Megablock
Shaping Cities in an Urban Age
Philipp Rode | Ricky Burdett
Interviews and film by Ian Garrick Mason
UrbanNext talks to Ricky Burdett, Urban Age and LSE Cities Director, and Philipp Rode, LSE Cities Executive Director, about how cities have evolved in the last 25 years and how they understand and address the issues that are affecting urban environments in the book Shaping Cities in an Urban Age.
House OS: A New Landscape
1-1 Architects
Architects: 1-1 Architects
Location: Aichi, Japan
Area: 166,79 m2
Year: 2020
The design is for a two-family house for the owner, who runs a tropical plant farm with the whole family. In the countryside of Japan, farmland and residential land are adjacent to each other and are mixed. The owner of this project purchased a site consisting of three types of land: residential land, farmland (with a road) and farmland (without a road).
Head in the Clouds: Recycled Plastic Bottles Design- copy
STUDIOKCA
Selected and built as the winning proposal resulting from a design competition organized by the American Institute of Architects New York, the Structural Engineers Association of New York and Figment, the Head in the Clouds Pavilion on New York City’s Governors Island originated with the desire to create a “place to dream in the city of dreams”. Made from 53,780 recycled plastic bottles – the number of bottles thrown away in New York City in one hour – it is a space that visitors can enter to contemplate the light and color filtering through the “cloud” from the inside out.
Concordia Amphitheater
Colab-19
Architects: Colab-19
Location: Bogotá, Colombia
Year: 2020
“The best way to predict the future is to create it” – Peter F. Drucker
Colab-19 is an architecture laboratory based in Bogotá and London. We design sustainable spaces for post-pandemic situations with low-cost and innovative architectural solutions. We contend that these interventions must be coordinated and connected with the vision and needs of the city. In doing so, collaboration between the public, private, and academic sectors is necessary to empower our cities in a more resilient way.
Pleat: Textile Design
Leanne Zilka
This chapter discusses a series of projects that revolve around the Pleat, a fashion and textile technique I have explored to develop an understanding around where fashion, textile design can be used to develop architecture, and how the differences in these approaches can be used to develop an architecture that considers material, structure, skin and form at the same time and not a separate processes. Through the design and fabrication explorations of the Pleat, I have applied the lessons learned from the previous collaborations with fashion and textile design, discarded peripheral directions, and established a way of operating for future projects. The projects discussed in this chapter include the Pleat Pod, Pleat Pavilion and Pleatent. These projects have used the process of developing smaller tests or croquis developed through the collaborations to inform the larger architectural propositions of the Pleat projects. The images in this section document the processes taken, problems encountered and resolutions to communicate the benefits and possibilities of working in the space between fashion, textile design and architecture.
Generosity of Space: Optimization of Materials
Anne Lacaton | Lacaton & Vassal
urbanNext interviews Anne Lacaton on the importance of the quality of space and the optimization of materials to be generous at a low cost.
Table Mannerisms
Penelope Dean
Excerpt from NESS. On Architecture, Life and Urban Culture 3 edited by Florencia Rodríguez and Pablo Gerson.
table (ta•ble)
a piece of furniture consisting of a smooth flat slab fixed on legs
Mirriam-Webster Dictionary
Teaching in Hong Kong: Architecture in Future Cities
Nasrine Seraji
Interview by Ricardo Devesa
Filmed by Xavi González
Edited by Sara Traba
urbanNext talks with Nasrine Seraji on teaching in Hong Kong and the role of architecture in future cities.
Care: A Shelter for the Protection of Human Life
Elke Krasny
Excerpt from AA Files 76 published by the Architectural Association.
Architecture is in need of care – dependent on maintenance, cleaning and daily upkeep to sustain its existence. From its beginnings architecture has been conceived of as a shelter for the protection of human life. Architecture protects us and therefore we care for it. By understanding architecture and care in this manner, it is possible to connect it to the concepts of social reproduction and its everyday labour as well as to the deficiency of a reproducible resources at an environmental scale. From this perspective, care in architecture is thus concerned with a ‘politics of reproduction’ – a political critique of the current struggles not only with respect to the global labour force but also within the terrain of climate change.
Sexism and the City: From Policy to Infrastructure
And The City
The city can be discriminating, from its policy to its infrastructure, or public space to private toilet space. It can sometimes designed without considering women and the most vulnerable member of society. Join us as we talk how the city can be a safe space for everyone with our guest: the author of ‘No Place to Go’, Lezlie Lowe.
Kitchenless City: Comfort as a Cultural Construction
Anna Puigjaner | MAIO
Interview by Ricardo Devesa & Marta Bugés.
Filmed and edited by Meriem Sakrouchi.
urbanNext interviews Anna Puigjaner (co-founder of MAIO) on how the kitchen became a political tool, the evolution of domestic architecture and the impact of her research in her practice.
Kitchen Politics
Julia Wieger
Excerpt from Spaces of Commoning published by Sternberg Press
Eight members of the Spaces of Commoning research group sit around a large office table. They are organizing a summer school called “Commoning the City” and it is one of their last meetings before the event.[1] They are still undecided on how to organize the provision of food:
A: So, I spoke to the organic food store and they said they could deliver a meal each day including salad for quite a reasonable price.
B: I still like the idea that summer school participants prepare food together. It’s a way of getting to know one another and it could become part of our knowledge production.
C: On paper this sounds great, but if you think about it, there would always be a group spending the whole morning organizing and preparing food. When you think of our dense program, we just don’t have enough time …
D: Have you ever organized collective cooking as part of an event? It eats up all the time and attention and pretty much dominates the entire setting. Do we really want this? We have so many interesting guests coming!
C: And cooking is one thing, but afterward, washing the dishes?
E: Still, I think it would be great if everyone is involved in the reproductive parts of the summer school—it’s part of the issue at stake. If each person attends one shift during the week it could really work. It’s half of a day you would miss.
F: I think C is right, I didn’t think about dishwashing. That’s a hassle. It really puts me off.
A: I can ask if the organic food store can take care of the dishes as well.
