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?

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Formalizing Infinite Properties: Beyond Functionalism in Design

Laia Mogas Soldevila | Silklab

These materials and methods were developed at the Tufts University Living Materials Silklab, led by Dr. Fiorenzo Omenetto, and are part of a current effort to bridge science, technology, and art with design and the fabrication of living material everyday products. They were commissioned and supported in part by the Art and Science seed fund from the Office of the President at Tufts and by the U.S. Office of Naval Research and were performed in collaboration with the Center for Applied Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

The world of advanced materials is a highly competitive arena, but there is one company that could never fail. (…) That company is Life, and its materials the most advanced on the planet. — Phillip Ball [1]

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TIJ: Sustainable Wooden Bird Observatory

RAU architects

Architects: RAU architects
Location: Stellendam, Netherlands
Year: 2019

RAU Architects, in collaboration with Ro&Ad Architects and with the Droomfonds project as the client, designed a huge wooden construction that lets people watch a rich variety of birds in a beautiful way. Thanks to the use of sustainable and circular materials and a unique shape, the fully rebuildable structure offers a genuine experience for every nature lover.

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SUNIMPLANT: An Avant-garde Off-grid Hemp Building

Monika Brümmer

Architects: Coopérative ADRAR NOUH (MA); ENAT (MA)
Location: Benguerir, Morocco
Area: 90 m2
Year: 2019

The hemp-built project Sunimplant took part in the recent edition of Solar Decathlon, the first to be held in Africa. The biannual editions of this international competition challenge teams, which include students, to develop highly efficient and innovative buildings, exclusively powered by solar energy. Sunimplant aims to be truly sustainable and therefore does not use technology alone to resolve higher energy-efficiency requirements, climate emergency demands considering environmental health by using corrective knowledge. Comfortable spaces let habitants maximize their well-being.

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Topographic Architecture: Kenneth Frampton’s Interest in the Ground

Véronique Patteeuw

This essay is an excerpt of Being The Mountain by PRODUCTORA, published by Actar Publishers and the Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture Press.
This book is the result of research PRODUCTORA initiated as winners of the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP) for Emerging Practice at Illinois Institute of Technology.

“It is said that architects always design the same building. In a sense I have always rewritten the same essay.”[1]

In 1980, just a few months before the opening of the first International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, British architectural historian Kenneth Frampton resigned from the curatorial team. His co-curators, Paolo Portoghesi, Robert A. M. Stern, Charles Jencks, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Vincent Scully, had settled on an approach that emphasized the glorification of the past and positioned postmodernism as an architectural style of historicist eclecticism, in fierce opposition to Frampton’s ideology.[2] Although Frampton was critical of the legacy of the modern movement, he shared Jurgen Habermas’s commitment to “the unfinished project of modernity”[3] and argued for an architecture that would resist the universalizing hegemony of the postmodern times he was witnessing.
Frampton’s “criticism from within,” as Léa-Catherine Szacka has suggested, prepared the field for alternative sensibilities in architecture through which his interest in the ground becomes apparent.[4] In reaction to impending universalization, the historian argued for the specificities of place. In reaction to the postmodern reduction of architecture to images, he reclaimed expressive forms of architectural structure and tectonics. In reaction to the modernist tabula rasa, he emphasized the importance of site and topography. Frampton elaborated his vision in a sequence of texts, articles, books, lectures, and teaching modules,[5] an exploration that had started a decade before his involvement in Venice and would climax in his seminal essay “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” published in 1983.[6]

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Modern Movement and Tourism. Reality Makes Things Fantastic

David Goodman | Eleni Gigantes | Elia Zenghelis

Published in "UNCHARTED / The New Landscapes of Tourism", 2014.

