The Berlage Institute is holding their final reviews for the first year studios today, from 10 to 21:30 (CEST). If you are quick, you can watch the live video stream here.

The first session is already over (When Economies Become Form: Micro-Economic Models as Spatial Prescriptions in Northeast Brazil, Tina DiCarlo and Markus Miessen). H2OBITAT (Freek Persyn, Laurence Tait, Nico Tillie) starts at 14:00 (CEST), and Bridging Untroubled Waters: The Ningbo Mall as a Quest for Alternative Strategies in Open Space Development (Rients Dijkstra, Thomas Stellmach) is scheduled for 18:30 (CEST). Teaching the latter studio has been one of the reason why it has been so quiet around here the during the last weeks…

The guest critics we’ve invited include Carson Chan, Director of Programs, Berlin; Filip Geerts, Assistant Professor of Architecture, TUDelft; Adrian Hornsby, editor, The Chinese Dream; Jorg Leeser, principal of BeL, Cologne; Hiroki Matsuura, architect, Maxwan, Rotterdam; Marc Ryan, architect, West8; Jan Nauta, researcher, nOffice, Berlin; Ralf Pflugfelder, partner of nOffice, Berlin; Caroline Rovers, Stadshavens Rotterdam; Jaap Wiedenhoff, principal, Arup, Amsterdam.

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The Planungsnetzwerk geo-Innovation of the University of Karlsruhe is organizing its second symposium on the 23rd of april in Karlsruhe. Its all about gis, web 2.0, experiments within urban context with gps and geodata.
Contributors are amongst others the openstreetmap (see also Thomas article openstreetmap) and the unortkataster.

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.

Lately the readers of Volkskrant selected 30 year old Almere the ugliest place in the Netherlands; average Dutch associates Almere with bourgeois, boredom and absence of culture. Almere’s city officers are desperate;
they look up to cities like Maastricht and go as far as buying mediaeval castles from Belgium at outrageous cost. Envying Amsterdam and Rotterdam, they want to have old warehouses and factories for their ‘creatives’. Inspired by medieval cities, Almere desires a city heart, and just got a brand new city center with a heavy shopping program. At a time when old cities themselves wriggle out of generic and conformist shopping-mall-downtowns, why should Almere be the next sheep in the herd?

Beyond all these hopeless imitation adventures, Almere is the only growing territory of otherwise stagnating country. The ethnically mixed population profile is rather young, which enjoys the fastest internet connection in the country. Just as in a museum for contemporary architecture, beauties of early as well as late O.M.A, MVRDV, of British [Chipperfield, Alsop], French [Christian de Potzamparc] Japanese [Sanaa], and native [Architecten Cie, UN Studio] are all in Almere’s panorama. Further the local government experiments with new urbanism concepts, such as selforganized-city production; here, one can log on to web and start being part of a planning team. Further, by now Almere has her global export products, such as the Big Brother, which was invented on this young soil a decade ago.

There is the moment where new towns turn adolescent from puberty: they become cities. But is Almere there yet?

All Slides of our airplane tour over Almere (if you’re reading the RSS feed, these images might not show):

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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.

Google Maps recently updated various cities within Europe, including Amsterdam and Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Of course, Europe being much more dense, has caused privacy problems for Google as seen in a row exposed by the BBC News in the UK. While I’ve snooped through some of my favourite spots in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, I’ve yet to explore the limits of what Google has made available online. It seems that some of the secondary cities such as Utrecht and Maastricht still lack the service. Given that the cameras are placed high above a moving truck, there are few (or no) views of pedestrian streets; and perhaps Google should think about capturing Amsterdam by boat?

UPDATE: I’ve added a map with the cities where street view is available. The recently added Oxford, London (Millenium Dome), Rotterdam (Ben van Berkel’s Erasmus bridge) and Amsterdam (Mirailles, West8 & Co. at Borneo) are not yet on it. Even more recent are the additions of Cannes, Zaragoza and the Amalfi Coast. Whatever Google’s criteria for inclusion are, we agree with them.

I’d like to point the german-speaking among you to the ChaosRadio Podcast Issue on Open Street Map. The Open Street Map (wikipedia entry) project is a collaborative effort to create maps without many of the licensing restrictions of other, proprietary, sources (OSM uses the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 license). Even though the map is the most visible feature of the project, it is mainly a data-collection effort. Additional information, as in the case of a road data like the amount of lanes, driving direction or speed limits can also be stored in the OSM database. This data can than be rendered in a multitude of ways and styles, like in other GIS systems. In contrast to these systems which cover the professional market, open street map has a more comprehensible interface. At this time about 70.000 people have registered at the project site.

