Community Lighting for the Urban Environment has set itself the goal of encouraging and challenging young designers such as students (University & Colleges) and emerging Professionals (<5 years in their profession) to develop innovative lighting concepts for interior and exterior spaces, stimulate challenging ideas and recognize the individuals creating those ideas. 

An international seminar and exhibitions on the experiments of design research in alternative contexts, it provides an exceptional opportunity to examine the potentials and limits of design research, a fundamental shift in contemporary architecture, tested against the hybrid conditions of practice. Speakers include Stephen Hodder, Francois Penz, Jeremy Till, Murray Fraser, Felipe Hernandez, Ingrid Schroder, Helen Castle, Pingping Dou, Andong Lu, Lu Feng, Ling Zhou, Hua Li, Wowo Ding, Chen Zhao. The seminar is accompanied by three exhibitions, featuring especially the outputs from the Investigate-It Workshop (2015 Nanjing, China) by ten leading young Chinese architects/scholars practicing their visions/methods/theories on a common site.

Dallas Architecture Forum, a non-profit organization for everyone interested in learning about and improving the architecture, design, landscape and urban fabric of the North Texas region is pleased to continue its 2015-16 Lecture Season with the outstanding architect Kevin McClurkan, Management Partner of Ennead Architects of New York City. McClurkan's many major projects include the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock; the Newseum adjacent to the US Capitol in Washington, DC; and The Standard hotel on the High Line Park in New York City. He will speak on Tuesday, November 3 at 7 p.m. in the Horchow Auditorium

The design media is little more than a sycophantic, vapid and naval gazing extension of the PR industry. Our monographs, magazines and museums feed a cycle of shallow celebratory hysterics with little to no investigative or critical practice. Awards programmes lurch between jacking off the already engorged egos of starchitects or chasing the virginal myth of untainted emerging designers preying simultaneously on the young's insecurity and the old's fear of death in the name of profit for disconnected share holders. Cosy relationships between judges and judged, editors and edited amount to mild corruption - unsubscribe now.

The story of the African built environment is often told through historical perspectives of colonization and political crises, emphasizing the difficulties that African people have faced. Economic perspectives such as poverty, development and globalization also create stereotypes of the continent. Often missing from these are the transformations in space that result from daily and repeated use. These transformations emerge from ideas exchanged between people and their movements through their neighborhoods, cities, regions and countries. The quality of spaces that we may find will paint a complex picture of Africa.

Community consultation is meaningless vacuous tick-box bullshit. It has become a decoy that developers deploy to shove unwanted projects down the throats of an unconsenting public. Its cringeworthy language of community empowerment is just thinly veiled power moves and lazy spin. The profession, the public, and the built environment would be better off without it.

Consultation Con is one in a series of debates rugby tackling six fundamental issues facing contemporary practice with a playful and combative format designed to ferment open and critical discussion. Framed by theatrically provocative opening gambits, a series of free debates will turn conventional consensus on its head.

We all assume that to quit architecture is to fail. Yet the vast majority of those who stick it out are sucked into a world of disempowered subservience to big business. Becoming an architect squanders the creativity and energy of those who are attracted to study architecture in the first place, robbing society and the individual of their potential. There is a better way. We should all quit architecture before it's too late.

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The Korean artists, MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho have teamed up with the design collective, Urban-Think Tank, based at ETH Zürich, to launch the newest version of the ongoing project, “News from Nowhere.” Past versions have appeared in documenta (13) in Kassel and the Sullivan Galleries of the School of the Art Institute in Chicago in 2013. The “News from Nowhere: Zürich Laboratory” establishes an interdisciplinary and participatory platform to discuss the urgent social, political and economic issues. Located in the Migros Museum for Gegenwartskunst, the “News from Nowhere” exhibition brings together artists, architects, designers, scientists, and documentarians in order to discuss issues facing contemporary society. 

In 2015 Critical Concrete was founded with the ambition of promoting a new model: the refurbishment of abandoned places for social housing and cultural initiatives through summer camp programs centered around sustainable architecture and art in context. In this sense, we want to conceptually reconnect the artist to the amateur and foster the sharing of skills and knowledge between experienced practitioners and surrounding communities, material reuse and sustainable, ecological constructions.

Come to the Table is an installation made of reconfigurable elements that serve as a platform for dialogue. The construct is a framework to engage local architects, artists and thinkers in questioning What is the State of the Art of Architecture Today? Confirmed Panelists include Penelope Dean (Associate Professor, UIC), Vedran Mimica (Associate Dean, IIT)
and Ben Nicholson (Professor, SAIC).