I meet with Eleni Gigantes and Elia Zenghelis in the inevitably spectacular golden haze of a late Athens afternoon. My hosts are waiting for me in the terrace of a bar across the street from the Athens Hilton, and I arrive a bit out of breath after having walked too briskly from Plaka, across Syntagma Square—where the entire Greek National Police force seemed to be marshaled in anticipation (or provocation?) of anti-Troika protesters—past the presidential palace and the remnants of the 1896 Olympic games, down a busy boulevard choked with smog and French hatchbacks, and through a quiet neighborhood of sturdy and dignified neo-modernist 1960s housing blocks, where roughly half of the street-level storefronts stand empty and for rent.

I am greeted with a sincere warmth and familiarity that feels at once entirely natural and somehow surprising, as I have never before met Eleni, and have only met Elia once, a few months earlier, for a lecture and jury in Segovia.

At some point in our conversation, I take an absurdly large microphone out of my bag, turn it on, and we begin to discuss the first of the many questions I’d prepared. This is the only one of those questions we would address, as the conversation moves in fascinating turns I’d not anticipated, complete with brief engagements with psychic healing, Communists, snakes, and exploding mountains. Through it all: a focus on tourism, territory, infrastructure, and the possibility of intelligence in planning.

It is dark and we are hungry by the time I put the microphone away.

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Succulent Walls: Innovative Architectural Ideas

MADWORKSHOP | PLANE—SITE

With its precarious relationship to water and lack of disaster preparedness, Southern California is in need of innovative architectural ideas that are simple to integrate into everyday life. In response to this real-world challenge, graduate students from a research seminar at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design, led by Chair and Associate Professor Heather Roberge, in collaboration with Mary and David Martin’s MADWORKSHOP, have unveiled two prototypes that present a potential solution: Succulent Walls.

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The Voxel Quarantine Cabin

IAAC

The Voxel is a project developed by the team of students and researchers of the Master in Advanced Ecological Buildings and Biocities (MAEBB) of the Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) which takes place at Valldaura Labs, under the direction of Daniel Ibáñez and Vicente Guallart.

The Voxel is a prototype of an advanced ecological building constructed with natural km.0 materials and industrialized techniques in the natural park of Collserola (Barcelona, Spain). The project proposes a space for confinement as an architectural solution to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Seoul Groundscapes: Node-places more than no-places

Manuel Gausa

This essay is an excerpt of Superground / Underground by Manuel Gausa and Young Joon Kim.

The last few decades have confirmed the evidence of a spectacular change of scale (and paradigms) in the definition of our spaces of live and sociability – of our own habitats and our cities – linked with the accelerated increase in mobility and long-distance communication, the delocalization of ex­changes, and the technological and material capacity of trans­formation of our environment.
A global process connected, also, with the digital rising capacity to combine overlapped and simultaneous parameters of information. The contemporary multi-city evidences, more and more, its dynamic and complex condition, that is the nature of a territorial and informational system.

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Concordia Design Wrocław: A Mixed-use Building

MVRDV

Architects: MVRDV
Location: Wrocław, Poland
Area: 7.000 m2
Year: 2020
Photography: Juliusz Sokołowski

MVRDV has completed construction of Concordia Design, a mixed-use building containing co-working spaces, an event venue, a food hall, a café, and a rooftop terrace on Słodowa Island in Wrocław, Poland. The project is a renovation and extension of a 19th-century listed building, retaining the façade of the existing building and adding a contemporary extension to create a focal point for the neighboring park and a destination that will enhance the experience of the island for visitors.

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Architecture and Complexity: “Binding Together”

Dominique Coulon & Associés

Excerpt from Crossings by Dominique Coulon & Associés. Published by Actar Publishers.

