The other day I walked into my gym and saw a dog. A half-dozen people were crowding around him, cooing and petting. He was a big dog, a lean and muscular Doberman with, I later learned, the sort of hair-trigger bark you’d prize if you wanted to protect a big stash of gold bullion.
“This is Y.,” the dog’s owner said. No explanation was offered for the pooch’s presence, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to have a dog in a place usually reserved for human beings. Huh, I thought.
The dog came up to me, because in my experience that’s what dogs do when you don’t want them to come up to you. They get up real close, touching you, licking you, theatrically begging you to respond. The dog pushed his long face toward my hand, the canine equivalent of a high five. And so—in the same way it’s rude to leave a high-fiver hanging, especially if the high-fiver has big teeth and a strong jaw—I was expected to pet him. I ran my hand across his head half-heartedly. I guess I was fairly sure he wouldn’t snap and bite me, but stranger things have happened—for instance, dogs snapping and biting people all the time.
Anyway, happily, I survived. But wait a second. Come on! Why was this dog here? And why was no one perturbed that this dog was here? When this beast was barking at passersby through the window as we were all working out, why did no one go, Hey, just throwing this out there, should we maybe not have this distracting, possibly dangerous animal by the free weights?
Excerpt from an article written by y Farhad Manjoo at SLATE. Continue THERE
New Yorkers don’t fade away—they just move. But to where? From Miami to Austin to Berlin, detailed maps of nearly every other significant city’s neighborhoods show ex-pats exactly where to emigrate.
The Informal City Dialogues is a year-long project supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and conducted by Forum for the Future. It homes in on six cities: Accra, Bangkok, Chennai, Lima, Manila and Nairobi. In each of these cities, it aims to foster a conversation about the informal urban realm, and how it can be cultivated and harnessed for the benefit of all.
These informal realms, from single-chair barbershops to nine-passenger vans to sprawling settlements, are propelling the explosive growth of the urban Global South. They are the neighborhoods, economies and systems that exist beyond the reach of government: the slums, black-market industries and undocumented businesses that fuel these cities’ growth. They’re split off from the formal city, and often neglected or harassed by local authorities.
And yet the informal aspects of these places are also intricately intertwined with the formal. Indeed, many residents have one foot in both worlds: the slum dweller who commutes to her job at a major hospital, the unlicensed microbus driver who lives in a condominium highrise.
For the next round of discussion I’d like to shift the subject to the physical environment, posing the question, Is architecture rational?
Much of the newer work we see as we walk the streets of the city whether it’s New York, Seattle, Dubai, or the newer sections of Copenhagen, is more dramatic than architecture once was: taller, swoopier, twistier, less symmetrical. Architectural language, informed by the capabilities of parametric software and computerized fabrication tools, has become more fluid and less rectilinear.
From the onlooker’s perspective, it looks a lot like style. But when you talk to an architect, you often wind up having a conversation about how utterly pragmatic the building in question is.
For instance, the Seattle Central Library by OMA, completed in 2004. The lead architect on the project, Joshua Prince-Ramus, once told me: “Style freaks us out, the very word style.” He went on to explain the strange shape of the building—it looks like a monstrous mechanical jaw—by showing a diagram made by the library’s administrators of all the functions they required in the new building. Prince-Ramus claimed the architects translated the librarians’ chart directly into architectural form. He called this method “hyperrational.”
Book-ish Territory: A Manual of Alternative Library Tactics by architect NIkki O’Loughlin is an exciting and interesting way of conceptualizing the idea of libraries as a public space not just for the public but by the public. Read it HERE
Through an un-usual DNA collection method, American artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg creates portrait sculptures from the analyses of genetic material collected in public places. From cigarette butts to hair samples, she works using random traces left behind from un-suspecting strangers. In a statement by Dewey-Hagborg, ‘Stranger Visions’ calls attention to the impulse toward genetic determinism and the potential for a culture of genetic surveillance. Using DNA facial modeling software and a 3D printer, physical models are conceived – reconstructed from ethnic profiles, eye color and hair color.
