Browsing: Biennale

How and what can architects and urbanistst contribute to the way we live in cities? What is the Open City? How do people work, think, dream and act there? And why is it urgent to re-imagine the Open City?

These are just some of the questions that will confront the visitor to Open City: Designing Coexistence.

The 4th edition of the IABR will take place from 24 September 2009 until 10 January 2010 in Rotterdam and Amsterdam. You can find the program on the official site, including debates, lectures, and theater performances .

As one of the runners for the design and curatorial aspects of a pavilion during the past Venice Biennale, I was very intrigued on how each country will address the theme proposed by Betsky, as “Architecture Beyond Building” is such a powerful call, specially in times when architecture is being able to address problems beyond its traditional scope, after being apart for quite some time.

But sadly, most of the exhibitions were the total opposite. After seeing the pavilions, but most important, what was being exhibited at the pavilions, I think that the answers went on the opposite direction. On the -pessimistic- words of Amanda Baillieu “The Venice Biennale has become reflection of the state architecture is in”… a biennale by architects and for architects, with 0 relation to our society.

But among this panorama, there were a few exhibitions that were up to “architecture beyond building”. One of them was Into the Open: Positioning Practice, the US exhibition curated by William Menking, Aaron Levy, and Andrew Sturm. They selected 16 practices which are working very close to communities, creating new work in response to contemporary social conditions, expanding the conception of architectural practice. People who are answering the question we always ask on our interviews (“What is -or should be- the role of the architect in contemporary society?”) from a unique perspective.

And after this, the curators successfully raise the question: need the end product be a building? More importantly, they ask: need the end be a product?

This questions try to be answered on a video produced by SMAC, highlighting the work of Teddy Cruz, Laura Kurgen, and Rural Studio:

Cruz’s project, Radicalizing the Local: 60 Linear Miles of Transborder Urban Conflict maps the collision between wealth and poverty, the formal and informal city and many other disparities apparent along the 60 miles north and south of the Mexican border at Tijuana and San Diego. Kurgan organizes city data on poverty, infrastructure, criminal activity and prison displacement to ask: what if more resources were spent on investment in housing and infrastructure rather than sending people to prison? Rural Studio’s Animal Shelter is a project carried out by students earning their degrees by assisting the structural development of Hale County, Alabama.

Currently, the New School for Design is hosting the exhibition Into the Open: Positioning Practice until May 1st. You can see more info about that on our previous feature.

Parsons The New School for Design invites you to a conference held in conjunction with the New York presentation of Into the Open: Positioning Practice, the official U.S. Pavilion of the 11th Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. On view through May 1, the exhibition features work by a new wave of architect-activists who are reclaiming a role in shaping community and the built environment. These 16 architectural groups actively engage communities, responding to social and environmental issues, including shifting demographics, changing geo-political boundaries, uneven economic development, and the explosion of urban migration.

The conference on Friday, April 24 will bring together representatives of four of these architectural groups: Teddy Cruz, Deborah Gans, Laura Kurgan, and Rick Lowe, to discuss how the issues explored in the exhibition can translate into and transform contemporary architectural practice. Exhibition curators Aaron Levy (executive director, Slought Foundation) and Bill Menking (founder, The Architect’s Newspaper) will deliver the introduction. Each guest will speak for twenty minutes, followed by an informal conversation with the public triggered by agents provocateurs William Bevington, Jean Gardner, Robert Kirkbride, David J. Lewis, Lydia Matthews, Brian McGrath, Miodrag Mitrasinovic, Raoul Rickenberg, Bob Rubin, Grahame Shane, John Thackara, Sven Travis, Susan Yelavich, and Alfred Zollinger.

Into the Open: Positioning Practice is on view through May 1 in the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons. Hours are Monday-Friday, 10 a.m.-8 p.m. and Saturday -Sunday, noon-6 p.m. Admission is free.

For more information on the exhibition and conference, visit the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center website.

Postopolis! LA has come to an end (at least for 2009). Postopolis! was discussion, debate and reflection around Architecture and a great variety of related topics: Art, City, Technology, Geography, Visualization, etc., which merged into a multidisciplinary conversation broadcasted live by seven different blogs. It’s impossible to resume in a couple of paragraphs what this days in LA were without thinking we suffered a big overdose of information that we need to take the proper time to digest.

Trying to sort out some ideas, I think at least five topics defined these days for us.

