The Urban Conga has collaborated with HIVE Public Space and Long Island City Partnership on a new urban intervention titled "Ribbon", a vibrant and interactive installation for people to connect, share, and learn about each other's experiences in Long Island City, New York. Each unit includes kinetic pieces that rotate, reflecting the surrounding context and revealing different love notes written by locals to the city.
Andreas Ruby, Director of the Swiss Architecture Museum shares his thoughts on the wrapped Arc de Triomphe installation by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, in a 3 part essay, converting a monument glorifying war into a monument of decolonization. The temporary installation opened to the public on September 18, 2021, and will be dismantled starting October 3, 2021.
After several event cancellations due to the pandemic, Manhattan’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts complex have transformed their outdoor plaza into a green park and outdoor performance venue called The Green. As of May 10, the Restart Stages initiative will add fake grass across the 14,000-square-foot (1,300 sqm) Josie Robertson Plaza. The plaza, which was originally designed by Philip Johnson, Wallace K. Harrison, and Max Abramovitz, and renovated by award-winning architecture firm DS+R in 2010, will transform into a public urban space of gathering, leisure, and entertainment.
Edoardo Tresoldi has inaugurated a permanent installation on Reggio Calabria’s seafront, in Italy entitled Opera. Commissioned by the local Municipality and the Metropolitan City, the public art intervention “was created to celebrate the contemplative relationship between place and human beings through the language of classical architecture and the transparency of the Absent Matter”.
"Les Jumeaux" or The Twins is a new large-scale public urban intervention by French artist and designer Camille Walala in White City, West London. The project encompasses two pedestrian crossings and seven striking murals, created with geometric patterns and primary colors, Walala’s signature style. Moreover, Camille Walala also unveiled this month her East London intervention, a giant work of art aiming to breathe new life into the street and boost the local economy, entitled "Walala Parade".
The concept of Design for Disassembly (DfD for short) gained increasing traction in recent years, as it addresses the growing concern around the high consumption of resources and low recycling rate within the construction industry. The following article details on the method and features guidelines for a design process that facilitates the dismantlement of future buildings, with the scope of providing a better understanding of this principle within the broader framework of the current practice and circular economy.
There is a slide I like to show at the beginning of the architecture courses I teach that provides an overview of the last hundred years or so in design and technology. In the left column, a car from the beginning of the 20th Century (a Ford Model T) is poised over a contemporary car (a Tesla). The middle column contains a similar juxtaposition, showing a WWI-era biplane and a modern-day stealth fighter (an F-117A). In the right column, Walter Gropius’s 1926 Bauhaus Dessau building is seen next to an up-to-date urban mixed-use building. The punch line, of course, is that the two buildings—separated by roughly 100 years—look basically the same, whereas the cars and planes separated by the same timespan seem worlds apart. What is the reason for this?
Framlab, an innovation studio based in Bergen and New York City has created Glasir, a community-based system for urban farming. The proposed modular structure relies on aeroponic growth systems to provide local products.
Dedicated to love and diversity, the public art installation Heart Squared has just opened to the public. In its 12th edition, the Times Square Valentine Heart Design Competition curated by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum had selected the winning proposal of MODU, an architecture and design firm based in Brooklyn, and Eric Forman Studio.
It is an inevitable truth that the world population is growing exponentially. Higher numbers can only lead to a higher demand for resources, food, and housing. By the year 2100, the 7.6 billion people currently living on earth will reach, according to the UN, a whopping 11.2 billion.
This increase can only mean that the need to accommodate these people will become an urgent priority, innovating and shifting from the household system that is present nowadays. Soon enough this will be a global pressing issue.
Created by Studio Studio Studio, the new interdisciplinary lab founded by Edoardo Tresoldi, Gharfa is a pavilion located in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The experimental installation is part of the temporary creative project Diriyah Oasis, designed and curated by Dubai-based studio Designlab Experience.
As a firm which has already won major awards, worked on culturally significant projects on a large scale, and generally achieved substantial success and recognition in just over 10 years, SO-IL seem to straddle a line between being an “emerging” and an “established” practice. Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu founded SO-IL (Solid Objectives-Idenburg Liu) in 2008 and have since gained a reputation for modern, clean-lined designs, but often with a unique material twist.
Constructed as part of Agrikultura—a triennial of public artworks and urban interventions in Malmö, Sweden—this installation, described by the designers a "maquette of a monument to the honeybee", is in fact home to an entire colony. It references—by design—the mysterious elements of 'bee orientation': verticality (gravity), geometry (the cell structure of the beehive), and the position of the sun relative to the hive. The project is, on the one hand, "a potential memorial for the bees" while, on the other, "a celebration of the sun on which all life depends."
__by_Camille_Walala__in_White_City_Place__London_2020_Photography_Charles_Emerson_HighRes_004.jpg?1597595156 "Les Jumeaux. Image Courtesy of Camille Walala")
__by_Camille_Walala__in_White_City_Place__London_2020_Photography_Charles_Emerson_HighRes_002.jpg?1597595028 "Les Jumeaux. Image Courtesy of Camille Walala")
