The Splash: A Functional Artwork

Architects: Arttenders and Cindy Bakker
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Year: 2021

WHAT?! An outdoor pool? In Hart van Zuid, at the Annie M.G. Schmidt square in Rotterdam, a functional artwork has been launched in the shape of… a swimming pool – just before the start of the Eurovision Song Contest. Not a real one of course, but an artistic interpretation that serves as an interactive meeting place for the inhabitants of Rotterdam and visitors. The Splash, a collaboration between Arttenders and artist Cindy Bakker, is inspired by the natural appeal of paddling pools. It is a place where functionality, art, spatial development, and policy solutions come together through social design.

Bottom-up: Towards a New Urban Spontaneity Starting from the Oostewold Model

Flavio Martella

The reintroduction of spontaneity in contemporary architectural processes can represent a new form of interaction to create a new urban environment and lead to a rebalancing of internal hierarchies. The city of Almere is a pioneer in this field, especially in the experimental district of Oostewold, where it seeks to promote a new system of building the city based entirely on bottom-up processes. This initiative radically reverses the consolidated urban development processes, starting the creation of relationships based on a contemporary understanding of the city. It is an understanding that includes the citizen in the construction of the city, integrating the participatory process model with that of the construction of the city itself. As such, it aims to arrive at the creation of a more vital, inclusive neighborhood in which the inhabitants not only feel belonging but give the city its real identity – a new way to build the city.

Co-ownership of Action: Trajectories of Elements

Kozo Kadowaki

Curator: Kozo Kadowaki
Participants: Jo Nagasaka, Ryoko Iwase, Toshikatsu Kiuchi, Taichi Sunayama, Daisuke Motogi, Rikako Nagashima

Your actions are not yours alone. Any act, however trivial, sits atop an accumulation of countless acts that arose from your interactions with someone else. Therefore it can never be said that what you do belongs solely to you.

Immaterial Architecture: The Power of Walking

Francesco Careri

Interview filmed within the Series of Talks 'Variations on the City' of the 'Camera and City' exhibition held at CaixaForum Barcelona in collaboration with Centre Pompidou.
Interview by Marta Bugés.
Filmed by Chiara Cesareo.
Edited by Sara Traba.

urbanNext interviews Francesco Careri on immaterial architecture and walking as a way to explore it.

The Cybernetic Wilderness of Data Centres

Donal Lally

This essay is an excerpt of States of Entanglement: Data in the Irish Landscape by ANNEX. Published by Actar Publishers

The data centre is arguably the iconic architectural typology of the information age. Like a weed, it can exist in extreme environments, reproduces quickly, and can overrun delicate ecosystems. To date, its adaptability has been enabled by the extreme standardisation of its component parts. With advances in artificial intelligence enhancing this adaptability, we are now witnessing the data centre as catalyst for a new urban habitat. This article is about a cybernetic wilderness – dominated by data centres – that is present and growing on the edges of Dublin city; a wilderness where machines commune with machines and the human is pushed to the periphery.

The Lack of Spatial Data on the Economic Capacity of Places

Hyungmin Pai | Matteo Robiglio | Nina Rappaport

Excerpt of an urbanNext think tank held at the Torre dell'Arsenale in Venice, as an event alongside the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2018, for the Future Urban Legacy Lab (FULL), a research centre of the Politecnico di Torino.
Filmed and edited by Daniel Ruiz.

Hyungmin Pai, Matteo Robiglio and Nina Rappaport talk on the lack of spatial data on the economic capacity of places.