The exibition ‘The Freestate of Amsterdam’ (dutch website), which is the contribution of the municipality of Amsterdam to the 4th IABR, curated by DRO director Zef Hemel, opened its gates to the public yesterday. The exibition takes place in our backyard, the Tolhuistuin.
Nine Dutch urban design offices present their visions on the future of Amsterdam, in nine large models for sections of the future metropolis. The offices were given, as it is said, a free hand to make their designs without predetermined rules or restrictions. Their models intend not to show plans or blueprints for the city as such, but rather inspirational ideas for the long term.
Urhahn Urban Design
Rietveld Landscape I Atelier de Lyon
Already twee weeks ago Dutch public broadcaster VPRO screened a documentary entitled Amsterdam Makeover 2040, where at least some guys dropped some critical notes on the vision of the Physical Planning Departement. VPRO also initiated the Urban Century project, which is really taking off at the moment en forms a nice platform for divers information on the urban cauldron.
Filed under: Architecture, Design, National Practice, Social Engineering , IABR, Vrijstaat Amsterdam
Yesterday the 4th edition of the IABR opened it’s doors for the public. The theme of the 2009 edition Open City: Designing Coexistence raises the question of social cohesion in and access to the city in relation to the contributions architects and urbanists can make for improving the quality of the urban condition. The curator of the exibition is Kees Christiaanse. The main exibition will take place at the NAi in Rotterdam until january 10 2010.
One of the highlights of the exibition, at least in terms of relevance for this blog, is the Maakbaarheid (makeability) exibition sub curated by Crimson Architectural Historians. As part of the exibition Crimson, together with numerous local and international partners, reveals the persistent belief in the makeability of urban society that has infomed urban policies and projects throughout the Netherlands for more than half a century. ‘Facts on the Ground’ is a case study of the post war urban landscape of Rotterdam in which the large scale social engineering projects from the 1950s onwards, form the inspiration for nine bottum-up design proposals for existing locations in Rotterdam. Other parts of the exibition are the ‘Make No Big Plans’ Manifesto, which argues that the time is not yet right for the Big Solution, but rather argues for architectural interventions on a scale that still allows for perspective, and the film ‘Story of an Open City’ which shows, how time has left its mark on the city’s structure.
Anyway, there’s plenty of stuff going on at the IABR the coming months. Check the exibition calendar for detailed information. The event program will focus on Maakbaarheid from 21 to 25 October.
Filed under: Architecture, Design, Social Engineering , IABR, Research, Rotterdam
Up until april this year the Canadian Centre for Architecture hosted the exibition Actions: what can we do with the city?, where seemingly common activities such as walking, playing, recycling, and gardening where pushed beyond their usual definition by architects, artists, and collectives to show the potential influence personal involvement can have in shaping the city, and challenge fellow residents to participate.
The accompanying website presents a toolkit to inspire actions in the city and functions as a databank of the individual actions taken. Check out the list of the 99 submitted actions for the exibition. Although the exibition has officially come to an end already, you can still submit your ideas and actions to the database.
For instance, Amsterdam based Droog Design in collaboration with NEXT Architects submitted the Table Tennis Fence.
© Droog Design. Photograph by Misha de Ridder
The Table Tennis Fence subverts the fence as a dividing element. A built-in ping pong table can be opened for neighbours to play with each other, transforming the fence into a meeting place. Share Fence is a related project with cut-outs in the shape of gardening tools like trowels and a watering can. Neighbours can hang tools to be shared in fence holes where they are accessible from both sides.
Or what about the the Instant Pink Puffs Roll Playground by Berlin based Topotek 1?
© Hans Joosten
Twenty-four inflatable pink rubber objects and fifteen foam cubes were installed in a temporary playground beside a horse pasture in Wolfsburg, Germany, for the 2004 State Garden Show. The pink landscape created by the structures was designed to evoke childrens’ toys and contrast with the natural surroundings. There are no fixed uses for the objects in the Temporary Playground: they are both shelter and surface, capable of being rolled into any space, transforming a sidewalk corner or a vacant lot into a beguiling and playful garden.
