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Publisher Actar says: Verb Crisis examines architectural solutions to the extraordinary conditions of an increasingly dense and interdependent world.It presents innovative projects and research through original photos, essays, and exclusive interviews with key figures from architecture and urban planning to environmental, economic, and global affairs. Confronted by shifting densities and uncharted urban transformations, Crisis tackles the conflict between the physical limits of architectural design and the demands on the practice for an updated social relevance. With a description like that and coming from one of the most fashionable publishers in Europe, Crisis could only raise very high expectations and, of course, fail to fulfill them. Granted that i'm not an expert in crisis, i'd say that the book doesn't disappoint, it is a fantastic source for reflection and inspiration. The editors invited first class urbanists, thinkers, researchers and architects to explore some particular projects in order to illustrate the "crisis issue": FOA, Teddy Cruz, Shigeru Ban, Elemental, Boris B.Jensen, Hilary Sample, John May, Jacobo García Germán, Markus Miessen, Interboro Partners, MVRDV, and Takuya Onishi. There are some brave statements, some very critical views on what is being regarded as "urban crisis management" today, some inspiring examples of practices coming from Chile and other locations over the globe, etc. But what's Crisis about exactly?
Crisis is one of Actar's boogazines, hybrid volumes that combine the flexibility of a magazine with the depth and format of a book. While previous boogazines were focusing on the most promising aspects of innovation and technological progress, this one takes a step back and questions current models of urban developments. Crisis states that to remain relevant, architecture must not connive at the economic, social, cultural and environmental challenges our world is currently facing. The volume opens with an etat des lieux of Dubai and the many ambitious promises the city of superlatives is likely to make or break. At the risk of sounding like the usual sneering Europeans, the authors demonstrate that there are as many hopes as cracks in the glossiness of one of the most talked about real estate adventure: no matter how much money is poured in the mammoth project, the sand is an everyday reality likely to tarnish the pristine surface of the buildings, badly paid workers live in ramshackle housing, the thematically designed sets of dwellings might not always dialog well one with another, etc. However, the chapters that fascinated me most were dedicated to:
- Madrid's urban sprawl and the transformation of the periphery into a space for endless rows of off-the-shelf brick and mortar apartment buildings interwoven with soulless shopping malls and a playground where edgy architects throw in some examples of their most experimental works. Jacobo Garcia-German as well as architects from MVRDV and FOA share their personal experiences, strategies and views regarding a periphery which grows at a rate of thousands of square meters per month
- California suburban housing properties being exported as symbols of wealth and progress in China or, even better, massively reproduced on a miniature scale or dismantled and loaded onto trucks to find a new life on the other side of the US-Mexico border and forming "non-conforming patterns of development."
- Chilean architecture studio ELEMENTAL was asked by the government to knock down Iquique'sinner-city slum and turn it into a viable neighbourhood for the 100 families who had occupied the space illegally for 30 years. Interestingly, the architect decided to regard the housing as an "investment", he provided the families with a minimum life unit but left enough room for them to improve, build upon and customise their housing according to their own needs and tastes.
- the pages dedicated to Detroit invite readers to redefine their definition of crisis and of what could constitute a solution to it by forcing them to see Detroit as a place for healthy suburbs in the making rather than a city in decline. Urban design, planning and architecture firm Interboro Partners have been investigating the Detroit suburbs and discovered what they call "blots" - lots that that get bigger and better when homeowners take, borrow, or buy adjacent lots. The phenomenon give rise to a new form of "suburbanism".
- the "BioMed City" scheme regards cities as prone to public health crisis and argues that cities worldwide need infrastructures dedicated to studying and fighting infectious diseases. - there's a gripping story about Fresh Kills landfill (Staten Island) set to become the 2,200 acres Fresh Kills Park. Far from being all cheerful and optimistic (that would be hard to achieve with a name like that), the pages remind us that if the life of a consumer goods inside our houses is quite short (there's always a model which has the virtue of being shinier and full of even more promises), its synthetic corpse disappears after a very slow and hideous process. Set in 1948, the dump could be regarded as being the largest man-made structure on Earth, with the site's volume eventually exceeding the Great Wall of China.Closed in March 2001, the landfill had to be temporarily reopened in order to receive and process much of the debris generated by the 9/11 attack (via). The debris was later removed into various locations, including museums and steel mills. The happy green plan to create a public park three times bigger than Central Park has to meet with system able to control leakage of methane gas and toxic leachate.
