Jos Lichtenberg, TU/e)

12:30 Closing and Collecting of the 3D printed parts

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.

The show has been curated by Mirko Zardini, CCA Director and Chief Curator (curatorial essay); and Giovanna Borasi, CCA Curator for Contemporary Architecture (curatorial essay). The show runs until the 19th April, 2009 in Montréal.

For many designers and artists, they will already be familiar with some of the work. And for many of us, we’ve already been involved with our own DIY actions for many years. In this regard, the exhibition is especially important in its presentation of these largely hidden actions to the greater public. In compiling the 99 works together under themes such as: Excess, Choice, Frictions, Guerrilla, Planning Smarter and Sharing; the public finds their own worlds recontextualized through an optic of change and imagination. This is hugely important to society, that an attitude of DIY permeates throughout or collective conscious so that our daily lives become more creative. In essence, this is a contemporary stimulation of the inner tendencies that many avant-garde urban utopias, such as Constant’s New Babylon (images) project, and the Situationist‘s Dérive championed. His work, based on theories of Homo Ludens, now finds itself in nearly all urban exhibits around the world, most recently in Amsterdam (related article).

But many of the actions are political and economic, with actions started by local civic groups, city councilors and mayors, as well as urban transport engineers. Many of these are the most interesting, because it signifies non-designers encroaching into design territory. Speaking with Mirko Zardini at the press opening, he signals a loss of faith in current city planning and urbanism practice. Citizens and users/stakeholders (ie. the public) are rarely the centre of design and planning decisions. It is therefore an intention of the show to stimulate the debate as to what we need as a society within our societies, and how can we get there. Perhaps it isn’t through the design practices that we actually arrive at a user-oriented, accessible and mutable urban environment.

But could there be such a thing as a pluralist approach to urban design where a sort of long-tail of urban activities can be integrated into the built shared built environment? Or is everyday life left to the citizenry and the urban design is merely the placeholder and facilitator of action. This question was exactly the goal behind a project by Maxwan a+u in Rotterdam. For the Port of Rotterdam, they proposed a “harbour park” throughout the unused strips woven between the enormous network of port activities. [Full disclosure: I worked on the project.]

From the Press Release:

The exhibition and its accompanying publication present specific projects by a diverse group of activists whose personal involvement has initiated vital transformation in today’s cities. These human motors of change include architects, engineers, university professors, students, children, pastors, artists, skateboarders, cyclists, pedestrians, municipal employees, and many others who address the question of how to improve the urban experience. Their actions push against accepted norms of behaviour in cities, at times even challenging legal limitations. The individuals and groups presented in the exhibition employ a range of approaches, from skating and parkour to dumpster diving and urban foraging. Some engage architecture directly by finding new uses for abandoned buildings, while others create tools for guerilla gardening. In their individual critiques of urban modes of production and consumption, these actors share a conviction that the traditional processes of top-down civic planning are insufficient, and new approaches and tools must be developed from the ground level upwards.

Actions: What You Can Do With the City features international contemporary architectural projects, design concepts, and research conveyed through a range of materials including architectural drawings, photographs, videos, publications, artefacts, and websites. The 97 distinct actions presented in the exhibition are drawn from a larger number identified by the curators. They include projects related to the production of food and urban agriculture; the planning and creation of public spaces to strengthen community interactions; the recycling of abandoned buildings for new purposes; the appropriation of urban sites into terrain for play, such as soccer, climbing, skateboarding, or parkour; the alternate use of roads for walking or rail lines as park space; the design of clothing to circumvent urban barriers against loitering or resting on benches; and many others. The exhibition places particular emphasis on the activists’ tools, which comprise unusual materials ranging from large-scale inflatables and fruit-collecting dresses to seed-bomb rocket launchers and wheelbarrow-bicycle hybrids. Included are masks disguising children as horses, or sneakers customised for sliding along railings.

Over the past couple years, the CCA (Youtube Channel) has made a greater effort to extend itself publicly through digital media and it is working, with the quality of work and method improving with each new exhibition. An interesting website has been created, CCA-ACTIONS, and they’ve produced a promo-video (below).

Another fascinating example of Actions in the city is the recent snowboard video (below), Forum or Against’em, from Forum. The just released video especially documents urban riding in Montréal and Québec City last year when we had a near record snowfall which left the city under meters of snow, turning the concrete and steel environments into an endless snowpark.

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.

Research Project

Caochangdi, one of more than 300 urban villages in the city of Beijing, tells a specific story about itself and its mostly illegal residents (including farmers, floaters, taxi drivers, and world-class artists). Also embedded within it are both the problems and the possibilities of a new urban space that is redefining the city of Beijing at this pivotal point in human history when cities make up half of the world’s population. The lecturers, who live and work in Caochangdi, dissect the multiple phenomena that form this dynamic urban condition.

Robert Mangurian and Mary-Ann Ray’s winning proposal opens up an original discussion of issues of development in China, going beyond a concern with extreme densification, and addressing a dynamic urban context in a way that is both historically-informed and clearly oriented to emerging social, political and cultural processes.

Robert Mangurian and Mary-Ann Ray, principals at Studio Works in Los Angeles, were selected from 43 applicants from 15 countries, ranging from senior scholars and practitioners to emerging voices.

This year’s jury included:
James Corner (Founder and Director of Field Operations, New York; Chair and Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Design), Ann Pendleton-Jullian (Associate professor of Architecture, MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Boston), Matthias Sauerbruch (Architect, Sauerbruch Hutton Architects, Berlin and London), Fran Tonkiss (Associate Director, Cities Programme, the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)) and Mirko Zardini (Architect, Urban Theorist, and Director of 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:

An exhibition in the elevated ground level documents the development of the television tower and gives extensive background information. Moreover the panorama view that would be visible from the observation platform (when open to the public) is replicated by means of printable film on the basement windows, and selected architecture and urban development projects are explicated in the “Schaufenster zur Stadt”. At “Liegen unterm Turm” at the bottom of the Colonius visitors can savour coffee and cake and enjoy the television tower from a distinct angle. But the most spectacular event is the artful illumination of the tower. By illuminating its column the Colonius is transformed into a giant sculpture that is thus promoted to a highlight of Cologne’s nightly skyline during plan08.

Dieckmann’s and Wetzels’s and vision is to establish a competition in the future: the Colonius Award. International artist and designers shall be asked yearly to hand in their proposal for an illumination of the Colonius. The illumination of the television tower during plan08 is made possible by Stadt Köln, Deutsche Funkturm GmbH and Deutsche Telekom AG.

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…

It was partly because I was curious and all together critical about the idea, and partly because I thought that maybe I could found out something that I did not already know about the Architecture Biennale, that I decided to buy “The Making of the Biennale” with Aaron Betsky. It is a DVD on sale for 15 Euros at the Biennale wherein Betsky explains his ideas for the exhibition while walking through each of the 20 installations of the Arsenale’s exhibition.

I finally understand what the Coop Himmelb(l)au machine is for, or what the Zaha Hadid sculpture represents. I also realised that the Peneznic and Rogina installation is made of moving parts, or that the Philippe Rahm piece simulat a miniaturized gulf stream made of hot and cold poles. I even realised that I missed the last installation by the Gustafson Porter group, the Towards Paradise garden, a piece referring to Voltaire’s last phrase in Candide: Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

If there is still time, I recommend you have a look at this video before visiting the Biennale; because even if we don’t like to admit it, there are times when we need a bit of didactics.

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).

Urban Meetings
With over half of the world’s population now living in cities, and up to two-thirds by the middle of the century, the issue of how to run a city is becoming increasingly important. Rapid urbanization is having a strong impact on communities, cities, economies, urban ecologies and policies.

How to develop and run a city as an engine for for balanced, inclusive and sustainable growth?? How to connect the challenges of managing and of designing a city in order to further that urban sustainability?

In the context of its 50th anniversary the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS) has teamed up with the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) and the Architecture Institute Rotterdam (AIR), to present a series of Urban Meetings to explore the outlines of an Urban Agenda for the 21st century.

By juxtaposing the global with the local perspective, and by triggering an exchange between urban managers and developers, and urban designers and architects, the series of Urban Meetings hopes to shed light on where our cities may be heading if headed right.

Among the speakers are Jan Pronk (former Dutch Minister of Development Cooperation and former Minister of the Environment), Anthony Williams (former mayor of Washington DC), Ivo Opstelten (current mayor of Rotterdam), Jaime Lerner (architect and former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil), Vedran Mimica (Director of the Berlage Institute, Rotterdam and curator of the 3rd International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam) en Kees Christiaanse (architect, and curator of the 4th IABR).

Urban Meetings:
Wednesday 8 oktober – Are cities more important than countries?
Tuesday 14 oktober – Sustainable cities
Tuesday 28 oktober – Leading cities
Thursday 13 november – Safe cities
Thursday 20 november – Inclusive cities
Wednesday 26 november – My city

The Urban Meetings will be moderated by Felix Rottenberg and will take place in Zaal Staal, in the World Trade Center Rotterdam (Beursplein 33).

They are free of admission and will be held in English. We do recommend that you make reservations: info@airfoundation.nl. Please state your name, the name of your organization, the date of the meeting you wish to attend and how many people will accompany you.

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.

The official catalogue came at a price though, 50 Euros for press, 70 for visitors. We hope someone builds a Pavilion out of these plastic shells holding the books together.

This neon-orange-glow bag was handed out at the opening ceremony – we missed to get this one while sick at home. We photographed this dude on the 2G Vaporetto Party – he’s lucky we didn’t jump him for it!

This is only the Australian back-up bag, the larger one was already out of stock. The nice booklet with an overview of all the exhibited models was a separate purchase.

The cliché stays true, black is the most common color.

The Danish bag was one of the most spotted ones – due to its size, and the nice handle.

We received this bag of the easy-to-miss Portugese Pavillion, which is worth a visit due to Souto de Moura’s mirror installation. The bag came with a really nice book on the piece.

Spin the bag fast enough and you get the Swiss flag.

Excitement for the idea – Potential of the idea

What happened to the biennale was the main question running through my head the whole time inside the main pavilions this year. The theme, Out There: Architecture Beyond Building, is loaded with intellectual potential and openness of interpretation, and yet did not seem to unite the chosen content exhibited. It is possible that the theme developed by Aaron Betsky was too broad and not accurately defined, or that it was too ambitious without the right resources.

While the biennale is somewhat desynchronised every year –due to the individual country pavilions running with their own themes- this only emphasizes the need for strong curation of the main exhibition pavilions. The Arsenale Pavilion overall read more as a who’s-who list of architects than an intentional presentation of relevant work. Add to this the fact that many pieces of the exhibition where older, well-known works, they were unable to inspire surprise.