Gender & Public Space
Inés Sánchez de Madariaga
This a podcast from urbanNext exchanges, the urbanNext series curated by Ricardo Devesa and Marta Bugés.
For centuries, architecture and gender has been a silent debate but in the last decades there has been a very fruitful conversation about how design can have biased implications. This has awaken the need to find which strategies can lead to the building of more gender inclusive cities.
Inés Sánchez de Madariaga, director of the UNESCO Chair on Gender and professor of urban planning at Technical University of Madrid, talks about designing a gender inclusive urban environment and women in participatory processes.
Women’s Opportunity Centre
Sharon Davis Design
Architects: Sharon Davis Design.
Location: Kayonza, Rwanda.
Completion date: 2013.
Photographer: Elizabeth Felicella.
On a two-hectare site in Rwanda, the most densely populated country in Africa, the Women’s Opportunity Center is empowering one small community and, in turn, rewriting our role as designers.
Pomophobia and Feminism: Revisiting the Swedish Postmodern Discourse
Helena Mattsson
This essay is an excerpt of Architecture in Effect vol. 1 edited by Sten Gromark, Jennifer Mack and Roemer van Toorn. Published by Actar Publishers.
In his article “1980–2000: Pomofobi och uppsving,” the architect Thomas Hellquist (2001) argues that an avoidance of postmodernism, what he calls “pomophobia,” ruled the architectural establishment in the early years of the 1980s. This interpretation seems reasonable, as few practitioners would have called themselves postmodernists, but revisiting the period today, can we reframe the postmodern turn in Swedish architecture to broaden the picture? Looking more closely into the international postmodern discourse, another picture develops, one where the Swedish case is not an exception but an important historiographical piece influencing the understanding of the bigger picture. If the concept of “postmodernism” was unclear from the start—as Charles Jencks wrote in 1975, “The only way to kill off the monster is to find a substitute beast to take its place and decidedly ‘Post Modern’ won’t do the job” (Jencks 1975: 3)—revisiting the discussion today is even more confusing. The attempts to define the concept all share a critique of modernism, and they signify that a shift could be formal, social, or political. Otherwise, the lowest common denominator seems to be the contradictions inherent in the discourse. However, postmodernism has left us (as modernism did) with a sedimented idea of a “style” in architecture and certain conceptions of a discursive content.
Building without Bias: An Architectural Language for the Post-Binary
Hannah Rozenberg
Technology is not neutral. We’re inside of what we make, and it’s inside of us. We’re living in a world of connections – and it matters which ones get made and unmade.
Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ (1991), pp.149-181
Man is to Computer Programmer what Woman is to Homemaker.
Mind the (Commuting) Gap and the City
And The City | Prima Abdullah
Listen to the related podcast: Mind the (Commuting) Gap and the City by And the City.
In 1994, Tokyo was already a city with one of the lowest crime rates. With only 60 crimes per 100,000 people, it had earned a reputation as one of the safest cities. Unfortunately, not everyone experiences the same sense of safety: at least 70% of women commuters have experienced harassment. A women’s group in Osaka, Japan’s second-largest city, says three-quarters of women in their 20s and 30s who responded to a questionnaire reported encountering a groper— or chikan in Japanese, at least once.[1]
VOW Manifesto
Martha Thorne | Odile Decq | Voices of Women
We as Voices of Women are building conversations and taking actions to raise awareness to combat pervasive prejudices and disrespectful behaviour that appears to be systemic in our culture and discipline.
Nature of Enclosure: Session 7
Daisy Ames | Daniel A. Barber | Jeffrey S Nesbit | Mae-ling Lokko
This a podcast from urbanNext exchanges, the urbanNext series curated by Ricardo Devesa and Marta Bugés.
In the 7th session from Nature of Enclosure, Jeffrey S. Nesbit is joined by Daniel A. Barber, Daisy Ames and Mae-ling Lokko to reflect on climate change, air quality, and cultures from within the architectural envelopes as the Nature of Enclosure.
Depot Boijmans van Beuningen: A New Type of Experience
MVRDV
Architects: MVRDV
Location: Rotterdam, the Netherlands
Year: 2020
Photography: Ossip van Duivenbode and Rob Glastra
Located in Rotterdam’s Museumpark, the depot features a new type of experience for museum visitors: a sturdy engine room where the complete collection of 151,000 objects is made accessible to the public. In addition to the various storage and care areas, the depot has a restaurant and an award-winning rooftop forest at a height of 35 meters. The construction completion paves the way for interior furnishings and the long process of moving the museum’s complete collection into its new storage facility.
Land Reclamation in Island Cities and the Enclosure of Public Space
Adam Grydehøj
This essay is an excerpt of Terra-Sorta-Firma by Fadi Masoud, published by Actar Publishers
This chapter considers drivers of island city land reclamation as well as land reclamation’s impact on public space. It represents a reworking of material previously published in Grydehøj. [1]
Urbanism without Density
Els Verbakel | Rafi Segal
Our built environment is in the process of reorganizing itself, redistributing densities of buildings, population and activities. Cities are expanding, growing and sprawling, while at the same time their centers and downtowns are shrinking, disappearing, voiding out. This process of growth and redistribution has been partially described by terms such as sprawl, suburbs (with roots in the American context[1]), wild living and the diffuse city (‘città diffusa’, mostly referring to the European context[2]). Dispersal functions as an umbrella term for these phenomena, by zooming out and describing them as part of a larger global tendency. In this context, Cities of Dispersal can be recognized as an emerging type of low-density environments; decentralized, heterogenous, radically different from traditional definitions of the city in their spatial organization and patterns of growth.
Pontsteiger Residential Building: A Public Space Within Itself
Arons en Gelauff architects
Architects: Arons en Gelauff Architecten
Location: Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Area: 64.000 m2
Year: 2019
Photography: Jeroen Musch, Ossip van Duivenbode and Arjen Veldt
Pontsteiger (‘ferry pier’) is a large-scale residential project in Amsterdam, NL. The building is located at the end of a 200-metre dam that projects into the water of the River IJ. The ‘Big Friendly Giant’ foreshadows Amsterdam’s growth of high-rise buildings around the River IJ. The design creates not just an iconic object but a public space within itself.