Did you ever want to hide something from prying eyes, yet were afraid to do so in your home? Now you can secrete your valuables away from home, by following Dennis Fiery’s eye-opening instructions. The world around us is filled with cubbyholes and niches that can be safely employed….and this book identifies them. Illustrated with numerous photographs, and including an index of hiding places, appendices of Simplex lock combinations and appropriate vendors, and a bibliography, this is the most comprehensive and informative book ever written about public hiding spots. Eliminate the risks involved with hiding your possessions at home by utilizing the techniques described in this book. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Are you among the millions of people whose only opportunity to observe wildlife comes after it has been run over and pressed into a patty by big rigs, then desiccated by the elements until even flies don’t recognize it? This is the field guide for you! Roger Knutson, a biologist at Luther College, IA, fills an important gap in our natural history knowledge and fosters a heightened respect for the ecology of the paved environment. FLATTENED FAUNA is a classic field guide to the 36 most common species of roadside remains in North America. The book includes descriptions and silhouetted illustrations of the top squashed avian, mammalian, reptilian, and amphibian species. Due to rabid interest from overseas, the expanded new edition includes global ramifications of international necrology.
“At a time when the total world fauna is surely shrinking in both absolute numbers and species complexity, the road fauna is clearly increasing. Before 1900, in the United States, its presence was recorded by only the most fragmentary references to the occasional horse-stomped snake. With the development in the twentieth century of a much elongated road network and dramatically increased traffic speed, the flattened fauna has increased in both species and total numbers.” — Roger M. Knutson
The badger, “the largest, flattest creature to be found on the road,” is here compared to a standard road marking for ease of identification. From Flattened Fauna.
Today, art is simple, direct and clear. No illusions. Today, art could not possibly function as l’art pour art, or ‘art as art’, or ‘art as idea as idea’. Unlike historicism, it does not aspire to exalted objectives (aesthetical or political), as it did during the epoch of historical modernism1, neither is it eclectically dispersed or decentered as pure pleasure like in the era of consumer post-modernism.(2) Today, art subjects are socially explicit(3), culturally referential(4) and artistically realistic(5). The relationship between art and reality(6) is ontological.
Art is not a mirror representation of the world, but it is a representative, or rather a probe of an ‘artistic action’ in the world that is a ‘new-or-other’ nature. Here the term ‘nature’ denotes polysemy of culture, or to be more precise, the multifold effects of the struggle for power inside culture and society. In the course of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century, this was the ‘class struggle’ between capitalists and workers. In the second half of the 20th century the struggle was waged between politically opposed blocs (the East and the West) in the symmetrically split world (influential spheres). Today it is the struggle between the ‘center’ and ‘margins’:
- within individual (localized) societies,
- within culture as new nature,
- within private or public art of communication,
- within global politics,
- within local or global economy,
- within the distribution of power inside our everyday,
- within production, exchange and consumption of values (information, influence, pleasure).
“A group of Russians went to Egypt and climbed the Great Pyramide. According to their story, they arrived there early while the complex was open, then waited in shadows till the visitor hours are over and the night came down, so later they climbed on the top and made photos. “There are lots of signs on the top of the pyramide on different languages, including Russian, and they say somewhere among them there is a signature of last Russian Tsar who climbed it too sometime long ago”. The security didn’t notice them, they got back down uncaught, keeping in mind that according to Egypt’s laws there is a possible couple of years sentence for such kind of things.”
Touring internationally since 2008, “Play Me, I’m Yours” is an artwork by British artist Luke Jerram. Reaching over two million people worldwide – more than 700 pianos have already been installed in 34 cities across the globe, from New York to London, bearing the simple instruction ‘Play Me, I’m Yours’.
Located in public parks, bus shelters and train stations, outside galleries and markets and even on bridges and ferries the pianos are available for any member of the public to play and enjoy. Who plays them and how long they remain on the streets is up to each community. Many pianos are personalised and decorated by artists or the local community. By creating a place of exchange ‘Play Me, I’m Yours’ invites the public to engage with, activate and take ownership of their urban environment.
