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Great work from a young firm in Slovenia! Projects are very clear and direct. I was especially impressed with their ability to envision, develop, and construct very precise details that support the project at a macro scale. Regardless of project type, their work carries a strong vision established in initial diagrams and followed throughout the documentation and construction process.
to see more, move to Slovenia or go to: Bevk Perovic Arhitekti
"Concrete, produced at an estimated rate of five billion cubic yards per year, is the second most widely consumed substance on Earth, after water"
LIQUID STONE: NEW ARCHITECTURE IN CONCRETE is an online exhibition provided by the National Building Museum.
Be sure to check out the 'Translucent Concrete' section!
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for more info, goto RANDIC-TURATO
read essay by Kenneth Frampton: "LATE MODERN LARES: RANDIC AND TURATO"
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excerpt from PW, The Second Coming of Bart Blatstein:
McDonald suggested he meet with two young, aggressive architects -- Scott Erdy and David McHenry -- but Blatstein was still stubborn. "Well," he said, "I'm supposed to be on vacation tomorrow, and I'm not changing my plans. If they want to meet me, they can drive to the shore. I'll be in Margate."
And so they did. Blatstein wore a T-shirt and shorts and ordered subs from Dino's. Erdy and McHenry dressed in suits and ties. The temperature must have been 85, but Blatstein didn't invite them inside. Instead, they sat on the deck while the Thunderbird air show team performed stunts and maneuvers over their heads. Blatstein was distracted and enjoying it, staring up at the airplanes as the architects talked.
By the time that meeting ended, he was pretty much sold on retooling his plans for Northern Liberties yet again. "I liked what they showed me," he says. "I got religion."
Composed of a propriety micro-concrete mix within which a light-conducting fiber-optic like matrix is embedded; SensiTile Terrazzo blends the durability of concrete with the latest in optical technology.
goto SENSITILE.COM
page 45, LIFE STYLE - Bruce Mau
Surfaces of Inscription
"Image technology, global markets, and digital infrastructure all demand a predatory colonization of open space - whatever the physical or virtual, extensive or temporal form that may take. The imperative of inscribed and inscribable surfaces is now an endless need."
goto GKDMETALFABRICS
page 45, LIFE STYLE - Bruce Mau
Surfaces of Inscription
"The internet is a surface of limitless dimension in a high-stakes race to capture eyeballs, or page views, as they say. It is the quintessential chorus of soloists, with every site desperate to express "personality," and every innovation set to trigger collective adoption. The chorus takes another step forward. In this context, nature(what remains of it) is perhaps all we have left that is free from the hostile takeover of space by the logo, by the predatory regime of inscription."
URBAN VOIDS, Grounds for Change
INSIDEOUT city - View entry
CITIES
Cities are largely defined through a composite network of cultural and ecological patterns.
VOIDS
Voids are dense. They are a social construct; spatial segments loaded with traces of ecological and cultural events.
Voids are dependant. Their existence relies on the inherent interaction with immediate environments. This interdependency between the vacant lots and their host zones constitutes a field condition. Discussing the notion of "thick surfaces" Stan Allen writes, "a field condition would be any formal or spatial matrix capable of unifying diverse elements while respecting the identity of each. Field configurations are loosely bounded aggregates characterized by porosity and local interconnectivity." (Stan Allen: Distributions, Combinations, Fields)
OBJECTIVE
The objective of the project is to integrate the patterns of vacancy into programmable urban frameworks.
Based on a spatial and demographic mapping analysis, four areas were selected as pilot studies. The pilot studies examine neighborhoods in North Philadelphia, Mantua, Grays Ferry, Point Breeze, Kensington, Pennsport, and Whitman. Each neighborhood contains various intensities of residential vacancy identified as gap-tooth, contiguous, and block wide. While all of the neighborhoods share similar spatial characteristics and demographic data, each area was chosen for its unique relationship to its adjacent "large-scale" zone: river, transportation, commercial, or industrial corridor.
With emphasis placed on sustainable strategies, the proposal focuses on establishing a symbiotic relationship between residential neighborhoods and adjacent "large-scale" corridors. Vacant segments, integrated into new urban frameworks, can be activated to provide each neighborhood with programmatic and pragmatic amenities: riverfront access, recreational areas and green habitats, decreased impervious coverage and improved storm water management, renewable energy systems, revitalization of brownfield sites, minimization of light pollution – all green design strategies consistent with LEED guidelines.
INSIDEOUT
As the residential areas are branded with a new formal network (defined by patterns of vacancy), the established field condition contests the boundary between the residential and the adjacent "large-scale" zones. By grafting, or stimulating the interaction between different use groups, each community has an opportunity to activate the network of VOIDS to best satisfy the community's needs. This process is referred to as "INSIDEOUT city" as it provides the communities with a voice to impact cultural and ecological patterns of the city. It integrates the residential areas into a programmable urban framework that extends from the public space along the riverfront to the privacy of the back yard.