Dead Ends: Managing Urban Density
Eran Chen | ODA
The tower has helped manage urban density, but it often fails to honor qualities of life on the street. Now we have the opportunity to change that.
The Precursor of ‘Co-housing’: Soviet ‘Komuna’ Houses
Jelena Prokopljevic Bugarski
Originally published in The Conversation España.
Last December, the Catalan Generalitat passed a law regulating the construction and rental of community housing, known as co-housing. This defines a type of micro-house that allows the interior to be reduced to a minimum of 24m², adding another 12m² (to reach the minimum space standard of 36m²) of shared spaces, which would optimise functional spaces such as laundries, work areas or communal living rooms. This model is based on continuous interaction between users and aims to promote social cohesion.
Recently this type of housing was partially tested in tutored housing for older people or in cooperative housing projects such as La Borda, in the Sants neighbourhood, or the Xarxaire building, which is starting to be built in Barceloneta.
However, the idea of attributing urban qualities to housing using external spaces and co-use of some of its areas has a long history.
La Borda Housing Cooperative: Self-management, Collective Property, Sustainability, and Affordability
LaCol
Architects: LaCol cooperativa
Location: Can Batlló, Barcelona
Photography: LaCol, Institut Municipal de l'Habitatge i la Rehabilitació and Lluc Miralles.
La Borda defines itself as the first housing cooperative following the model of cession of use to be developed in Barcelona and built on public land. The initiative emerged in the context of the urban renewal of Can Batlló, a former industrial site located in the district of Sants-Monjuïc (Barcelona).
In June 2011, after 30 years of waiting for the transformation of Can Batlló, the neighborhood of Sants took the initiative and occupied the site with the aim of organizing it themselves.
Denizen Bushwick: Communal Spaces Open to Neighborhood
ODA
Architects: ODA
Location: New York, USA
Area: 92.900 m2
Year: 2019
Situated on the former site of Brooklyn’s historic Rheingold Brewery, Denizen Bushwick will generate 1,000,000 square feet of apartment units in Bushwick, 20% of which will be affordable. The project will host a multitude of communal spaces open to the neighborhood, while a 17,850 square foot public park will bisect the development creating a green promenade and two 400 feet by 200 feet blocks. These masses are further perforated by a sequence of meandering, interconnected courtyards which ultimately lead to the promenade. Over the pair of these NY city blocks, ODA superimposed the layout of woven streets in a typical old town core. Denizen Bushwick features a fragmented façade with rust-colored, deeply recessed windows.
From Architectural Urbanism to Integrative Architecture
Nasrine Seraji
Interview by Ricardo Devesa
Filmed by Xavi González
Edited by Sara Traba
urbanNext interviews Nasrine Seraji on collective housing and how the project Big Heavy Beautiful required going from architectural urbanism to integrative architecture.
DeFlat Kleibrug: An Innovative Renovation
NL Architects
Architects: NL Architects
Location: Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Area: 66000 sqm
Year: 2016
Photography: Marcel van der Burg, Stjin Brakkee and Stijn Poelstra
Kleiburg is one of the biggest apartment buildings in the Netherlands: a bend slab with 500 apartments, 400 meters long, 10 + 1 stories high.
Kleiburg is located in the Bijlmermeer, a CIAM inspired residential expansion of Amsterdam designed in the 1960s by Siegfried Nassuth of the city planning department. De Bijlmer was intended as a green, light and spacious alternative for the inner city, which was degraded at the time.
The Bijlmer was designed as a single project, a composition of slabs based on a hexagonal grid, an attempt to create a vertical garden city.
Design Activism in the Context of Macau
Rui Leão
This article focuses on the EPM or Portuguese School of Macau and on the building’s struggle to “survive” as a post-classic monument in a city that navigates a fragile balance when it comes to heritage conservation.
The Portuguese School of Macau, previously known as Escola Pedro Nolasco, or Escola Comercial, designed by the Portuguese architect Raúl Chorão Ramalho, is a significant building included as part of the continued infrastructure interventions in the colonial territories by the GCU [1]– Gabinete Colonial de Urbanização. It reflects the conflict of discourse of the 20th century, trying to re-invent a place for architecture through the management of light, open space (the open plan), orientation, natural ventilation, proportion, submission to a total system of order and universalism. The plastic expression of the materials (concrete, glass and steel), and the urban situation of the complex are solid manifestations of both the paradigm of Modernism and its re-discovery of the East as a purifying journey.
Darling Harbour
HASSELL
Architects: HASSELL
Location: Sydney, Australia
Area: 20 ha
Year: 2018
Photography: Simon Wood and Brett Boardman
The challenge was to reinvent one of Australia’s most visited public places – the Darling Harbour precinct in central Sydney.
The new precinct is a ‘people magnet’ where Sydney comes together to relax, to do business, to be entertained, to enjoy city living – and to share their experiences (hello, Instagram).
The transformation of this 20-hectare precinct was a pivotal urban renewal project for Sydney. A once-in-a-generation chance to create a ‘must see’ destination complete with convention centre, theatres and events spaces – all tied together with an array of parks, water features, plazas and paths for walkers and cyclists.
Repairing the Urban Landscape: the Weave Youth and Community Services
Baracco+Wright Architects | Collins and Turner
Filmed and edited by Daniel Ruiz.
urbanNext interviews Huw Turner and Mauro Baracco on Repair and the Weave Youth and Community Services at the Australian Pavilion of the 16th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia.
Nature of Enclosure: Session 2
Aleksandra Jaeschke | Fred Scharmen | Jeffrey S Nesbit | Jordan Bimm
This a podcast from urbanNext exchanges, the urbanNext series curated by Ricardo Devesa and Marta Bugés.
In the 2nd session from Nature of Enclosure, Jeffrey S. Nesbit is joined by Jordan Bimm, Aleksandra Jaeschke and Fred Scharmen to reflect on the cultural impact of the enclosure in architecture, landscape and aerospace history.