The event for itself, that concentrated expositions and discussions about some very interesting and diverse topics. From talks about the city and security with people from the LA Police Department to understand how some cities are reformulating the relation between cities and their citizens through technology, thanks to Ben Cerveny’s exposition. Complete list of everyone who participated can be found here.

In these five days we had the opportunity to interview some of the best exposers of Contemporary Architecture based in LA. Yo-Ichiro Hakomori (wHY Architecture), Dwayne Oyler & Jenny Wu (Oyler Wu Collaborative), Whitney Sander (Sander Architects), Sarah Johnston & Mark Lee (Johnston MarkLee) and Austin Kelly (XTEN Architecture), Eric Oweb Moss (Eric Owen Moss Architects), and some others we will introduce soon.

Of course, being in LA, we were forced to travel through the city and it’s renowned highways. We realized how hard it is to move without owning a vehicle. But we also got to know a friendly side of the city, with many interesting and different central places to visit.

Finally, a special mention for the place where Postopolis! was carried out: The Standard Hotel in Downtown LA, a great renovation of a 13 floor building by Konig Eizenberg Architecture, where it seems that everything was specially design for the hotel which has one of the most interesting rooftops of LA.

At the same time, Postopolis! was part of the LA Art Week, organized by the For Your Art foundation, so we were immersed in a great cultural environment. Finally, our most sincere thanks to everyone who made Postopolis! possible, specially to everyone who works at The Storefront for Art and Architecture (Joseph, Gaia, Cesar, José, Faris), For Your Art (Bettina, Devin, Julia, Melissa), to the folks at the Standard Hotel, each one of the curators: BLDGBLOG (Geoff), City of Sound (Dan), SubTopia (Bryan), Mudd Up! (Jayce a.k.a. dj/Rupture), We Make Money Not Art (Regina) and of course, every guest who gave life to the event. Thanks to all!

Images that try to resume these 5 days in LA, after the break. read more »

Into the Open: Positioning Practice is the official U.S. representation at the 11th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. The exhibition explores how architects, urban researchers, and community activists are meeting the challenges of creating new work in response to contemporary social conditions. The exhibition also addresses factors challenging traditional methods of architecture, such as shifting socio-cultural demographics, changing geo-political boundaries, uneven economic development, and the explosion of migration and urbanization. At the same time, it will advocate for an expanded conception of architectural practice and responsibility. The sixteen practitioners included, all of whom actively engage communities in their work, demonstrate multifaceted responses to social and environmental issues.

Into the Open: Positioning Practice is presented by Parsons The New School for Design, in collaboration with Slought Foundation and PARC Foundation, with media partner Architect’s Newspaper. The exhibition and related public programs are coordinated by Laetitia Wolff of futureflair, and director of strategic alliances at Parsons; with exhibition and graphic design by Ken Saylor and Project Projects.

For more information, fo to the official website of the exhibition, here.

Architect: Felipe Assadi / Assadi + Pulido
Location: Santiago, Chile
Collaborators: Pablo Casals, Francisco Duarte
Project year: 2008
Constructed Area: 400 sqm
Material: Scaffolding, Hunter Douglas aluzinc stripes, Wood
Photos: Felipe Assadi & Nicolás Saieh

read more »

The 11th Venice Biennale is just around the corner, starting on Sept 14th with a preview on Sept 11th-13th. I´m eager to see the pavillions and installations on the Biennale, specially because the title for this version is “Out There: Architecture Beyond Building” on which Aaron Betsky, the curator, says ” “will point the  way towards an architecture liberated from buildings to engage the central issues of our society; instead of the tombs of architecture, which is to say buildings, it will present site specific installations, visions and experiments that help us figure out, make sense of and feel at home in our modern world”.

One of this installations is “AirXY: From Inmaterial to Rematerial” by M-A-D, an interdisciplinary design firm with primary expertise in branding and visual communications.  From their authors: he airXY screen is folded to seem as if it had burst out of the wall behind. as visitors approach they notice what appears to be a giant checkerboard with a vertical line scanning from left to right. suggesting the surface of an interface, a desktop and a machine simultaneously, on further observation, the visitors see that the composition is, in fact, charting the passing of time along an XY axis divided into 24×60 units. in addition to the vertical line and rectangular XY units, tiny green abstract icons are floating across the screen, looking like runes, contemporary urban signs or the graphic language of circuit diagrams”.

More pictures after the jump.

read more »