‘When I speak of complexity, I use the elementary Latin meaning of the word “complexus” — “that which is woven together”. The constituent parts differ, but the overall effect is as in a tapestry. The real problem (with reforming thinking) is that we have learnt too well how to separate things. It would be better for us to learn how to bind things together. “Binding together” is more than creating an end-to-end connection: it means establishing a connection that forms a loop. Indeed in French the word for “binding together” (relier) includes the syllable re, meaning “return”, which represents the loop turn­ing back on itself. A loop is autoproductive. Life orig­i­nates with the creation of a kind of loop, a kind of natural machinery that loops round on itself and produces increasingly diverse elements that make up a complex being that will be alive. The world auto-produced itself in an extremely mysterious fashion; knowledge today has to have instruments — fundamental concepts — that are necessary before any binding together can be possible.’ [1]

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Conspiracy Theory and the City

And The City | Prima Abdullah

Listen to the related podcast: The Collective Dream Boundaries and the City by And the City.

In 2008, 23 public schools were about be closed by D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty, whose political agenda included aggressive educational reform, claiming that public education in the US, particularly in troubled urban neighbourhoods, had been broken for a long time.[1] At the beginning of his term, public schools in DC were considered the lowest performing in the US. Collapsed infrastructure, non-merit-based teacher salaries, and bloated central office bureaucracy were said to be the main causes of low performing students. He had defined the problem and aimed to fix it.

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Residence and Reversible Car Park

BRUTHER

Architects: BRUTHER
Location: Plateau de Saclay, France
Area: 23.000 m2
Year: 2020
Photography: Maxime Delvaux

Room with a View

– What do you see?

– I see the air full of ideas, the trees undulating, the inhabited void, the boundaries evaporating, the city and its blocks, the dawn, the day, the twilight and the night, the images scrolling by, the garden in the center, the inner landscape, the memory of the cloister, the passing time, the suspended time, the erased time, the wind weavers weaving, people walking, people waiting, people interrupting, people talking, things evolving, the weft that governs, the weft that rhymes, the weft that arranges, the weft that distances, the reversible floors, the near and the far, the generous rigor, the concrete slabs and columns, the subtle variations of registers and atmospheres, the love at first sight and the reason, temporal collisions, inevitable ambiguity, the same old songs, the range of surprises and wonders of the world, the identical that is declining, the mix of activities, those who were there before, those who are there and those who will be there, those who would like to stay there forever, the theme and the variation, economy and efficiency, the collective and the individual, variety and nuance, accident and surprise, la fièvre d’Urbicande, the light levelling off the ground, the unthought and the unexpected, the expression of all, the appropriation of each, the functional spatial logic, the potential conversion, the possible infinity and much more.

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Skin vs Space

BRUTHER

Interview filmed within Europa Europa lecture series, commissioned by Moisés Puente and organized by COAC Catalunya, February 2017.

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Melopee School: Diverse and Extensive

XDGA

Architects: XDGA
Location: Ghent, Belgium
Area: 2.625 m2
Year: 2020
Photography: Maxime Delvaux

In the harbor area, a narrow stretch of land along a dock is freed from port activities. A very simple ‘chop stick’ urban plan is developed by O.M.A. in which green open pockets alternate with dense construction. In order to offer a notion of centrality to the linear plan, a public path is meant to cross the whole strip.

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Jujuy Redux

Marcelo Spina | Maxi Spina Architects | P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S

Published in Total Latin American Architecture.

Architects: P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S + MSA.
Principals in charge: Marcelo Spina, Georgina Huljich and Maximiliano Spina.
Location: Rosario, Argentina.
Area: 1.255 m2
Photography: Gustavo Frittegotto.

The vertical apartment building, or so-called PH [which stands for the Spanish phrase “propiedad horizontal,” or horizontal property in English] is perhaps the most intellectually underestimated architectural program in Argentina, an uncanny combination of both economical speculation driven by private developers and construction companies, and the constraints of an over-subdivided urban grid that provides very narrow plots for actual interventions. A major percentage of the city has been, and continues to be, built according to a typology that celebrates homogeneity and monotony.[1]

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Public Space Considerations in Pandemic NYC 2020

Julia Nevarez

The deep-seated global transformation currently underway has challenged assumed notions of the relationships between people and their environments. Urban in character and based on everyday life observations and visual documentation, the images in this essay speak about the triggers of this transformation in New York City: namely the pandemic and social movements in 2020 after the lockdown was lifted. Taken close to the one-year anniversary, from this temporal vantage point these images are illustrative, not in a comprehensive way, but as a snapshot of the awakening to economic stress, psychological and cultural shock, and social justice. Overarching in tone and impact, this selection points at the complexity of a reckoning with established patterns, in many instances forced and prompted by the cultural transformation provoked by the pandemic and its concomitant repercussions, collectively phased.