Play Me, I’m Yours is currently taking place in Monterey in California until 24 March 2013. Watch out for Street Pianos coming to Munich, Cleveland OH, Omaha NE and Boston MA later in 2013! Watch this space as we will be announcing further new cities for 2013 over the coming months.
The Sky Orchestra is an artwork designed to deliver music to sleeping people from out of the sky. A form of provocative urban art, Sky Orchestra questions the boundaries of public artwork, private space and the ownership of the sky.
The Sky Orchestra is made up of seven hot air balloons, each with speakers attached, which take off (at dawn or dusk) and fly across a city. Each balloon plays a different element of a musical score, creating a massive audio landscape.
Many thousands of people experience the Sky Orchestra event live as the balloons fly over their homes at dawn. The airborne project is both a vast spectacular performance as well as an intimate, personal experience. A form of provocative acoustic urban art, Sky Orchestra questions the boundaries of public artwork, private space and the ownership of the sky.
BASTARD CHAIRS BY Michael Wolf. The bastard chairs of china from the book “Sitting in China” published by Steidl in the fall of 2002, distributed by D.A.P. in the United States.
There’s something eerie about a clown-striped fumigation tent on a dark, residential street. Perhaps, in addition to its incongruous looks, it’s the knowledge that the house underneath is abandoned, its air rich with aerosoled death, necessitated by an infestation of parasitic insects. It evokes a sense of the uncanny – a mood that photographer Robert Benson went to great lengths to capture in his new photo series.
“I was never arrested and always stood on public property or had permission, but I definitely got some weird looks,” says Benson, who by day is an editorial and commercial photographer.
For several months Benson scoured San Diego (where he lives) for tented houses. At first he tried shooting the project by day with a film camera, but the photos were flat. By shooting at night with a digital camera, he found an added contrast and a tone that makes the photos so evocative, almost menacing.
Excerpt from an article written by Jakob Schiller at WIRED. Continue HERE
See more of this series at Robert Benson’s site HERE
“Participation is war. Any form of participation is already a form of conflict. In war, enemy and adversary usually hold territory, which they can gain or lose, while each has a spokesman or authority that can govern, submit, or collapse. In order to participate in any environment or situation, one needs to understand the forces of conflict that act upon that environment. Participation is often understood as a means of becoming part of something through proactive contribution and the occupation of a particular role. However it seems that this role is rarely understood as a critical platform of engagement, but rather based on romantic conceptions of harmony and solidarity. In the context, I would like to promote an understanding of conflictual participation, one that acts as an uninvited irritant.” – Extract from Marcus Miessenʼs essay The Violence of Participation
Architecture depends—on what? On people, time, politics, ethics, mess: the real world. Architecture, Jeremy Till argues with conviction in this engaging, sometimes pugnacious book, cannot help itself; it is dependent for its very existence on things outside itself. Despite the claims of autonomy, purity, and control that architects like to make about their practice, architecture is buffeted by uncertainty and contingency. Circumstances invariably intervene to upset the architect’s best-laid plans—at every stage in the process, from design through construction to occupancy. Architects, however, tend to deny this, fearing contingency and preferring to pursue perfection. With Architecture Depends, architect and critic Jeremy Till offers a proposal for rescuing architects from themselves: a way to bridge the gap between what architecture actually is and what architects want it to be. Mixing anecdote, design, social theory, and personal experience, Till’s writing is always accessible, moving freely between high and low registers, much like his suggestions for architecture itself.
The everyday world is a disordered mess, from which architecture has retreated—and this retreat, says Till, is deluded. Architecture must engage with the inescapable reality of the world; in that engagement is the potential for a reformulation of architectural practice. Contingency should be understood as an opportunity rather than a threat. Elvis Costello said that his songs have to work when played through the cheapest transistor radio; for Till, architecture has to work (socially, spatially) by coping with the flux and vagaries of everyday life. Architecture, he proposes, must move from a reliance on the impulsive imagination of the lone genius to a confidence in the collaborative ethical imagination, from clinging to notions of total control to an intentional acceptance of letting go.
