“If you design with a view to optimize anything, it is bound to end up suboptimal, because it can’t cope with change. This applies as much to political constitutions, universities and buildings”
~ Jeff Mulgan
It began as a housing marvel. Two decades later, it ended in rubble. But what happened to those caught in between? The Pruitt-Igoe Myth tells the story of the transformation of the American city in the decades after World War II, through the lens of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing development and the St. Louis residents who called it home. At the film’s historical center is an analysis of the massive impact of the national urban renewal program of the 1950s and 1960s, which prompted the process of mass suburbanization and emptied American cities of their residents, businesses, and industries. Those left behind in the city faced a destitute, rapidly de-industrializing St. Louis , parceled out to downtown interests and increasingly segregated by class and race. The residents of Pruitt-Igoe were among the hardest hit. Their gripping stories of survival, adaptation, and success are at the emotional heart of the film. The domestic turmoil wrought by punitive public welfare policies; the frustrating interactions with a paternalistic and cash-strapped Housing Authority; and the downward spiral of vacancy, vandalism and crime led to resident protest and action during the 1969 Rent Strike, the first in the history of public housing. And yet, despite this complex history, Pruitt-Igoe has often been stereotyped. The world-famous image of its implosion has helped to perpetuate a myth of failure, a failure that has been used to critique Modernist architecture, attack public assistance programs, and stigmatize public housing residents. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth seeks to set the historical record straight. To examine the interests involved in Pruitt-Igoe’s creation. To re-evaluate the rumors and the stigma. To implode the myth.
Speakers: Professor Craig Calhoun, Professor Bruno Latour, Alan Rusbridger, Professor Judy Wajcman, David Adjaye, Professor Geoff Mulgan, Lord Richard Rogers, Polly Toynbee.
This event was recorded on 14 May 2010 in Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building.
In this exciting half-day conference two panels on ‘Public Life and Public Policy’ and ‘Cities and the Public Realm’, discuss these themes in the context of the work of Professor Sennett, the eminent sociologist whose recent books include The Culture of the New Capitalism and The Craftsman.
Amidst society’s hopes for a green future, the power of working with nature is still not sufficiently understood or exploited. Too many visions remain divorced from the end user. Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto, the architects and co-founders of London-based ecoLogicStudio, feel that ‘using and interacting with natural elements in a symbiotic way can become a game with ecological benefits.’ Recently they have focused on the potential of algae—micro-algae are used for energy, while macro-algae—like bio-radars or generative agents—is used for filtering water and making food.
New symbiotic algae and seafood/fish farms generated in Crane Greenhouses
As global regions undergo structural and demographic shifts, agritourism and algae farms have huge potential, but models need testing and feedback from people, so that prototypes can be optimally identified as multi-use educational resources related to their living context. ‘You don’t have so many choices at the moment. There is a detachment of production from consumption, when even recycling can be fun’, say ecoLogicStudio. Their Algae Farm for the Swedish Municipality of Simrishamn demonstrates the interactive potentials for algae-related urban activities and architectural prototypes. Here on the Ostersjiön region of Sweden on the Baltic Sea a decaying fishing industry and aging local population ‘calls for the introduction of a new type of economic and urban system.’
HORTUS (Hydro Organisms Responsive To Urban Stimuli) is a new exhibition from ecoLogicStudio that engages with the notions of urban renewable energy and agriculture through a new gardening prototype. Over a four-week growing period, flows of energy (light radiation), matter (biomass, carbon dioxide) and information (images, tweets, stats) will be triggered to induce multiple mechanisms of self-regulation and evolve novel forms of self-organisation. HORTUS proposes an experimental hands-on engagement with these notions, illustrating their potential applicability to the masterplanning of large regional landscapes and the retrofitting of industrial and rural architectural types, as exemplified in the project ‘Regional Algae Farm’ developed by ecoLogicStudio for the Swedish region of Osterlen.
Architectural Association School students, staff and visitors are invited to engage daily with HORTUS to invent new protocols of urban biogardening. A virtual organism such as this offers the opportunity to capture and build up information and cultivation practices, enriching the material experience of the visitor turned urban ‘cyber-gardener’.
Japanese based designer Noriyuki Otsuka recently completed the design of a all white shop with a mesh portal in the upcoming neighborhood of Umeda in Osaka, Japan. The design of LE CIEL BLEU is based on his design philosophy “Nothing is everything,” then Otsuka brought the design to life with his other philosophy “Mixtures of transparency.”
With these two concepts in mind, Otsuka and his team built a 2992 sq.ft. space using an array of white and cream hues with a large architectural element with in the space. We caught up with the architect who explained that the “interior space was a cylinder made with a structurally self-supporting mesh.” He noted that “because of the size of the feature I wanted to avoid integrating it too much with the surrounding space, so deliberately aligned it off center from the axis of the building.” By using this layout, the architectural portal became a strong design feature in the shop.
The floor was hand painted with original gold paint, while the walls and ceiling were finished in an acrylic emulsion paint.