Along with the spotlights on several crisis location there are interviews with urbanists and architects: - Shigeru Ban explains why architects do not get much respect in Japan, discusses how he creates strong and resistant architecture using weak materials, like paper tube to build emergency shelters for Rwandan refugees, bridges, churches, houses and offices, how he manages to finance his social contribution architectural projects and why he hates the hype built around the "sustainability" label.
- i also discovered the work of Takuya Onishi. The architect designs mobile, ultra-light, inflatable, air-delivery or foldable structures that respond to challenging and emergency situations. Because in his view, private companies take decisions much faster than governments, Onishi developed some fascinating way to hijack commercial powers in order to finance and develop his project (most notably with the FedEx Pak Project.)
Previous boogazine review: Verb Natures. Image on the home page by Cristobal Palma for Elemental. |
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I've often heard the statement "Oh! but you're a blogger you must find magazine old-fashioned!" No, actually i don't. I love mags, i love paper and beautiful graphics. I like adding notes in the margins and having something to read while i wait for the metro.
The mag opens with an interview with a dead-pan Joep van Lieshout describing life inside Slave City and his interest for the non-buildable architecture and urbanism (see Slave City and SlaveCity - The Board Room). Expected borders are analyzed in an innovative way, for example there's a very engaging comparison of Tijuana vs. San Diego's architecture and urban strategies. Then there are the more unusual destinations: the "island" situation of Kalingrad, the borders built inside city centers (with Istanbul, its gated communities and the "camps" where refugees and immigrants confine themselves), Ceuta and Gibraltar as a case study to explore "borderscape", the border city of Teplice in Czech Republic dissected in an interview with its Mayor, etc. The pages i found most striking show a map of The Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO). The members of this democratic, international organization are indigenous peoples, occupied nations, minorities and independent states or territories which lack representation internationally. And there's way more of them than i expected. MONU is currently looking for essays, photography, art projects or design concepts for its #9 issue which will investigate what the term exotic actually means for our cities and how exotic urban elements appear, what they look like, and how they may influence our cities. Submissions should be sent to info at monu-magazine dot com by the end of June 2008.
The issue encourages architects to have a more pro-active and sometimes slightly irreverent attitude towards the social needs, to take advantage of emerging opportunities and look for new territories for intervention. The central part of the magazine exemplifies the idea by presenting the portfolio of the Office for Unsolicited Architecture, a practice --founded by Ole Bouman and students of MIT-- which blends in a unique way fun with concern for pressing issues. There's a list of past projects which inspired the transgressive attitude of OUA: Michael Rakowitz' inflatable shelters for the homeless, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's book Learning From Las Vegas for the way it embraces "low-brow" architecture, Santiago Cirugeda's work (of course), Jurgen Bey's Garden Bench, Gordon Matta-Clark's Odd Lots, etc.
Then come 7 projects by OUA which each engage with a key playground for unsolicited architecture (border zones, (il)legality, global climate change, shelter, new technologies, etc.) Most are extremely witty and appealing. I especially liked The Golden Gate Remains which addresses the high number of people who chose this national landmark to commit suicide, the lack of cemeteries in San Francisco and the difficulty to raise fundings to maintain the bridge. OUA's solution is The Golden Gate Columbarium which would both host the cremated remains of the suicides and constitute a barrier to prevent future desperate acts. The last part showcases some rather interesting unsolicited interventions by architects and artists from around the globe.
To be added to THE mailing list, fill in your details in LifeSignsNetwork.net and they'll send you the mag for free. The last magazine i recently got my hands on is the venerable Domus which had a dossier on surveillance. The dossier is actually quite ok. Not groundbreaking if you've been following the discourse about surveillance over the past two years and certainly not half as exciting as most art project commenting on the phenomenon but still worth a look. I must say though that the rest of the issue is quite appalling. Are people really turned on by the sight of shiny bathrooms and immaculate kitchen table tops? |
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The Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo in Sevilla is currently running an exhibition dedicated to Ant Farm, a group of experimental architects and critical artists active mostly in the '70s. The exhibition includes videos, models, original drawings, inflatables and all the quiet you can expect in a cultural center located inside a stunning monastry on the bank of the Guadalquivir River, the Monasterio de la Cartuja de Santa María de Las Cuevas.