Dysturb.Link: For a full set of photographs from the Venice Architecture Biennale 2008, visit our Dysturb.Net FlickR Set

While the Arsenale had a number of well-executed pieces, the overall sequence of the exhibition seemed broken and detached. Within the Arsenale was a sub-exhibit entitled Roma Interrotta / Rome Interrupted, a fantastic set of original urban plan drawings originally produced in 1978 for one of the “International Art Meetings” conceived by the architect Piero Sartogo. The beauty of the plans are not overshadowed by any hype, and the spatial experience is completely discontinuous to the next room, Uneternal City. The experiential contrast of the two rooms, even though the theme is continuous, asks the simple question “Is the Uneternal City more hype than content?” There is a small project by BIG Architects in Uneternal City that proposes a “Pizza Plan” for Rome. While it is funny, it is only that, it doesn’t go further.

The Padiglione Italia within the Giardini felt more successful. The pavilion was tightly organized and the overall sequence was more fluid and continuous. There was more play within the source of content and the type of representation. Photo-collages, installations, sculptures, videos, models and drawings are all put at the service of what each architect/office has been investigating. There is less burden of trying to “go beyond” while still playing with the theme itself.

The theme in its context

When the theme was originally announced, I questioned the theme in a previous post. The uncanny similarity to themes already investigated by Volume magazine are in the least humourous, but also question the originality of the curating. To quote Betsky’s text from the exhibition catalogue:

Out There: Architecture Beyond Building
The 11th Architecture Biennale, entitlted Out There: Architecture Beyond Building, points the way to a beautiful and critical architecture arising out of the tomb of building. It starts out by pointing out what should be an obvious fact: architecture is not building. Buildings are objects and the act of construction leads to such objects, but architecture is how we think and talk about buildings., how we represent them, and how we build them. More generally, architecture is a way of representing, shaping and offering critical alternatives to the built environment. In a tangible sense, architecture is that which allows us to be at home in the world. In our society, buildings are too often the residue of the desire to make another world -a better world, open to possibilities beyond the everyday.

This year’s theme seems uncannily similar to the manifesto of Volume magazine, published by Archis:

About Volume
Volume is an independent quarterly magazine that sets the agenda for design. With going beyond architecture’s definition of ‘making buildings’ it reaches out for global views on designing environments, advocates broader attitudes to social structures, and reclaims the cultural and political significance of architecture. Created as a global idea platform to voice architecture any way, anywhere, anytime, it represents the expansion of architectural territories and the new mandate for design.

We are architects = Are we architects?

I applaud this theme absolutely, and hope that the idea resonates for a long period within the discipline, and within the public. It is obviously a theme that is widely felt within the Netherlands, especially because of the work of offices such as AMO. Their work literally goes beyond the architecture of buildings, but it is important to remember that AMO is often filled with people that have mixed experiences, with backgrounds often more broad than architecture.

Nonetheless, the larger debate about how architects and architecture can go “beyond architecture” is not so widely established within the discipline, and such an exhibition could do well to help establish a strong theoretical and strategic understanding of just what an architect can do in society if it is not building. For this reason, Volume magazine is an enormous contribution to architects opening our vision towards a broader implication in the world.

One danger to taking architects out of our domain is that our talent seems to be neutralized and even made somewhat banal. There are pieces in the exhibit that seem to only reproduce ideas already explored in other fields. One such example is MVRDV’s Skycar City that appears to be a terrible remake (not remix) of what Science Fiction artists have been imagining for over 100 years.

Our Favourite Pavilions!

Poland Pavilion
One of the best projects from the biennale is in fact a series of photo-collages produced in collaboration by two photographers (not architects), Nicolas Grospierre and Kobas Laksa for the Poland Pavilion (no link). The work takes existing photos from well-known buildings in Poland and reimagines the same project in 50 years. The images portray both utopia and dystopia for future urban scenarios. The projection of utopia and dystopia permeates the biennale overall.

Swiss Pavilion
Some of the most “revolutionary” work (if such a thing exists today) was shown in the Swiss Pavilion. The research at the ETH Zurich in the DFAB unit in collaboration with Gramazio & Kohler Architects proves a totally reinvention of how to build architecture by employing industrial robots. If something isn’t more revolutionary in terms of building construction methods, economics and social norms, I don’t know what is. The swiss have also compiled the work, Design Explorations, into a very beautiful book and useful website.

Japan Pavilion
The Japanese pavilion exhibits the very subtle and sensitive work of Junya Ishigami. He has been recognized for his inventive recent project, the Kait Workshop on the campus of the Kanagawa Institute of Technology in Japan. For the exhibition, 20 students meticulously hand-drew plans and landscapes onto the gallery walls in pencil. The work is quite magnificent, and a small installation behind the pavilion resembles the Kait Workshop.

Danish Pavilion
Curated by the Danish Architecture Centre, the Danish Pavilion has created Ecotopedia, a broad initiative to educate people about environmental initiatives. While I’m sure that many people are either overwhelmed or underwhelmed by the constant debate on environmentalism and sustainability, the Danish pavilion is very ambitious and they deserve credit for taking the pavilion exhibit to another level. While the exhibit is full of data and interactive programs, almost no one has the time and energy to spend reading and absorbing the content. On the other hand, the content is online and preserved for future reference. In the 2006 biennale, Denmark also created a fantastic exhibit, showing the ambition of the country in design. How about a trip to Copenhagen?

Dysturb.Link: For a full set of photographs from the Venice Architecture Biennale 2008, visit our Dysturb.Net FlickR Set

Dysturb has spent the opening press weekend at the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale. This year’s theme, Out There: Architecture Beyond Building, was curated by Aaron Betsky, the former director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, and now director of the Cincinatti Art Museum (previous article here).

As we start to process the event, we have first uploaded our best images for all of you to see: Dysturb or FlickR. Coming soon will be more detailed articles. To find out more about the individual country pavilions both within the Giardini and around Venice, their listing and links can be found here.

See all pictures here:

I am wrapping things up here at maxwan architects & urbanists, as tomorrow is going to be my last day. I will be teaching urbanism at a private university in Aleppo (google maps) in a week.

We have achieved quite a bit recently – not only did we launch our new maxwan website, but we also won the competition for the design of 2009′s Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam (IABR). The motto of next year’s Biennale is ‘Open City’, a term Kees Christiaanse (the Biennale’s Curator) has been working with for a while. Maxwan translates this idea spatially by turning the NAi inside out.

A more direct access to the main large exhibition hall turns it into a multi-functional lobby/conference-hall/exhibition space, directly exposed to the public space instead of being tucked away in the belly of the building.

Maxwan’s new website stays true to maxwan’s excel-driven soul, providing quite complete data on the projects including high-resolution images. Check out what I have been working on recently – supervising the Barking Riverside masterplan and previously developing a new vision for Rotterdam’s Harbour.

Experimenta Design is an existing festival from Lisbon that has been invited to Amsterdam for the first time starting this September (2008). With a great line-up of events and conferences, the festival is very promising. The Droof Event 2: Urban Play aims to attack the streets of Amsterdam with urban interventions. And of course, any reason to visit Amsterdam is great.

About the festival:

After 4 successful editions in its native Lisbon, ExperimentaDesign, the international Biennale dedicated to design, architecture and contemporary culture, was invited by the City of Amsterdam to branch out to the Dutch Capital. As a result of this, ExperimentaDesign will now take place in alternating years in Lisbon and Amsterdam, each with different programmes.

In 2008, Amsterdam hosts its first edition of the Biennale, from 18 September to 2 November, under the theme Space and Place – Design for the Urban Landscape.

ExperimentaDesign Amsterdam 2008 highlights urban culture as the playground for the global citizen. The world’s cities are not only home to over half of the world’s population, they are also a metaphor for today’s cultures and a testing ground for new forms of conviviality and interaction. Throughout its three core exhibitions, the Biennale turns the spotlight on innovative urban design as a process of social action, exchanges and experiment.

As in previous editions of the Biennale, ExperimentaDesign Amsterdam 2008 promises to set the city’s pulse racing with a challenging, multidisciplinary programme that combines exhibitions, urban interventions, lectures and debates. For over a month and a half, the Dutch Capital will be host to a fresh selection of international talent, buzzing with playfulness, interactivity and creative energy.

During the Opening Week – from 18 to 21 September – Amsterdam is the ultimate place to be, as the Biennale launches with four days of lively exchange of ideas held in emblematic venues throughout the city.

About the theme – Space and Place: Designing for the Urban Landscape:

For the first time in history the earth’s population is more urban than rural. This means that for most people on this planet, the city has become their natural habitat. When in this context we speak of growth and blossom, terrain and flow, or use other natural metaphors, we speak in fact of engineering, architecture and design. We talk about the city as a landscape, that we have created ourselves and continue to shape.

Shaping a place is as much about imagining it as it is about building. Look at a child playing and you can recognize an arch-instinct shared by all living beings. Stepping over an imaginary line, and closing a virtual door behind him, the child says: now I’m in my home. If he has only sticks and stones to play with, he will use these to demarcate the difference between inside and outside, between a place and its surrounding space.

In design for the urban landscape, such symbolism meets the existential needs of the city’s inhabitants, who use it to define their habitat as a place to be. ExperimentaDesign Amsterdam 2008 focuses on the new urgency with which we consider urban public space. We highlight the latest strategies for enhancing public places as theater of public conviviality. From informal – and sometimes illegal – interventions which reclaim the street as the meeting place for independent citizens, to proposals by architects and designers to develop the city’s public space as a playground for social interaction. Plus reflections on how to transform a neutral space into an individual place by an international range of cutting-edge designers.

ExperimentaDesign Amsterdam 2008 invites designers, architects and other creatives from all over the world to meet their audiences in one of the finest urban playgrounds of all: the city of Amsterdam.

Workshop announcements come in packs. Here is the third one, which I’d like to recommend especially. The INTI supported masterclass compares highly regulated planning strategies in the showcase newtown of the Netherlands, Almere, with the self-organised strategies employed in Gulensu, a clandestine city extension of Istanbul.

Planning is a messy, time and energy-consuming business of trial, error and failure. Success is not a certainty and even when the result is successful, it is often a surprise, not what was actually being sought. Jane Jacobs

THE RESPONSIVE CITY: ISTANBUL – RANDSTAD

Why?
The Responsive City: Istanbul-Randstad* focuses on new approaches to the 21st city. Theories of complexity and their application onto the field of urban design and architecture form its core. Here, the city is seen as a dynamic open system, constantly influenced by interacting bottom up and top down players.
Who?
The Responsive City is an interdisciplinary course offered as an once-only-elective for 16 participants with diverse backgrounds such as human geography, planning, sociology, architecture and urban design.
How?
The course requires a hands-on approach with two intense on-site masterclasses in Istanbul and Almere. Agent-based mapping and responsive design game are main tools of the course. Knowledge/interest in GIS mapping, informal city, Istanbul and/or Almere is highly appreciated.