Heat maps of apartment rental prices. In June 2011 Jeff Kaufman made a map of Boston-area apartment prices. He says: I’ve made an updated version: $/room, $/bedroom. As before the data comes from the (awesome) site padmapper, which means it’s pretty close to all Boston-area apartments currently on the market.
While he may shelter behind a concealed identity, he advocates a direct connection between an artist and his constituency. “There’s a whole new audience out there, and it’s never been easier to sell [one’s art],” Banksy has maintained. “You don’t have to go to college, drag ’round a portfolio, mail off transparencies to snooty galleries or sleep with someone powerful, all you need now is a few ideas and a broadband connection. This is the first time the essentially bourgeois world of art has belonged to the people. We need to make it count.”
Excerpt from an article written by Will Ellsworth-Jones. Continue HERE
At the moment, we are bound to the americans military GPS and network companies. As we are using digital maps empowered with GPS, which are curated and therefor have impact on our navigation and experience of our environment, we also have to think about the given technology. The technology is closed at the moment and can be curated or shut down at any time.
This navigation system is open. Which means it is not run by companies nor control. The goal is to gather interested people on the web platform openps.org to develop the necessary software, hardware and testing processes. Anybody who is interested, from beginner to professionals can participate and contribute their knowledge to the community and this system.
To use given things in cities and reuse them for the projects needs is one aim of this project.
The idea is to use seismic frequencies, produced by generators in power plants, turbines in pumping stations or other large machines running in factories. These generators, machines etc. are producing seismic activity, distributed over the ground.
The sensor prototype can detect seismic waves on the ground, walls or anything with enough contact to the ground. At the current stage of this project the sensor can detect and collect different frequencies.
To calculate the noise in a city out of the received signals from the ground, the sensor has to be tuned into a specific frequency. To get a specific frequency from one machine, turbine etc. the sensor has to be as close as possible to the seismic source to receive a clean and strong signal at least once.
When at least three signals and their positions on a map are known, one can calculate the position within these three signals.
In this early stage, the project will still rely on GPS and maps. With the process of expanding the new network of seismic sources, it can be possible to build an own positioning system.
Last month, 100 students attending the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design (NSCAD) interrupted a board meeting to read their manifesto.
“Our manifesto was collectively written by the student faculty and staff to reaffirm what is essentially to NSCAD as a university.”
“The meeting was pretty much immediately adjourned once the students entered the room,” she says. “Half the board members left, but some stayed and had a conversation with students.”
The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard documentary, which tells the story behind the embattled Swedish Pirate Bay project, is now available on YouTube. The film just premiered in Europe and was simultaneously launched on line at Youtube and for download on Pirate Bay.
It’s the day before the trial starts. Fredrik packs a computer into a rusty old Volvo. Along with his Pirate Bay co-founders, he faces $13 million in damage claims to Hollywood in a copyright infringement case. Fredrik is on his way to install a new computer in the secret server hall. This is where the world’s largest file sharing site is hidden.
When the hacker prodigy Gottfrid, the internet activist Peter and the network nerd Fredrik are found guilty, they are confronted with the reality of life offline – away from keyboard. But deep down in dark data centres, clandestine computers quietly continue to duplicate files.
In 1895, the City of Austin acquired a novel street-lighting system from Detroit consisting of thirty-one 165-foot tower lights. Their cool glow and looming height earned them the popular moniker “Moonlight Towers.” In the 1930s, however, the towers were all but obsolete due to the advent of newer, brighter street lamps that were closer to the ground. Over the years for a variety of reasons including public safety and urban growth, more than half of the original towers have been removed. This series preserves the remaining towers at their most visible moment just after they turn on at dusk.