Founded in San Francisco in 1969 Ant Farm could be regarded today as a very effective mix between Archigram, the Rolling Stones and The Yes Men. Ant Farm embraced the latest technologies at the same time as they hit American culture on the head with their social and political comments and their highly critical (up to being in some cases destructive) approach to mass media. Their projects do not stop at the work of art itself, they also encompass the mass media rendering of that work of art. All i knew about them was their rusty Cadillac Ranch installation which i do not like very much but the rest of their practice impressed me beyond words. I can't think of any artistic group playing a similarly brilliant, innovative and multidisciplinary work today. Here's a shortcut to their works:
Ant Farm deployed their conceptual world through videos, manifestos, spectacular performances and installations until 1978, when they disbanded following a studio fire. Most of the slide and video documentation was saved, but very little else survived.
Ant Farm started their career as evangelists of inflatable structures. Cheap and easy to assemble, they challenged the American consumerism culture and fitted perfectly a nomadic, communal lifestyle, in total contrast with the Brutalist architecture prevalent in the United States during the 1960s.
In 1971, they took the road abroad their Media Van, a customised Chevrolet van turned into a mobile studio to share information and images with the public while they toured the country to give talks and organize public happenings. The van not only transported the material necessary to build their ICE 9 inflatables but its motor was also used to generate the energy indispensable to blow up the structure.
In 1972 the group built in Texas the House of the Century, a ferro-cement weekend residence with organic shapes that remind the inflatable structure that Ant Farm had realized a few years earlier, in particular their ICE 9 prototype.
Video showing what the House was like before its decay: The Dolphin Embassy was a never realized sea station in Australia which engaged with interspecies communication using the new video technologies. The structure would sail with the help of a solar mechanism.
In 1974, Ant Farm created their most famous pieces in Amarillo, Texas, Cadillac Ranch. They half-buried a row of used and junk Cadillac automobiles dating from 1949 to 1963, nose-first in the ground, at an angle corresponding to that of the Great Pyramid of Giza. To add to the outrage done to the iconic vehicle, the public is very welcome to graffiti the cars.
The installation was originally located in a wheat field, but was later moved 3 kilometers to the west, to a cow pasture in order to place it further from the limits of the growing city.
A year later Ant Farm staged the performance Media Burn. Dressed as astronauts, they drove at full speed a 1959 Cadillac into a wall of burning television sets. Media Burn critiqued American ideals of heroics and technological superiority, and offered an affront to the television media who were the only one invited to attend the event. Their video of the performance is styled after news coverage of a space launch, including melodramatic pre-stunt interviews with the artists and a speech by "JFK" (impersonated by Doug Hall).
Short video and a 26 minute one. Media Burn was not their first attack of the media, in 1972 they collaborated with the video collective Raindance to launch the guerrilla Top Value Television (TVTV) to provide alternative coverage of the political conventions of that year.
Let's close the post with The Eternal Frame, a 1975 reenactment of the John F. Kennedy assassination. Part of it plays on America's obsession with the media, but the video demonstrates also that the sacred images of the assassination cannot be mocked. The work can be read as a commentary on the pervasive media culture in America, as it explores how the Kennedy assassination itself became a new type of media event. Video: More images. The exhibition of Ant Farm's work is on view at the CAAC in Sevilla, Spain, until June 8, 2008. Actar has just released Ant Farm - Living Archive 7. Felicity D. Scott has collected archival material to illustrate the early trajectory of the collective, including its architecture, inflatables, performance, multimedia, and video work. |
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Was taken last week at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies at La Jolla, California which Kati London and I visited courtesy of Lev Manovich and Jeremy Douglass. The institute was built by architect Louis Kahn as two symmetric concrete buildings with a thin stream of water flowing in the middle of a courtyard that separates the two. Too bad my images don't do justice to this amazing building.
I find it hard to believe that no one has ever shot a movie there. Elio Petri would have done something amazing with this set. Anyway, any solemn thought and sense of beauty we might have been filled with vanished half an hour after when we met with Mary Flanagan's Giant Joystick which is on view until March 17 in the art gallery in the Calit2 building at UCSD.