The Deadline for Application is 5th of September 2008, Dates are 29 September – 3 October 2008 in Almere; 27 – 31 October 2008 in Istanbul. The Masterclasses are run by Prof. Arnold Reindorp, Prof. Juval Portugali & ir. Ekim Tan.

More at INTI, and soon at theresponsivecity.org.

Our friends from Supersudaca host an interesting workshop on tourism in post-castro Cuba in September. It’ll set you back 1000€, but scholarships to reduce the fee are available. The objective of the workshop is to find specualtive answers on questions as:

How will Cuba change its tourist branding in a SIN-EMBARGO scenario?
How will it mutate its current spatial segregation strategy between locals and tourist in a SIN-EMBARGO scheme?
What will be the territorial impacts in a Cuba SIN-EMBARGO that admits cruise ship tourism?
Will Cuba become a role model for next generation tourist developments in the Caribbean and worldwide in a SIN-EMBARGO condition?
What is the emerging territorial paradigm of Sun and Beach in the Cuba CON-EMBARGO? Will it change in a SIN-EMBARGO context?
Will the regulation culture and environmental management remain the same in a ‘liberalized’ Cuba SIN-EMBARGO?
How will Cuba react spatially to the opening of the massive market of second residences for American pensioners in a Cuba SIN-EMBARGO?

The inscription period ends on 15th of August. The (slightly disappointing) results of last years sudapan competition will be at display at RAS gallery in Barcelona from 4th September on.

More at sinembargo.org.

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.

You may also watch the Livestream Broadcasts online.

2007–2008 Second-year final presentations

Associative Design Research Program
Urban Ecologies

There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds.
——Felix Guattari

In the Three Ecologies the French psychologist Felix Guattari states that now, more then ever, nature cannot be separated from culture. He argues for a politics of “ecosphy”—or the interrelationship of social, mental and environmental ecologies. Based on this thesis, this research studio has hypothesized the forms of urbanization that can be actualized within the various environmental ecologies of Phoenix, Arizona.

The studio has been studying the region’s specific social, economic, political, climatic and material environments with the aim of presenting serious alternatives to the contemporary housing production surrounding Phoenix. Located in a wide valley that has allowed for low-density urbanization with few limitations, the region has maintained rapid and sustained growth since the end of World War II. Pro-growth civic policies have helped fuel an economy that, along with the region’s natural amenities, has attracted many new residents. This growth has resulted in the need for more water, much of it now coming from the Colorado River. This has also created regional and sectorial conflicts between Arizona and its neighboring states as well as between agricultural and urban land uses. Demand for electricity, especially for air conditioning, continues to escalate. An abundance of motor vehicles, but lack of highway infrastructure, has led to increased air pollution and traffic congestion. These specific site circumstances, and limited natural resources, have made Phoenix an environmental ecology between growth and supply.

In opposition to the conventions of typical American subdivision development, the studio is presenting neighborhood models that generate an urban environment. Instead of establishing a predetermined master plan, these growth models follow potential decision-making processes in order to react to various changes within the economic market and the development of complimentary programs according to of inhabitation or demand. They also are actualized in relation to the ecological constraints set by Phoenix desert.

Five projects will be presented that argue that new forms of housing neighborhoods must learn from site-specific circumstances. Each project is structured in four phases, taking a quarter mile section of the Phoenix desert as a case study. From the local vegetation ecology and radiation production to the effects of flooding in relation to the economic value of the raw desert, these projects unfold specific and intensive characteristics of the desert. Additionally, two projects will demonstrate the desert’s potential as an urban growth model of one possible decisionmaking process.

This studio is part of the Associative Design Research Program, headed by Peter Trummer, which investigates the potential and design of new site-specific housing environments by applying associative techniques to all scales of a design process to increase its relevance to the architectural discipline.

Tutor: Peter Trummer
Participants: Tsung-Jen Chang, Botsung Chiu, Daewon Kwak, Tzu-En Hsu, Kyo Suk Lee, Chia-Ying Lin, Fairuz Razali, and Mika Watanabe.
Guest Critics: Lawrence Barth, Christophe Cornubert, Aris Georges, Christopher Lee, Lars Lerup, and Matthew Moore.

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Capital Cities Research Program
The Limits of the City: A Strategic Project for Seoul

We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.
——Hannah Arendt

The studio focuses on the relationship between forms of metropolitan labor and the possibility of political life. As one of the most physically dense, socially complex, and technologically advanced cities in Asia, Seoul is the ideal site to test how economy affects a city’s political life.

It is generally assumed that our contemporary civilization is a post-industrial one, shaped by the emergence and the hegemony of immaterial labor over the production of goods. The studio argues that the place of this process of production is the metropolis.

The metropolis brings these processes outside of their canonical space —the factory— and disseminates them through all aspects of urban life. If we assume that industrialism is not simply the process of production of goods, but a way to make anything economically productive —from the human body to the human mind— then we can presume that we are still part of the industrial civilization where urbanity itself is the ultimate factory. Confronting this scenario, the critical issue this studio explored is what kind of cityness can be imagined in the contemporary metropolis, where production seems to be sustained by economics.

The site of research and design is the conceptual border between the city as a locus of production and the city as locus of political life. The studio attempted to answer how an architectural intervention can consciously frame prototypical forms of density, shared facilities, and living and workspaces. An overall urban strategy for Seoul, consisting of 11 punctual and prototypical urban design interventions, will be presented. In their exemplarity, these interventions are capable of transforming the geography of the entire region. They are mainly concerned with the proposal of living typologies of space that can limit the expansion of the built environment, the proliferation of scattered settlements, and that can foster the creation of places of encounter and sharing that are different from the living and working patterns imposed by economic exploitation.

This studio is part of the Capital Cities Research Program, headed by Pier Vittorio Aureli, which aims to redefine the idea of the city as a political institution by focusing on the relations between architectural form, political theory and urban history by means of large-scale critical urban projects.

Tutors: Pier Vittorio Aureli, Martino Tattara, and Elia Zenghelis.
Participants: Julica Grzybowski, Seung Jeong Hong, Eun Kyung Lee, Alejandro Martinez, German Ramirez, and Tsai-Ching Tsai.
Guest Critics: Christopher Lee, Lars Lerup, Gabriele Mastrigli, and Andreas Ruby.

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Program Tuesday, 1 July 2008

10:30am Welcome by Rob Docter, General Director
Introduction by Vedran Mimica, Director
10:45am Final presentations of the Associative Design Research Program
studio entitled “Urban Ecologies”
12:00pm Comments by guest critics and faculty
12:30pm Round-table discussion with guest critics
Moderated by Peter Trummer, Head of the Associative Design Research Program
1:30pm Complimentary lunch
2:30pm Final presentations of the Capital Cities Research Program
studio entitled “The Limits of the City: A Strategic Project for Seoul”
4:00pm Comments by guest critics and faculty
4:30pm Round-table discussion with guest critics
Moderated by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Head of the Capital Cities Research Program
6:00pm End-of-year exhibition opening and reception
7:00pm Graduation ceremony

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Graduating participants:

Tsung-Jen Chang, Taiwan
Botsung Chiu, Taiwan
Julica Grzybowski, Germany
Seung Jeong Hong, Korea
Tzu-en Hsu, Taiwan
Dae-Won Kwak, Korea
Eun Kyung Lee, Korea
Kyo Suk Lee, Korea
Chia-Ying Lin, Taiwan
Alejandro Martinez, Dominican Republic
German Ramirez, Colombia
Fairuz Reza Razali, Malaysia
Tsai-Ching Tsai, Taiwan
Mika Watanabe, Japan

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Guest critics:

Lawrence Barth, Senior Lecturer in Urbanism, Architectural Association, London
Christophe Cornubert, Architect, Los Angeles
Aris Georges, Dean, Taliesin, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA
Christopher Lee, Principal, Serie Architects, London
Lars Lerup, Dean and the William Ward Watkin Professor of Architecture, School of Architecture, Rice University, Houston
Gabriele Mastrigli, Architectural Historian, Rome
Matthew Moore, Visual Artist, Phoenix
Andreas Ruby, Architecture Critic and Theorist, Berlin

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Institute faculty:

Vedran Mimica, Director
Pier Vittorio Aureli, Head of the Capital Cities Research Program
Joachim Declerck, Centre for Architectural Research and Development
Salomon Frausto, Head of Architectural Broadcasting
Roemer van Toorn, Head of the Projective Theory Program
Peter Trummer, Head of the Associative Design Research Program

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.

This friday at 16:30 an interesting exhibition opens @ the Casla in Almere. It will feature the winning projects of the Eenvoud Competition, the third edition for an experimetal neighbourhood in Almere. Its predecessors, “De Fantasie” and “De Realiteit”, ‘Fantasy’ and ‘Reality’ were held back in the eighties and their results are still worth an excursion. More information on that below.

“De Éénvoud” or ‘Simplicity ‘is the result of a competition held in 2006. The brief was to design a freestanding and simple low-cost house, expressing their own wishes and ideas for dwelling. The winners got the possibility to build their design on a beautiful open spot in the woodland of Noorderplassen-West.

The twelve winning projects, amongst which an ornithologist’s house, a rubber house, a convertible house and a scaled version of the Unité d’Habitation were submitted from The Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Portugal and Sweden. The houses will have a permanent character, with a minimum of building regulations. Some of the projects will be built by the designers themselves; nine projects are still open for clients to join in.

The Exhibition “De Éénvoud” opens the 28th of march and will run until 10th of may 2008 @ Architectuurcentrum CASLa, Weerwaterplein 3, 1324 EE Almere Stad
Open Tuesday to Saturday between 12.00-17.00

The Predecessors
“De Fantasie” and “De Realiteit” were meant to stay only for five years, but as always with experimental projects, they usually last longer than permanent houses. The houses are used either for permanent living, as holiday homes or studios.
They are part of a number of special residential neighbourhoods in Almere, amongst which such ridiculosities as The Regenboogwijk (Rainbow Quarter), Stedenwijk (City Quarter), Muziekwijk (Music Quarter), Filmwijk (Movie Quarter), Parkwijk (Park Quarter). De Realiteit and De Fantasie have arguably yielded the most striking architecture. De Realiteit comprises seventeen projects on the Noorderplassen lakes, while nine houses make up De Fantasie on Weerwater.

De Fantasie
De Fantasie has developed into a beautiful and tranquil neighborhood on the southwest shore of the Weerwater. Because of the involvement of the people in this area it has the feel of a holiday resort. The intention was to build homes which were to be demolished after five years. However, due to the project’s success, the houses are still standing. A striking design in this quarter is ‘Hard Glass’, by architect Jan Benthem of famous dutch office Benthem Crouwel. It was one of their first projects, now they are building every major train station, airport etc. This project, ‘Hard Glass’ is a glass, cubic villa which has been lifted off the ground by a construction of steel tubes. The living quarters inside the cube resemble an aquarium. The type of doors also used on ships divide the villa’s rooms.
The VVV (the local tourist information office) in Almere has a CASla route description through De Fantasie which you can enjoy without a guide.

