Fellow dysturber, Darrel Ronald, founded Open Form Architecture in Montréal (Canada) with colleagues Maxime Moreau and Maurice Martel. We were recently invited to participate in the Pecha Kucha Montréal as our first public presentation. Following our 20 slides / 20 seconds at the special edition of Pecha Kucha Montréal as part of the Portes Ouverts Design Montréal festival, we have made the slides, as well as video available online.

The title of our presentation is, Simple Rules, Complex Behaviour, and illustrates a limited selection of our work over the past years dealing with generative design, cellular automata, simple programming and complexity. We have been particularly influenced by the work of Steven Wolfram and his book, A New Kind of Science. Having participated in two of his NKS Summer Schools, we’ve been fortunate to collaborate with him and a team of mathematicians and programmers in the United States using Mathematica software.

The presentation is bilingual French and English, just like our favourite city! Unfortunately the first words are cut off, and they are: WE ARE OPEN FORM, and WE LOVE OPEN FORM! We hope you enjoy! Below are our 20 slides, that accompany the video.

A new documentary film, archiCULTURE, is in the works about the lives of student architects and the culture surrounding the daily life of design students. The film (trailer) is a grassroots project currently seeking money to finance the project.

The Film Synopsis:

Archiculture is a feature length documentary that examines contemporary issues surrounding the realm of architecture through the perspective of university students during their final thesis semester. The film follows the protagonists through the evolution of their respective senior thesis projects and the internal and external conflicts each student faces during this intense year-long process. Interviews with family, friends, significant others, industry professionals, architects, and design professors are woven throughout the film to create a story that builds an intimate connection between the characters and the audience. The emotional storyline will reveal a breadth of experiences ranging from the 4AM deadline dash, to the fulfilling sensation of graduation. The film provides viewers with an in-depth look into the creative yet competitive process of architectural education while also depicting current issues such as the role of architecture in society, the disproportion of gender and race within the profession, and environmentally conscious design. The story is structured in a way that chronologically follows the students’ development of their theses and continually builds suspense as the final critique looms. The film concludes at the students’ final thesis presentation as they find themselves on the brink of their adult and professional lives, and the closure of their adolescence.

I had to laugh when I found this video linked from the OMA website. After OMA won the BNA Cube award in the Netherlands, this video was produced by Blue Eye Productions to portray the working atmosphere within the office. I really hope you guys (that work there) respond to this. I can tell that some things are true, but others are misleading, like the fact that the teams in the office “are not competitive.” Also linked from the Blue Eye Productions website are other videos and topics concerning architecture.

And if you get the urge to work for OMA, and haven’t applied all ready, they’re (always) looking for people.

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!

UN Studio and MVRDV (in collaboration with the spanish office GRAS) have recently sent us their competiton entries for the Ciudad del Motor in Spain, which has been won by the widely published, but less interesting fish-shaped design by Foster.

UN Studio’s design is a continuous dynamic form, a structure ducking to the ground with a motor-sport aesthetic, reminding of the visual language of an BMW ad. MVRDV’s proposal is a group of buildings - blocks breaking from the ground in a sandy desert, creating an ensemble of squares. Where UN Studio’s design is a new object in the landscape, MVRDV’s design forms part of it. More of a place, less of an object. You can download MVRDV’s project PDF, complete with sections and plans (Thank you, Oana!) here:

UN Studio’s project description:

The building is organized as a continuous loop with two crossing points, offering multiple visitor experiences all related to thetopic of speed and movement. Like a real city, the design for the Ciudad del Motor contains and facilitates multiple programmatic elements, such as a shopping mall, experience centre, museum of movement, a multifunctional hall, a hotel and housing towers. The design of the building is based on the generation of a maximum interaction with the surroundings, especially the tracks, with the Grand Stand accessed via a programmed bridge.

From MVRDV’s project description:

The combination of the racing activities and the dry, arid landscape gives the new Alcaniz race track area a distinct character. Its development can be easily compared with Las Vegas. But can we learn from Vegas again? More ecology? Less gambling? More leisure based on the powers of the landscape?
Maybe instead of an artificial new icon, that specific contradiction, this specific situation itself can lead to an outstandingly remarkable development and approach. Each of the different programs have there own timing, size and character. By positioning them close to each other, they can share their parking, they can create a climatic pocket and they can share a collective plaza. And the rest of the grounds can be used in the future… It gives a compact settlement that enlarges the possibility for remarkability in the vast landscape.
By covering the undeniably huge roofs of the program with the found material (red sand, stones, small plants, vegetation), the buildings can obtain a heavy roof that can act as temperature buffer for the program. The buildings gain a more ecological and natural character. They “blend” in with the landscape.