The community is most active in central and northern Europe, and that is reflected in the amount of data and layers you have in the maps. Whereas in areas with an active community the data set is quite detailed, as for example in Berlin, other areas are blank – depending where the focus of the participating community lies. So in some spots you have information down to public phone booths, post boxes and bus stops, whereas in other regions even names of main streets are missing. In that respect the project is comparable to the early wikipedia, and might well grow to similar importance.

Google also realised this and thus created a similar project inside the Googleverse, called Google Map Maker. Google hopes to ‘crowdsource’ the costly drawing of maps. All rights of the content created by the community go to google, though, in contrast to the OSM model.

As far as special layers are concerned – historical, or data for specific projects – google still has the edge, as there is no way yet do to that in OSM. I hope this will be possible soon. A basic way to do collaborative mapping projects with google maps is by creating a kml layers via “My Maps” at maps.google.com, if you have a google maps account. I recently implemented that for a TU Delft workshop, see the example here.

The issue is scheduled for 2010 and will focus on actual and (what did you expect?) sustainable developments in the Gulf.

via: architectenweb.

Indeed, the ultimate aim of the European vision of the city is to make society, in other words to bring together people of all conditions and origins. However, the dominant trend towards individualisation, the quest for autonomy, cannot be ignored. This is precisely the contradiction that Europan addresses: on the one hand wanting the city – i.e animation, communal life, people – and on the other side wanting intimacy, privacy, home and the immediate circle.

Europan launched the tenth session of their young architects’ competition series yesterday. This year’s topic is inventing urbanity : regeneration, revitalization, colonization.

Whereas the subtopics make sense, the title appears to be far-fetched. Do we need to ‘invent’ urbanity? The principles of urban life are well understood since the first criticism of modern planning had been advanced.

On the other hand I welcome that the recent Europan sessions (‘European Urbanity: Sustainable City and New Public Space’) are much more concerned with density and the urban condition than earlier issues (‘New Housing Landscape’, ‘In-between Cities’). This year’s brief emphasizes equally social and ecological issues.

Participation is limited to the young (i. e. under 40) architect who has 62 competition sites to choose from – 12.000€ for the winner, 6.000€ for the runner-up. The sites are grouped into 3 subtopics –
those that must undergo a strong transformation (regeneration), those that must both keep their identity and redynamise their programme (revitalization) and those that must undergo a development (colonization).

UPDATE: I have put together an overview table of all the competition sites for easy comparison (pdf):

UPDATE II: Check out the hard-to-find page with the registration statistics. Typical diploma projects come out on top, as of 8th of march 101 registrations for Dunkerque, a harbour pier transformation.

From the Europan Site:

Schedule
Launching : 19 01 2009
End of registrations: 29 05 2009
Entries: 29 06 2009
Results: 18 01 2009
[...]

Questions on the sites via the internet forum
Closing date for submitting questions about the sites
Friday, May 1, 2009
Closing date for grouped answers about the sites
Friday, May 15, 2009

Questions on the rules via the internet forum
Closing date for submitting questions on the rules
Friday, May 29, 2009
Closing date for grouped answers on the rules
Friday, June 12, 2009

Submission of entries
Closing date for submitting or sending entries
Monday, June 29, 2009
Closing date for receipt of entries sent on June 29, 2009 by express delivery or by post
Monday, July 20, 2009

Selection
Shortlisting of entries by the national juries
September-October 2009
Comparative European analysis by the committee of the shortlisted project ideas, followed by the Cities and Juries Forum based on this analysis
November 2009
Final selection of entries by the national juries
December 2009 – January 2010

Results
Announcement of results
Monday, January 18, 2010
International presentation of results
May/June 2010

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.

MovingCities.org has published the fith and last part of a wonderful documentary on China. Each part is about 6 minutes and covers different themes.
The documentary is a mix of very quiet, long shots of remarkable sites and thoughts of five local architects to the respective theme.

‘China According to China’ is initiated, developed and shot by Diego Grass Puga from 0300TV, a web channel for architectural broadcasting. It was completely filmed before 2008’s Beijing Olympics and edited right after its ending.

It isn’t an effort to portrait a certain scene [the profiles of each character are quite diverse] but to establish four issues that every Chinese architect has to deal with in today’s practice [opening-up, speed, agriculture & education] all of which may set the parameters of future development for Chinese architecture –and this is no prophecy: power has always proven to be Architecture’s most diligent ally.

Instead of branding/promoting individual genius, this is a story of how an [almost] obsolete discipline struggles to follow the pace of China –just like everyone else, everywhere.

“CHINA ACCORDING TO CHINA” presents a set of thoughts by five local architects on China’s current situation and history. Foreword by MovingCities.
Ai Wei Wei [FAKE design], Jiang Jun [Urban China], Yu Kongjian [Turenscape], Wang Shu [Amateur Architecture Studio] and Ma Qingyun [MADA s.p.a.m.] are in charge of defining the issues that every Chinese architect has to deal with in today’s practice, all of which may set the parameters of future development for Chinese architecture.