ANCIENT HISTORY: The layers of sediment excavated in Denisova Cave (top left) and its surroundings have yielded such artifacts as chipping tools (top right), a fragment of a pinky bone, and a molar. DNA in the bone and molar led to the identification of a new hominin group, the Denisovans.Photos: Courtesy of David Reich (top left, top right, bottom right); Courtesy of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (bottom left, middle right)
Perched in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia, and overlooking the Anui River and its surrounding forest, is the Denisova Cave. It is not a particularly large natural structure, but its high ceilings, central limestone chimney, and location near abundant food sources have made it an inviting shelter for humans and animals for tens of thousands of years.
“It’s kind of a magical cave,” says David Reich, an HMS professor of genetics who traveled to the site this past summer. It was a rugged trip, covering 5,500 miles on a 48-hour journey that began in Boston, touched London and Moscow, and finished with a bumpy 10-hour van ride to the Denisova Cave, near Russia’s border with Kazakhstan. But Reich, whose affiliation with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard means he’s more often surrounded by gene sequencers than Stone Age tools, took the opportunity to step inside this remote refuge to witness the resting spot of ancient DNA that had been preserved in bone fragments buried deep in cave sediments.
For the past year, Reich and an international team of evolutionary geneticists have been coaxing information from that DNA. What they’ve found has changed our understanding of human history.
DOWN TO EARTH: Excavation of Denisova Cave, a site overseen by the Russian Academy of Sciences, is an ongoing venture involving international teams of researchers. Photo: Courtesy of David Reich
Text and Images via Harvard Medicine. Continue HERE
Household archaeology has a long history of anthropological inquiry. Archaeological investigations of the household serve as a microcosm for the greater social universe. The household serves as a space for socialization processes. Household archaeology focuses on the household as a social unit, and involves research on the household’s dwelling and other related architecture, material culture, features, and larger sociopolitical organizations that are associated with a specific culture. Household social relationships have been associated as serving as an “atom” for society. Therefore, household studied effectively convey information pertaining to flexible economic and ecological conditions Household activity encompasses spheres of activity related to function and how people act. Household archaeology redefines the notion of the household and the domestic by challenging notions of what households are, how they operate and the social implications of such analysis. The material culture provides information about such activities. Households are families, domestic groups, and co-habitations. Households function in a variety of fashions.
History of Theoretical Background
Household archaeology involves archaeological investigations of household activities. It encompasses social formation processes, family or co-residential organization and the material culture associated with such activities. Scholarly inquiry into household studies began in the 1960s with research emphasis upon a micro-scale analysis of social groups. Households are commonly referred to as the most basic social unit. Households operate within social and economic processes aimed to structure general conditions of social life. “Household” and “family” are social phenomena. According to Bender, these constructions are “logically distinct and, under certain circumstances, vary independently of each other.” The household has three elements: the social (demographic), the material (possessions and dwellings) and the behavioral (activities). Household membership employs a variety of strategies and behaviors. Household archaeology is concerned with the material culture remaining from basic activity patterns as a result of human behavior.
A mysterious band of hacker-artists is prowling the network of tunnels below Paris, secretly refurbishing the city’s neglected treasures. Photo: UX
Thirty years ago, in the dead of night, a group of six Parisian teenagers pulled off what would prove to be a fateful theft. They met up at a small cafè near the Eiffel Tower to review their plans—again—before heading out into the dark. Lifting a grate from the street, they descended a ladder to a tunnel, an unlit concrete passageway carrying a cable off into the void. They followed the cable to its source: the basement of the ministry of telecommunications. Horizontal bars blocked their way, but the skinny teens all managed to wedge themselves through and ascend to the building’s ground floor. There they found three key rings in the security office and a logbook indicating that the guards were on their rounds.
But the guards were nowhere to be seen. The six interlopers combed the building for hours, encountering no one, until they found what they were looking for at the bottom of a desk drawer—maps of the ministry’s citywide network of tunnels. They took one copy of each map, then returned the keys to the security office. Heaving the ministry’s grand front door ajar, they peeked outside; no police, no passersby, no problem. They exited onto the empty Avenue de Sègur and walked home as the sun rose. The mission had been so easy that one of the youths, Natacha, seriously asked herself if she had dreamed it. No, she concluded: “In a dream, it would have been more complicated.”
The unauthorized cinema that UX built beneath the Palais De Chaillot. Photo: UX
Privately commissioned to create a gift for an architect, Daniel Weil created a one-of-a-kind clock that is both simple and complex. Reducing objects to their component parts has long fascinated Weil. The Radio in a Bag he created for his degree show at the Royal College of Art three decades ago is an icon of 20th century industrial design. This clock is the latest demonstration of his interest in investigating not just how objects look, but how they work.
The Clock for an Astronomer follows Clock for an Architect and Clock for an Acrobat as part of the “Matter of Time” series of unique timepieces designed by Pentagram’s Daniel Weil.
“The sun is the celestial time setter, and timekeeping is its terrestrial reflection,” says Daniel Weil.
A Sardine Street Box of Tricks is a handbook for anyone who wants to make their own ‘mis-guided’ tour or walk.
Written by ‘Crab Man’ and ‘Signpost’ (Phil Smith and Simon Persighetti – both members of Exeter-based Wrights & Sites group), the book is based on the mis-guided ‘Tour of Sardine Street’ that they created for Queen Street in Exeter during 2011.