De Realiteit
The ‘temporary character’ is also reflected in the much talked-about quarter De Realiteit. Here too the houses are still standing, as they are a resounding success. De Realiteit lies in a fairly remote area, which has resulted in a surprising ambience. The seventeen houses differ in the materials used and the construction, but mainly in shape. The house created by Dick Bruijne and Gerard Koppelman is a striking design which stands out. ‘A bird is flying underneath our house’ is suspended five meters above the ground in a steel frame. The house itself is a small, two-storied wooden cube. The surface area of the house is small in proportion to the steel frame.
You probably also come across ‘Markies’ a house which unfold from a trailer. I guess you won’t see it there though since its constantly on the road.
De Realiteit is situated on the Noorderplassen and the VVV also has a route description on this one.
Check out the website for more details on the houses.
More photos also here

June 11th the first Museum entirely dedicated to Graphic Design will be opened by our Queen Beatrix in Breda.
For the opening my friend Teun Castelein will make his graphic statement out of concieved content from 250 participants. Everybody is welcome to design its own flag and mail it to flag@graphicdesignmuseum.com. All designs will be printed on unique flags and put against the building. The result will be an explosion of information. A colourful art piece at the old baroque building of the supermodern Graphic Design Museum.
Really a piece of art that makes people think about modern visual communication, about the position of musea in the contemporary image-culture and the fact that everybody is a designer/ image-maker nowadays.

So invest some 250 €, add another line to your CV and be part of the opening exhibition. You can upload your images here.
It seems to be selling quite well and I’m sure it will look amazing.

Teun did a similar spectacular work of art inspired by the famous website ‘www.milliondollarhomepage.com‘ in 2005. He sold the façade of his Alma Mater, the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam to more than 300 companies, organisations and individuals.

They added logos and trademarks, images of art, poetry and lovenotes. The façade consists of more than 16,000 tiles [35x29cm], each of which is supplied with its own individual printed plastic plate. The result is an overwhelming mosaic of colour and information – a project that seeks to push the boundaries between commerce and art, society and the movements of the market, the private sector and public space. The Sandberg Institute is located on the Amsterdam ring road in the Zuidas district, the city’s new economic centre.

Teun Castelein, who is actually the first man in real size on the web, graduated in 2002 at the Art Academy of Utrecht with a research on Dutch suburban town Hoogvliet, just outside Rotterdam.
This ghetto town had a very negative image, so he decided to start a feel good branding campaign for its citizens as part of the WIMBY! project. One of his proposals was a Hollywood sign of ‘HOOGVLIET’ [which was implemented in a park design by FAT architects]. With this icon of Hollywood he wanted to give the people something to believe in, that you can be somebody! By giving Hoogvliet a bit of Hollywood allure, he made its inhabitants the stars.

So, go get your creativity boiling, convince your boss to spend those Euros and put something more on it than just your average company logo!

Amsterdam’s finest photography museum, FOAM Fotografiemuseum, has what should be an excellent exhibition opening on the 14th March. The new exhibit by Daniel & Geo Fuchs: STASI – Secret Rooms runs until the 4th June 2008, and documents the interior spaces used by the East German Stasi.

From the FOAM press release:

From 14 March 2008 Amsterdam’s photography museum Foam presents STASI – Secret Rooms by the German artist duo Daniel & Geo Fuchs. The exhibition opens up the hidden rooms once used by the STASI, the infamous East German secret service, in a series of monumental photos. While much of the former DDR infrastructure has been destroyed, or given an entirely new function, the clandestine spaces that Daniel and Geo Fuchs photographed are still in their original condition. Offices, cell complexes, bunkers, living quarters and interrogation rooms: everything is exactly the way it was before ‘Die Wende’. The typical East European interiors, with their functional furniture and sober colours seem remarkably stylised in retrospect. Yet above all, what this large, intriguing project shows is the symbiosis of architecture, power and impotence.

In January 2004, the Starke Foundation invited Daniel and Geo Fuchs to participate in an artists-in-residence programme in Berlin. Following their successful Conserving and Famous Eyes projects, it was only now that they discovered the full extent of the DDR’s structural heritage in Berlin. Besides the Palast der Republik (the DDR parliament) this consists primarily of offices of the Ministry of State Security (STASI) in Lichtenberg, Bautzen and Hohenschönhausen. Even today many of these places remain practically untouched.

Daniel and Geo Fuchs researched the historical background of these locations and photographed them meticulously with an large format-camera. They used a strict system, photographing each room from the same perspective. Thanks to the subtle framing, apparently insignificant details acquire a new importance and give each picture an unusual interpretation. A red phone, a large, archaic intercom, typically East German furnishings, a solitary calendar; it all seems as if it were deliberately put in place by a fashion-conscious stylist. That the reality is rather more sinister gives these pictures their typically bitter aftertaste: the places we see here are checkpoints, prison cells, and for example the residence and offices of the former minister of state security. Daniel and Geo Fuchs’s extremely precise pictures gradually draw us into the maelstrom as we realise the awesome absurdity of this most recent chapter of German history.

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.

This year’s 11th International Architecture Exhibition will be curated by Aaron Betsky, the former director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute and now director of the Cincinnati Art Museum. You can find an interesting interview from 10.2004 between Archinect and Betsky here.

This year’s theme will be:

Out There: Architecture Beyond Building

These days –in Betsky’s vision– buildings are not enough, or too much, to answer to the call of making ourselves at home in our modern world. We must be willing to use all forms, shapes, images and tactics to help us frame, figure out and order a world that is continually changing.

The worlds of art, interiors, landscapes, projected media and literature can and must be mined for such elements. We must not let buildings be the tombs of architecture, but must make an architecture that helps us to feel at home in, figure out and represent the world we live in.

This year’s theme seems uncannily similar to the manifesto of Volume magazine, published by Archis:

About Volume
Volume is an independent quarterly magazine that sets the agenda for design. With going beyond architecture’s definition of ‘making buildings’ it reaches out for global views on designing environments, advocates broader attitudes to social structures, and reclaims the cultural and political significance of architecture. Created as a global idea platform to voice architecture any way, anywhere, anytime, it represents the expansion of architectural territories and the new mandate for design.

And the official Aaron Betsky biography published through the biennale:

Aaron Betsky

Born in Missoula (Montana, USA) in 1958, Aaron Betsky trained in the Netherlands and the United States. Betsky brings vast and varied experience as curator, manager, historian, critic and in creating architecture exhibitions to the Biennale di Venezia.

Director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) of Rotterdam –one of the most important architecture museums and centres in the world– from 2001 to 2006, for three editions (2002, 2004, 2006) he held the post of Commissioner for the Dutch Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia’s International Architecture Exhibition. At the 8th International Architecture Exhibition (2002), the Dutch Pavilion, curated by Aaron Betsky, won the Golden Lion for best foreign pavilion.

After finishing his secondary education in the Netherlands, Betsky graduated from the Yale School of Architecture (USA) and gained a Ph.D. in the History of Architecture from the Technical University in Delft (Netherlands).He is currently Director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (since 2006), one of the most important and oldest (125 years) in the United States. Before this, between 1995 and 2001, he was Curator for architecture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Betsky is a prolific writer and journalist and the author of a dozen books and numerous articles with leading international specialised periodicals. He has written for the “Los Angeles Times” (1991-1994), and amongst the many other newspapers and periodicals he has contributed to, the “New York Times”, “The Village Voice”, “Domus”, “Elle” and “Metropolitan Home”.

He has held the Eero Saarinen chair in architecture at the University of Michigan and has been Visiting Professor at some leading US universities: at Columbia University in New York, at the California College of Arts in San Francisco, at the School of Architecture in Houston, and at the Southern California Institute of Santa Monica. He is an honorary member of the British Institute of Architects (2004) and has won an award from the American Institute of Architects (2001). From 1985 to 1987, he worked with Frank O. Gehry Associates, Inc. (Venice, California).

Among his books are What is Modernism (Phaidon Press, to be published in autumn 2008) and The United Nations Building (Thames & Hudson, 2006).

You can follow these links to see photos from the 10th biennale in 2006 from Darrel Ronald and Thomas Stellmach.

From 22nd February to 18th March 2008, The Architectural Association in London present DRL TEN.

DRL actually stands for Design Research Lab, a research unit started at the AA in 1997. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of DRL, the AA have decide to organise an exhibition, build a temporary pavilion in Bedford Square, and publish DRL TEN: A Design Research Compendium.

The pavilion, designed by DRL graduates Alan Dempsey and Alvin Huang is not yet ready. Its opening is announced for Friday 29th of February Thursday 13th of March (6.30pm – 8.30pm) while the show at the AA gallery opened yesterday night.

The book will be launch Thursday 13th of March (6pm-8pm) and will documents the activities of the DRL from 1997 to 2007.

The exhibition DRL Ten is featuring ten years of work by the DRL’S staff and former students. The coordinators of DRL TEN invited a group of selected graduates of the program (called the ‘Young Punks’) to present their work since graduation. Some of them have now started their own offices, while others are working for some of the big starchitects (Zaha Hadid Architects, Future Systems, OMA, and so forth).

Yesterday’s opening at 36 Bedford Square was painfully congested: Visitors had to queue for about twenty minutes in order to enter the exhibition, as the ‘one in, one out’ rule seemed to be of primary importance for the DRL TEN’s organizers.

Exhibition Poster

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).

I just got news about the Berlage Institute’s lecture series this term. It’s starting rather late, but as always impresses with a highly profiled list of speakers. It’s the pattern we all know and love: A few well known names mixed with a bunch of people maybe less known but definitely worth noticing.

Here’s the details:

Practicing architect and Associate Professor at Ohio State University. Author of ‘Small Buildings’ and ‘Strange Details’, a ‘lively and unconventional appreciation of pivotal buildings by Carlo Scarpa, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Louis Kahn that reveals enough idiosyncrasies and conceits to make any rationalist shudder’ (MIT Press)

of the well known Rotterdam practice NeutelingsRiedijk

Founders of Mansilla + Tuñón Arquitectos, Madrid (check their design for the Museum of Automotion)

Founders of Grafton Architects, Dublin

of Abalos Herreros, Madrid. May we call him the thinker of this office? (No offense, Juan!)

of BevkPerovic, Ljubljana. One of the most interesting offices in balkan Switzerland.

Do we even have to link to UN Studio? Anyway, it will be interesting to hear what his idea of the future Berlage Institute is, now that he’s part of academias new boygroup.

Well, to be honest, I don’t know… Wikipedia list him as an American banker who served as the 70th United States Secretary of the Treasury during both the first and second Clinton Administrations. Apparently that same Robert Rubin has bought the Maison de Verre in Paris by Pierre Chareau and has renovated it in painstaking effort. Might be him….