In related news, Ben van Berkel & Caroline Bos have been awarded the Charles Jencks Award, which is presented annually to the individual who has recently made a major contribution both to the theory and practice of architecture. As the winner of this international award, Ben van Berkel will be giving a lecture at RIBA, in Jarvis Hall at 18:30 pm on 16th October. Other recent projects of UN Studio include the Waldschlösschen bridge in Dresden, which features the typical fluidity of the UN Studio’s project, but surprises with minimal fragility in the elevation.

UN Studio about the bridge:

The design for the Waldschlösschen bridge in Dresden creates an infrastructural connection that spans a length of 800 meters accross the widest parts of the unique and beautiful Elb flood plain, forming an integral part of this landscape. From the banks of the surrounding area, wide transitions taper to establish an interconnecting network for the continuous flows of the diverse users. The asymmetric and topographic shape of the bridge evolves from its inherent conditions, whilst simultaneously integrating the bridge into the outlines of the undulating landscape.

Mark Simonson was invited to talk about typography legend Adrian Frutiger last summer at TypeCon in Boston. He made his inspiring slides available as a PDF. Something you should miss in no circumstance, if you are ever so slightly interested in design! Read more on Simonson’s blog.

Or download here:

The NAi (new website) hosted the book launch and discussion featuring Rem Koolhaas, Mark Wigley and Ole Bouman Monday night in Rotterdam (10-09-2007).

The three presenters first outlined their positions about the gulf region context, before sitting down to take questions about the book. As a possible strategy to diffuse the potential early judgments and criticisms of the crowd, Bouman asked the question, “Who has been to Dubai [or gulf] and seen it first hand?” Roughly not even 10% of the crowd raised their hands, and only half-heartedly at that. It reflects one of the weaker themes of the evening that ‘we should not judge’ the situation in the gulf region, especially in the UAE. When it came to the questions at the end of the evening, the presenters were at times defensive, and repeated numerous times that the books aims to suspend judgment and rather present a detached overview/reading of the situation. But this is not to say the evening wasn’t full of great ideas, polemics galore, and of course, the exciting subject of Dubai and the Gulf Region itself.

More Photos can be found in our photo section.

Ole Bouman: Architecture and Social Change

Ole Bouman presented the most aggressive position of the evening, arguing quite easily that Dubai and the other wealthy emirates are surrounded by the “ring of pain” extending from Africa to the Middle East, to Central and South-East Asia. Encircling this pocket of extreme wealth is the misery and hardship of internal and external wars, civil strife, infrastructure collapse, environmental destruction and a bottoming-out of healthy conditions for society. In a very powerful way, he toured the surrounding region showing the utter destruction of certain countries listing:

• 9 o’clock Darfur
• 10 o’clock Palestine
• 12 o’clock Baghdad
• 12 o’clock Basrah
• 1 o’clock Asfahan, Iran
• 2 o’clock refugee camps in Afghanistan
• 2 o’clock Pakistan
• 3 o’clock slums of Mumbai
• 4 o’clock Sri Lanka (Civil War)
• 5 o’clock Indian Ocean (Tsunami)

Understanding the scale and intensity of the strife and destruction is the turning point for Ole. Architecture, knowing these terrible things, should think hard about the problems, and the often simple ways to remedy the larger problems. He didn’t argue that architects were to tackle the larger problems, given the “absurdity” of the task, but rather engage with the everyday solutions to very real human problems. As an example, he showed a winning project for the 2007 Agha Khan design awards. The success, he says of the Samir Kassir Square in Beirut, Lebanon, is because of its meaning within the context. The simple public space with its trees, is a complete contrast to the grey concrete and at times destroyed city surrounding it.

While Bouman certainly declared the urgency and necessity of architects to engage with this dilemma, he seemed to receive a perhaps unflattering title of preacher, and proclaiming a messianic mission, especially by Wigley. It was as if Wigley ridiculed the task Bouman believed in, suggesting an absurdity to his whole mission to improve the world.