The book is designed to help anyone who makes, or would like to make, walk-performances or variations on the guided tour. It describes a range of different approaches and tactics, and illustrates them with examples from their tour of Queen Street. For example:
– Wear something that sets you apart and gives others permission to approach you: “Excuse me, what are you supposed to be?”
– Take a can of abject booze from the street or a momentary juxtaposition of a dove and a plastic bag and mould them, through an action, into an idea
– Attend to the smallest things
– Examine the cracks in your street and the mould on its walls, note its graffiti, collect its detritus, observe how its pavements are used and abused
– Set yourself tasks that passers-by will be intrigued by: they will enjoy interrupting and even joining in with you
– Draw upon ambiguous, ironical or hollowed-out rituals to complement the multiplicity of your walk with intensity of feeling or depth of engagement.
– And so on…
Everything you need to build a town is here – Wrights & Sites
Once upon a time there was a primitive tribe that hunted and gathered in a verdant forest in a temperate clime.
I call them a “tribe” but that name may mislead if it suggests some rigorous form of social organization. In fact, the group was about as un-organized as it is possible for people to be. There were among them no elders, chiefs, shamans or any other kind of leader with authority over his fellows. With one exception– which we will soon discuss — there were no laws, rules or taboos that were obeyed or enforced among them and no judges or police to enforce them.
This lack of norms was reflected in their language which (luckily for our narrative purposes) was much like modern English but which lacked any moral or legal vocabulary. The natives never spoke of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘legal’ or ‘law’. They had no words for ‘promise’, or ‘contract’ and none for ‘property’ or ‘ownership’.
Even so, as I just averred, there was one rule that the natives generally acknowledged and mostly conformed to. They called it “The Rule”.
The Rule: No Bullying!
By ‘bullying’ the natives seem to have meant, roughly, hurting other people or using force or the threat of force to compel others to do what they would otherwise not do. But not every use of force or infliction of harm was regarded as bullying.
It was, for example, not considered bullying to use force or its threat to defend oneself or someone else against a bully. The Rule permitted self-defense and “other defense” and this had important consequences for all of tribal life.
For the next 306090 book, guest editor David L. Hays wants to know, “What is essential knowledge for architecture?”What is essential knowledge for architecture?
This frequently posed question targets fundamental principles of design, those basic criteria and priorities through which disciplinary stability is ensured. Yet, insofar as relevance is a core value of architecture, in both theory and practice, the contingent nature of the future guarantees that some forms of knowledge not presently considered essential will eventually become indispensable.
With that condition in mind, the editors of 306090 15, (Non-)Essential Knowledge for (New) Architecture, seek contributions that envision possible futures for architecture through speculations about new disciplinary knowledge. What specific methods, materials, or understandings—tools, ratios, formulas, properties, principles, guidelines, definitions, rules, practices, techniques, reference points, histories, and more—not presently considered essential to architecture could, or should, define its future? Pertinent knowledge might be previously forgotten, currently undervalued, generally misunderstood, or not yet recognized. Architects have long looked both to the outmoded traditions of their discipline and to other fields altogether when imagining possible directions for their work. In blurring the boundary between essential and non-essential knowledge, this inquiry seeks not to codify the contemporary state of the art for architecture, nor to assert the value of multidisciplinarity, but to envision, and potentially catalyze, new disciplinary approaches.
(Non-)Essential Knowledge for (New) Architecture will serve as both a gauge of contemporary concerns and a manual for emergent theory and practice. Submissions are sought from practitioners, theorists, historians, critics, artists, activists, and anyone else with direct or indirect interest in the future of architecture.
Click HERE to submit and for more information.
Deadline: Friday, March 30, 2012
The Deleted City is a digital archaeology of the world wide web as it exploded into the 21st century. At that time the web was often described as an enormous digital library that you could visit or contribute to by building a homepage. The early citizens of the net (or netizens) took their netizenship serious, and built homepages about themselves and subjects they were experts in. These pioneers found their brave new world at Geocities, a free web hosting provider that was modeled after a city and where you could get a free “piece of land” to build your digital home in a certain neighborhood based on the subject of your homepage. Heartland was – as a neighborhood for all things rural – by far the largest, but there were neighborhoods for fashion, arts and far east related topics to name just a few.
Around the turn of the century, Geocities had tens of millions of “homesteaders” as the digital tenants were called and was bought by Yahoo! for three and a half billion dollars. Ten years later in 2009, as other metaphors of the internet (such as the social network) had taken over, and the homesteaders had left their properties vacant after migrating to Facebook, Geocities was shutdown and deleted. In an heroic effort to preserve 10 years of collaborative work by 35 million people, the Archive Team made a backup of the site just before it shut down. The resulting 650 Gigabyte bit torrent file is the digital Pompeii that is the subject of an interactive excavation that allows you to wander through an episode of recent online history.
The installation is an interactive visualization of the 650 gigabyte Geocities backup made by the Archive Team on October 27, 2009. It depicts the file system as a city map, spatially arranging the different neighborhoods and individual lots based on the number of files they contain.