China According to China / Part 1: opening-up from 0300TV on Vimeo.

“What is exactly happening here?” [Bert de Muynck, movingcities.org]
We might never know. We neither speak nor read mandarin; and above all: it seems that we’ve forgotten the existence of any kind of Chinese Architecture before the [overexposed] Bird’s Nest. So, we choose five local architects who were willing to share their experience from the inside.

China According to China / Part 2: speed from 0300TV on Vimeo.

Speed [in design and construction]: It isn’t only matter of opportunities and good reflexes: it’s also an issue of control and power. How does Chinese Architecture deals with this form of speed?

China According to China / Part 3: agriculture from 0300TV on Vimeo.

Agriculture: 30 years of fast-placed industrialization and urbanization cannot erase more than 9000 years of agri-culture. Is this destruction/construction cycle about erasing everything? Or is it just another manifestation of China’s agricultural intelligence?

China According to China / Part 4: education from 0300TV on Vimeo.

Education: This five architects we’ve chosen are all part of an extremely wide international network of influences, deeply rooted to the most relevant academic centres [Harvard, MIT] and close to the most renowned architects [Koolhaas, Herzog & De Meuron].
But what’s in it for the average Chinese architect? What about the thousands of students who’re not part of the 12 top Chinese architecture schools [Tsinghua, Tongji and South East to name a few] linked to the West? Are they pursuing individual genius or a mass of skilled workers?

China According to China / Part 5: architecture from 0300TV on Vimeo.

Architecture: 2008, China the discipline has started to shift from a quest for a certain local identity [mid 1990’s – early 2000’s] into acknowledging the social power of Architecture.
In the context of an over-accelerated market, 10.000.000 years of History and an outdated educational system, is there any formula of how to do things right? What can we expect from Chinese Architecture? Ai Weiwei [FAKE Design] has something to say about it. Featuring images of Three Shadows Photography Art Centre and Red Brick Art Galleries [Chaochangdi Village, Beijing].
The End.

Check out more of MovingCities.org here. It is a Beijing-based think-thank investigating the role that architecture and urbanism play in shaping the contemporary city. Established in 2007 by Bert de Muynck (BE) and Mónica Carriço (PT), living and working in Beijing since 2006, MovingCities publishes, collaborates, research, interacts, talks and walks, and operate as embedded architects.

I am struck by this image by Isaac Brekken recently published (article) alongside an article about early voting in the US elections by the New York Times. The article by Jennifer Steinhauer looks at early voting in the US and includes other photos by multiple photographers. On top of being a fantastic photo aesthetically, the complexity it shows so clearly is fascinating.

What it seems to reveal is the at times blunt pairing of capitalism, materialism and democracy in the United States. In the same space you can shop, cast your early vote, and then step over to the slot machines to try your luck. It is of course in Las Vegas, which has a distinct legal and commercial environment, but it forces so many questions to the surface about the culture of this place and the United States in general. Is this what we want in our societies? That democracy and the right to vote becomes a banality only facilitated through commercial space? It highlights that for many people, the idea of a public, civic space that guides a democratic and political process has been completely eroded. The government no longer has widespread representation through architecture and urban space, but rather is hidden within the vast network of privatized and commercialized environments sprawling across the country. Without a White House, and the state legislature buildings, what would be left of civic space?

It is worth looking at Brekken’s other images. He is based in Las Vegas and covers the (what one could consider superficial) things that absorb the city.

I’ve watched a highly interesting documentary on the prospects of solar power today. Now an english version is available on youtube:

Also highly interesting: The Car of the Future. Featuring Opel P-1 experimental, a car that ran 375miles on one Gallon. That’s about 160 km per liter or less than 1 liter per 100 km….

Here is an article (again in dutch) that describes the way it worked (back in 1959).
Apparently, just as some other inventions, they were patented by shell and never got into further development. How come?

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.

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.

From the 28th of August to 7th September, we will finalize the One Land Two Systems project with a series of public events, workshops, and spatial, social and cultural interventions in Ein Hawd. The project aims at exposing the situation of the unrecognized Palestinian villages in Israel, and at the same time finding alternative planning solutions.

Check the Press Release PDF, or read more at www.one-land.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.

You can download Podcasts and archives of the show at the Métropolitains site.

Back in 1992, the young and aggressive Dutch architects that we know so well today, came together to work on a large project in Amsterdam. The Ruimtelijk Scenario Y-Oevers Amsterdam (Translation: Spatial Scenarios for the Y-Waterfront Amsterdam) shows a long list of heavy-hitting architects and urbanists that now largely control the European architecture debate.