Sorry for Wikipedia again: ‘Weiss/Manfredi, is an architectural firm headquartered in New York City, founded by Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi. Weiss currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design.’

We’ll find out more when the official poster including lecture titles will be out. Please note that this program is preliminary…
Lectures will usually start at 19:00.
For reservation contact Lenny at the reception one day before under: +31 (0) 104030399

See you there!

ps: the dates are corrected and now also in the calendar: subsrcibe your iCal to this.

Since the fog is holding Rotterdam hostage since a few days (my wonderful theory burst into pieces…) you’ll be happy to hear that next weekend (Oct. 11th to 14th) we’ll have the architectur film festival in town.

Reservations are possible since a few days so get to the phone (010) 411 5300 and make sure you get to see a few delicacies.

Our preliminary tips would be:

• De Grootste Architect Van Nederland (to be translated as either the tallest or the greatest architect of the netherlands, which might both be true…), a documentary on Huig Maaskant as a walk-in movie in Hotel New York. details
• Radiant City, the opening movie ‘Suburbia: Politicians call it growth. Developers call it business. The Moss family call it home.’ details (You should get to see it on Thursday, cause then its playing in the amazing, cantilevering auditorium of the Schipvaarts & Transport College by NeutelingsRiedijk.)
• LA Plays Itself, three hour ‘essay’ by New York Filmmaker Encke King on the cast of the city in different movies. details
• Site Specific, Olivo Barbieri’s semi-blurred helicopter shots across urban landscapes that look like marquettes. (If you haven’t seen it in the NAi’s Spectacular City show last year). details
• Building the Gherkin, well… needless to explain I guess. details
• and, I guess you won’t miss it anyway: Rem Koolhaas, A Kind Of Architect, OMA’s press officer: ‘we are extremely happy, it is a good film’ details

You’ll find a summarized program in our calendar, for further details check www.affr.nl
Enjoy and let us know what you liked!

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.

Sculpture International Rotterdam has just opened this years public art installations, Publiek, showing the work of Ugo Rondinone (CH), Monica Bonvicini (IT/DE) and Germaine Kruip (NL). The work is clustered around Rotterdam’s historic City Hall along the Coolsingel, and activates the city on multiple scales, from the interior space of the recently closed Postkantoor, to the rooftop signage of the Generale Bank, to the doorstep of the City Hall. The outdoor exhibition will be open daily, and is on display until the 18th November, 2007. Above and below Monica’s amazing piece Don’t Miss A Sec, a public toilet made entirely of one-way mirrored glass, causing its user a disconcerting feeling of exhibitionsm or inverse voyeurism.

The Duende (new website) artist-run studio in Rotterdam is one of the city’s finest initiatives. This Saturday, 22nd September, at 17.00 is a vernissage for recent artists working in the studios. Miren Arenzana (ES), Vicky Falconer – personal site (UK) and Saskia Schuler are the three artists presenting their work.

From 21st to 28th September the Forum for current architecture is launching the PLAN 07 in Cologne, Germany. It is the 9th architecture festival with venues all over the city featuring diverse exhibitions, lectures and more. With public realm as a theme the city will become a stage for projects done by architects, urban & landscape designers, institutions, artists and scientists.

For the full program and further information please take a look under plan-project.com.

It has been a while since Dutch architecture has needed a make-over. You can also read the autumn 2005 issue of OASE (link) titled: After the Party:

Half-consciously, but not explicitly, the ‘young’ Dutch architecture [of the 90ies - ed.] reflected the silent consensus of the enlightened neo-liberalism of the period. Conflicts of interest were not resolved, but laconically presented. The complications of building and the shoddy standards of the industries involved were not avoided, but displayed with hardly disguised pleasure. Whereas earlier generations of architects had tried to find balances between vested and public interests, or – in the ‘critical’ 1970s had formulated alternatives to the dominant culture, the SuperDutch architecture was pragmatic, self-confident and frighteningly contemporary. The provocative statement was an important style figure, but its direction remained unclear.

Four years of economic decline and a succession of populist and Christian-conservative politics have brought the post-ideological party of the 1990s to an end. Debates on immigration and the common values of a secularised society have acquired a sharp edge; appeals against political and other ‘elites’ have become commonplace statements on the hymn sheets of a new class of rulers who emerged from the populist revolt that transformed the country, like others in Western Europe, after the millennium. The privatisation of the public sphere – a process that started in the economic crisis in the 1980s and continued without much protest – has accelerated. Cutting subsidies for cultural institutions and wilfully dismantling the system of regional planning, this new regime offers a clear vision of a society that has shaken off what was left of the arrangements of post-war collective planning and cultural politics, replacing it with the disciplinary force of the market.

So Dutch architecture will presumably join the rest of the technology world with a symposium scheduled for November, launching this new theme: Architecture 2.0? Clearly it stems from the O’Reilly Media term Web 2.0 – which is now passé. So Architecture is trying one more time to jump on the bandwagon of a hype, but unfortunately arriving late. The website announcing the conference is very Web 1.0, too: a static, non-community oriented and non-database driven site for starters. But more importantly – will the conference address these issues – communities, communication, bottom-up planning structures, open-source architecture?

The conference participants is a nice list of NL Architectuur 1.0 favs: Wiel Arets, Ben van Berkel, Francine Houben, Rem Koolhaas, Winy Maas and Willem Jan Neutelings. The moderator is Ole Bouman, while Ivo Opstelten and Mels Crouwel will also make opening and closing comments respectively. This raises the question then, who is the next generation of Dutch architects, or foreign architects operating in the Netherlands? Or is architecture version 2.0 the same architects as 1.0 but with some new tricks?

With the subtitle, The Destiny of Architecture, and almost no explanation of the theme, we don’t really know what to expect, other than many grand ideas, perhaps great, perhaps not. But if you’re up for a conference, hopefully you have 350 euros (excl. BTW) to burn, because this is an expensive one. Otherwise, if you’re student, it’s nearly free at 20 euros (incl. BTW).

The Delft School of Design at TU Delft will hold another conference on urbanism following on the heels of the first. Permacity is an international conference on the 27th and 28th November in Delft. The conference theme concerns “the sustainability of urban environments and urban societies under the conditions of globalization and ongoing urbanization.”

The conference applies Permaculture to urbanism and urban design as a position for creating sustainable cities. It should be great for anyone interested in Landscape Urbanism and who feels that designers share responsibility for the future of civilization.

Power Vision: Winy Maas en Indisem (Power Talk 31 may 2007)
Urban future and the power of the architect. Watch

The Power of Urban Design – from London to Almere (Power Talk 1 june 2007)
Presentations by Peter Bishop, Ken Livingstone and Adri Duijvesteijn. Followed by a discussion with Ole Bouman (head of the Nederlands Architectuur Instituut) Watch

Hyper Power: Keller Easterling about Dubai (Lecture)
Keller Easterling (Yale University School of Architecture): Is Duba the prototype of the city of the 21st century? Watch

Fear in the City: Arjun Appadurai (Lecture 6 june 2007)
Arjun Appadurai (New School New York): What are the consequences of global urbanisation, migration and fear and uncertainty of today’s city dwellers? Watch

In addition to these there are a few dutch lectures (watch here):

• De Nieuwe Nederlandse Stad #2: Design Power
• VPRO Laat – Retopia Bijlmermeer
• VPRO Laat – Detroit come back city
• DNW – Onze Hoofdstad

I’d also like to highlight the 50 minute documentary about Caracas – in dutch, but worth watching:

• Tegenlicht – Carácas: de informele stad (Rob Schröder, 2007)

And the R.A.M. series, not related to the Biennale, but also featured on Holland Doc:

• Daniel Libeskind (Rob Schröder, 2004 – 59 minuten)
  A portrait of Daniel Libeskind, Architect of the Jewish Museum in Berlin and winner of the Ground Zero Competition in New York. Watch
• R.A.M Compilation – Architecture (Gabbi Werner, IJsbrand van Veelen and Allan Smithee, 2004 – 47 minuten) A discussion with Anca Petrescu, Shigeru Ban and Rem Koolhaas about architecture and ethics. Watch
• Koolhaas, Petrescu, Shigeru Ban and Aaron Betsky (VPRO, 2004 – 75 min.) A discussion about Architecture with Rem Koolhaas, Anca Petrescu, Shigeru Ban and Aaron Betsky Watch
• War and (in)security (VPRO, 2003 – 76 min.) The easy-going 90ies have been followed by the unstable 00′s. How do artists and architects cope with catastrophe and terror and the desire for safety? Watch

The International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam announced today that Kees Christiaanse (KCAP) has been appointed as the curator of the next Rotterdam Biennale of Architecture in 2009. The early appointment hopefully avoids the organisational problems which accompanied this years’s biennale. In spite of these problems and the smaller size of the biennale this year (due to funding problems), the press release mentions a 30% increase of visitors from 2005′s biennale, painting an optimistic picture for acquiring funds for the 2009 biennale. The press release:

“Kees Christiaanse appointed curator International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam 2009

The board of the Biennale has appointed Kees Christiaanse as curator of the 4th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, in 2009.

Prof. Ir. Kees Christiaanse (1953) studied Architecture at the Delft University of Technology. Between 1980 and 1989, Christiaanse worked for the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, becoming a partner in 1983. In 1989, he started his own firm in Rotterdam, KCAP. In 1990 he founded ASTOC Architects & Planners in Cologne.
KCAP is an internationally operated Dutch design firm specialized in architecture and urbanism. KCAP’s oeuvre is wide in scope and ranges from complex urban transformations and landscape design to architecture and interiors. More than 140 projects have been designed since its founding, of which more than 60 are realized in the Netherlands and Germany. Furthermore, KCAP participates in European and Asian based projects.
From 1996 until 2003 Christiaanse was professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the Berlin University of Technology. He is now professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He regularly acts as a jury member for international competitions, and is the author of several publications about architecture and urban design.”

And further:

“International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam 2007 success

On September 2, the 3rd International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam closed its doors. The four main exhibitions –Visionary Power, The New Dutch City, A Better World/Another Power and Form and the City– at the Kunsthal Rotterdam, the Dutch Architecture Institute (NAi) and the Maashavengebouw received 77.500 visitors, an increase of more than 30% compared to 2005.

The Berlage Institute curated this 3rd biennale edition that focused on urbanization and had as its theme: ”POWER – Producing the Contemporary City”.
Every single day over 150,000 people migrate to the city. The need for architects and urban planners to project and think ahead is urgent. This sense of urgency was the ultimate message of a biennale that successfully acted as a platform for young contemporary architects with a plan, with the will to grasp control of the idea of the city again, and respond to a call-to-arms for advocacy and real engagement in the urban process.

