In the years to come, might the best employers encourage women to work longer by offering them the means to unlimited fertility in the form of a golden orb spider farm from which to harvest silk for their luxury spare womb?
Category Archive: architecture
Designers and architects have to make decisions regarding color every day. But how does one find the necessary inspiration? The appropriate color? How do other designers and artists deal with the issue? With “Chroma,” the Greek word for color, as its title, this illustrated book provides answers to these questions and makes it clear that color is much more than mere decoration – it is one of the central problems of creative work
Each of the winning projects for Vardø, a city swept in darkness 2 months of the year, is fascinating in its own way. Taken together they form a truly thought-provoking perspective on what young architects can bring to local urban challenges
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Interactive Architecture includes contributions from the worlds of architecture, industrial design, computer programming, engineering, and physical computing. The book examines the vanguard movement from all sides, including its sociological and psychological implications as well as its potentially beneficial environmental impact
The exhibition explores the key role that bartering is fulfilling in developing countries. This kind of informal economy is not only often more important than the official economy, but its importance will increase dramatically in the coming years as the cities in poor countries undergo explosive population growth. Reciprocity examines how this system of barter and returning of favors affects the infrastructure and vitality of Jakarta where a large majority of the population receives its wages in kind, and creates its own alternative chain of supply and demand
Refuge – Architectural Propositions for Unbound Spaces explores the causes and spatial impact of migration through voluntary or involuntary “refugees” who are transforming cities around the globe. Individuals or groups are elegantly or forcefully encapsulated from within the context of the city and society. Refuge produces an ever more atomized urban tissue where the “camp” has become both spatial paradigm and everyday reality, be it in the form of a gated community, slum, or humanitarian refugee camp
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It seems that, given a choice, most Americans choose to live in a homogenous community over an heterogenous one. However, the suburban landscape of semi-public spaces that exist in between these homogenous communities reveal, here and there, what Interboro calls “spaces of encounter” where diverse social and ethnic groups coexist, interact and generate complex relationships and networks
Whether they take the Skyscraper Index seriously or not, people agree that Architecture is conditioned by the economical climate. Architectural projects were the first casualties of the current financial crash, and architects, along with bankers, were the first who suffered collective layoffs. Rien ne va Plus, an exhibition taking place at Bureau Europa in Maastricht, delves into the economic crisis and its intricate relation with architecture
I first thought Princen’s photograph was fake. How could this be real? Looking online for the location of the photo, Mokattam, i discovered the image is authentic. It’s a suburb of Cairo, called Garbage City. A community of mainly Coptic Christians were allowed to collect and dispose of Cairo’s waste by feeding it to their pigs
Like paper projects designed in the absence of “real” architecture, installations offer architects another way to engage in issues critical to their practice. Direct experimentation with architecture’s material and social dimensions engages the public around issues in the built environment that concern them and expands the ways that architecture can participate in and impact people’s everyday lives
Digital Fabrications explores the methods architects use to calibrate digital designs with physical forms. The book is organized according to five types of digital fabrication techniques: tessellating, sectioning, folding, contouring, and forming. Projects are shown both in their finished forms and in working drawings, templates, and prototypes, allowing the reader to watch the process of each fantastic construction unfold
Volume 20 is dedicated to the art of storytelling. It presents the storylines of current events and architecture to show that while the truth is important, so is the ability of fiction to elevate fact. Perhaps the best way to understand our era is through narratives that distort, pervert and animate reality?