Filed under: Architecture, Design, International Practice, Social Engineering , Urban Play
Here is another episode in our series on alternative forms of mapping:
Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired, asks people to participate in visualizing the internet. Here is how:
The internet is vast. Bigger than a city, bigger than a country, maybe as big as the universe. It’s expanding by the second. No one has seen its borders. And the internet is intangible, like spirits and angels. The web is an immense ghost land of disembodied places. Who knows if you are even there, there. Yet everyday we navigate through this ethereal realm for hours on end and return alive. We must have some map in our head. I’ve become very curious about the maps people have in their minds when they enter the internet. So I’ve been asking people to draw me a map of the internet as they see it. That’s all.
Here are some of the results:
via kk.org
via kk.org
via kk.org
You can view all maps here. If you want to draw a map yourself, you can download a customized PDF here.
via next nature
Filed under: Design, International Practice , Mapping
Sander Veenhof designed an interactive greenhouse in which a bouquet of ‘graduation flowers’ is growing, depending on your help! A greenhouse control system converts all online publicity into plant growth by switching on the grow-lights when you blog or Twitter about it, upload a photo at Flickr, or bookmark ‘puplicityplant’ on Delicious. Below you can watch the plants grow in realtime. The project is a graduation project for the Gerrit Rietveld art academy in Amsterdam.
Filed under: Design, National Practice, Social Engineering , Social Media
The discussion around nature in relation to our artifical, urban environment already brought us along vertical forests, wild animals, floating gardens and markets. The trick to balance modern technology and materials with our natural surroundings is very much sought after. Samantha Lee’s design for a floating urban farm that grows medicinal plants and herbs in a series of nets along the brick wall of Regent’s canal in London, is taking the whole enterprise one step further. The factory’s design employs a waterwheel to wash, dry, grind, and distill herbs into their commercial state. The design is a response to Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo de Ostos’s Vertical Studio at the Architectural Association.
via inhabitat
via inhabitat
via inhabitat
Filed under: Architecture, Design, International Practice, Social Engineering , The Farmacy, Urban Farming
Laatst week the results of the research conducted by Ontwerplab Krimp in three different areas in the Netherlands have been presented at NAi. The research was focused on shrinking cities and, in contrast to the most research on the topic until today, on the opportunities and chances these developments bring with them. You can download the webversion (dutch) of the publication right here.
Filed under: Architecture, Design, National Practice, Press, Theory , Shrinking Cities
The New York City Department of Transportation has recently published a street design manual, which in essence is a collection of patterns intended to be implemented throughout the city state in similar ways. Under the lead of transportation commissioner and traffic anti-planner Janette Sadik-Khan, who the NY Magazine describes as a mixture in equal parts between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, the New York streets have during the last two years undergone a small scale revolution. The approach is strongly influenced by the work of Jan Gehl, who is the author of Life between Buildings (1971) and Public Spaces, Public Life (1996).
The manual advocates a move away from a car oriented to a pedestrian oriented inner city design through promotion of ,for instance, urban cycling and the expanded use of full sidewalks. This uniform pattern language reminds me in some ways of ISOTYPE developed by Otto Neurath en Gerd Arntz. On Streetsblog you can view the implementation throughout New York in real time.
via emergenturbanism
Filed under: Architecture, Design, International Practice, Theory , ISOTYPE, New York
I just came across a great idea which was part of the City Eco Lab at the Biennale internatinale design 2008 in Saint Etienne. John Thackara from doors of perception was the curator of the exibition. He asked the guys from velowala from the Walhalla of bike-based commerce, India, to contribute with an installation to make bike-based commerce also salonfähig for an European audience. French based QooQ developed Le Cargo LCV for the exibition:
via les couriers verts
via velowala.org
And the trade has some obvious advantages. Bike-based comerce is 100% green, a likely solution to the annoying daily inner city traffic jams in Amsterdam (we are biking anyway) and elsewhere and opens up a universe of activities, products, services, design, economy and humanity that is mobile using bicycles. But there’s more to it: The interesting thing about being on a bicycle is that it immediately frees you as an entrepreneur from the shackles of immovable real estate. Velocommerce is all about the mobility of property, and it challenges notions of ownership and private capital.
Or as G.K. Chesterton, one of the brains behind the idea of distributism, put it:
To much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.
It is also interesting because it exists at the intersection of entrepreneurship, mobility, sustainability, grassroots innovation, cultures, local economies and decentralized, last-mile service delivery.
Filed under: Design, International Practice, Social Engineering, Theory , Distributism, Doors Of Perception, John Thackara, Velocommerce