Emergent Topographies
Firas Safieddine
Emergent Topographies is a collaborative work by Firas Safieddine and Yasser Sinjab and was a winning project at the AI Artathon. It was recently showcased at the Global AI Summit in Riyadh, KSA.
Through a very wide lens, Emergent Topographies is a video installation and a collaborative digital artwork that deals with current clinical elements of the spatiotemporal ecosystem of data objects, topographically demonstrated through geodata and biodata examined by artificial intelligence.
The artwork explores the artistic applications of artificial intelligence, specifically using a generative adversarial network (GAN). The data that is generated is ultimately illustrated using an agent-based behavioral algorithm to visualize the morphing behavior using the mapping aesthetic of a connectome.
On Involving Neuroscience
Christoph Hölscher | ETH Zürich | Victor Schinazi
urbanNext interviews Christoph Hölscher & Victor Schinazi, at School of Architecture UIC Barcelona as part of the lecture series Foros 2016. Barcelona, March 2016
Camp del Ferro Sports Center
AIA | Barceló-Balanzó arquitectes | Gustau Gili Galfetti
Architects: Barceló Balanzó Arquitectes, AIA and Gustau Gili Galfetti
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Area: 7.237 m2
Year: 2020
Photography: JoséHevia and Simón García
Given the large volume required by the functional brief (three sports courts) in relation to the limited dimensions of the site and the high urban density of the area, the architects decided that much of the sports complex would be partly underground. The meticulous design of the building in section ensures good lighting, natural ventilation, ease of access and safe evacuation, even for the lower areas.
Tower of Bricks: Connecting the Past and the Present of a Place
Interval architects
Architects: Interval architects
Location: Hengshui, China
Area: 2065 m²
Year: 2018
Photography: Zhi Geng
The project began with an abandoned Hoffman brick kiln, which was located between Hengshui wetland park and the city proper of Hengshui. It was formerly a place where nearby factories used to drain their sewage water. As the only building on a wetland site, the brick kiln was highly recognizable with its chimney. However, the Hoffman kiln was gradually abandoned due to the national policy that banned the burning of bricks out of clay as an environmental protection measure. The building was eventually demolished by the government due to its collapsing condition. With the new governmental plan to convert the wetland into a botanic park, the project called for the design of a botanic art center on the site of the former kiln. We decided that the memory and history of the demolished kiln has to be recalled and remembered with the new architecture. We hope to connect the past and the present of the place with this project.
Nantou Old Town Preservation and Regeneration
URBANUS
Architects: URBANUS
Location: Nantou, China
Area: 38.150 m2
Year: 2017
Photography: Zhang Chao, Wu Qingshan and URBANUS
The Nantou Old Town in the city center of Shenzhen, China was founded as a city over 1,700 years ago starting from the Jin Dynasty. In the past century, the ancient town has gradually vanished, as the village was constantly expanding. The exacerbation of urbanization in Shenzhen has resulted in an intertwined layering with a complex pattern: the historical town is embedded in the urban village, which is again encircled by the city –“village in city, city in village”.
The Evolution of Radical Urbanism
Alexis Kalagas | Alfredo Brillembourg | Ersela Kripa | Hubert Klumpner | ka-au | Stephen Mueller
Excerpt from "Re-Living the City: UABB 2015 Catalogue" curated by Aaron Betsky, Alfredo Brillembourg, Hubert Klumpner and Doreen Heng Liu. Edited by Gideon Fink Shapiro. Published by Actar Publishers.
What does it mean to be radical architect or designer today? Never before have cities mattered as much to the future of humanity. As David Harvey attests, we have sleepwalked unknowingly into a full-blown “crisis of planetary urbanization”, with acute social, political, and ecological dimensions[1]. Cities are fundamentally places of opportunity – after all, urban migrants continue to be drawn in their millions by the promise of security as well as upward mobility. But cities are too often sites of yawning inequality, where land, housing, infrastructure, and services are transformed into symptoms of exclusionary growth. Faced with contemporary urbanization patterns, we are forced to question how cities and city-making have traditionally operated. More to the point, as architects and designers we are forced to rethink how we can operate within the city, learning from its emerging intelligence and shaping its outcomes to radical and tactical ends.
Juan Bobo Creek: Bringing Community Youth Together
Taller de Vivienda
Excerpt from Pure Space by Elisa Silva. Published by Actar Publishers.
The Juan Bobo creek is part of Comuna 2, a densely populated urban district on the northeastern slopes of Medellin. As space for new homes ran out and demand for housing continued to increase, people built precarious structures directly over the creek, exposing themselves to the risk of floods and landslides. The City of Medellin relocated these families into new multifamily buildings nearby and transformed the banks of the creek into space for recreation and leisure. The intervention also incorporated bridges over the creek, bringing community youth together that had previously maintained antagonistic relationships.
Arctic Mobilities and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Ethics for a Warming Planet
Mimi Sheller
Originally post on The Rule of Law.
Scientists now recognize that the Arctic is heating up more than twice as fast as any other region. As average land temperatures shift to more than 1.9 degrees Celsius (3.4 degrees Fahrenheit) above the historic baseline, Arctic researchers have come to recognize that the “region is moving from a climate that is characterized less by ice and snow and more by open water and rain” (Fountain 2020, A13).
Defining the Scope: Architecture in Extreme Landscapes
BBConstrumat | Lola Sheppard
urbanNext interviews Lola Sheppard on the importance of expanding architecture to define a broader scope in order to work in extreme landscapes.
70% Water – A Metabolic Balance
IAAC
70% Water is a project of IAAC (Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia) developed for the Master in Advanced Architecture MAA01 in 2020 by Tomás García de la Huerta Eluchans, Vatsal Kapadia, Ka Man Lee and Nihar Mehta and by the Self-Sufficient Studio faculty Edouard Cabay, Peter Geelmuyden Magnus and Oana Taut.
The importance of the accessibility and availability of water has become more evident than ever with climate change and population growth. This is a crisis, not of scarcity but of management. Can the management of building resources help us live and interact with our surroundings in a more efficient way? To address this question, we developed a metabolic machine that conditions microclimates with water. The states of ice, liquid, steam, and mist circulate cyclically, creating controlled systems, both open and closed.