The project was carried out by the teams of: OMA, Neutelings, van Berkel & Bos (now UN Studio), Christiaanse (now KCAP) and West8. The model was built by De Rijk Parthesius (including Vincent de Rijk). Even more impressive was the line-up of the teams and to see where each of the members went on to. At times, they started their own offices, as with the case of Alejandro Zaera (Foreign Office Architects), Winy Maas (MVRDV) and Rients Dijkstra (Maxwan). The final booklet for the project reads as a whos-who of contemporary Dutch architecture, and the designs and presentation methods within are absolute precursors to the styles developed by each of the offices throughout the rest of the 1990s until today. You can almost tell which architects worked on which drawings, it’s an amazing period just prior to the launch of the many offices we see today in Rotterdam.

It is one of the most impressive architect lists in the history or contemporary Dutch architecture.

Supersudaca, a befriended south-american think-tank has launched Sudapan – Endless(s)trips, an international competition about the urban potentials of mass-tourism in the Caribbean. The competition focuses on the 140km resorts-strip of Riviera Maya, on the Mexican coast.

The competition tries to put forward of the key territorial issues of Latin America and the Caribbean for their inclusion in the contemporary global agenda. Endless(s)trips is a competition of ideas about the urbanism potential of the massive beach tourism in the Caribbean.

Endless(s)trips is a space of reflection an proposals for rethinking the relation between the local elements, the tourists, the environment, tourism managers, the State, the infrastructure and the landscape. It is an opportunity to imagine other cities, other territories and other ways of tourism management.

Due to its size, dynamism and complexity, the Mayan Riviera is an intense and urgent case of great potential, an urbanism laboratory in the Caribbean coast.

Endless(s)trips is supported of the IAAC (Advanced Architecture Institute of Catalunya) and sponsored by Prins Claus Fonds.

* Tourist strips are the mono functional strips of tourism activity developed along the coast line.

Jury

Vicente Guallart (Valencia, Spain, 1963)
Winy Maas (Schijndel, The Netherlands, 1959)
Prof. Carel Weeber (Nijmegen,The Netherlands, 1937)
José Castillo (Mexico)
Bruno Stagno (Santiago, Chile)

Full explanation is available at www.sudapan.org. Feel free to contact info@supersudaca.org for more information. Anyway, make sure you check out their slideshow on the type of ‘urbanism’, created by all-inclusive tourism.

For those who’ve missed the recent day of open doors, here are views from some of the highest of Rotterdam’s rooftops (all courtesy of dakvanrotterdam.nl, © 2006 – Roelof de Vries). Click on the images to get started (quicktime required, ctrl and shift to zoom). The overview map and more panoramic views can be found here.

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.

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.

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.

Stichting Spangmaker announced a small open competition to link the Rotterdam neighbourhood of Spangen better to the van Nelle ‘Design Factory’ (a gem of modernism, worth a closer look anyhow!). 1st prize: 10.000€, deadline 18th october.

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.

Since first seeing the AMO Gulf Cities study presented at the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale, most of us have been anxious to hear more about the region, and get an in-depth look at the economic processes at work. And so the wait is over with the release of Al Manakh, released throughout the Netherlands this past week, and is widely available, including at the NAi.

While the book was first released for the attendants at the May 2007 International Design Forum (IDF) conference in Dubai, it has been notoriously hard to get ahold of until now. The 495 page book was largely organised by Moutamarat, a recently-established private body that aims to “create business knowledge for the Arab world.”

Al Manakh serves as a barometer for the changes taking place in the region, and translated, the title means “the climate”. As Koolhaas writes in the opening, the book is a form of “critical participation”. But when he writes that “The Gulf is not just reconfiguring itself; it’s reconfiguring the world”, I find it hard to believe this is entirely special. Can we not say this about China? How about New York and London?

If you have already heard, both Koolhaas and Bouman will present the book at the NAi on September 10th at 20.00. If you haven’t reserved tickets yet, you are probably out-of-luck, since it has been sold out for some time. I don’t usually see scalpers at the doors either.

As you all might have read, the book is divided into three sections: a) Dubai Guide – edited by Moutamarat, b) Gulf Survey – edited by AMO, and c) Global Agenda – edited by Archis. You can read the introductory excerpts from Ole Bouman and Rem Koolhaas at Archis here.

Section one, Dubai Guide, does set the stage for the project, dealing with issues of publicity and privacy; authenticity and fantasy; social equity and environmental sustainability; growth rates and tourism rates; and looks at the overarching issues and problems facing the Gulf region, and in particular Dubai. The issues are somewhat global in that many cities around the world in emerging economies face the same set of problems due to fast, hard-to-control growth, and too much foreign investment. In some ways, this section comes across as though it was written for an under-educated audience, which is a possibly deliberate technique. Looking at the text, Design in Retail by Tim Greenhalgh, it reads as a “how-to” for retail entrepreneurs and what not to do when designing commercial spaces.