Extremely fun and physically exhausting. |
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010 publishers says: Ground-up City. Play as a Design Tool maps the continuing history of an urban design strategy for play in the city. Liane Lefaivre has developed a theoretical model for tackling playgrounds as an urban strategy. She steps off from a historical overview of play and the ludic in art, architecture and urban design, focusing particularly on the post-war playgrounds realized in Amsterdam as joint ventures between Aldo van Eyck, Cornelis van Eesteren and Jakoba Mulder. (...) Ground-up City places the playground high on the agenda as an urban design challenge. It also shows how specifying a generic, academic model for a particular situation can lead to a practically applicable design resource. The first interesting aspect of the book is that it was written by a theorist and an architecture firm both very keen on exploring the potential of playgrounds as a means to connect people together, to increase a sense of community and to improve the integration of immigrants into the city. Liane Lefaivre is Professor and Chair of History and Theory of Architecture, University of Applied Art, Vienna, and Research Associate at the Technical University of Delft. The architecture firm Döll - Atelier voor Bouwkunst has developed a practice where creativity and innovation are deployed in order to tackle the design task in an undogmatic way. Lefaivre has been investigating playgrounds for years, tracking the archive of urban playgrounds Aldo van Eyck had told her about before he died, setting up an exhibition about playgrounds and design for children at the Stedelijk museum in 2002, and writing numerous books on architecture, playgrounds and van Eyck.
The legacy of Van Eyck pervades the book. The Dutch architect is famous for having designed the playgrounds that almost everyone who grew up in Amsterdam during the '50s, '60s and '70s have played in. In 1947, the young architect was asked to design a small public playground for Bertelmanplein, a residential area in the Dutch capital. Van Eyck designed a sandpit bordered by a wide rim. He adeed four round stones and a structure of tumbling bars. Bordering the square were trees and five benches. Van Eyck also designed the playground equipment with the objective that it could stimulate the minds of children. The first playground was a success. Many playground commissions followed and Van Eyck adapted his compositional techniques to each site. Of the 700 playgrounds realised by van Eyck between 1947 and 1978, 90 still maintained their original layout in 2001, though sometimes equipment designed by others had been added. With the playgrounds, he had the opportunity to put the needs of the child and neighbourhood democracy at the centre of town-planning and urban renewal. Playgrounds are hardly ever taken seriously in urban projects, at least not as much as car parking or street density for example. Besides, the emphasis is usually on safety rather than spontaneity and creativity.
In their chapter about "The Nature of Play", Döll explains that There is a need for an inspiring alternative that cultivates the potential of homo ludens in an urban context. They set out to demonstrate that the city is already full of playful opportunities by listing some of the most inspiring examples of the re-appropriation of public space by city dwellers: Ingo Vetter's exploration of Urban Agriculture, free-running, urban golf, street football, rockabilly fans gathering for dance sessions in Tokyo parks on Sunday afternoons, Stadtlounge in St Gallen by Pipilotti Rist and Carlos Martinez, a blue house, Pink Ghost in Paris by Périphériques Architectes, etc.
Lefaivre then kicked in again with a long and fascinating chapter on the place of play, in particular in the art world, from XVIthe century Dutch paintings to Carsten Höller's Test Site at Tate Modern. Another focus of the chapter is the history of post-war playgrounds, in particular in Amsterdam. Lefaivre and Döll had the opportunity to apply their ideal of top-down (driven by the citizens themselves) playground design in a study they realized in two urban redevelopment areas in Rotterdam. Oude Westen in the inner city and Meeuwenplaat in Hoogvliet, both defined as "multicultural neighbourhoods" experiencing social problems. They asked children to give them a tour of their neighbourhood, to take pictures of anything in their area on which they had a positive or negative opinion and to report on how and where they play. See Döll, Work / The World is My Playground.
The study has received much interest in the field of public space and play but its materialization into policy and practice is still accompanied by a big question mark. An interesting appendix is the one made of the interviews carried out by Lefaivre with 2 artists and a curator whose practice involves a particular attention to play: Dan Graham, Erwin Wurm, Jerome Sans. I picked up that book without thinking too much while i was in my favourite Berlin bookshop, it followed me reluctantly in my suitcase and i only opened it the other day because i was stuck in a hotel room without internet. It might have been one of the very first times that i said "thank you" to the evil and capricious spirits that govern internet connections. Ground-up City is an inspiring little book. More playground: Playful Parasites, A playground under the table, Playing with urban geography, etc. Image on the homepage: Daniel Ilabaca does a cat balance, by Jon Lucas. And one for the road: |
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DLD panel on Future City (Part 1) Last part of the notes i took during Future City, a panel curated by Carson Chan and Johannes Fricke and moderated by Kazys Varnelis. After Richard Saul Wurman, Patrik Schumacher, Charles Renfro, Bjarke Ingels took the stage for a memorable performance. I thought he deserved a whole post because his work is slightly less famous than the one of the other panelists. Besides, i never found the time to blog the works That he and his team were showing at the exhibition New Faces in European Architecture: David Adjaye, Jürgen Mayer H., PLOT=BIG+JDS, SeARCH at the NAI in Maastricht last year.