Bio-integrated Design
Jordi Vivaldi | Marcos Cruz
This essay is an excerpt of IAAC Bits 9 - Black Ecologies edited by Manuel Gausa, Areti Markopoulou and Jordi Vivaldi. Published by Actar Publishers.
Jordi Vivaldi: Since the end of the 20th century, we have been experiencing a shift in relation to our understanding of the notion of nature: we are moving from a conception of nature understood as Mother Nature (that is to say, a harmonic, perfect and secularized garden of Eden that only humans can disrupt), to another understanding of nature as being highly manipulable through technology (like in the recent cases of artificial DNA or the unfolding of the human genome). How do you think the notion of ecology should be interpreted given this new understanding of nature?
Torcuato di Tella University: Integrating Diversity
Josep Ferrando
Architects: Josep Ferrando Architecture
Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina
Area: 15,000 m2
Year: 2019
Photography: Federico Cairoli
The proposal for the new Torcuato Di Tella University building is presented as a rigorously open organization that integrates the diversity of the campus into a single spatial and structural system.
Habitactory: Working and Living
[igg - office for architecture] | The Open Workshop
Excerpt from New Investigations in Collective Form published by Actar Publishers
Nowadays, the difference between work and home is increasingly blurred. Not only are more people working from home—with a range of tools from computers to 3D printers—, work environments are increasingly taking their aesthetic cues from domestic environments. While this blurring has transpired within particular types of work, larger scaled environments of production have typically been separated from domestic environments due to their specific needs and differential scale. Regions such as Elbinselquartier incite the challenging question of how spaces of production and living can co-exist and benefit from their proximity. Elbinselquartier’s future success in creating an inclusive, affordable, and productive form of urbanity is contingent on how it reconciles different scales of time with diverse spatial uses. The opportunity within such peri-urban sites is the symbiotic negotiation of productive uses and domestic space to create a more flexible city that accounts for a range of users and uses.
The Platform: Innovative & Sustainable
Space Encounters
Architects: Space Encounters
Location: Amersfoort, The Netherlands
Area: 5,270 m2
Year: 2019
Photography: Lorenzo Zandri and Peter Tijhuis
In mid 2017, Schipper Bosch Development commissioned Space Encounters with the design of a new office building above the former Prodent warehouse in De Nieuwe Stad (The New City) in Amersfoort. The new building is located on the south side of the Oliemolenhof. This central space is the heart of De Nieuwe Stad. It was designed by ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles, Rotterdam] as a forest, square and charging station for electric vehicles. Typologically a new public space, this renewal in form and use is characteristic of De Nieuwe Stad. With respect for the past, the future is being built in an innovative, sustainable and dauntless manner.
Capital Petrolera
Alejandra Espinosa
Originally published in Issue No2 of DESIRED LANDSCAPES.
Drawings by Dimitris Zampopulos.
There is always a line or, better to say, infinite lines between the spaces we aspire to inhabit and those existing within the actual realm of possibility. Sour Lake, or Lago Agrio in Spanish, is an Ecuadorian city that challenges western and modern conceptions of an ideal city. Emerging in the center of the Amazonian region, Sour Lake’s aesthetics and its architecture perspire oil: buildings, streets, stores and all the brick and mortar composing its urban dynamic are influenced by oil resources exploitation. Altogether, as the city grew, it came to be defined by an “unfinished” aesthetic that puts into discussion the relationship between urban imaginaries and their realization.
What a Gender Sensitive City Should Be
Inés Sánchez de Madariaga
The bulk of urban space that makes up contemporary cities was built during the 20th century, especially in the second half. One characteristic of cities is that their creation and existence are inscribed in the long term – the so-called longue durée in historical terms. The main features of the social and economic organization according to which today’s cities were planned and built are the Fordist production model and the sexual division of labor. As gender studies have shown, these two characteristics are interdependent: attributing the responsibility for caring for the home and for dependents to half of the population – women – without any economic remuneration allows the other half of the population – men – to dedicate their time exclusively and entirely to economic activities in the realm of production.
Wayco Ruzafa: Scenographic Intervention
José Costa ARQ.
Architects: José Costa ARQ.
Location: Valencia, Spain
Year: 2019
Photography: Mariela Apollonio
During the final stretch of construction on the Wayco Ruzafa coworking space, an opportunity arose to add the adjacent property – a 1,590 m2 building that housed the Goya cinemas in the early 20th century and later the Crisol bookstore.
Space as a Teacher: Social Spaces for Learning
Giancarlo Mazzanti | PLANE—SITE
Bogotá-based architect Giancarlo Mazzanti creates scenarios for play in daily life. In this video interview from PLANE—SITE, Mazzanti elaborates on his experimental approach to design research and guides us through several of his ‘spaces for learning’, including the Baby Gym in Barranquilla, 21 Atlantico Kindergartens in Atlantico and El Porvenir Kindergarten in Bogotá. Many of these projects are situated in low-income neighborhoods and act as catalysts for social change, bringing joy and pride to marginalized communities.
Newsburgh Enclosures: SWF as a Catalyst for Development
Aerial Futures
Situated 60 miles north of Manhattan, the once-grand and historic city of Newburgh has suffered the effects of economic stagnation, intergenerational poverty and post-industrial decline. However, Newburgh is beginning to rise once again. One of the most promising drivers for Newburgh’s economic development is its airport. A new video made on the occasion of AERIAL FUTURES: Newburgh Enclosures explores how New York Stewart International Airport (SWF) has become a catalyst for development in Newburgh and its neighbouring region. It proposes ways in which the airport could positively impact Newburgh’s economy, agriculture, mobility, and civic life, and expand on its function as a travel hub.
Perspectives on a Life in Drawing
Janet Abrams | Michael Webb
This essay is an excerpt of WWW Drawing by Janet Abrams and Mehrdad Hadighi, published by Actar Publishers and Pennsylvania State University’s Department of Architecture, Stuckeman School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture.