Section two, Gulf Survey, is classic AMO/OMA from the start. While I have not read through the chapter in its entirety, it is full of economic data, images, projects, key players, social statistics, and key history. This chapter covers 62% of the entire book, so it will take you some time to enjoy it. Sections of this have already been printed recently in The Gulf, a fold-out pamphlet outlining the major projects in the Gulf region, and already available in bookstores. This content was also exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2006.

Section three, Global Agenda, is edited by Archis and aims to discuss broader urban and architectural issues. Ole Bouman’s introductory editorial raises the urgent question of “What must be done?”, and he doesn’t shy away from the position that architects and designers are obliged to engage in the shaping of the future and the shaping of our planet.

As he writes, “The To Do list for architecture and design is short. The planetary action list for architects and designers is endless however.” And as a direct hit at the self-satisfying architecture the world over he writes: “[Design] can draw its legitimacy not from making things nice for certain people, but from making things livable for everyone.”

Bouman doesn’t refer to aesthetics alone of course, but to the larger problems of infrastructure, housing, governance, climate change, social resources and so forth. It makes me think back to the first chapter of the book concerning semi-private space in Dubai, totally detached from the continuous public urban environment, with the goal of creating artificial ‘urban experiences’. The point at which we separate a fictional urbanity from a non-fictional urbanity is exactly where we fail in creating a viable future, continuous with the surrounding environments and its history. But of course, the only thing holding back the real from the artificial in Dubai is a row of palm trees and a concrete wall. What’s to stop us from tearing these down in the future? Hopefully the book will stimulate such a thought in the minds of the developers and designers in Dubai.

Here are the facts about the book:

Editors: Ole Bouman, Mitra Khoubrou, Rem Koolhaas
Managing editor: Arjen Oosterman
Design: Irma Boom, Natasha Chandani, Sonja Haller
Format: 24×17, 500 pages
Publisher: Archis Foundation
Distribution: Europe, Asia and USA by Idea Books, IPS Pressevertrieb
Price: EUR 29.90 ISBN: 978-90-77966-12-9

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.

Cross River Park, UK

The Cross River Park is in the immediate neighbourhood of the Barking Riverside development in East London. The approximate size of the park is 350 ha with a distance of roughly 9km to the city centre. The brief for the feasibility study was to bring two communities (Newham and Dagenham) along with the two landscapes on either side of the River in the London Thames Gateway closer together. A new bridge, the Thames Gateway Bridge, with a height of 50m and a length of 600m, will be the missing link between the divided communities and therefore an important element of the park.

The area proposed for CRP features unique opportunities: It is one of the few areas in East London where access to the Thames riverfront is possible. The CRP area is environmentally diverse; it features wetlands and a variety of flora and fauna alongside sites of heavily contaminated land and former industrial land uses. A look on the map of London shows however, that the area is a typical ‘dumping-place’ of all those functions and institutions which are regarded as the most unattractive ones in a city, such as: waste-deposits, Sewage-works, Gas- Works, Logistics, a Jail and an Airport. The site is both smelly and it’s noisy: it is the typical part of a city you would normally never go to without a specific, pragmatic purpose.

The historic evolution of heavy service industries in the area, dating back to the extensions to the Woolwich Arsenal and the 150yr old Sewage and (later) gas works have been significant barriers to integrated planning. Each function is isolated, and the area is difficult to cross; beside a few lines, points and pockets of vegetation, it has few ecological or recreational qualities. The area is the ‘belly’ of East London: It contains those ‘organs’ of the body/city which guarantee its metabolism. Concerning the present debate on ecology, this could be an interesting and stimulating aspect. Incorporating the sewage plant and the waste-deposits as well as the gas-works and the logistics into the park concept could set the park apart. The CRP area experiences strong pressure from current regional developments, including significant areas of housing, sewage works expansion, or the displacement of warehouses due to the Olympic Games.

CRP’s potential to become a High Quality Park for the 21st century will be reached by synchronizing the interests of the different stakeholders, being the logistic buildings, the sewage plant and gas works, and the new or existing populated areas. Therefore, CRP needs strong leadership to gather everybody under the ‘umbrella’ of CRP’s vision and turn them into active partners rather than indifferent neighbours. The opportunities at CRP are therefore both unique and complex, but offer fantastic possibilities to interact with the river and the new bridge, and unlock an intriguing mosaic of hitherto hidden sites and functions of the living city.

Moving forward, the creation of Cross River Park will require political and economic courage. Its success depends an alternative way of acting and doing, rather than planning extensively. The process could and should start immediately by opening the area to the public, and creating small events and interventions.

Masterplan Barking Riverside, UK

This is a masterplan we have been busy with for the last couple of years in London. Barking Riverside is a housing development with a site area of 180ha. Because of its size and the proximity to the city centre of London, the housing development has been chosen by the Greater London Authority (GLA) as one of seven outstanding housing developments in the Greater London area.