This volume includes a monumental stash of documentary photographs, ephemera, documents, transcripts and original writings on all things related to the oil crisis–from Jimmy Carter to underground utopias. Reproductions cover everything from impossible traffic jams leading up to empty gas stations to board games with names like Energy Quest and Petrol
Directly influenced by the 50s and ’60s experiments, ExtraRoom puts the sensory deprivation practice in a near futuristic scenario, when mind reading technologies are in common use and thoughts are not private anymore
Postopolis Day 5 was the day i realized once more that many people in the audience should have been on the programme too. It was the day i fell in love with stripped trousers and the day i decided all those hours spent on the roof of The Standard had not been that cold after all
Notes from the talk given by Benjamin Ball from Ball-Nogues Studio, the wonder boys whose temporary installations explore the crossroads between art, architecture and design
Second day of the blogathon in Los Angeles. I’ve lost my notes and my memory is not that great. Still, here’s for you a couple of architecture wonders, a strange floating landscape that makes pollution glow, and a project to turn America into a commune
Highlights of Day one includes postborder city, gardening instead of mowing the lawn, temperature architecture, adventures in Kazakhstan and live interviews. Do not forget to bring on the blankets tonight. It’s freezing up there on the roof top
Join us in Los Angeles for a series of discussions, interviews, slideshows, panels, talks, and presentations about architecture, landscape, urbanism, art and space
Together with a team of 14 people and the help of a whole range of experts, Cesar Harada is currently busy developing the Open Sailing project, a floating architecture that evolves like a living organism, a laboratory for techno-social experiments
Peter Bialobrzeski’s photographies attests men’s desire to built themselves a place they can call home, even from the garbage thrown away by civilization
Postopolis is a 5-day blogathon with discussions, interviews, panels, slideshows, films and parties designed to push the architecture, urbanism and landscape conversation from virtual to reality. It’s hosted by bloggers which means that the event will also be an opportunity to reflect on how blogs participate, and sometimes even redefine and lead the architectural discourse
For the 2009 edition of its festival, Radiator put the emphasis on the theme of the urban networked environment and its effect on our day to day lives. The organizers commissioned artists to develop projects that investigate and challenge the dominant forces at work in an increasingly hybrid and ever-changing urban environment
A spectacular exhibition currently on view at the CCCB in Barcelona gives an overview of the recent processes of construction and implacable deconstruction that China is undergoing. The contemporary urban design, architecture, landscape and infrastructure of various Chinese cities is analyzed in the light of the country history and culture
Asking for your help in collecting videos, information, links, online essays, artistic experiences, etc about the role of architecture, urbanism and technologies in the conflict Palestine/Israel
An exhibition in Paris brings together works by teachers and students of the celebrated Dusseldorf School: Bernd and Hiller Becher, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and many others
This provocative collection of photography, essays, and maps looks at infrastructure as a way of mapping our place in the city and affecting change through architecture
Recognizing that Israeli colonies and military bases are excruciating instruments of domination, the project assumes that a viable approach to the issue of their appropriation is to be found not only in the professional language of architecture and planning but rather in inaugurating an “arena of speculation” that incorporates varied cultural and political perspectives through the participation of a multiplicity of individuals and organizations. How could the architecture of Israel domination be reused, recycled or re-inhabited by Palestinians?
The exhibition assumes that innovation of the architecture of dwelling can only be based on the interaction between ‘container’ and ‘contained’, that is, between architectural invention and changes in living ideals
The latest issues of two of the best magazines you could get your hands on, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest and Volume, are out and i beg you not to bypass them
El Bòlit, a brand new Contemporary Art Center located in Girona (SP), is still waiting for a proper building, but that doesn’t prevent the center to have strong personality, dauntless attitude and a very promising exhibition programme
The exhibition, currently running at the Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel, explores the little-known architecture of the post-socialist period and the result of unregulated, uncontrolled urban planning in the countries of South Eastern Europe
Looking beyond the form given to buildings by architects, the curators of the pavilion question the durability of edifices. Their project tries and forecasts how the passage of time, the changes in social or environmental conditions will affect and slowly modify buildings
A new generation of architects in a country whose building rhythm over the last decade has been unstoppable, as China’s architects are making their mark within the backdrop of an avalanche of world class architecture stars
Vicente Guallart’s contribution to the biennale is a research project that explores the potential of information technology to reorganize the habitability of the world. From a single small object to the planet itself
In the view of the Curator, ‘architecture is not building. Architecture must go beyond buildings because buildings are not enough. They are big and wasteful accumulations of natural resources that are difficult to adapt to the continually changing conditions of modern life.’
The artist of the paraSITE plastic shelter revisits the sad fate of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project, evoking the end of segregation in Missouri, the Twin Tower and the failure of an utopian urban community
Sleep without Architects, a section of the exhibition, presents several examples that escape the clutches of architecture. By focusing on the position of the homeless and in other ways, this chapter raises the role of architecture and the way in which it organises sleep for discussion
What if you built the whole mass of western europe in 20 years? What if 400 million farmers then moved in? What would it look like? How would it work? Would you be able to go to sleep at night? And if you did, would you dream of somewhere else …?
In big cities, groups of people decide to occupy then inhabit buildings which were left unfinished and abandoned because of economic crisis, ups and downs of the estate market, war, cataclysm, etc, giving way to an unexpected collaboration between construction industry and invention prompted by necessity