housing

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 […]
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: 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
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: Wishful Thinking

Housing is a Human Right

Following this year’s Habitat III, it is worth remembering that “Adequate shelter for all” was one of the two key issues of the previous Habitat conference in Istanbul. Ten years later we are looking at an even deeper housing crisis that does not only embrace homelessness and growing population of urban slums, but also growing […]
Article: Critical Imagination

An Old Way of Living, Yet Innovative

The Statement on the International Co-operative Identity ratified by the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) in 1995 voices that ‘Co-operatives are based on the values of self-sufficiency, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity’. Nearly 20 years later terms such as ‘self-sufficiency’ have acquired an extensive array of meanings, ranging from energy and food production to the advent […]