An interview by soso Magazine about sexual attraction to urban objects, featuring the love story between Erika Eiffel (aka. Mrs. Berliner Mauer) and the Berlin Wall: A radical extreme of literally appropriating public space.
Generations of chain-smoking writers, skinny-jeaned bloggers and people with guitars have howled on about the subject. Love. Why do we love when all heavenly odds seem to be working against us? Why do we love after the other has disappointed us? Heck, why do we even love at all? During 5½ hours worth of tea, Erika Eiffel and I attempted to answer the unanswerable. It took us just that long to realize that, well, it’s beyond us, but we’ll probably never regret that we tried.
Erika’s objectum sexual – the sexual orientation of individuals engaged in romantic relationships with objects. Meaning, like your friend Benny can love boys, and your friend Andrea can love girls, your friend Alex can love his broomstick, or floorboard, or loudspeaker. Erika’s partner, her soul mate and love of her life, is the Berlin Wall. Now, this is not an easy object to love. It’s chipped, it’s graffiti-smeared, it’s crooked and it’s disappearing. It tore the city of Berlin – and the world – in two, ripped apart families, cost countless lives and helped define decades of a very chilly war. Erika’s Wall may be the human equivalent of that boyfriend with a terrible past. The one who ended up in jail, or the one who lied and cheated and hurt everyone you cared about. Yes, the one you loved anyway.
Before the Wall, Erika had a string of successful relationships with truly inspiring objects of affection. The kind that looks great on paper, at least. There was her love for a bow, which earned her two world champion titles on the US national archery team. Then there was the Japanese sword that made her the youngest world champion in the art of Iai-batto-jutsu. And her relationship with the admittedly very sexy F-15 jet got her one rare congressional nomination to the US Air Force academy. Finally, in 2007, she settled down and had a public commitment ceremony with the Grand Madame of Paris — the Eiffel Tower. Everyone agrees the tower is beautiful. With its straight lines and sturdy steel it’s an architectural marvel. Although she loves the tower to this day, she now knows that the ceremony was her attempt to have an at least somewhat accepted, mainstream objectum sexual relationship. It didn’t feel quite right. So just like I moved on from my eerily beautiful, learned and sophisticated ex-boyfriend to be with someone I had loved for years, Erika packed her bags and moved to Berlin to be with her Mauer.
[Interview conducted by Jennifer Hofmann; photographs by Anastasia Loginova]:
Okay, let’s get to it. When did you first realize that you were objectum sexual?
Well, I always knew. I used to hate manufactured toys so I built my own. For example, I found these two small planks of wood that I really connected to. So I nailed them together and took them with me wherever I went. To school, to bed, to play dates…everywhere. Of course, people thought it was cute then.
There is a circular hole in the wall, about 30-40 cm diameter and perforated at 1 meter above the ground. A man enters through the hole in the wall and a man (apparently the same individual) exits again through the same hole. His mate is standing right next to the hole and seems to be waiting for him. Yesterday I came across these pictures again. The enigmatic hole is the entrance to a room. It is a door that keeps you fit, elastic and flexible, if you want to discover what there is at the other side of the wall. Its dimension relies on the utmost reduction of a bending human body. And the erotic experience of penetrating it is intimately connected both to the materiality of the hole and the earthen texture of the wall. It is an intuitive understanding of a house as the shelter of a woman’s uterus. It requires thinking where to place first a leg, an arm, then a hand and a foot. But even if it looks like a perforation, as if material had been removed out of the massive surface, the hole was indeed already there before the wall was built all around it. It is incredibly mysterious when our iconic idea of a rectangular door mutates and becomes something else that defines a new type of threshold.
Below there is another door of Korongo houses that also fascinates me: the oversized threshold, shaped as a human-size keyhole. One discovers its meaningfulness after knowing that it lets villagers access the room while carrying two large jars with drinking water hanging from a stick over their shoulders.
George Rodger captured in his photographs the everyday lives of the Nuba people in Sudan in late 1940s, their houses, their wrestling combats with sharp-edge bracelets, and their aesthetic scars that adorn their bodies.
Lego toys have always seemed pleasantly gender-neutral. Perhaps that’s why the new Lego Friends line for girls has triggered a fair bit of protest from some health and equal-rights organizations.
The new line, whose characters sport slim figures and stylish clothes, will contribute to gender stereotyping that promotes body dissatisfaction in girls, said Carolyn Costin, an eating disorders specialist and founder of the Monte Nido Treatment Center in Malibu.
Online petitions have been started to protest the line, which includes a Butterfly Beauty Shop and a Your Fashion Designer Workshop. The International Assn. of Eating Disorder Professionals said the toys were “devoid of imagination and promote overt forms of sexism.”