Janet Abrams: Michael, You’ve been drawing for decades now.
Michael Webb: Seven and a half decades, if you count those done when I was six or seven years old.
JA: Do you ‘do’ or ‘make’ a drawing?
MW: That’s a very important question. To ‘make’ a drawing implies a certain inventing, whereas a Working Drawing, where everything has already been designed (or so you delude yourself), would be a drawing you ‘did’. But a drawing you ‘make’ has the implication of creativity. In French, there is presumably no difference: the verb faire translates as ‘to do or to make’.
314 Moments: Delineating Incidents
APPAREIL
The series of drawings featured here are the result of an experiment that occurred at the Cercle Artistic Sant Lluc in Barcelona as part of the exhibition Traces – Delineating Incidents in May 2016.
Le Monde Group HQ: Generous Respite in the City
Snøhetta
With the completion of its new headquarters, the 1,600 employees of the Le Monde Group have been brought together under the same roof in a large arching building on 67-69 Avenue Pierre-Mendès-France in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. With its bold new plaza and semi-transparent envelope, the building creates connections to the general public and surrounding transit, while also offering citizens and passersby a generous respite in the city. On December 11, 2020, the building received the prestigious French real estate prize, the Grand Prix SIMI, in the category “New Office Building Larger than 10,000 m²”.
The Garden and the Machine
Eduardo Prieto
Few concepts have undergone an inflation of meaning as spectacular as that of the picturesque. For the writers of treatises in the Renaissance and the Baroque, the picturesque merely referred to what was worth painting; the definition was so broad – and ultimately useless – that it would have been lost to history had Joseph Addison not freed it from irrelevance at the beginning of the 18th century by turning it into something different: a novel object that produces a pleasant surprise and which, precisely for that reason, is “appealing”.
360º View Tower Nantes: a City Landmark
LAN
Architects: LAN (Local Architecture Network) Paris
Location: Nantes, France
Year: 2018
Photography: Julien Lanoo
The 360º View Tower represents the end and the beginning of the Brossette block. Seen from the Loire River, its volume heralds all the elements that will be developed thereafter across the site. Conversely, when viewed from the south, this architecture will complete a succession of spaces and connections that will give the Brossette city block its character. The net volume imagined in the beginning had very quickly to be enlarged and adjusted. This involved a design that took into account the trees, the perspective from the main axis of the site, the dialog with the system of variable heights of the other buildings, and its role as a landmark.
Nature of Enclosure: Session 5
Ersela Kripa | Jeffrey S Nesbit | Kathy Velikov | Neeraj Bhatia | Stephen Mueller
This a podcast from urbanNext exchanges, the urbanNext series curated by Ricardo Devesa and Marta Bugés.
In the 5th session from Nature of Enclosure, Jeffrey S. Nesbit is joined by Ersela Kripa, Stephen Mueller, Kathy Velikov and Neeraj Bhatia whose scholarly work interrogate the role of territory, border, and technology as it relates to the politics set within the Nature of Enclosure.
Barcelona’s Livability: The Mercè Project
300.000 Km/s
Mercè is part of the “Algorithms trained by citizens” project developed by 300,000 Km/s, an urban planning firm, focusing on exploring the potential of data and new computing paradigms to extract relevant information for urban planning and decision making.
Mercè was created and developed thanks to collaboration from the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) - Ministry of Science and Innovation and support from the Barcelona City Council, the Architects’ Association of Catalonia, the S+T+ARTS Prize and urbanNext.
Today, we are at a crucial moment for urbanism as a result of both the technological context, the new era of mass information (big data, open data, IoT) and a greater desire for transparency and participation on the part of all agents involved in urban planning and design processes.
In this context, the Mercè project embodies a new line of research that applies novel machine learning techniques (one of the branches of artificial intelligence) to the disciplines of urban planning, geography, sociology, economics and urban health with the goal of building objective knowledge and open data about urban environments.
New Solutions for New Disruptions: Methodologies of Data Analysis and Visualization
300.000 Km/s
Interview by Marta Bugés.
Filmed by Chiara Cesareo.
Edited by Sara Traba.
urbanNext interviews Mar Santamaria on how new methodologies of analysis and visualization are needed to tackle new disruptions in cities and how these new solutions are incorporated in her urban planning practice at 300.000 Km/s.
Westbeat: Dynamic New Link in the Public Space Network
Studioninedots
Architects: Studioninedots
Location: Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Area: 24.300 m2
Year: 2020
Photography: Frans Parthesius
The completion of Westbeat adds a dynamic new link in the public space network of Amsterdam Nieuw-West. Designed by Studioninedots, the new housing complex features a public base composed of 86 arches that shape a network of inviting, shared open spaces. Measuring 65 x 50 meters long and 8.5 meters high, this superspace literally and metaphorically elevates Westbeat to become a distinguished destination in the city’s densifying urban periphery.
The Widest Vibration
Ricardo Devesa
Excerpt from Good Vibrations published by Actar Publishers.
What should I observe about an architectural design? This question, which critics ask ourselves as we prepare to write about a building, also applies to photographers as they prepare to document a project. What should I photograph? Its façades, details, unique spaces – in other words, its architectural conditions, like 99% of building photographs? Very few photo essays and critical texts, however, set out to reveal a building’s relationships to its surroundings, which tend to be less obvious. Ultimately, in this case, as critic and photographer, we both set out to describe an object and the relationships it establishes with its environs. One through words, the other through images. And where the work is done in tandem, both readings are mutually enriched. That was the case here. In October 2017, as the editor of this book, I joined Jordi Bernadó on his photo shoot, and he joined me in the writing of this text.
Loop of Wisdom: Exuberant Landmark
Powerhouse Company
Architects: Powerhouse Company
Location: Chengdu, China
Area: 5.000 m2
Year: 2020
Photography: Jonathan Leijonhufvud
Living up to the suggestiveness of its name, the Loop of Wisdom embodies a timeless architectural concept. Powerhouse Company’s design for a technology museum and reception center for a new neighborhood in Chengdu, China, is much more than an exuberant landmark. In addition to its obvious aesthetic appeal and cultural program, the fluid structure incorporates a spectacular public space – an undulating rooftop trail. This addition makes the Loop of Wisdom an accessible icon, rather than a remote beacon. It invites people to explore it and make it part of their regular walking or jogging routine.