Besides our urban proposal there are several large-scale developments along the River Thames. Mostly these involve the regeneration of the former docklands, industrial areas and open brown fields out of use for a long period. In a way, these are the last opportunities within London for such large scale developments of new employment and housing areas for the growth of the London population.

The project consists of 11’000 dwellings (average density 120 dw/ha) with commercial, employment, education, health and sport facilities. The site is located approximately 10km east of London city centre and about 5km form the London City Airport. The extension of the Docklands Light Railway to this project site with 3 stations makes this development possible in the first place.

Our site was originally the location of Coal-Fired Power Plants, once the largest in all of Europe. After the closing of this power plant, and because of its contaminated ground and its isolated location from the city centre of London, this site was neglected for many years. At one point the Borough of “Barking and Dagenham” was rated the tenth worst place in the UK for its contamination of asbestos. But on the other hand, this site has been one of the richest nature reserve area for a wide range of species because of its size and isolation from the surroundings, as well the beautiful scenery along the river.

In this project we had to deal with many different parties. In the usual planning process of a UK housing development you only have to convince the borough to get what they call a “Planning application”. But in the case of this project, we had to convince all the parties in this chart more or less. Actually, there were two previous masterplans for this development; but in both cases, the masterplan was rejected by the borough. Maxwan finally made it to the “planning application” phase in 2006.

The urban design framework (UDF) plan shows the primary and secondary road structure, developable housing areas, trajectories of the 2 major public transport lines, including the position of the stations and stops, major public space, Parks and the conservation area for the nature. And this plan was made with the synthesis of all the constraints of this site such as the exiting overhead electrical lines, nature reserve, topography of the site with flooding issues, and the connections to the surrounding neighbourhood.

After submitting this urban design framework with all the descriptions and guidelines for major public space and main roads, we received the further request from the Greater London Authority for developing the quality and design guidelines of the housing area, in order to show the atmosphere of each neighbourhood in greater detail. The concept of “Design Guidelines” for such a large development was an experimental thing for the city of London at that time. Since their ambition for this project is so high, they have tried very hard to prevent the anarchic development of each plot by the local developers.

The Urban Design Guidelines (UDG) are split-up into two categories: the rules and the guides. The Rules were obligatory in the sense that the architects must stick to them; whereas the guides give an indication of how certain aspects should be dealt with. The realm of work in this phase contains the creation of varied streetscapes, diverse block typologies and specific buildings as well as guidelines for play, sport and recreation areas. The Landscape and ecological guidelines aim to increase existing habitats for animals, as well as creating people zones in the heart of the urban development. Our role as a masterplanner has come to an end, yet maxwan is now involved in selecting the architects for the development.

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)

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)

The emerging Rotterdam architecture and urbanism office, The Powerhouse Company, has just published their first “autobiographical magazine”, Power to the House. The magazine is an exciting overview of their work over the past couple years, and features architectural and urban projects, buildings under construction, competitions, and research.

The Powerhouse Company is run by Nanne de Ru in Rotterdam, and Charles Bessard in Copenhagen. The two-year old office is off to a good start with their strategy of working across Europe. The young architects have split their office in two cities from the start and exploit free online tools and cheap long-distance networking tools such as Skype, Gmail, You Send It, Lulu and Transavia. They represent a new generation of ambitious architects that know how to exploit the tools of globalisation to get things done.

The magazine is self-published, and can be either downloaded digitally for free, or bought and delivered to you in print form, from Lulu online publishing.

Here are some of the projects:

Villa 1, Netherlands, under construction

Dutch Houses, Netherlands

Spiral House, France, under construction

On Top of Things – Watertower Conversion, Denmark, design phase

* More photos here: Powerhouse Company

De Gasperi Housing development, Italy

The “De Gasperi housing development” was a competition held in 2005 by the city of Naples. After the 2nd phase of the competition, we were awarded first prize and are expecting the start of construction next year. The location of the site is about 6km to the east from Naples city centre, in an adjacent outskirt of Mt. Vesvio. The size of the site is about 5ha and the aim of this project is to regenerate the area, which was built as a high-density post-war residential area in 1950.

The required program for this project is: 114 dwellings for 627 residents with extra facilities such as retail, post office, maternal school and sport facilities. The existing buildings are to be demolished. When we deal with urban plans especially focused on the regeneration of existing neighbourhoods, we normally first investigate the most pressing problems of the current condition. And on the other hand, we also try to include the positive resources of the current condition. This approach helps to focus upon where the majority of money should be spent in the new development.

The first problem is the existing street structure with a lot of cul-de-sac situations. This problem should be solved by fluently opening up the area into the surroundings. The second problem is the layout of housing blocks. The current layout has one orientation to array all the housing blocks along, although the shape of the site is highly irregular and triangular. This means that the grid-like regular building placement creates quite a lot of left-over spaces along the irregular shape of the site boundary.