Written by Shari Roan, Los Angeles Times. Continue HERE
Synopsis: This conference aims to reflect on the relevance of the concept of dissidence for architectural practice today. Although dissidence has been primarily associated with architectural practices in the Eastern Bloc at the end of the Cold War period, contemporary architectural and other aesthetic practices have in recent years developed a host of new methodologies and techniques for articulating their distance from and critique of dominant political and financial structures. Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence asks how we can conceive of the contemporary political problems and paradoxes of architecture in relation to their precedents? Devoid of the agency of action, Cold War dissidents articulated their positions in drawings of fantasy-like paper architecture, while contemporary forms of architectural practice seem to gravitate towards activism and direct-action in the world. The political issues – from interventions in charged areas worldwide to research in conflict zones and areas undergoing transformations – currently stimulate a field of abundant invention in contemporary architecture. Both, Cold War dissidents and contemporary activists encounter problems and paradoxes and must navigate complex political force fields within which possible complicities are inherent risks.
New forms of critical practice, and political and spatial dissent are manifold, appearing in stark contrast to contemporary architectural practice in which professional courage seems to have been translated into structural “virtuosity” of surfaces. This conference seeks to map out and expand on the methodologies of architectural action and reinvigorate the concept of dissent within the architectural/spatial field of the possible. A more historical thread that runs through the programme will seek to weave the genealogy of political/spatial practices from the Cold War dissidents of the Soviet Bloc to the activists of South American favelas.
Dissidents in the former communist countries used a specific set of codes to question the ideological doctrine of the state party. Architects who were otherwise employed in state run architectural collectives, or as staff in architecture schools met to produce writings, private lectures, secret installations and architectural articulations of allegories and legends – activities that challenged the ’stifling’ standardized language of Soviet architecture. Many of these ‘paper architects’ questioned the relationship between art, architecture and politics, but also, and significantly so, the ideological, and thus also ethical function of various forms of ‘creative practices’. The political melt-down of the Soviet Bloc reconfigured this complex field of political codes, architectural gestures and references. The withdrawal of the architect from large ideological concepts regarding social utopias mirrored that fragmentation and dissemination of (neo)liberal market structures. Large ideological battles were replaced with a multiplicity of local, or issue-specific conflicts within which forms of activism have been integrated. Dissent against large integrated and complex networks is no longer possible. All that is left is to navigate the complex fields of forces in a reflective and innovative manner. But can the assemblage of gestures and techniques of past struggles and ‘dilemmas’ of working in politically suppressive regimes help to inform those of today?
The conference thus seeks to attract contemporary spatial practitioners, architects, urbanists, journalists, activists, filmmakers and curators, asking them to reflect upon contemporary forms and conditions of dissent and their potential problems and inevitable paradoxes. It welcomes, too, the reflections of architects and architectural historians to reflect upon previous articulations of political dissent through architectural practice.
“One of the most radical solutions in the field of shelter is represented by the underground towns and villages in the Chinese loess belt. Loess is silt, transported and deposited by the wind. Because of its great softness and high porosity (45%), it can be easily carved. [...] The dark squares in the flat landscape are pits [...] about the size of a tennis court. Their vertical sides are 25 to 30 feet high. L-shaped staircases lead to the apartments below whose rooms are about 30 feet deep and 15 feet wide, and measure about 15 feet to the top of the vaulted ceiling. They are lighted and aired by openings that give onto the courtyard.” [from LeopoldLambert's boiteaoutils on B. Rudofsky's Architecture without architects]
Amazon: In this book, Bernard Rudofsky steps outside the narrowly defined discipline that has governed our sense of architectural history and discusses the art of building as a universal phenomenon. He introduces the reader to communal architecture–architecture produced not by specialists but by the spontaneous and continuing activity of a whole people with a common heritage, acting within a community experience. A prehistoric theater district for a hundred thousand spectators on the American continent and underground towns and villages (complete with schools, offices, and factories) inhabited by millions of people are among the unexpected phenomena he brings to light.
The beauty of “primitive” architecture has often been dismissed as accidental, but today we recognize in it an art form that has resulted from human intelligence applied to uniquely human modes of life. Indeed, Rudofsky sees the philosophy and practical knowledge of the untutored builders as untapped sources of inspiration for industrial man trapped in his chaotic cities.
A new school system in Sweden eliminated all of its classrooms in favor of an environment that fosters children’s “curiosity and creativity.”
Vittra, which runs 30 schools in Sweden, wanted learning to take place everywhere in its schools — so it threw out the “old-school” thinking of straight desks in a line in a four-walled classroom (via GOOD).
Vittra most-recently opened Telefonplan School, in Stockholm. Architect Rosan Bosch designed the school so children could work independently in opened-spaces while lounging, or go to “the village” to work on group-projects.
All of the furniture in the school, which looks like a lot of squiggles, is meant to aid students in engaging in conversation while working on projects.
The school is non-traditional in every sense: there are no letter grades and students learn in groups at their level, not necessarily by age.
Admission to the school is free, as long as the child has a personal number (like a social security number) and one of the child’s parents is a Swedish tax payer.
Written by Meredith Galante for Business Insider. Continue HERE
Welcome to Designing Civic Encounter an initiative by ArtTerritories, engaging in existing and potential forms of urban development and public culture in Palestine. The event which took place between July 21-24, 2011, unfolded through an URBAN BUS TOUR traversing urban locations within and around Ramallah city enabling debates and conversations at different stations, a two-day SYMPOSIUM on questions of urban transformations in Palestinian and Arab cities, and a full day WORKSHOP with visionary social architect Teddy Cruz.
