architecture

Publication
Letters to the Mayor: Rotterdam cover.

Letters to the Mayor: Rotterdam

Five manifestos by Rotterdam’s architects. Letters to the Mayor: Rotterdam publication emerged as a follow-up to the exhibition under the same title organized by Het Nieuwe Instituut in collaboration with the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. The publication includes five short manifestos on the most pressing issues for the city accompanied by […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

The Monument

Modes of urban authority traditionally seen to be wielded by the State, such as the production of public realms, provision of security, and administration of infrastructure, are now shifting into the hands of private corporations. In line with such erosion of state sovereignty is the emergence of a specific type of capsular urbanism – the […]
Research
Letters to the Mayor Rotterdam. Photo: Petra van der Ree. Courtesy of Nieuwe Instituut.

Letters to the Mayor: Rotterdam

Our Letter to the Mayor of Rotterdam. The exhibition ‘Letters to the Mayor: Rotterdam’ is a result of a collaboration on the theme of ‘City Forces’ between Het Nieuwe Instituut and Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. As a part of this project, 66 architects and urbanists wrote 46 letters to the Mayor […]
Article: Critical Imagination

Barbican on Solitude: a Story of Walking

‘You and one companion areaudience enough for each other,so are you for yourself.For you, let the crowd be one,and one be a crowd.’ Michel de Montaigne, On Solitude Walking is a verb that describes the body’s movement traversing a specific surface.1 It is a link between two points, a path related to a beginning and […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Ziggurat, East, Summer

Vacant spaces are often considered ownerless. Detroit’s Fisher Body Plant 21 has been abandoned for more than 30 years. When Scott Hocking constructed a ziggurat structure out of 6,201 wooden floor-blocks inside of it, it’s devalued and deteriorated state has been called into question. It seems to have awoken a desire to control that space. […]
Article: The Unmasters

The Unobvious Ways of City Making

ZUS merges the theoretical and practical aspects of what we today call city making, yet they are also a design office for architecture and urbanism. Together with ZUS principal, Kristian Koreman, we discussed the ways they combine the two, how it was to be at the forefront of emerging unsolicited architecture and what do they […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Vacant Lot

When a development plan for an empty plot of land is being drawn, the plot enters a state of limbo where it is not any more an open space but already a construction that is about to happen. Yto Barrada’s photo freezes this moment of anticipation, where all imaginable visions for the future are still […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Landscape with crane rooms and keg apartments

What does it mean to live together or in isolation and what extent of isolation renders a common future impossible? Both architecture and technology allow us to create and regulate the interfaces of interaction between each other and our surroundings. In this landscape, Aristide Antonas builds a post-apocalyptic vision where our minimal existence is focused […]
Article: Wishful Thinking
Alles ist Kontext - Davide Tomasso Ferrando

Alles ist Kontext

Iconic buildings come to define cities’ skylines, contribute to their branding, and function as landmarks and status symbols. But what if we remove them from their direct surrounding? It is worth questioning whether the same buildings could maintain equal status in a meadow. Would they still operate as objects of admiration, when the hustle of […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

An unexpected breakdown of the advertising market

A contemporary horror vacui is occupying every available surface of our cities. Times Square is the symbol of an urban space becoming iconic precisely because the presence of advertisements has been elevated into an attraction in itself. The identity of the space is deeply dependent and affected by the content of the blinking screens and […]
Article: Critical Imagination

The City as Advertising

Anyone interested in getting a first-hand experience of the dynamics behind the transformation of global cities, should pay a visit to one of the biggest real estate exhibitions in the world – the MIPIM in Cannes. Every year, this event gathers ‘the most influential international property players’ for four days of ‘networking, learning and transaction’, […]
Article: Wishful Thinking
The White House by Ryan Mendoza

The White House

Ten years after the onset of the housing crisis, Detroit is still afflicted with emptiness and blight that it left behind. Ryan Mendoza preserved this part of American history by bringing an abandoned single family house around the world. What if we could make places so telling about the inglorious urban histories more prominent? Should […]
Article: The Unmasters

Is Fair Building Possible?

During the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale, entitled ‘Reporting from the Front’, Dominika Janicka in cooperation with Martyna Janicka and Michal Gdak curated the exhibition ‘Fair Building’ at the Polish Pavilion, taking a close look at the ways in which architecture is made and the rather questionable conditions in which the construction industry operates. – Read our […]
Publication

Archifutures: The Studio

The Studio is the second book in the Archifutures series conceived by dpr-barcelona and &beyond collective for The Future Architecture Platform. This volume’s focus is on cutting-edge thinking and wider theoretical questions and themes that underpin the series, from reflections upon what our ideas of the “future” really mean to the changing role of the architecture profession as a whole.
Article: Wishful Thinking

Memory 02

Places often play an important role in shaping our memories. In a similar but reverse logic, spots that don’t exist in our memories seem not to exist at all. Forgotten spaces, whereabouts nobody visits and hidden dark corners fill our cities creating gaps that are in fact only mentally inexistent. In this series of sculptures […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Risk Theme Park

Playgrounds are terribly dangerous places. As a child, you might fall down, scratch your knees, break an arm and you will definitely get dirty. This supervised exposure to danger is considered necessary for the healthy development of a child, but as we grow older we become more risk averse, both individually and as a society. […]
Article: Critical Imagination

Seizing the means of rendering

There is a history of the future written in renderings; images of fantasy assembled as marketing, escapism and policy toolkits. Images of ‘the’ future hold a powerful grasp over the things we orient towards as we innovate and disrupt our way to a receding hyper-real horizon.1 For example, the relationship between science fiction and technological […]
Article: Critical Imagination

Call to Action – On How the Political Potential of Architecture can Give Power to a Marginalized Community

With the unstable political ground in recent years, the subject of architecture in the political setting has suddenly gained new interest worldwide. As a response to the post-2008 financial recession and its inevitable repercussions within the built environment, the prevailing doctrine of corporate ‘iconic’ architectural production is now being greatly challenged by the daring alternatives […]
Article: Wishful Thinking
Xavier Delory - Pèlerinage sur la Modernité

In a state of decay

Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye embodied the modernist utopia of the Machine for Living. The beginning of the last century was marked by optimism for the future and the intention to shape the world according to everybody’s needs. From that utopian vision about living, Taylorism survived while humanism seems to have been left behind. What happens […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Treasure Island

Inspired by freeports where collectors store valuable artworks without paying taxes, Skye Yuxi Sun imagined a series of repository private islands in the River Thames. She pictured a place where the future extra-rich would  store, what could be the ultimate symbol of total triumph over life, death and nature – resurrected extinct animals. Even the […]