Biennale-director George Brugmans is optimistic: “The great success of this edition has resulted in an even stronger support for the future of this research oriented biennale that wants to function as an international platform for all related parties: architects, urban planners, academics, politicians, administrators and market parties. So we’re delighted that Kees Christiaanse has accepted to be the next edition’s curator; he is the ideal choice given our decision to continue to focus on the future of the city and the issues raised by unbridled urbanization.”

The TU Delft Faculty of Architecture will soon host the 4th International Seminar on Urbanism and Urbanization, with professors from around the the world discussing the theme of: The European Tradition in Urbanism -and its Future. From the 24th to 26th September, many participants will be at the school addressing issues of permanence and change, and conformitites and differences within urban practices within both a European and non-European context.

The main speakers will be: Bernardo Secchi, Joaquim Sabate, Marcel Smets, Zdenek Zavrel, Heng Chye Kiang, Jurgen Rosemann, Christine Boyer and Han Meyer. This is mainly a conference for PhD students, other scientists, and professionals in the field of urbanism; and is jointly organized with KU Leuven, UPC Barcelona and IUAV Venice.

One of the main events will be a round table discussion concerning Urbanism after the Welfare State, and is probably quite important for contexts such as the Netherlands, which has over the past 10 years totally shifted public policy concerning the housing corporations. I know, it sounds quite dry, but this is urban planning-speak. I can imagine that the heart of the matter can be good content. As for the future of (European) Urbanism, the task of urbanists in general is to make the profession much more user-friendly, ugh.

The august break is over, and we’re back at drinking beers in galleries and openings instead of plain bars. We’ll rewire our cultural neurons starting tomorrow at the lecture at the NAI of José Oubrerie about his work with le Corbusier:

The architect José Oubrerie (72) worked for Le Corbusier from 1957 to 1965. In this lecture he will talk about his cooperation with Le Corbusier and in particular about one of his last works, the building of the church of ‘Saint Pierre’ in Firminy, France. This was a long-term project that was only brought to a final conclusion, under Oubrerie’s supervision, last year. “We never stopped fighting for the project,” José Oubrerie comments. “We came back to the work again and again, like an actor who must bring the same freshness to a play even at the 200th performance.”

This Saturday (1st Sep.) you’ll find us at the opening of Riverine, a media installation of my friend Philipp (aka Videogeist – check his website and beautiful work on flickr) from Berlin. The event is hosted by club 11 in Amsterdam, DJ Schege from Tied&Tickled Trio takes care of the music.

In his video-room installation ‘RIVERINE ZONES CONNECTED’, multimedia artist Philipp Geist displays video recordings and video stills from national and international rivers. Using underwater video cameras Geist has filmed the world beneath the surface. It is an attempt to get in touch with our immediate reality; an artistic examination about the ubiquitous element of water. Geist manages to show a part of our reality that is usually hidden from us.

The weekend after the Wereld van Witte de With festival starts featuring heroes as a theme.

Festival De Wereld van Witte de With is traditionally set in the second weekend of September: from Friday the 7th till Sunday the 9th of September 2007. For three days this arts-festival will show you the present art along the Witte de Withstraat and the Museumpark quarter during the opening of the cultural season.
Again you can watch and enjoy fine arts, theatre, photography, film, music, literature, dance, fashion, debate and performances. The festival offers a platform to art-institutions, city-dressers, art-galleries, artists and fashion initiatives to show their work in a different way to their new and existing audience.
In short, the festival is an unique interdisciplinary mixture of art forms, lifestyles and subcultures. Be surprised on the boundaries or similarities of the different disciplines.

And we’re already looking forward to the skyscraper weekend on the 20th to 22nd of September. Learn more about it and the upcoming artpark and the last days of Follydock in our Dysturb Calendar Section!

The Tent gallery has another promising exhibition opening next week, Dutch Design Port, that showcases Rotterdam design talent -we are such navel-gazers here. The exhibition was originally curated for the Milk Gallery in New York, including 10 Dutch Designers, and has now come back home from over the ocean.

Dutch Design Port will display the work of Jurgen Bey, Demakersvan, Simon Heijdens, Richard Hutten, Hella Jongerius, Chris Kabel, Joris Laarman, Atelier van Lieshout, Bertjan Pot and Wieki Somers. The Show runs from 7th September until the 28th October, 2007, and the opening night is also the 7th, at 18.00.

Photos from the Milk Gallery show, after party, and more can be found here.

UPDATE: We’ve added pictures from the event to our Photo Page!

Rotterdam’s top museum Boijmans van Beuningen gets a archive extension by MVRDV. I especially like the cross-section.

Last week we pointed you to emerging architects and cities to go to, this week archinect interviewed offices about what they value in job applications. Useful. The shift to digital applications is remarkable, but it was about time.

Worth a visit is the recently launched site of REX, with a nice virtual tour through the Museum Plaza Project.

The former employer/partner of Prince-Ramus, Rem Koolhaas, will present the “Al Manakh” publication together with Ole Bouman at Rotterdam’s Nai on 10th of september at 8pm. Details in our calendar. If you can’t attend, you can as well watch your idol doing acrobatic stunts.

The Holcim Foundation started accepting entries for their sustainable construction awards. From their site:

The Holcim Awards competition is now open for entries and will close on February 29, 2008. The competition celebrates innovative, future-oriented and tangible sustainable construction projects from around the globe and provides prize money of USD 2 million per three-year competition cycle.

The Holcim Awards (main category) competition is open to projects at an advanced stage of design with a high probability of execution. To be eligible for entry, the project must not have commenced execution prior to June 1, 2007.

In addition, a “Next Generation” category is open for project visions at a conceptual level, early stage of design or with a low probability of execution. To be eligible for entry, the project author(s) must be less than 35 years of age at February 29, 2008. Please note there is no global phase of the competition for entrants in the “Next Generation” category.

Jaime Salazar :

Why can’t Rotterdam return to the forefront in applying imagination to design and production, and lay the ground work for a truly sustainable architecture?

Angelika Schnell:

No doubt Rotterdam’s wish is to be shameless, modern, radical and metropolitan – the ‘city of architecture’. But the reality is more modest, yet more complex.”

Michael Speaks :

Lloyd Quarter is the result of an approach to city development that treats architecture and the city more like products than producers.”

The Dutch Flyer after the break. Admission for the conference (13:00-18:00, De Doelen, Jurriaanse Zaal, Kruisplein 30, 3012 CC Rotterdam) is 175€, and a more friendly 20€ for students.

german architecture & theory magazine arch+ put the first three videos or their interview marathon at the documenta online.

yes, its the same format as the serpentine gallery event and yes, its also Koolhaas and Obrist who are interviewing.
The first online videos are with Marie-Luise Scherer, former ‘der spiegel’ reporter (on journalism and writing), Karl Schloegel, historian (on bottom-up europe) and Thomas Schütte, sculptor (on his archi-scultures, life as an artist and many things more).

Unfortunately the interviews are almost completely in german. I didn’t know RK speaks such good german…

Looking forward for many more to come. The complete list should include:

Thomas Bayrle (*1937, Künstler, Frankfurt/Main)
Gottfried Böhm (*1920, Architekt, Köln)
Hannes Böhringer (*1948, Philosoph, Berlin/Braunschweig)
Arno Brandlhuber (*1964, Architekt, Berlin)
Martin Burckhardt (*1957, Autor/Kulturtheoretiker, Berlin)
Harun Farocki (*1944, Filmemacher, Berlin)
Jeremy Gaines (*1958, Publizist, Frankfurt/a.M.)
Manfred Grohmann (*1953, Bauingenieur, Frankfurt/a.M.)
Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm (*1940, Autor, Berlin)
Sejla Kameric (*1976, Künstlerin, Sarajevo/Berlin)
Eva Meyer-Keller (*1972, Performance Künstlerin, Berlin)
Annette Kelm (*1975, Künstlerin, Berlin)
Friedrich Kittler (*1943, Medientheoretiker, Berlin)
Alexander Kluge (*1932, Filmemacher/Theoretiker, München)
Antje Majewski (*1968, Künstlerin, Berlin)
Jürgen Mayer H. (*1965, Architekt, Berlin)
Isabel Mundry (*1963, Komponistin, Zürich)
Ingo Niermann (*1969, Autor, Berlin)
Marie-Luise Scherer (*1938, Journalistin/Schriftstellerin, Damnatz)
Karl Schloegel (*1948, Historiker, Berlin/Frankfurt Oder)
Eckhard Schulze-Fielitz (*1929, Architekt, Essen/Bregenz)
Thomas Schütte (*1954, Bildhauer, Düsseldorf)
Hito Steyerl (*1966, Filmemacherin, Berlin)
Günter Zamp Kelp (*1941, Architekt, Berlin)

This coming Saturday between 14.00 and 15.00, 14th July, will see the book launch of Archydam: Een Hoopvolle Stad at the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi). Archydam is the product of Raise It Up, the brainchild of Rotterdammer Goshia Grubbin. This will especially be a great event for anyone with kids!

It is an educational project for immigrant children between the ages of 7 and 14 living in Rotterdam. Raise It Up first has the kids think about, and study the world around them. And then at the end of this process they developed an urban plan for a fictional city, Archydam, wherein each of them created their own architectural masterpiece. It is a tool for teaching the kids to understand their new environment, in comparison to the world they originally came from.

Of the many end-of-year shows around Rotterdam, we are especially excited for this Thursday’s opening of Knowing Nothing of Agility at the Tent Gallery, Rotterdam. It is the graduating exhibition for Master of Fine Arts students from the Piet Zwart Institute, part of the Willem de Kooning Academie here in Rotterdam.

Opening Event: 12 July 2007 @ 20.00.
Exhibition Runs: 12 July 2007 – 19 August 2007

Students showing: Alexis Blake [US], Jérémie Boyard [FR], Ruth Buchanan [NZ], Angeline Dekker [NL], Deirdre M. Donoghue [FI/IE], Rafael F. Mendieta [PE], Ruth Legg [UK], Lieke Snellen [NL], Niels Vis [NL]

More info for the Tent Events here.

Press Release – Anke Bangma [course director MA Fine Art]:

Knowing Nothing of Agility presents the graduates of the Master of Fine Arts course at the Piet Zwart Institute, the post-graduate course of the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam.

Ruth Legg [UK] deliberately works with artistic materials or ideas that seem exhausted — used up, like a joke that has been told too often. She explores ways of restaging these cliché materials, such as cardboard boxes or newspaper images, and finding potential in their exhausted condition.

Ruth Buchanan [NZ] engages in intimate, often humorous, negotiations with the artistic legacies that also influence her own work and position as an artist. She searches for ways in which the works, documents and characters of a different era can be taken as a point of orientation, and inherited artistic approaches and meanings can be received and reanimated.

Deirdre M. Donoghue [FI/IE] is interested in memory, as an act that unfolds in the here and now of a social encounter. For her video work Becomings, she brought together family members that had not seen each other for over twenty years, and directed a setting that activated a process of remembering and negotiation of personal, collective and official histories, between three remarkable women.