Designing Civic Encounter opened a forum in the real for the inquiry and discussion of the public urban experience under the current trends in planning, financing and building practices. Attracting an active local and international roster of architects, artists, educators, environmentalists, community activists and politicians, this online publication compiles video documentations generated from the events and also features art works and newly commissioned texts and photographs.
You can navigate the web publication through the names of the contributors listed on the right hand column and the listed summaries on the left hand column.
“Craft practices are at once defined and restrained by their connections to tradition. Viewing woodworking in the context of objects made with wood; housing, particularly stick frame construction, emerges as possibly the most widespread use of the material throughout the modern world. Utilizing these techniques in a studio based practice, it is my hope to further the conversation on how notions of craft fit into the modern world.”
Ted Lott, an artist/sculptor/woodworker from Madison WI, USA. More of his work <strong>HERE
To consider compiling an encyclopedia (of any kind) in post-Wikipedia times is an exercise in emotional withdrawal.
From a position of bewilderment and confusion we choose to act by producing and employing another tool from the land of the naive and outdated, represented by encyclopedic work, devoid of all logic and meaning considering current cultural conditions and speed. What the first edition Dubai graphic and visual encyclopedia presents is a reality that acts as a counterpoint to all the excess of attempts to decipher and understand Dubai. Attempts that are mostly unable to uncover items that shed light on the question ‘What’s it all about’?
Organizing scanning devices for the entire physical reality and processing information in much the same way as the early explorers did in order to reach unknown lands. The encyclopedia will be updated periodically so as to provide an authentic (temporal) guide and a database for Dubai and its times. With the suspicion that perhaps behind all this there’s a new grammar, we also need to develop new dictionaries. Brusselsprout
Germany’s famous Bauhaus school from 1919 to 1933 forged new boundaries in the art and design world and remains highly influential today. But its brand and legacy has been under threat for five decades from a large German-Swiss home goods retailer that took the title and trademark “Bauhaus” in 1960 and now has 190 stores around Europe.
Architect Walter Gropius and his group of communal craftsmen put a radical stamp on architecture, design and art education during Germany’s Weimar Period between the two world wars. He even claims he coined the term “Bauhaus” as the name for his atypical art school.
Along the way, though, he forgot an important thing: to protect the name.
As a result, up to 40 companies in Germany and myriad others abroad have taken the word “Bauhaus” as a brand or title. The imitators include a furniture label in the United States, a rumored bordello in Japan, a chocolate variety that touts its form and function, a real estate company and the early British gothic band led by Peter Murphy.
“Bauhaus sells,” says Dr. Annemarie Jaeggi, director of the Bauhaus Archive Museum in Berlin. “That’s the point.” When someone is copying you or your name in a corporate context, she says, “then you see that you really have a brand.”
But the greatest squatter of the moniker is a do-it-yourself retailer based in Mannheim, which trademarked the Bauhaus during postwar divided Germany. It happened before Gropius and others moved to established archives and museums — in Dessau and Weimar (in the former east) and Berlin — to explain and protect the historical Bauhaus and its legacy. Now, it’s causing confusion to the general public and frustration to Bauhaus design aficionados.
Written by Paul Glader at the Spiegel. Continue HERE
Bracket 3 invites the submission of critical articles and unpublished design projects that investigate the potentials when situations extend beyond norms – into the extremities. We are conditioned, as designers of the built environment, towards the organization of people, programs and movement. Indeed the history of modern urbanism, architecture and building science has been predicated on an anti-entropic notion of programmatic and social order. But are there scenarios in which a state of extremity or imbalance is productive?
Ulrick Beck, in “Risk Society’s Cosmopolitan Moment” suggests that being at risk is the human condition at the beginning of the twenty-first century. While risk produces inequality and destabilization, he argues, it can be the catalyst for the construction of new institutions. The term extreme is defined as outermost, utmost, farthest, last or frontier. Bracket [at Extremes] seeks to understand what new spatial orders emerge in this liminal space. How might it be leveraged as an opportunity for invention? What are the limits of wilderness and control, of the natural and artificial, the real and the virtual? What new landscapes, networks, and urban models might emerge in the wake of destabilized economic, social and environmental conditions?
Bracket [at Extremes] will examine architecture, infrastructure and technology as they operate in conditions of imbalance, negotiate tipping points and test limit states. In such conditions, the status quo is no longer possible; systems must extend performance and accommodate unpredictability. As new protocols emerge, new opportunities present themselves. Bracket [at Extremes] seeks innovative contributions interrogating extreme processes (technologies, operations) and extreme contexts (cultural, climatic). What is the breaking point of architecture at extremes?
The Chinese sustainable building company, Broad Group, has yet attempted another impossible feat, building a 30-story tall hotel prototype in 360 hours, after building a 15-story building in a week earlier in 2011.
You may ask why in a hurry, and is it safe? The statistics in the video can put you in good faith. Prefabricated modular buildings has many advantages over conventional buildings.
Higher precision in fabrication (+/- 0.2mm).
More coordinated on-site construction management.
Shorter construction time span.
Lower construction waste.