FIELDS OF INTERFACE - program builds program IDENTITY VARIES
Architecture is an interface. Operating in a continuous flux, architecture attempts to negotiate the link between culture and space. Programmatic substance of any architectural intervention is saturated with uncertainty. If we consider program to be a combination of event and space, program becomes a variable, a process that establishes unprecedented spatial adjacencies; ...reinforcing the notion of flux and architectural intervention as one that should enable rather than freeze a spatial framework.
I wrote the text above in 2000 for my thesis prep class. At the time, I was excited about the Dutch movement and the notion that architectural interventions should create programmable environments. I was never really sure how that worked. In 2005, I visited a social housing project in Croatia - built in 1950's, the buildings were supposed to be demolished after 20 years. 50 years later, the structures stand re-programmed to suit each tenant. I was blown away by the current state of the project, especially by the ability of each structure to sustain and accommodate change. I question the identity of MVRDV's VPRO, Mirador, Floriade, - are these projects loose environments of change or are they simply a representation of such processes? - in a way an imposed trend/fashion?
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hunch 9 investigates the state of architecture and the notion of "disciplines". the issue examines redundancy in architectural publications, ..."it is not the quantities of publications that are problematic, but rather their consistent failure to present lines of reasoning."
hunch 9 includes essays by Bernard Cache, Lieven de Cauter, Helene Furjan, Jeffrey Kipnis, Mark Linder, and Paul Morrell, transcripts of lectures by Brian Eno, Rem Koolhaas, and Richard Sennett, plus an interview with R. E. Somol, and self-portraits by Philip Akkerman.
goto: EPISODE PUBLISHERS
price: 15 euro
Massive Change
Design Economies
An economy is a system of exchange. We explore paradigm-shifting
events, ideas, and people, investigating the capacities and ethical
dilemmas of design in such systems as: URBANIZATION, MOVEMENT, INFORMATION, THE IMAGE, MARKETS, ENERGY, MATERIALS, MILITARY, MANUFACTURING, LIVING, WEALTH & POLITICS.
S,M,L,XL
OMA
Rem Koolhaas
+ Bruce Mau
What Ever Happened to Urbanism?
This century has been a losing battle with the issue of quantity.
In spite of its early promise, its frequent bravery, urban-ism has been unable to invent and implement at the scale demanded by its apocalyptic demographics. In 20 years, Lagos has grown from 2 to 7 to 12 to 15 million; Istanbul has doubled from 6 to 12. China prepares for even more staggering multiplications.
How to explain the paradox that urbanism, as a profession, has disappeared at the moment when urbanization everywhere - after decades of constant acceleration - is on its way to establishing a definitive, global "triumph" of the urban condition?
Modernism's alchemistic promise - to transform quantity into quality through abstraction and repetition - has been a failure, a hoax: magic that didn't work. Its ideas, aesthetics, strategies are finished. Together, all attempts to make a new beginning have only discredited the idea of a new beginning. A collective shame in the wake of this fiasco has left a massive crater in our understanding of modernity and modernization.
What makes this experience disconcerting and (for architects) humiliating is the city's defiant persistence and apparent vigor, in spite of the collective failure of all agencies that act on it or try to influence it - creatively, logistically, politically.
The professionals of the city are like chess players who lose to computers. A perverse automatic pilot constantly outwits all attempts at capturing the city, exhausts all ambitions of its definition, ridicules the most passionate assertions of its present failure and future impossibility, steers it implacably further on its flight forward. Each disaster foretold is somehow absorbed under the infinite blanketing of the urban.
Even as the apotheosis of urbanization is glaringly obvious and mathematically inevitable, a chain of rearguard, escapist actions and positions postpones the final moment of reckoning for the two professions formerly most implicated in making cities – architecture and urbanism. Pervasive urbanization has modified the urban condition itself beyond recognition. "The" city no longer exists. As the concept of city is distorted and stretched beyond precedent, each insistence on its primordial condition - in terms of images, rules, fabrication - irrevocably leads via nostalgia to irrelevance.
For urbanists, the belated rediscovery of the virtues of the classical city at the moment of their definitive impossibility may have been the point of no return. They are now specialists in phantom pain: doctors discussing the medical intricacies of an amputated limb.
The transition from a former position of power to a reduced station of relative humility is hard to perform. Dissatisfaction with the contemporary city has not led to the development of a credible alternative; it has, on the contrary, inspired only more refined ways of articulating dissatisfaction. A profession persists in its fantasies, its ideology, its pretension, its illusions of involvement and control, and is therefore incapable of conceiving new modesties, partial interventions, strategic realignments, compromised positions that might influence, redirect, succeed in limited terms, regroup, begin from scratch even, but will never reestablish control.