Our proposal is to align each housing block according to its most prominent adjacent circumstance such as a main street, main public space, a park, buildings in the neighbourhood or a railway track. This treatment results in creating more positively enclosed and shaped public spaces in the middle of neighbourhood. And these should be car-free public spaces, a feature that the current situation completely lacks.
The position of the local centre was easily determined because of the existing commercial street. We proposed a small piazza in combination with the local centre. The position of the maternal school was determined because of the existing large open space.

The housing block unit consists of two building volumes facing each other, with an inside court. The court space serves an opportunity of communal activities such as a safe playground for small children, a meeting place for neighbours, and as a shared landscape/garden. We decided to keep the existing site topography and large pine trees as much as possible.

Masterplan Leidsche Rijn, NL

In 1993 the founder of maxwan, Rients Dijkstra, was working at OMA as a project leader. At the age of 32, he suddenly became a Cinderella boy by getting this enormous masterplanning job.

The masterplan is an extension of the Dutch city, Utrecht, called Leidsche Rijn. It is the largest development site of what is called VINEX, the Fourth Bill on Spatial Planning in the Netherlands, a government bill that promotes the development of 1.1 million new houses by the year 2005.

The new city plan for 75.000 inhabitants is to include: 30.000 housing units in a wide range of densities, two local urban centres and one regional commercial centre; 700.000 m2 office space, 200 ha of business estate, 250 ha of park and landscaping, and numerous schools as well as health care facilities. The masterplan was made in 1994 and now, in 2007, the construction is about to finish.

Anamorfose Revisited, NL

The project “Anarmorfose revisited” is for the interior design of the Westerschelde Tunnel; with a length of 6km, it is the longest in the Netherlands. The tunnel is located at the southern end of the country, near to the border of Belgium.

Originally, Maxwan was asked to be a committee giving suggestions for the selection of the artwork for the interior of the tunnel. But we could not come across any truly interesting art work for this project, so we decided to show what we think is interesting – public art from a driver’s point of view. See the movie (wmv, 10MB).

Nuilding, NL

This 60.000m2 design for a building complex consists of a hotel for computer servers, a power plant, as well as car-showrooms and offices. It is located along the A20 highway in Rotterdam.

An inbuilt 40 MW power plant provides power, excess electricity and heat will be sold to a neighbouring hospital. The functional core with the hotel/box storage/office programme is wrapped in a car-showroom skin.
Cars are often put on display in glass boxes on sites bordering highways. The idea is that passers-by get a good look at the goods behind the curtain wall, but in general the glass reflects more than it lets through. Maxwan’s proposal is a radical mutant of this worn-out typology: the glass façades are not parallel to the highway, but perpendicular to the sightlines of the approaching drivers; the cars are not behind glass, but on balconies; the curtain wall does not drop down vertically, but follows a saw-toothed profile, mirroring down sights of the exposed cars in a peepshow fashion. Higher up, where the servers hum, the saw tooth profile keeps sunlight from entering the overheated interior.

Reality Machine

Design for a travelling exhibition entitled ‘Reality Machines’ that presents an overview of recent Dutch architecture, graphic design, fashion, product design and photography.

The main exhibition hall of the NAi (Netherlands Architecture Institute) in Rotterdam is turned into a bright showroom. Sockets, walls and showcases are avoided. The 120 selected designs hang from the edge of a lowered ceiling in the shape of a huge E. The work hangs from a rail conveyer as used in assembly halls. The exhibits move at the pace of a couple meters per minute, creating a slow parade of items across the hall and beside the long window facing the museum-park.

One could sit still and watch the whole show pass by in an hour. Or one could walk around and be surprised by the continuously changing arrangement and the unexpected combinations of objects. And sometimes, when when they walk slowly keeping pace with a piece, the visitors look like they are part of the object.

a friend of mine just pointed me to one of the latest events in the AccessAllAreas program: skating Zaha’s Phaeno in Wolfsburg. Unfortunately the video of a

50-50 down a 15 stair rail with a mean kink at the end which reminds of that Pat Duffy kinkrail in SF by Mack McKelton from Berlin.

is pretty unspectacular from an architects point of view. …. apart from the six-pack closeup for the girls maybe… There will be more coverage soon under accessallareas

via DRMTM and skateboard.de and nillomatic

Al Manakh, a architectural guide for the Gulf area, has been published by OMA during the IDF. Read more at the IDF blog. If you don’t get the title of the book, read it again aloud.

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)

it needs to be mentioned, but eikonographia anyway has again the best images of OMAs latest. And the best pairs too. dezeen has the full pressrelease with plans etc.

pic via eikonographia

Last weekend we went for a tour to the Emscherpark, which is meandering between Duisburg and Hamm, with an approximate length of 70 km (straight trajectory Duisburg – Hamm). The objective of this trip was to get a feeling how a huge and dispersed park can work. We are working on a similar project in the greater London area at the moment for or office maxwan, which sponsored this trip.