Also many other health and energy features are included in Broad Sustainable Buildings (BSB)
The building was built over last Christmas time and finished before New Years Eve of 2012.
Fabrizio Saiu works with Italian and European musicians and in some ensembles: Radici Ensemble, Ligatura and Pasceri Rinaldi Saiu Trio. In Perform Art he collaborates with ClgEnsemble; in Video Art and Photo with Alessandro Ligato, Stefano Mazzanti and Paolo Asaro; In Theater/Dance with the TIDA. He works within improvisation and contemporary music he works with Phi4, Ligatura and with the composer M. Montalbetti. Currently he is working on Objet sans corps: a performance focused on the dynamics of matter transformation, of movement, and of resonance in the relationship between man and environment.
Objet Sans Corps III and IV
The audio-visual document Objet sans corps is composed of 5 scenes and it lasts 14 minutes. The document is the Trace, the residue, the Supplement of a research on the dynamics of
matter transformation, of movement, and of the resonance on the link between man and environment. Every scene is focused on the circular repetition of the same movement and it is characterized by a precise and essential displacement of the body in the environment. The corporal acts do not have a ultimate aim, and their self-referential frees the body that on them produce itself from every functionality, canceling it inside itself. Is it through this alienation that Objet sans corps become an effect of the process instead of his outcom.
When we think of bee nests, we often think of a giant hive, buzzing with social activity, worker bees and honey. But scientists recently discovered a rare, solitary type of bee that makes tiny nests by plastering together flower petals.
The O. avoseta bee builds a tiny nest about a half-inch long using petals from the flower Onobrychis viciifolia. Each nest usually houses a single egg.
One mother bee may make around 10 nests, often nestling the single-cell berths near each other.
A bee closely related to O. avoseta bites off a flower petal with its mandibles.
Peeling back the outer layer of flower petals reveals the paper-thin mud layer.
The mother bee lays a single egg in the flowery bower, right on top of a nutritious deposit of nectar and pollen.
Via NPR. Images Jerome Rozen/American Museum of Natural History.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Inca Empire was the largest South America had ever known. Centered in Peru, it stretched across the Andes’ mountain tops and down to the shoreline, incorporating lands from today’s Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, Equador, Argentina and Peru – all connected by a vast highway system whose complexity rivaled any in the Old World. Rich in foodstuffs, textiles, gold, and coca, the Inca were masters of city building but nevertheless had no money. In fact, they had no marketplaces at all.
The Inca Empire may be the only advanced civilization in history to have no class of traders, and no commerce of any kind within its boundaries. How did they do it?
Many aspects of Incan life remain mysterious, in part because our accounts of Incan life come from the Spanish invaders who effectively wiped them out. Famously, the conquistador Francisco Pizzaro led just a few men in an incredible defeat of the Incan army in Peru in 1532. But the real blow came roughly a decade before that, when European invaders unwittingly unleashed a smallpox epidemic that some epidemiologists believe may have killed as many as 90 percent of the Incan people. Our knowledge of these events, and our understanding of Incan culture of that era, come from just a few observers – mostly Spanish missionaries, and one mestizo priest and Inca historian named Blas Valera, who was born in Peru two decades after the fall of the Inca Empire.
Wealth Without Money
Documents from missionaries and Valera describe the Inca as master builders and land planners, capable of extremely sophisticated mountain agriculture – and building cities to match. Incan society was so rich that it could afford to have hundreds of people who specialized in planning the agricultural uses of newly-conquered areas. They built terraced farms on the mountainsides whose crops – from potatoes and maize to peanuts and squash – were carefully chosen to thrive in the average temperatures for different altitudes. They also farmed trees to keep the thin topsoil in good condition. Incan architects were equally talented, designing and raising enormous pyramids, irrigating with sophisticated waterworks such as those found at Tipon, and creating enormous temples like Pachacamac along with mountain retreats like Machu Picchu. Designers used a system of knotted ropes to do the math required to build on slopes.
Rendering of the Cloud during day and Close-up of the Cloud (Courtesy MVRDV)
Archpaper: Urban design historian Grahame Shane weighs in on the controversial project tracing MVRDV’s explosive imagery to its source in research.
When Ole Scheeren departed from OMA Beijing with the MahaNakhon Bangkok tower to found his own office in 2010, he had the idea to connect tower and urban village, marking a key moment in a very Dutch delirium that moved beyond OMA’s CCTV tower. In the Bangkok tower the developer’s website claims this skyscraper “melds with the city by gradually ‘dissolving’ the mass as it moves vertically between ground and sky.”
An early concept rendering of the Cloud tower and a rendering of the final design released last week. (Courtesy MVRDV)
MVRDV pursued this same research and logic in their Cloud twin tower development in Libeskind’s masterplan for the ex-US base in downtown Seoul. The firm had earlier developed the Sky Village project in Copenhagen in 2008, similar in concept to the MahaNakon project with its spiral upwards. Indeed, this spiral had long been a concern of Ken Yeang, the Malaysian architect in his “Bioclimatic” Malaysian skyscraper projects of the 1990′s. MVRDV pursued this research in their 2011 Vertical Village show in Taipei, Taiwan, that opened at the same time as the announcement of the Cloud. Continue HERE
Andrea Zittel, American, b. 1965, “Indianapolis Island,” 2010. Fiberglass, foam, mixed media. Commissioned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
The Indianapolis Museum of Art is issuing a call for proposals for a summer 2012 six-week residency on Andrea Zittel’s Indianapolis Island within the IMA’s 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park. Graduate and undergraduate students and emerging professionals in the fields of art, design, architecture and performing arts are encouraged to apply to customize and reside on Indianapolis Island.