After co-founding PLOT Architects in 2001, Bjarke Ingels started his own office in 2006: BIG / Bjarke Ingels Group. Their work combines experimentation sustained by specific knowledge, social responsibility and humour. Three of his projects were the focus of his presentation: Superharbour, REN and Kløverkarreen. The Superharbour project was an attempt to re-invent the role of an architect regarding the constant evolution of seas. It started with a proposal to "re-design Denmark, to re-brand the country". Video of the Superharbour project: The project started with a few facts: - 40% of the coast line in Denmark is urbanized (compared to only 12% of the whole country), urbanity in the country is defined by the proximity to the sea. 2/3 of the Danes live within 5 km of the sea. But it is harbour and its industries that occupy the best plots of land.
- Containerization. 98% of goods travel on ships. Over time container ships have become bigger ad bigger and they also reach deeper in the ocean. As a result, boats cannot pass between Germany and Finland anymore. Solution envisioned by BIG: bridge the two countries by combining a bridge and a tunnel: the hybrid solution would cost less than building a full-length bridge or tunnel and would create an artificial island. BIG proposed to use the island (located thus at the intersection between Europe and Scandinavia as well as between the "new" Europe and the rest of the world) as a Baltic super harbour where all the shipping traffic would be concentrated. According to BIG's analysis, the island would liberate 20 billion euros of prime real estate in Denmark's 12 biggest cities for new forms of life, instead of pushing people to the periphery of the cities where they want to live. Shaped like a star, the harbour will be organized around piers, each of them focusing its activities on its own program and uses. People's Building (aka REN) Video of the project: It actually started as a project for a hotel in Sweden. But the building was never made. Later on, the architects discovered that the shape of the building is the same as the Chinese character 'Ren' which means People. The Chinese liked the building as they felt that it "bridges the gap between traditional China and progressive China." "The REN Building is a proposal for a hotel, sports and conference center for the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai. The building is conceived as two buildings merging into one. The first building, emerging from the water, is devoted to the activities of the body, and houses the sports and water culture center. The second building emerging from land, is devoted to the spirit and enlightment, and houses the conference center and meeting facilities. The two buildings meet in a 1000 room hotel, a building for living. The building becomes the Chinese sign for 'The People', and a recognizable landmark for the World Expo in China." Kløverkarréen (aka The Clover Block):
Having followed the debate of the skyrocketing cost of market rate housing in the centre of Copenhagen, the designers of BIG wanted to come up with a new affordable housing proposal which would create 2,000 units. Their initiative came on the heels of Mayoral candidate Ritt Bjerregaard campaign pledge to fund 5,000 units of affordable housing to teachers, firemen, nurse and community service professionals, etc who can't afford to live in the center anymore. Following their habit of not waiting for a competition to be launched or for a developer to bring the designers a proposal, they started the Kløverkarréen project at their own initiative. Kløverkarréen is built along the perimeter of a large recreational area, and will house 2,000 residents without losing a single recreational field. It is located closed to public transportation hubs, and to the city centre. The structure would provide generous daylight flats, a wind and noise barrier for people playing football in the recreational field (+ an audience for any match is always on hand), and it would be covered by a rooftop that can be used as a 3 kilometre promenade. BIG dubbed it "the Great Wall of China of housing."
The new mayor was seduced by the idea, the football clubs who usually train on the field agreed with the idea. However, some people in the neighbourhood did not want to share their green oasis with the less wealthy and opposed the development. A survey was carried and and it emerged that 64% of Copenhagen's citizens thought the project was a good one. A few months later, it was decided that project would indeed be carried out. Bjarke Ingels believes that the role of architects is a constantly evolving one, they have the responsibility to make sure that the city evolves in the right direction. |