By using different elements from hip-hop culture, such as sampling and breaking, Alexis Blake [US] engages with the ways in which people put forward and experience their selves within the structures of society. Working with hip-hop artists from the Rotterdam HipHopHouse, she explores the paradoxes of how one develops one’s own self-image and creates a space of one’s own in a subculture that has, by now, become commercialised and institutionalised.

The work of Rafael Freyre Mendieta [PE] springs from his experience of being a migrant. Moving between autobiography and fiction, he develops narratives of his journey of transition. There are narratives of nostalgia, where memories of home resonate in the landscape of his new environment, but there are also critical narratives, where Europe appears not to be the promised paradise of a free and nomadic subjectivity.

Over the past year, Jérémie Boyard [FR] has been roaming the city of Rotterdam, gathering a large collection of photographs. Persistently looking down, at the micro-level of the pavement, he finds leftovers, incidents, and accidents, with which he traces the utopian idea of a city under continuous de- and reconstruction, and speaks about its people without ever showing them directly.

Angeline Dekker [NL] sees buildings as organisms, subject to time and change, even to mortality. Often she works with abandoned buildings, wresting doors and floorboards from the already derelict architectural skeleton, with which to create a precarious sense of equilibrium; but she also manages to produce instability in seemingly stable settings, like in TENT..

Lieke Snellen [NL] is concerned with the relationships between the human body and functional objects and environments. She works on location in semi-public spaces, such as a school or an office, setting up exercises involving people and sculptural elements to explore how these spaces choreograph the movement of the people within them. She presents her findings through documentation as well as by translating them into interventions in the exhibition space.

Niels Vis [NL] has been fascinated by the technologies with which we produce images of reality, and by how these technologies expand our experience of time and space. While some of his works have explored the mechanisms of the camera obscura, his recent work is concerned with contemporary virtual spaces, like Second Life. How do we interrelate with physical and fictional spaces when the borders separating them seem to be disappearing?

Update: I have added some pictures of the exhibition to our photo section. Or use the flash Viewer below:

I finally managed to update the calendar. Plenty of lectures, debates and events this week. Starting from a picnic at the Sonnenveld House, the last debates in the PowerLounge, 100% Design exhibition at the VanNelle and finally the Rotterdam Day Of Architecture on the 26th.
It looks like this is the final spurt before the summer-holdidays, so get your notebooks ready and enjoy some air-conditioned lecture halls. From July on not too much is happening.

Tthe IABR (3rd International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam) opened it’s doors for the public on Friday. The opening event in OMA’s Kunsthal listed Herman Herzberger, Edi Rama (mayor of Tirana) and Ivo Opstelten (mayor of Rotterdam) among others as speakers.

The audience consisted almost exclusively of architecture professionals, and the optimistic words of the speakers about the importance of the urban planner and architect in our society found an easy target. Despite this year’stheme, ‘Power’ is apparently less easy to talk about than Social Consciousness or Optimism.

After some words of Herzberger on Le Corbusier (featured in an exhibition at the Nai right now) Edi Rama, the mayor of Tirana held the most interesting speech of the day. He described the transformation of Tirana in the advent of capitalism. Tirana went from 1000 cars (in 1999) to 125.000 cars in 5 years, from no commercial space at all to sudden proliferation of little barber shops everywhere.

Rama explained how he asked himself how to deal with this new condition needing urban development, having no budget at all. The cheapest solution was to paint, and see how people would react (pictures).

And when we painted the first building – purple, and orange – I received a call: there are hundreds of people on the street, it is a traffic chaos. And everybody started to talk about colors – it was the first time that people debated about something which was there, instead of debating what the quickest way out of the country is.

Read a text about Tiranas city transformation bei Edi Rama himself after the break. The question remains what the next steps have been after this colorful inception – we did not hear about more sustainable urban development happening now.

More about the Biennale coming up, in the meantime check our pictures of the Biennale at the photo page.

When looking up the word "innovation" in the encyclopaedia Britannica, I found the following interpretation:

Innovation: a) the introduction of something new; b) a new idea, method or device.

A little bit further down a comment attracted my attention. A hyperlinked phrase: “innovation – effect on social change”, was explained as follows:

Some social changes result from the innovations that are adopted in a society. These can include technological inventions, new scientific knowledge, new beliefs, or a new fashion in the sphere of leisure. Diffusion is not automatic but selective; an innovation is adopted only by people who are motivated to do so.

Around the year 2000, some scaffolding appeared on the facade of a living block in Rruga e Durresit in Tirana. A renovation process had earlier involved several governmental buildings in the centre of the city, all of architectural value representing a landmark of rational architecture in Tirana. All buildings were built by Italian architects in the 30's but their facades had degraded after long years of forgetfulness or sporadic rennovation of a "free style", totally disconnected to the original colours of the buildings. However, the rest of the city was still the dull grey of blighted communist architecture, mortar falling apart, windows and balconies changed as people liked and could.

A couple of weeks later, when the scaffolding was removed, some strong, blitheful colours painted in square shapes and different forms, were revealed.

This was the first building painted by Edi Rama, the newly elected mayor of Tirana, and it marked the beginning of his project to transforml the ruined facades of the city into fascinating paintings. In the following days more scaffolding appeared and more squares or colours covered other facades of that street. In the months to come, all the streets of the city centre were one by one covered by scaffolding and then reappearing with new, sparkling colours. Alongside with the painting, at the crossroad at Rruga e Durresit, the first street lights were installed, causing an unusual sensation during the first nights, as no part of the city had never before been fully lit.

On other sides of the city there was an immense amount of rubbish being accu­mulated, as numerous illegal kiosks and barracks that had invaded all the green areas of the city centre (including the main park and the riversides) were being torn down. The remains of this informal city, a safe heaven for informality, shady businesses and drug dealers, was step by step being replaced by a green carpet, making the city brighter and more attractive.

Howeyer, let me go back to my initial point. As one can see from the dictionary, innovationis understood as introduction of something new, a new idea or method. Here one can wonder what is new (read innovative) with making a public garden, or fixing street lights, or even with painting a facade?

Well, it is here that one can get help of the larger definition of the word innovation - seen as a social change: "Some social changes result from the innovations that are adopted in a society, "

When asking how the painting of facades can bring social changes, one must step out of the aesthetic realm of colours and forms and remember that one of the main problems of post communist Albanian society was the loss of collective responsibility towards a shared public space/domain. Private property used to rule; everyone had become very individualistic and refused to take responsibility for whatever existed outside the doorstep of their house. They would go as far as changing everything they could inside their old houses, without bothering at all about how it would affect the outside. This example also reflects the attitude towards public space, which was regarded as a space tor pure personal profits.

As soon as the first colourful compositions had been painted on the facades, people started to react. Some didn't like what was happening, some enjoyed it very much, but most felt unsure and started to talk and discuss the phenomena. For the first time there was a sense of a shared public space, and the feeling of collective responsibility crept out from the historical abyss "here Albanians had condemned it. Besides painting the facades, sidewalks were being repaired, lights were being put up, and the amount of geenery was increased. Instead of only men in leather jackets smoking slim cigarettes, women and children, old people and young couples slowly started to reclaim the space that earlier had been socially denied to them. The sun seemed to shine differently from the reflection on colours and fresh green grass. Tirana started to change.

Mirroring the Change

Albanian organised crime has become a point a/reference for all criminal activity. Everything passes via the Albanians. The road for drugs arms and people -meaning illegal immigrants destined for Europe – is in Albanian hands." (Cattaldo Motta, Italian public prosecutor, 2000)

When the world's media shipped out in 1999, Tirana looked like a huge sink estate with some self-important government buildings in it … Tirana now looks like it has been assembled from giant Liquorice Allsorts. This fresh coat is the work of Tirana's mayor and principal topic of conversation … There is a palpable sense of the rise of a generation that sees what needs to be done as more challenging than the swim to Italy … Albania dind't join the 20th century until 1990. By 1997, it had collapsed into anarchy. Six years later, Tirana is the kind o/place where simple people want to raise their children … I fly home contemplating something which, five days previously would have struck me as utterly risible. One day, I'm going back to Albaija. Of my own accord. On holiday … (Andrew Mueller, the Guardian)

Is there a need to comment on these two different quotes, written only 3 years ago apart from each other? Not longer than a few years ago. Albania was still identified with a country of anarchy, thieves, prostitutes and civil war. Only at the beginning of the second mandate of Rama as mayor of Tirana. more and more journalists started to visit the country, first attracted by and then fascinated with the facade painting project No need to say that the sort of "filter" international media uses to represent different realities was taken away from the scrutinizing binoculars of the journalists. The painting and the greenery was by now functioning not only to fascinate the curious western eyes, but as the quote from the Guardian shows, it was helping the VIsitor to see the reality through the eyes of Albanians. After all, this was not merely an aesthetic gesture, a nice painterly act. It was at the same time a pure political act, a gesture of departure with the past, a gesture of hope, a reflection of the energetic drive of a country striving towards the future. At the same time, jobs ,were being created, more public works being realized, streets were being enlarged and repaved and lights were slowly entering all the dark corners of the city. The project materialized the economic growth of the country. Forgotten group ages, as the elders and children, were increasingly finding more and more public space to inhabit. Afier the inutial scepticism, not only citizens. but also businesses along the painted facades agreed to contribute financially to the repaving and improvement of the shared intrastructure of the city.

Where light lit the streets, shadows withdrew, and Tirana became a safer city to walk through at any our of day and night People started to feel more secure and less sceptical about paying taxes (very unacceptable untill the late 90s), because they felt their money was well invested. The Town Hall managed to raise the tax revenue in 2005, six times compared to year 2000 and as a consequence, increase the number of investments in public development projects. Also, the number of businesses was increased by three times during the period 2000-2005.

Some social changes result from the innovations that are adopted in a society … Diffilsion is not automatic but selective; an innovation is adopted only by people who are motivated to do so.

Topos and Tirana Biennale

The key point is how colours, amongst other things, are helping to change the contact between the people and the city; how you can change a city in which people are condemned to live by destiny into a city of choice. (from Anri Sala's interview with Hans Obrist in the catalogue of Tirana Biennale 2).

Alongside the economic growth, the painting of facades and the enlargement of green areas in the city, Tirana had started to get more and more involved in con­temporary art. In 2003, the second edition of the Tirana Biennale was held in the city, representing works by more than 120 artists from all over the world and collaborating with a number of international curators. It was inevitable that the painted city would catch the attention of the invited collaborators. Thus, an entire section of the Biennial, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and the Albanian artist Anri Sala, was dedicated to the continuation of the facade treatment project.

Inspired by the drive of change that the project had proven, the two curators de­cided to take it out of Rama's hands and give it over to a number of internationally established artists, whose artistic practices express ambitions for social change precisely through the construction of visual or environmental experience.