Rem Koolhaas: Dubai in Theory and Practice

Enter Rem Koolhaas, and his attempts to give a bit more of an introduction to the book and region itself, as a counter to Ole’s more general global perspective. In many ways, Koolhaas’ lecture was fragmented, developing a number of interesting themes, that didn’t always connect. Starting with an interpretation of globalization and its economics, he then went onto the “earnest” history of architecture and urbanism in the UAE. He further aimed a refusal of Mike Davis’ position that Dubai is an “Evil Paradise”, and continued with a declaration of the already or imminent “collapse of iconography”. The last treat were photos of Rem interviewed on Al Jazeera -and the audience was clearly pleased with this.

This theme concerning the transfer of financial control from the established markets to the emerging markets was by far the most interesting. It especially concerns the idea of semi-democratic countries beginning to invest in established democracies. Traditionally, while the developed western countries of Europe and North America have largely had the greatest financial stakes in the rest of the world, this is reversing. It is a story you can read about in nearly every issue of The Economist and The Financial Times. The above slide illustrates the wealth of individual nations and their democratic status. It of course concerns the west, and our ability to control our own resources, companies, and markets when large stakes are bought-up by either dictatorship-controlled or semi-democratic nations.

In the book, AMO aims to highlight the early period of the extremely compressed history of architectural and urban design in the UAE. In contrast, they argue that it was western architects and urbanists that have recently contributed to the current situation of hyperbolic, iconic, and often kitsch projects. Can we perhaps interpret this to be such offices as Atkins Middle East -well documented in Al Manakh? The two above images are particular favourites of Koolhaas, showing the apparent seriousness and earnestness of understanding the urban issues and problems. Other references to back the argument of seeking design excellence in the gulf region from the period of the 1970s onwards leads to projects by respected western designers such as Alison and Peter Smithson, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and also the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange. Of course the book goes into full details. In many ways there is strong grounds to argue that the region developed through its first “modernization” during the 1970s and 1980s with a seriousness of task. The unanswered question then, is how did Dubai design today arrive at spectacle and commercial hype?

In the most polemical part of Koolhaas’ talk is the refutal of Mike Davis‘ claim that Dubai is creating a condition of slavery for the workers, thereby creating an illegitimate condition, an evil paradise. This is a very sticky subject, and I do not want to get caught in-between the arguments. There is truth in what both Davis and Koolhaas is saying. The worker’s housing photograph was taken by AMO (or a local surrogate) when visiting a housing district. Koolhaas argues that the conditions are not that of slavery. He also claims that “we were the first to enter these areas” which might or might not be true. Koolhaas also argues that these housing conditions are typical of Asian situations, and that to “read this as slavery, is to misread the Asian condition.”

This is an argument which will always be balanced between the two sides, depending upon what standards we set. If we expect that the Dubai workers should receive the same standards as Posh Spice and David Beckham who own beach property in Dubai (Dubai World?) then clearly there is a problem. If however, we only expect “Asian conditions” for the workers who inevitably all filter into Dubai from the “Ring of Pain” surrounding the region, then everything is fine.

Koolhaas then jumped to the familiar subject of the “collapse of the icon” in Dubai. This has been presented world-wide, from Moscow to Montreal, and is not worth commenting on. The biggest criticism most people have is that the very notion of the “starchitect” is useless. Perhaps there is no legitimacy to “Starchitecture” at all.

Also presented were sketch masterplans of Dubai. They were beautiful plans that speculated what could happen in the desert region beyond the current developments. One massive oversight is the obvious fact that nobody builds in the desert now, and is unlikely to anytime soon. The current idea of Dubai completely revolves around water (a psychological element of survival). The OMA plans are obviously speculative, and served to show the size of what is possible -fitting London, Paris, Barcelona and many other cities into the vast desert. It is not a convincing future of Dubai -can we imagine many developers willing to extend Dubai into the sea of sand?

During the question period, one of the audience members pointed out that Koolhaas “let the cat out of the bag” in terms of his critique of Dubai. In the plan, states Koolhaas, we can see that “there is still hope for Dubai”. According to Rem, today’s practice of creating -at the hand of foreign architects- “enormous developments that focus on the tourism” and “creating endless coastal loops of resorts” is “utterly unsustainable”. The hope for Dubai is also that a new period of design will emerge. This is exemplified, Koolhaas adds, by the recent plan of Sir Norman Foster’s zero emission urban plan.