Because the generation of May '68 - the largest generation ever, caught in the "collective narcissism of a demographic bubble" - is now finally in power, it is tempting to think that it is responsible for the demise of urbanism - the state of affairs in which cities can no longer be made - paradoxically because it rediscovered and reinvented the city.
Sous le pave, la plage (under the pavement, beach): initially, May '68 launched the idea of a new beginning for the city. Since then, we have been engaged in two parallel operations: documenting our overwhelming awe for the existing city, developing philosophies, projects, prototypes for a preserved and reconstituted city and, at the same time, laughing the professional field of urbanism out of existence, dismantling it in our contempt for those who planned (and made huge mistakes in planning) airports, New Towns, satellite cities, highways, high-rise buildings, infrastructures, and all the other fallout from modernization. After sabotaging urbanism, we have ridiculed it to the point where entire university departments are closed, offices bankrupt, bureaucracies fired or privatized.
Our "sophistication" hides major symptoms of cowardice centered on the simple on the simple question of taking positions - maybe the most basic action in making the city. We are simultaneously dogmatic and evasive. Our amalgamated wisdom can be easily caricatured: according to Derrida we cannot be Whole, according to Baudrillard we cannot be Real, according to Virilio we cannot be There.
"Exiled to the Virtual World": plot for a horror movie. Our present relationship with the "crisis" of the city is deeply ambiguous: we still blame others for a situation for which both our incurable utopianism and our contempt are responsible. Through our hypocritical relationship with power - contemptuous yet covetous - we dismantled and entire discipline, cut ourselves off from the operational, and condemned whole populations to the impossibility of encoding civilizations on their territory - the subject of urbanism.
Now we are left with a world without urbanism, only architecture, ever more architecture. The neatness of architecture is its seduction; it defines, excludes, limits, separates from the "rest" - but it also consumes. It exploits and exhausts the potentials that can be generated finally only by urbanism, and that only the specific imagination of urbanism can invent and renew.
The death of urbanism - our refuge in the parasitic security of architecture - creates an immanent disaster: more and more substance is grafted on starving roots. In our more permissive moments, we have surrendered to the aesthetics of chaos - "our" chaos. But in the technical sense chaos is what happens when nothing happens, not something that can be engineered or embraced; it is something that infiltrates; it cannot be fabricated. The only legitimate relationship that architects can have with the subject of chaos is to take their rightful place in the army of those devoted to resist it, and fail.
If there is to be a "new urbanism" it will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of uncertainty; it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the irrigation or territories with potential; it will no longer aim for stable configurations but for the creation of enabling fields that accommodate processes that refuse to be crystallized into definitive form; it will no longer be about meticulous definition, the imposition of limits, but about expanding notions, denying boundaries, not about separating and identifying entities, but about discovering unnamable hybrids; it will no longer be obsessed with the city but with the manipulation of infrastructure for endless intensifications and diversifications, shortcuts and redistributions - the reinvention of psychological space. Since the urban is now pervasive, urbanism will never again be about the "new", only about "more" and the "modified". It will not be about civilized, but about underdevelopment.
Since it is out of control, the urban is about to become a major vector of the imagination. Redefined, urbanism will not only, or mostly, be a profession, but a way of thinking, an ideology: to accept what exists. We were making sand castles. Now we swim in the sea that swept them away.
To survive, urbanism will have to imagine a new newness. Liberated from its atavistic duties, urbanism redefined as a way of operating on the inevitable will attack architecture, invade its trenches, drive it from its bastions, undermine its certainties, explode its limits, ridicule its preoccupations with matter and substance, destroy its traditions, smoke out its practitioners.
The seeming failure of the urban offers and exceptional opportunity, a pretext for Nietzschean frivolity. We have to imagine 1001 other concepts of city; we have to take insane risks; we have to dare to be utterly uncritical; we have to swallow deeply and bestow forgiveness left and right. The certainty of failure has to be our laughing gas/oxygen; modernization our most potent drug. Since we are not responsible, we have to become irresponsible. In a landscape of increasing expediency and impermanence, urbanism no longer is a or has to be the most solemn of our decisions; urbanism can lighten up, become a Gay Science - Lite Urbanism.
What if we simply declare that there is no crisis - redefine our relationship with the city not as its makers but as its mere subjects, as its supporters?
More then ever, the city is all we have.
1994
"Visibility and access to the building's interior is therefore a programming principle of the project, with the building itself becoming an interface with which passers-by can interact."
BBCi Showcase
for BBC
Street-level interactive displays
2005
The scope of the Web today is hard to fathom. The total number of Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion. That's 100 pages per person alive. How could we create so much, so fast, so well? In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world's population.
We Are the Web
by Kevin Kelly