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Together! The New Architecture of the Collective
Read more.Housing is a scarce resource – that is something that has become increasingly clear in the last few years. As real estate prices in big cities continue to skyrocket, conventional ideas of housing development are proving increasingly unable to meet existing demands. In reaction to these challenges, a quiet revolution in contemporary architecture has been slowly brewing: the act of building and inhabiting homes collectively. Together! The New Architecture of the Collective is the first exhibition to treat this theme as a global phenomenon and present it in a spatial, experiential manner.
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NEVER DEMOLISH IN GELLERUP MUSEUM, AARHUS
Read more.The second venue of the exhibition Never Demolish, a space inside Gellerup Museum aims to view the potential of the transformation of Cité Grand Parc in a wider context by placing the exhibition in a similar surrounding to the one in Bordeaux: Gellerup, site of the largest modernist housing development in Denmark.
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NEVER DEMOLISH
Read more.In the 1960s and 1970s, large-scale housing complexes were built all over the world as a bold solution to satisfy the need for housing. Five decades later they are largely considered as ideologically outdated, urbanistically failed, and ripe for demolition. Against this backdrop Never Demolish claims that these projects can have a second life that's better than their first, through sensible renovation – enlarging the spaces and improving living standards. The exhibition features the spectacular transformation of 530 dwellings across three high-rise buildings of the Cité du Grand Parc in Bordea
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Flussbad Talks
Read more.Believe it or not, it does get really hot in Berlin in the summer. And the swimming pools get more than crowded. Wouldn't it be great to have a refreshing quick dip right in the city centre, next to the Museum Island, in the Spree? But how would that be possible whatsoever? The project “Flussbad Berlin,” initially developed by realities:united in 2012, calls for a radical approach towards historical urban spaces and a re-appropriation of public space that goes well off beyond the usual notions of sustainability...
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Architecture in Migration
Read more.What are the cultural effects of migration on architecture? The global movement of large masses of people who have given up or lost their home fundementally challenges the architectural notion of place – what used to be a permanent reference for the migrant turns into a momentary station on a longer journey...
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Treasures in Disguise
Read more.The Montenegro Pavilion at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale presents four examples of late-modernist architecture that were built in Montenegro between 1960 and 1986. When these buildings were first constructed, they radiated their builders’ enthusiasm and confidence about the new society they were building. Only a few decades later, these buildings embody the complete opposite: poorly used (if at all) and maintained (if ever completed), they are a testament to the failure of modernism. Nobody seems to be able to recognize any value in them; hence, their fate seems sealed...
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Druot, Lacaton & Vassal — Tour Bois le Prêtre
Read more.“You don’t really gain anything by demolishing an edifice and rebuilding it in the same place with a contemporary look.” Devoted to that principle, French architects Frédéric Druot, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal transformed a typical 1960's high-rise in the northern suburbs of Paris into a new residential building in 2001. An exhibition on the project curated by Ilka and Andreas Ruby with Something Fantastic was held in three different venues, and it provided its visitors insight into one the most successful renovation practices of the recent years...
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MACHEN! lecture series
Read more.Walls cast out of adobe and lightweight concrete; ceilings crafted using bamboo and wood; a reed-based filtration system capable of transforming the River Spree into a swimming pool: the exhibition MACHEN! presented six projects that conceive of sustainability not as a mere technological embellishment, but as a key design principle. The parallel MACHEN! lecture series gave the audience the chance to gain insight of these projects firsthand, as the creators got to present and discuss on their awarded work in three sessions...
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MACHEN! exhibition
Read more.Initially launched as a positive desideratum for building, the concept of sustainability has over time become increasingly problematic. Few projects today can dispense with the “s” word, or resist the temptation to obscure the dirty little secrets of construction with a halo of ecological benevolence. Thanks to greenwashing, deceptive marketing, and whitewashed statistics, the word sustainability amounts to little more than a PR line, its meaning dissolved like an effervescent tablet in a water glass...