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Fai Chi Kei Public Housing

LBA | Architecture & Planning

Architects: LBA Architecture
Location: Macao, China
Area: 7.000 m2
Year: 2013

The Fai Chi Kei social housing project is an investigation of the role of a single building in the broader context of a high-density city, of the role of public space within the plot, and the role of the common areas in the overall economy of the project. It is an exercise in the orderly stacking of over 700 apartments and the definition of a vertical neighborhood.

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San José Station: New Hub for Cultural and Economic Activity

FRPO

Architects: FRPO
Location: Toluca, Mexico
Area: 6.300 m2
Year: 2020
Photography: LGM Studio

The complex is located at the northern end of Avenida Juárez, which links the historic district with the university area. This new construction arises as an opportunity to concentrate the dispersed activity around this area and to create a new hub for cultural and economic activity, both at the local and metropolitan level.

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Gonsi Sòcrates Building: Embracing Diversity of Purposes

Picharchitects

Architects: Picharachitects
Location: Viladecans, Spain
Area: 6.864,95 m2
Year: 2020
Photography: Aldo Amoretti

This new mixed-use building is located in the Parc d’Activitats de Viladecans. The aim of this project is to build a new building that offers multipurpose spaces for rent, with the ability to embrace the diversity of purposes that were planned. These are complemented by common areas that interact, including parking lots and other services.

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The Postlunar Imaginary through Inflatable Architecture

Katarzyna Balug

This essay is an excerpt of New Geographies 11: Extraterrestrial by Jeffrey S. Nesbit and Guy Trangoš.

The membrane of the [inflatable] structure becomes an extension of one’s skin, seen from inside the body, as it indents, sweats and changes shape, as the person inside moves over and through various locations. . . . We are all part of an energy continuum throughout the universe. . . .Understanding of energy processes is reaching the point where the wave emissions of the body and brain can be registered and measured, opening up the possibility of ultimate environmental control. . . . We are not alienated by technological hardware, but freed by technological forecasting, control and simulation of the elements. —Graham Stevens, “Pneumatics and Atmospheres,” Architectural Design

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Moving in Nairobi: Matatus

Civic Data Design Lab

This is the second in a series of articles which explores the complexities of moving in Nairobi through the eyes of four commuters as they walk, ride motorcycles (boda boda), take buses (matatu), and hire Ubers from the wealthy neighborhoods adjacent to the United Nations to the low-income communities in the city center. Three and a half million people move through this East African capital every day, and the lack of coordinated transportation planning often causes the city to grind to a halt. Our second story is about Kevin Karani, the conductor of the famous Mad Cow matatu.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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Pleat: Textile Design

Leanne Zilka

This essay is an excerpt of Floppy Logic by Leanne Zilka, published by Actar Publishers.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Gender & Public Space

Inés Sánchez de Madariaga

This is a podcast from urbanNext talks, 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.

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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.

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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.

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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]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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, Lluc Miralles, Baku Akazawa, Álvaro Valdecantos and Chopo.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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”.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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’.

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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.

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Le Monde Group HQ: Generous Respite in the City

Snøhetta

Architects: Snøhetta
Location: Paris, France
Year: 2020
Photography: Jared Chulski and Ludwig Favre

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”.

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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”.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Streets and Gender

Aruna Sankaranarayanan

Map Streets and Gender at Mapbox
Statistic by NamSor

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.

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