The concept of the Emscher Park aims at preserving the industrial heritage, weave a green-blue network into Europe’s largest industrial area and add a new identity as culture and design centre to the defunctional coal and steel industrial areas.

An interdisciplinary team developd the plan over a period of 10 years. The first stage concluded with the opening of the Internationale Bauausstellung Emscherpark (IBA), stage 2 (of 3) is in progress now.

The Park consists of several big attractors as the Zeche Zollverein and the Landschaftspark Duisburg Nord combined with distinctive parks. The best way to experience the park is to rent a bike and follow one of the designated industrial tours. Guided tours through the former coal production facilities are highly recommendable as well.

Our personal favourite was an indoor ski centre, an ugly infrastructure (camouflaging itself as an alpine village) sneaking up a waste hill. You can use the elevator and just roll up, but don’t get caught.

See a full picture seection below or visit our recently added photo area (which is still a little bit rough).

This past week I was at the MIPIM Developers Conference in Cannes, France representing a client. With my suit on, business cards ready and a dose of capitalist opportunism in tow, the pavilions and stands became my playground. It was great to see inside the world of top-level decision makers – investors, developers, builders, lawyers, and the like. Of course the highlights are surely the seaside terraces that serve up fine drinks and hors-d’oeuvres. Check out the selection of models on our FLICKR site, some of them will make you barf — especially the Krasnodar Region. Why are they so out of touch?

It turns out that MIPIM had a record number of visitors – 25.000. No doubt, when you see the list of topics, you’ll be very impressed: Property: An asset class / Property: A changing world / Property: A regional focus. What everyone was really after was the Daniel Libeskind keynote lecture… entitled none-other than: “World Architecture Trends”. What to think about this title and his recent work? Perhaps we can deduce: World Architecture is now about commercialism, opportunism, weak theory and getting up all around the world. Sounds so glamorous, no?

see all pictures:

On March 14 (2007) the Berlage Institute (Rotterdam) hosted two lectures with the title “Instant City: The Rise of Dubai”. Kees Christiaanse (Architect, Rotterdam) and George Katodrytis (Architect, Dubai) gave presentations while Roemer van Toorn moderated the event. Marc Angélil unfortunately was stuck at the Zurich airport because of the infamous Swiss weather.

Dubai is a gated community. What can we do about it? And can architecture politically engage a global market-driven power structure?

Kees answered, that Dubai is dominated by “gatedness”, “sameness”, “fadedness” and “maleness”.

He distinguishes two types of gatedness: Gated Communities, and Public Space in the form of shopping malls. The Dubai Waterfront Project has almost no public space. The front garden, the back garden and the back beach are all privatized. Streets are without sidewalks. They become isolated islands, only accessible by private boat. This will lead to closed cities lacking any form of social interaction. The notion of a free and open city will exist no longer. Welcome to the resort.
Roemer van Toorn raised the provocative question: What is so bad about sameness? The people obviously want it! Kees replied that homogeneity creates boredom which is inherently bad.

He appealed to the architect’s morals of not simply implementing European models without giving the Dubai context a second thought. He even started a “No Holland Village” campaign in reaction to a new Dutch-style settlement in Dubai. Don’t get me wrong, architects copy and paste anyhow, and rightly so, as long as context and history are considered. Following only market requests and contributing to a homogeneous mass society is not the role of an architect who has a social responsibility.

Christiaanse compares Dubai to Los Angeles; hence the initial position of Dubai as isolated deserts without regulations was similar. Local inhabitants make up only 10% of contemporary Dubai’s population, whereas the rest of the people are aliens – service personnel, tourists and working-class trades people. This inhibits identity or authenticity of a place: Dubai is made for tourists and will be very successful at it.

George Katodrytis is much more optimistic about the new developments; he works with an adventurous spirit in the context. He describes the Dubai Waterfront development and its gigantic dimensions. He believes that the architect needs to follow the rules of the market. And he and his students try to find the spaces where it is still possible to intervene. But his discourse unwittingly showed the ultimate powerlessness of the architect.

But who is making Dubai?
We know that (see “What I have achieved for Dubai is only 10% of my Vision for it.“) Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, is mainly responsible for the development. He built up a totalitarian system with a selected core of highly educated advisors (Harvard, AA, and so forth) and has the money and power to push this extreme vision through.

Dubai becomes reality in the absence of democracy.

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 new Nissan Qashqai marketing campaign has been skating through the streets – and now landed on a temp skatepark along the A20 at the Giessenbrug crossing in one of Rotterdam’s notoriously horrible industrial areas – the Spaanse Polder. The video can be seen through none other than GooTube here. Clearly, the video kills the installation.