Building Images: New Image-Based Identities in Architecture
OMA | PLANE—SITE | UNStudio
Until recently, architectural images were most often encountered in magazines. Polished and often directed by the firms themselves, these images portray completed buildings from a single perspective. Today, the rise of social media has transformed the way we interact with architectural spaces. The architectural image as it exists online captures the dynamism of everyday life and gives architects new data sets for post-occupancy analysis. In this new short video, ‘Building Images’, PLANE—SITE examines the various ways that social media has inspired, challenged and democratized contemporary architectural practices.
Recreo House: Rethinking the Possibilities of a Patio
Fernanda Canales
Architects: Fernanda Canales
Location: Mexico
Year: 2017
Photography: Rafael Gamo
This house results from rethinking the possibilities of a patio. A central patio becomes the soul of the house and links the main access, service areas, social spaces and bedroom areas; another patio, which faces the forest, connects the bedrooms and studios.
Sexism and the City: Looking for Potential Catalysts for Change
And The City | Hagar Abiri
Listen to the related podcast: Sexism and the City by And the City.
50.8% of the world’s population are women and girls but this number does not have the corresponding weight when it comes to public space planning, a discipline that is still dominated by men. Women are under-represented at all levels of government, with less than 15% of mayors worldwide and up to 36% of representatives on European councils and in regional assemblies.[1] This article aims to review and articulate the problems, as well as the potential catalysts for change, while pointing out the advantages of equality for all public space users and suggesting ways to introduce equality into existing urban infrastructures.
Streets and Gender
Aruna Sankaranarayanan
Places and streets named after personalities are indicators of social hierarchy in a city. Often, they are as prestigious as the person they are named after, so we studied the distribution and location of gender in eponymous streets and made a map. We looked at the number of roads named after women versus men and their geographical distribution using OpenStreetMap data. To run the analysis, we put together a light script using Turf.js and Tile Reduce and queried OSM QA Tiles.
Surfaces of Urban Life: Design Opportunities for Addressing Climate and Comfort across Scales
Forrest Meggers
This essay is an excerpt of Design with Life by Mitchell Joachim and Maria Aiolova from Terreform ONE, published by Actar Publishers
While we have achieved unprecedented infrastructural feats, technical developments, and increased prosperity, our urbanity has also created the grandest challenges we have ever faced. The societal successes that enabled our massive urban expansion have simultaneously enabled our intellectual capabilities to recognize these problems. We can now characterize and predict with confidence the very real and dire consequences of unchecked resource consumption and environmental degradation. The urban climate is full of dangerous positive feedback loops that models show are driving conditions to be less and less conducive to life (Meggers et al. 2016; Bruelisauer et al. 2014; Allegrini, Dorer, and Carmeliet 2012; Salata et al. 2016).
Architecture & Climate: Facing Sustainability Issues
BBConstrumat | Javier García-Germán
Interview filmed within the Barcelona Building Construmat ’19 Congress “Logics of Innovation and Change”.
Interview by Marta Bugés.
Filmed by Chiara Cesareo.
Edited by Sara Traba.
urbanNext interviews Javier García-Germán on facing sustainability issues and the urge to work with climate in architecture.
Powerhouse Telemark: Decarbonizing New Construction
Snøhetta
Architects: Snøhetta
Location: Porsgrunn, Norway
Area: 6,100m2
Year: 2020
Situated in the historic industrial city of Porsgrunn in the county of Vestfold and Telemark, the new 11-story building marks a symbolic continuation of the district’s proud history as Telemark is home to one of the largest hydropower plants of the early 19th century. Powerhouse Telemark indicates the area’s growing investment in the green economy, positioning the county as a leader in decarbonizing new construction. The southeast-facing façade and roof of Powerhouse Telemark will generate 256,000 kWh each year, approximately 20 times the annual energy use of an average Norwegian household, and surplus energy will be sold back to the energy grid.
Layered Landscapes Lofoten: A History of Extremes
Gisle Løkken | Magdalena Haggärde
Lofoten is a history of extremes: extreme nature, extreme weather conditions, extreme natural resources and extreme survival. The islands of Lofoten float in a timeless mythical narration of battling between man and nature, dating back to the origin of human presence in these territories. The fact that Lofoten has hosted the world’s most precious fisheries of codfish for centuries in the same areas where the seabed is assumed to hide a prosperous amount of oil and gas, and which are now experiencing a significant influx of tourists, signifies a latent and incommensurable conflict that could irreversibly change the landscape. The people living in these territories have been connected to the landscape and its resources for innumerable years. They are therefore facing not only external threats from global economies and climate changes, but also national political decisions and structural changes in the fisheries which threaten to deprive local communities of their resources. These ongoing processes have long altered the way people have used and inhabited the landscape, but now more than ever there is a need for awareness and knowledge to build resilience – to maintain flexibility in the face of change – but, at the same time, to be in control of the changes’ impacts on the complex ecology of landscapes and societies.
Beirut Port Explosion
Forensic Architecture
Shortly after 6:00pm on 4 August 2020, an explosion ripped through the port of Beirut. It killed more than two hundred people, wounded over 6,500, and destroyed large parts of the city.
Forensic Architecture was invited by Mada Masr to examine open source information including videos, photographs, and documents to provide a timeline and a precise 3D model to help investigate the events of that day.
Repairing Natural Systems: Glebe4
Baracco+Wright Architects | James Mather Delaney design
Filmed and edited by Daniel Ruiz
urbanNext interviews Anton James and Louis Wright on Repair and the Glebe4 at the Australian Pavilion of the 16th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia.