Clearly the biggest crowd-pleaser was the photo of Rem presenting Al Manakh on Al Jazeera television. You could feel his sense of pride.

Mark Wigley: Going into the Desert

Mark Wigley won the award for rubbing the audience the wrong way. While admitting “never having gone to Dubai”, he was happy to say that he “sends many people there.” He also wins the award for being the most defensive of the three speakers. At nearly each question he attempted to accuse the questioner of being judgmental. Repeatedly he argued that the book was not created to pass judgment on Dubai. It became utterly banal and boring. He states that, “The purpose of the book is not to dictate a path, but to open possibilities for the intelligent reader.”

One appreciated argument from Wigley was that it was the architects in Dubai, and not Dubai that was off course. This however seems like judgment. The rest of his talk focuses on a free-flow discourse about the desert and our perception of it. The desert represents the void of spatial definition, something that - in the West - we feel a need to attack and conquer.

Last week I attended the presentations of the associative design 2nd year at the Berlage research studio synthetic vernacular. Led by Peter Trummer and assisted by our fellow dysturb evangelist Martin Sobota, the class investigated traditional chinese building typologies. The principles found in the analysis were used to create a set of rules to create a framework to parametrically derive urban structure and architecture of an exemplary plot in Shanghai: Deus ex Machina.

The research group divided up into for teams, each focussing on different base parameters as FAR, degrees of privacy, climate, internal room organisation, sun trajectories. The formal decisions of the teams also led to varying urban fabrics, from low-rise high-density urban mass not unsimilar to south-american favelas to a styled courtyard & slab network. The results are cutting edge and and visualisations of the process are breath-takingly beautiful. But watch the movie first, then proceed to the review.

The excellent critique acknowledged that the intricacy of the parametric modeling approach has vastly improved of the course of the last years at the Berlage classes. However, the models are still linear in structure, not spanning different scales or relating to larger scale configurations of the environment. From that perspective it was an interesting move to apply the method to an actual, real urban plot - the next task is to push things further, mix scales, create variety. The parameters now well emulate known existing realities and re-create desired qualities. The challenges lies in breaking these limitations, extending the ranges of the parameters to a point where the un-expected can happen, and surprising new qualities are generated. The outside influences, landscape, building limitations, real world effects, could also constitute the troubling element, which would introduce the tension, the catastrophies which the homogeneous plans miss.

Lars Spuybroek remarked that ‘when I studied, my fellow students presented quite similar projects, it was at the end of dutch structuralism. But interestingly, they presented it in a completely different way: the discourse wasn’t about shifting and re-configuring floor plans, but about grass root democracy, human interaction, all the 60’s idealism.’ This is visible when it comes to the eye-level renderings of the displayed projects: spaces of little programmatic definition, where the usual skaters and and happy couples photoshopped in look rather desolate. This is where a 2nd class could pick up the thread and evaluate the generated spaces, find the advantages and shortcomings and tweak the parameters accordingly, thus create a generate-test-feedback loop.

It is remarkable that even after looking at these points which need more investigation in this young methology, the results are convincing - even more so because ‘the market would solve the problem with four high rise towers’ as Zaera Polo noted.

Among the Critics were:

• Theodore Spyropoulos (Theodore is the co-director of the Architectural
  Association Design Research Lab in London)
• Ali Rahim (Ali is Assistant Professor in Pennsylvania, and is design director at C-A-P)
• Lars Spuybroek (of NOX Architects)
• Lawrence Barth (Consultant Urbanist for Zaha Hadid and Senior Lecturer at the AA)
• Alejandro Zaera Polo (Alejandro is head of FOA and former Dean of the Berlage)
• Bing Bu (principal of One Desing Inc.)
• Felix Claus (co-founder of Claus en Kaan)
• Kersten Geers (partner at Kersten Geers David van Severen)
• Jianfei Zhu (teaches at the University of Melbourne)
• Thal Kamener (co-director of 66east)
• Christopher Lee (unit master at the AA)
• Gabriele Mastrigli (architect and critic)
• Bert de Muynck (architect, writer and researcher)

Participants of the studio are: Nana Chen, Weijie Liu, Jiri Pavlicek, Shiyun Qian, Ming-Ying Tsai, Luming Wang, Zhenfei Wang and Sheng-Ming Wu.

Download the movie here: associative-design.mp4 (156MB, right-click to save)