In 1995, the then seventeen Moonlight Towers were added to the National Register of Historic Places and were celebrated with a $1.3 million restoration effort. However, only fifteen towers still stand today; two of the seventeen officially recognized towers have been removed due to new construction downtown. It is unclear if they will be reinstalled.
“Do not sit on the art!” is something you don’t hear very often at contemporary art shows, making Ina Weber’s new solo exhibition Architectures, Memories, Utopias at Berlin’s Haus Am Waldsee an exception. The confusion of some attendees (at least three on Sunday afternoon) is understandable: Weber makes sly, playful sculptures that mimic the ordinary objects and mundane buildings of the modern city. Consequently the red bench, one of a cluster of objects that make up the show’s first work Fußgängerzone (“Pedestrian Zone”), could easily be mistaken for, well – a red bench. Upon a closer look the artifice becomes apparent, but the object-imitations hew close enough to the originals to provoke our normal reactions to such objects, confounding in their similarity.
Weber is adroit in small acts of deception (a skill she might have picked up from the Martin Kippenberger, who taught her at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Kassel). In one room of the exhibition, 13 small sculptures of ceramic and concrete depict unassuming buildings in Berlin and beyond: a Chinese restaurant, a department store, a Mietskaserne, a post-war apartment block. Sitting in two rows directly on the floor, at the mercy of wandering toddlers, the diminutive models cut a sharp contrast to the oversized and ungainly sculptures on display elsewhere in the show. These distortions of scale and proportion in Weber’s work are disconcerting. Something is off here, but what exactly, is hard to say.
Awkward_NYC, or The New York City Map of Awkward Social interactions in Public Spaces, is a collaborative online map for reporting social accidents and small interpersonal traumas that occur unexpectedly in public spaces. The map pinpoints sites in the New York Metropolitan area where misunderstandings, outbursts, physical altercations, arguments between friends or strangers, and romantic spats or break-ups have occurred. These mishaps are characteristic of the human urban experience– they’re unsettling, often comic, strangely powerful mini-narratives and dramas that would otherwise go untold, but may linger in memory for months and years, as we move through the same urban landscapes, day in and day out.
Anyone can add a story to the map; the project is fully web-based and participatory. The map taps into the confessional, voyeuristic, narrative impulses that typify online behavior and subverts the notion of mapping as reductive, objective, and authoritative. As stories are added to the map, a series of data visualizations depicting the emotional terrain of the city will be generated.
Presented by Urban States, this lecture was given on Wednesday, August 31, 2011 at the University of Southern California School of Architecture.
Architect and theorist Markus Miessen (studiomiessen.com, criticalspatialpractice.org, nOffice.eu, winterschoolmiddleeast.org) lecture presents the third part of his “participation trilogy” – encouraging the role of what he calls the “crossbench practitioner,” an “uninterested outsider” and “uncalled participator” who is not limited by existing protocols, and who enters the arena with nothing but creative intellect and the will to generate change.
Two terms, or really, two groups of terms, seem to gather competing ideas as to how we might conceive anything like a collective, collectivity, or collective space today. The city figures prominently in both. On the one hand we have the set of concepts assembled around the term “public,” as in public realm, public sphere, public space, public sector, and “the public” itself. On the other we have the set of concepts associated with the term “common”: the common(s), common sense, and common wealth. The latter set resonates with communism, communal, and the like. But neither should its usage by environmentalists to debate an oft-misunderstood “tragedy of the commons” be overlooked; similarly, as the recent controversy over a potential “public option” in American health care reform showed, conventional Anglophone usage associates “public” with the welfare state and with liberal/progressive political reform more generally.
Circulating between these two sets of terms is the category of the “social,” as in socialism, but also as used by the philosopher Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition (1958), to differentiate the modern managerial sphere, including both state- and market-based social or behavioral management, from the classical res publica. According to Arendt, modernity is characterized by the preponderance of managerial practices — “housekeeping,” as she puts it — that have emerged from the classical domestic sphere, the oikos, to organize and dominate the life of the polis, or city. These practices take as their field of activity a newly constituted object — society — thereby blotting out the distinction between public and private life, or the distinction between household management and political life, on which city-states were founded in classical times. Many commentators have pointed out that in accepting uncritically this division of labor, Arendt idealizes the Greek polis, in which only male citizens participated in “public” (i.e. political) life, with women and slaves confined to the household (the “private” realm, or oikos) and its internal, domestic economy.