As artist Carsten Holler pointed out:

The political impact of this project lies in the visualization of signs of change … thereby inducing transformation, the social milieu changes as a result of the 'colourification'. The sign alone can be trigger enough.

As a result of the project, international artists turned whole living blocks in central Tirana into unique works of contemporary art. This turn of the project attracted an immense amount of attention trom the international art scene. And it attracted an ever growing number of local artists too that started to react and make works influenced by or commenting on the social phenomena caused by the colours.

And there's more. The city is now open to taking the project even one step further ahead. A larger number of both Albanian and international artists will be invited to turn blocks of buildings into art works. New ways of involving and working together with the different communities are being prepared.

Tirana is an open source to contemporary art, offering an unprecedented interac­tion between artists and public, attracting an ever growing number of visitors and tourists. As the city continues its strive on the way towards the future, the spectacle of colours, already turned into a political investment for development, unfolds everyday and lies in wait for its continuation.

Back to the Near Future
Is it or is it not worth (read innovative) to reinvent the wheel after all? Well, after having experienced what social changes colours can cause, what improvement of life quality the increased greenery brings, and how hope and security is restored by repared and newly lit roads, I think YES reinventing the wheel CAN BE an innovation, a pure introduction of new ideas and methods that causes significant social changes, and this, must be continued!

(Text: Edi Rama, from the IABR blog)

The Maastricht NAi will open a new exhibit on Jean Prouvé this weekend, 12 May, 2007. The exhibition, Jean Prouvé: The Poetics of the Technical Object, will be on display from the 12th May to 2nd September, 2007. Curated by the Vitra Design Museum, the show is billed as the most comprehensive retrospective to date devoted to Prouvé. And we’re big fans of this fantastic flyer by Experimental Jetset

Ruben Dario is one of Rotterdam’s finest. Currently studying photography at the Willem De Kooning Academie, he’s particularly focused on the role of photography in urbanism. His current show, Gated Conditions, showing recent photographs will be on display within the office of Doll Atelier voor Bouwkunst in Rotterdam. The exhibition will be on from the 3rd May 2007 to 15 June 2007. You can visit the office cum gallery between 09.00 and 17.30 daily – and the visit to see inside the office is also worth it.

The doors will open at 20.20. / Tickets can be bought for 5,- euro at the door.
Location: Off Corso, Kruiskade 22, Rotterdam hope to see you there!!!

speakers:(In random order)

Ralf Pasel// pasel.künzel architects

http://www.paselkuenzel.com/

architecture
Suzy Ann van den Berg
Art
Kaije Feenstra
art
Vincent van den Elshout / Don Quichotte Produkties

http://www.dqp.nu/

theatre & concepts
Mike Clark

http://www.iwillnotdrawasiamtold.com

art
Roel Huisman

http://www.roelhuisman.nl/

design
Lizan Freijsen

http://www.lizanfreijsen.com/

art
Ger C. Bout

http://www.gercbout.com/

art
Bart van Lieshout / Wereldtuinen

http://www.wereldtuinkatendrecht.nl

Designer of child friendly open spaces
Friso Gouwetor & Elbert Arens & Jorrit Verduin & Crispijn van Sas / The Girl Next-door

http://www.thegirlnextdoor.be/

architecture and propaganda
Daphne Bom

http://www.daphnebom.com/

art
Martijn van de Wiel / Popsoda
http://www.popsoda.nl/ http://www.hubcreative.nl/
design
Ronald Mannak / 1uptoys

http://www.1uptoys.com/

toys
Joeke & Marijne Beenhakker
http://www.joekebeenhakker.nl/ http:// www.marijne.eu http://www.gedachtegoederen.nl/
design
Ben Oostrum & Rob Bonneur / BOO | Ben Oostrum Ontwerpt & VVLFB architecten – on behalf of the EKWC Brick Project and Rotterdam 2007, city of architecture
http://www.boontwerpt.nl/ http://www.vvlfb.nl/ http://www.rotterdam2007.nl/
product design & architecture

via: http://www.pechakucha.nl/

I’ve just added a couple of dates to our Calendar page –

First of all, there is tonight's panel at the NAi discussing the state of architecture critique in the Netherlands (language will be dutch, fee is 5e). From their announcement:

Aan de hand van drie introducties van architectuurcritica Angelika Schnell (D), architectuurhistoricus Cor Wagenaar (NL) en docent architectuurkritiek Paul Vermeulen (B) wordt gedebatteerd over de stand van zaken in de architectuurkritiek in Nederland en Vlaanderen. Zij gaan in op de vraag in hoeverre de architectuurkritiek verdrinkt in de verschuiving van tekst- naar beeldcultuur? Hoe reflecteert ons denken over het maatschappelijk belang van de architectuur in de architectuurkritiek? En aan welk type architectuurkritiek is in de huidige tijd behoefte?

Also today the “Nederlands Fotomuseum” opens at Las Palmas – finally. There they’ll have enough room to host their extensive collection of not only photography, but also movies and digital media. The Las Palmas Building housed the Holland-America Line since 1953, but was soon used for other things, among them as a trade station for goods from the Canary Islands, thus the name. Benthem Crouwel Architecten conceived the renovation plans for its new use. The opening exhibitions are “Dutch Eyes’ and ‘Panorama Las Palmas”. See nederlandsfotomuseum.nl to see what else is going on on this opening weekend and after.

On the 26th of April you’ll find us at the Worm – a location we favor anyhow – where the new Yearbook of Dutch Architecture will be presented. It’s free, but you can make sure they’ll let you in at www.naipublishers.nl.

In the night of the 24th of may you’ll be able to behold the results of the eldaplus.org workshop “spelen met licht” (play with light). The selected locations gravitate around the Erasmus bridge. You’ll find a full map soon at www.rotterdam2007.nl, you can also register for the workshop at http://eldaplus.org/691.0.html if yo spare 1140e. Let’s hope that the results are more satisfying as the purplish city of Architecture installations we’ve seen so far at several sites in Rotterdam. The same evening will also be the opening evening for the Rotterdam Biennale of Architecture – which deserves an own post to be fully covered.

For a complete list of what’s going on visit our Calendar page.

On Tuesday, April 10, 2007, Martin Berendse of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science will officially open the Dutch Electronic Art Festival. The opening will take place at Rotterdam’s new Las Palmas cultural center at 7:00 pm. A performance by the Belgian group Code31 will be the highlight. DEAF, one of the most important international festivals devoted to art, media and technology, is organized every two years by V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media. DEAF07 runs from April 10 to 29, 2007, in Rotterdam.

Varied Schedule
DEAF07 presents a number of landmark works in the area of media, technology and art. A large exhibition of interactive art will serve as its focal point. Part of the festival’s program will be devoted to the network V2_ has built over the past several years in the People’s Republic of China and other parts of Asia. Chinese artists, curators and other key art world players will take part in the festival. Along with a very special night celebrating V2_’s 25th birthday, DEAF07 will host an extensive range of concerts, performances, seminars, workshops and a symposium.

Visit the Exhibition On the Internet
DEAF07′s large international exhibition of interactive art offers an intriguing overview of contemporary interactive art, from cutting-edge and experimental high-tech works to near-classic video pieces. There is work from Europe, the United States, Canada, the People’s Republic of China and Japan, plus a number of pieces realized in collaboration with V2_Lab.

Follow DEAF07 from your sofa through live webcasts and blogs – and MOBI, a mobile robot with a monitor screen and a camera, which you can control via the Internet. Use the robot to take a remote walk through the exhibition and communicate with visitors.

The DEAF07 exhibition take places at the new Las Palmas/LPII cultural center and Pakhuismeesteren in Rotterdam’s Kop van Zuid. DEAF’s other locations are V2_, NAi, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Ro Theater, Staal and Arminius.

More information about the Dutch Electronic Art Festival (DEAF07) is available here

copy-pasted from V2_info_int mailing list, subscribe here

The 3rd Rotterdam Architecture Biennale POWER is coming – so get ready

While Rotterdam’s notorious Witte de With Straat is full of new exhibitions in time for the recent Museumnacht, one photo exhibit should not be missed. The MKgalerie shows recent work by Dutch photographer Hans Wilschut. At times the images document architectural processes (construction), they also investigate architectural post-processes (abandonment). They are always engaging and having spoken to the artist about his recent photographic trip into China, we’re dying to see the new work. But that won’t go on show in the Netherlands too soon -the next Chinese exhibit will be in Shanghai, naturally. See it now – until the 25 March, 2007.

The Boijmans van Beuningen proves itself yet again with a soon-to-open retrospective on Kurt Schwitters. From March 3rd to May 28th, 2007 the exhibit showing more than 300 pieces will be on display in Rotterdam. With consistently great shows, the Boijmans again makes its neighbour, the Kunsthal, look like a flabby gallery for pop-culture amateurs.

air foundation is inviting us to see MVRDV‘s first realized project in Rotterdam.
After the Blue Houses in Beukelsdijk have been demolished, MVRDV fills the gap with a roof extension in Beatrijsstraat 71.

AIR is organizig a visit on Feb. 28th. The program reads as follows:
17.00 talk with Gishlaine van de Kamp (client), projectarchitect Fokke Moerel (MVRDV), Eric Vreedenburgh (architect and author of ‘Luchtgebonden bouwen’) as well as Wijnand Galema (projectcoordinator AIR)
17.45 tour
19.00 end

reservation have to be made by: 010 280 9700, or info@airfoundation.nl

For those not in the know, Pecha Kucha is an innovative approach to giving presentations that is taking design and architecture circles by storm. This format ensures that presentations last no longer than 6 minutes and 40 seconds as speakers are limited to using 20 slides, each of which is shown for only 20 seconds. These simple rules have resulted in Pecha Kucha nights becoming synonymous with punchy, fast-flowing presentations that keep audiences on their toes.

The Pecha Kucha craze originated in Tokyo among creative professionals as a means to introduce and exchange ideas with peers; and is named after the Japanese onomatopoeic equivalent for chitchat. As it continues to sweep through major cities all over the world, it is quite fitting that Pecha Kucha has made its way to the Embassy of Japan.

more info

“After the architect is dead, one receives another sort of ‘catalogue’, with every scrap of paper interpreted by historians. But building architects ask of the detritus of a working, thinking life completely different kinds of questions that wish to receive totally different kinds of answers.”

Alison and Peter Smithson.

Sun. Feb. 11th 15.00 Dirk van den Heuvel, long time Team10 researcher and editor of ‘Team 10, 1953-1981′ is giving a lecture on the Smithsons, browsing through the NAi archives, and focussing on the correspondece of Team10 members Alison & Peter with Jaap (Jacob Berend Bakema).
The lecture will be in dutch, but to listen is much makkelijker that speaking!

more info @ NAi