Anchored in the 35-acre lake within 100 Acres, Indianapolis Island is a habitable “off-the-grid” structure accessible by rowboat. At about 20 feet in diameter, the island serves as an experimental living structure that examines the daily needs of contemporary human beings. Residents collaborate with Zittel by adapting and modifying the island’s structure according to their individual needs. The project blends elements of environmental art, sculpture, design and performance in a unique way, offering a challenging and experimental forum for exploring ideas about individualism and self-sufficiency. Visit www.imamuseum.org/islandresidency for more information, including photos and renderings of the structure, and to apply for the residency.
The 2012 residency will be the third to take place on Indianapolis Island. During the artwork’s inaugural summer in 2010, Herron School of Art and Design (Indianapolis, Ind.) students Jessica Dunn and Michael Runge activated the installation through a series of visitor interactions based on a system of exchange with their project titled Give and Take. The 2011 island resident was Katherine Ball, a student of Portland State University’s Art + Social Practice MFA program (Portland, Ore.). Over the course of her residency, titled No Swimming, Ball initiated a series of ecological interventions in the Park’s lake and engaged a local audience through a series of public programs centered on the topic of water. For more information about the past residencies, visit www.imamuseum.org/100acres/artists/andreazittel.
Proposals are due Friday, January 13, 2012, and should include a brief written statement about the planned residency with renderings. Residencies must last six weeks or longer and be conducted between May and September 2012.
About Contemporary Art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art
The IMA’s robust contemporary art program is a model for how encyclopedic museums engage the art of our time. With a renewed focus on its contemporary collection, programs, and publications, the IMA has been actively seeking out the works of emerging and mid-career international artists through both gift and acquisition, and organizing major traveling exhibitions and newly commissioned projects. In recent years, the IMA has worked with artists including Ingrid Calame, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Los Carpinteros, Amy Cutler, Tara Donovan, Tony Feher, Orly Genger, Jeppe Hein, Robert Irwin, Alfredo Jaar, Josephine Meckseper, Joshua Mosley, Ernesto Neto, Type A, and Andrea Zittel, among others.
In June 2010, the IMA launched its new 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park to wide critical acclaim, and it has been hailed across the United States as a new model for site-responsive sculpture parks in the 21st century. Among the backdrop of woodlands, wetlands, and a 35-acre lake, the park currently includes nine commissioned art installations by artists from throughout the world as well as the Ruth Lilly Visitor Pavilion designed by architect Marlon Blackwell. 100 Acres is one of only a few sculpture parks in the United States dedicated to the ongoing commission of site-responsive artwork.
Lisa Freiman, the IMA’s senior curator and chair of the Department of Contemporary Art, was appointed the 2011 U.S. Commissioner for La Biennale di Venezia, the 54th International Art Exhibition. During the Biennale, the IMA presented six new works by the collaborative Allora & Calzadilla in the U.S. Pavilion for the exhibition titled Gloria.
Indianapolis Museum of Art
www.imamuseum.org
Twitter: @imamuseum
New symbiotic algae and seafood/fish farms generated in Crane Greenhouses
ANCIENT HISTORY: The layers of sediment excavated in Denisova Cave (top left) and its surroundings have yielded such artifacts as chipping tools (top right), a fragment of a pinky bone, and a molar. DNA in the bone and molar led to the identification of a new hominin group, the Denisovans.Photos: Courtesy of David Reich (top left, top right, bottom right); Courtesy of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (bottom left, middle right)
DOWN TO EARTH: Excavation of Denisova Cave, a site overseen by the Russian Academy of Sciences, is an ongoing venture involving international teams of researchers. Photo: Courtesy of David Reich
A mysterious band of hacker-artists is prowling the network of tunnels below Paris, secretly refurbishing the city’s neglected treasures. Photo: UX
The unauthorized cinema that UX built beneath the Palais De Chaillot. Photo: UX
Marrakech (Morocco)
The O. avoseta bee builds a tiny nest about a half-inch long using petals from the flower Onobrychis viciifolia. Each nest usually houses a single egg.
One mother bee may make around 10 nests, often nestling the single-cell berths near each other.
A bee closely related to O. avoseta bites off a flower petal with its mandibles.
Peeling back the outer layer of flower petals reveals the paper-thin mud layer.
The mother bee lays a single egg in the flowery bower, right on top of a nutritious deposit of nectar and pollen.
Rendering of the Cloud during day and Close-up of the Cloud (Courtesy MVRDV)
An early concept rendering of the Cloud tower and a rendering of the final design released last week. (Courtesy MVRDV)
Andrea Zittel, American, b. 1965, “Indianapolis Island,” 2010. Fiberglass, foam, mixed media. Commissioned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
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