Excerpt from an essay by Reinhold Martin at Design Observer. Continue HERE
Image above: Occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol Rotunda, 2011. [Photo by Peter Patau]
Image below: Top: Étienne-Louis Boullée, Bibliothèque du Roi, 1785. Bottom: Henri Labrouste, reading room, Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1868. [Photo by Vincent Desjardins]
TAAK is an international platform that develops innovative art projects and educational programmes relating to social issues such as ecology, urbanisation, social design and human rights. TAAK places topics of public interest on the agenda and develops innovative strategies and perspectives for a changing world. Art and culture shape and express values that can unite different groups in society. By using art to mobilise artists, commissioners, citizens and organisations around specific themes, TAAK investigates how new types of social initiatives and citizenship may arise.
For five years now Open is a cahier that reflects upon contemporary public domain from a cultural perspective. Through a thematic investigation into the changing conditions of public domain and through new ideas relating to this space, Open aims to make a structural contribution to the development of theories about these subjects and to function as a platform for reflection on socio-cultural and artistic practices. Among the international authors writing for Open are philosophers of culture, sociologists, media theorists, architecture and art critics and political scientists.
Open also works together with artists and designers, often in the form of special supplements, and occasionally invites guest editors to produce issues. The cahier is aimed at a diverse public that is interested in critical discourses and discussions about the relationship between cultural production and the public domain, and in the implications for this of processes such as globalization and mediatisation. Open wants to thus create and stimulate autonomous and experimental ideas concerning art and the public domain.
Torre David, a 45-story skyscraper in Caracas, has remained uncompleted since the Venezuelan economy collapsed in 1994. Today, it is the improvised home to more than 750 families living in an extra-legal and tenuous squat, that some
have called a “vertical slum.”
Urban-Think Tank, the authors of Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities, spent a year studying the physical and social organization of this ruin-become home. Richly illustrated with photographs by Iwan Baan, the book documents the
residents’ occupation of the tower and how, in the absence of formal infrastructure, they organize themselves to provide for daily needs, with a hair salon, a gym, grocery shops, and more. The authors of this thought-provoking work investigate informal vertical communities and the architecture that supports them and issue a call for action: to see in informal settlements a potential for innovation and experimentation, with the goal of putting design in service to a more equitable and sustainable future.
Architektur für Kinder is an ongoing research project about the history of playgrounds and will transform into an international show in the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh PA (June 2013).
NEXT Architectson the Melkwegbridge: The Melkwegbridge is located in Purmerend, the Netherlands. The bridge is part of the masterplan ‘De Kanaalsprong’ and connects the historic city center with the towns’ new district. The most striking part of the bridge, designed by NEXT architects, is a massive arch which reaches the height of 12m above water level and stands in a continuous line with the Melkweg-road, thus offering an incredible view over the city. The high lookout is an attraction in itself and lets pedestrians fully experience the relation between the new and historic center of Purmerend.
Bicycles and remainder traffic cross the bridge using the 100m long bicycle deck. This deck was designed as a pendulum over the water, so that the slope could be limited to a minimum. Because pedestrian traffic was separated from cyclists, the direct line between the Melkweg-road and city centre could remain. Furthermore the 48m arch remains the fastest possible way to cross the water.
The pedestrian bridge weighs 85 tons, consists of 130 steps and is supported by a steel arch. The design makes it able to retain the spatial openness of the channel and its surroundings. Both bridge sections flow smoothly into each other and form one whole. This unity is enhanced by the continuity of materials and colors. In the edges of the bridge LED lines are applied that follow the contour of the bridge and guarantees a spectacular view on the bridge even after sunset.
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