Sheikh Zayed Plaza: The Urban Environment as a Living Urbanism
Estudio Leonardo Zanatta
If we look at the urban environment as a living organism, with its circulatory systems, tissue stratification and matter metabolization, we start to understand why the generic urban patterns from the Modern period weren’t completely effective, demonstrating why a better relationship between the natural and built environments needs to be at the center of the discussion for healthier cities. Although using biology to solve major problems in contemporary architecture is not novel, bionics offers numerous strategies based on the amalgamation of natural and artificial mechanisms, and in this case, bionics is used to enhance the circulation of people in the urban environment, with less impact and waste generation.
Lleialtat Santsenca Civic Center: Defining an Intervention Strategy
H arquitectes
Architects: H arquitectes
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Area: 1.750 m2
Year: 2017
Photography: Adrià Goula
There were three starting points to the design: understanding the historic value of Lleialtat Santsenca (1928), an old working class cooperative in the Sants neighborhood; investigating the building’s (physical) state in detail, in order to maintain as much of it as possible; and being sensitive to the collaborative process launched by neighborhood organizations in 2009 to recover the building.
Saving Besòs’ Coast: Face Gradual Sea Level Rise
LANDLAB
The project is carried out in the area between the mouth of the Besòs River and the port of Badalona, an area with a coastal length of 1.5 km. The Three Chimneys and the turbine hall remained as symbolic elements for the city of Sant Adrià de Besòs after production closed down in 2011.
Kokkedal Climate Adaptation: Improved Urban Living
Schønherr
Architects: Schønherr
Location: Kokkedal, Denmark
Area: 61 ha
Year: 2017
Photography: Thõger Sõrensen, Carsten Ingemann and Leif Tuxen for Realdania
The challenge of the project was to develop a climate adaptation which could also promote improved urban living: connecting fragmented urban areas, creating new attractive meeting points, and bringing nature closer to the residents.
Freyming Merlebach Theatre: Updating the Disused
Dominique Coulon & Associés
Architect: Dominique Coulon & Associés
Location: Freyming-Merlebach, France
Date: 2017
Photography: Eugeni Pons, David Romero-Uzeda, Thibaut Muller
Freyming-Merlebach is a town with a substantial industrial past, in a part of Lorraine that developed in the 19th century, driven by the coal mining industry.
Daring Cities: Malmö
Julia Scott
In this episode, we visit Malmö, Sweden. This Scandinavian city has plans to form Europe’s first cross-border carbon-neutral zone with its neighbor, Copenhagen. At the same time, Malmö finds itself grappling with how to be “climate neutral” in a connected world where you can only act on the emissions you can control.
Nature of Enclosure – Session 8
Jeffrey S Nesbit | Joshua Nason | Julia Smachylo | Mishuana Goeman
This a podcast from urbanNext exchanges, the urbanNext series curated by Ricardo Devesa and Marta Bugés.
In the 8th session from Nature of Enclosure, Jeffrey S. Nesbit is joined by Mishuana Goeman, Julia Smachylo and Joshua Nason to reflect on territory, as a mode of power embedded in colonialism that maintains and consistently strives for boundaries of legibility within the Nature of Enclosure.
Making and Building: Fabrication and Installation of the China Pavilion
Studio Link-Arc
Text written by Yichen Lu, Kenneth Namkung, Qinwen Cai and Yihong Deng.
Excerpt from XPOSITIONS by Studio Link-Arc, published by Actar Publishers.
The fabrication and installation of the China Pavilion was a monumental effort that was accomplished in a very short timeframe of six months. A joint team including the client, Tsinghua University, architects, engineers, and builders from three continents worked intensely and effectively for many months, collaborating on a daily basis to ensure that the pavilion was ready for visitors when Expo Milano opened on May 1, 2015.
China Pavilion: XPOSITIONS
Original Copy | Studio Link-Arc
Interview filmed and edited by Ian Garrick Mason.
Learn more about XPOSITIONS: The Pavilion Dialogues, 2018.
urbanNext interviews Studio Link-Arc on the China Pavilion it designed for Expo Milano 2015, and Original Copy on the book, published by Actar Publishers, that tells the pavilion’s remarkable story.
Diamond Domes Tennis Eventhall
Rüssli Architects
Architects: Rüssli Architects
Location: Obbürgen, Switzerland
Area: 9.500 m2
Year: 2017
Photography: Leonardo Finotti
The Diamond Domes are part of the Bürgenstock Resort Lake Lucerne, located on a forested ridge 500 meters above Lake Lucerne in the heart of Switzerland. With an architectural history tracing back to 1873, the legendary Bürgenstock Resort welcomed its first tennis courts in the 20th century, where Hollywood celebrities like Audrey Hepburn took their first tennis lessons. As part of the major revamp of the Bürgenstock Resort, which reopened in 2017, the historic tennis courts were reinvented to become a multipurpose covered space, including an ice rink. In addition, the tennis halls were updated to cater to Davis Cup standards, as well as to allow for hosting events such as exhibitions and banquets. For this reason, the halls needed to be column-free, include lighting in line as well as ancillary services like lounge, kitchen, storerooms, and parking facilities.
Alfriston School Swimming Pool: A New Up-to-date Facility
Morris+Company
Architects: Morris+Company
Location: Beaconsfield, UK
Year: 2014
Photography: Jack Hobhouse
Alfriston School is a state-funded girls’ school with Academy status, catering for secondary-age day and boarding for a wide range of special educational needs and disabilities between the ages of 11 and 18.
The school has day places for up to 120 pupils and provides residential care for 20 of those pupils. Most pupils have moderate learning difficulties, and a large majority have additional needs, such as speech, language and communication difficulties, sensory impairment, or physical difficulties. The school serves the whole county of Buckinghamshire and a number of neighbouring local authorities. It became a Specialist Sports College in September 2009 with science as a second speciality subject.
Morris+Company was commissioned in January 2008 following an invited tender and interview process to replace an existing redundant swimming pool structure with a new up-to-date facility.
Daring Cities: Buenos Aires
Julia Scott
Today we visit Buenos Aires, Argentina. The country’s capital has been a pioneer on climate action in Latin America for over a decade. Now Buenos Aires is accelerating the pace of its green transition, in spite of the country’s strict COVID-19 lockdown and a challenging economy.