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BKULT
Read more.BKULT initiiert Debatten zur Gebauten Umwelt. Dazu stellt die Redaktion im Zweiwochenrhythmus eine Frage, die sich mit den Bedingungen unserer gebauten Umwelt auseinandersetzt, zur Diskussion und lädt Gäste ein, zu dieser Frage pro oder contra Stellung zu nehmen. Darunter sind neben Architekten auch Journalisten, Soziologen, Schriftsteller, Philosophen und Personen des öffentlichen Lebens...
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min to max
Read more.As cost of living increases in Berlin, and in other cities around the world, demand for affordable housing becomes even more pressing. In search of new strategies for housing, Min to Max revisits a crucial development of early Modernism: the Minimum Subsistence Dwelling (Die Wohnung für das Existenzminimum). Formulated at the 2nd CIAM conference, held in Frankfurt in 1929, this doctrine intended to improve living conditions for the working poor by establishing a minimum standard necessary for dignified living...
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Not More Not Less
Read more.With regard to its immanent powers, architecture today seems to be both under-challenged and over-charged at the same time. This biomorphic paradigm has reduced architecture’s potential to just dealing with issues concerning geometry, form-making, and manufacturing, whilst depriving it of any political impact. On the other hand, there is a programmatic notion of practice which reduces architecture to a predominantly political project, ignoring the fact that a building must eventually embody its contents through its tectonic and formal definition...
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Endless Bauhaus
Read more.Has the Bauhaus already become a historical entity of the past or does it still have a contemporary presence? Which of its original intentions and ambitions have survived and can be tied in with the present? Which of its ideas seem unrealizable today? Is there anything genuinely owed to the Bauhaus? Has its general claim and aspiration for a unity of the creative forces in the arts and crafts, science and technology become anachronistic today – or do we need such goals more than ever in view of increasingly diversified and specialized societies? ...
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Contemporary Architecture
Read more.The installation “Contemporary Architecture,” by realities:united at archcouture in Halle, Germany is a piece of subtle transfiguration. Tim and Jan Edler of realities:united, through the manipulation of standard light fixtures, made legible a quality usually invisible in architecture: time...
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Urban Prototyping
Read more.As there is no normative concept of city anymore, there is no normative concept of city-planning either. On the one hand, we see a landslide victory of the masterplan particularly in Asia with its seemingly unstoppable demand for instant cities to be planned and built from scratch in periods of 5-10 years. On the other hand, the masterplan easily finds its limits in situations where the city is essentially built already, yet still needs to be able to change and adapt to contemporary developments - such as in most saturated urban environments in Europe, but part of Asia too...
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Appropriate Design!
Read more.Taking up the topic “identity” from The Design Annual 2007, the exhibition “Appropriate Design!” asks about the identity of design. How does design become what it is? And how does it produce its identity? If you understand identity as that aspect that makes a thing or person special and distinguishes it from others identity is not a static property but a process. After all we do not only derive identity from ourselves but produce it in exchange with our changing environment...
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Urban Moods
Read more.The notion of "urban" is arguably one of the hot keys of contemporary culture. It’s become the synonym of cool and serves as Zeitgeist indicator of lifestyle, music, food, fashion and design. Yet precisely what urban means with regard to urbanism and the city has become increasingly vague. Depending on specific geographic, climatic, economic and cultural conditions, there are many, and often radically conflicting, implications of "urban" developments...
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Cross-Atmosphering
Read more."Cross-Atmosphering" presents a selection of works realized by the Slovenian architecture office Sadar Vuga Arhitekti. The title highlights a particular aspect of their work which opens up a new conceptual space for architecture beyond the established positions of the 1990s. Briefly, atmosphering means that a project’s atmosphere cannot be directly deducted from its program (a library with a librarykind-of-atmosphere). It comes into play rather from aside, subliminally manipulating the project just like the soundtrack of a movie completely conditions our perception of the image...