As the guest last week of Zurich University of the Arts I set the following task to a group of sixteen masters students: “Create the plan for a social harvest festival that will reconnect Zurich with its natural ecosystems and grassroots social innovators.”
The idea was to demonstrate, in practice, [continue …]
How best do you help a resilient economy emerge in a region that has one foot in ancient ways and traditions – its other in the world of global universities and nuclear power?
Left: “The Hill Farmer” by Bedwyr Williams. Right: a [continue …]
“Who needs oil when you have rain?” The ad for Landsvirkjun, Iceland’s national energy company, dominates this month’s Icelandair magazine. It sits alongside other ads that feature wild spaces, rugged outdoor clothing, and all-round natural purity. The message is not disguised: Iceland is blessed by massive amounts of clean energy.
The [continue …]
If you’re in Paris before 24 July a spectacular exhibition called The Fertile City: Towards An Urban Nature is well worth a visit.
The show’s OTT poster does not over-promise. The exhibition explores nature in the city from multiple perspectives: historical, social, cultural, botanical, ecological. Two [continue …]
The skyline of Pittsburgh, once America’s Steel City, is now dominated by towers belonging to two local giants of ‘Eds & Meds’ – education, and healthcare. Does this mean the city has successfully grown itself a resilient new economy?
If architectural [continue …]
Twelve-year-old childen in Rotterdam have never known a time when their city was not being rebuilt around them. And because they know no better, or at least no different, they are not much daunted by the huge scale of the projects [continue …]
Up to 1,500 litres of that water are needed to grow enough biofuels to move one car ten kilometres. 2,000 litres are needed a day to feed each one of us. It takes 140 litres of water to grow enough [continue …]
An interesting rebound effect of public spending cuts in the UK is that the UK Design Council and CABE (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment) are to merge. The move brings UK policy for design, architecture and public space together in a single [continue …]
I was snooty in suggesting, in my comment on Doug Rushkoff’s new book, that he should get out of the city more.
But if I’m an armchair tree-hugger, Stephanie Smith is the real thing.
Two months ago, this former architect abandoned her Los Angeles life for [continue …]
This blog first proposed the replacement of trophy buildings with street art back in 2002.
In a piece called “Trophy buildings are over” we argued that because they are conceived as spectacles, so-called signature architecture would be subject to the law [continue …]
[Summer re-run; first published last year]
The atmosphere at last week’s Megacities conference in Delft was subdued. I don’t suppose my own talk, which ploughed a similar path to the Debt, Diesel and Dämmerung narrative I mentioned yesterday, helped lighten the mood very [continue …]
My toughest work this year has been serving on the jury of this year’s Buckminster Fuller Challenge. Our work has been demanding because we’ve had to assess high quality entries that range from the use of social media to organize urban food systems, and transforming Chicago into a [continue …]
The stated ambition of Cornwall, in the the far south west of England, is to become a “green peninsular”. It’s an evocative concept, but people there interpret the word “green” in different ways.
For example, although Cornwall aspires to become a “knowledge economy” it is more of a tourism economy at [continue …]
It has always been a point of pride at Doors of Perception events to curate the bookstore as carefully as we curate the speakers. We do this because when a conference theme cuts across disciplines – as ours do – no single bookseller is likely [continue …]
As you may have read in this month’s newsletter, I’m a new fan of Spacing. This excellent new-paradigm magazine and multi-city blog (Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Atlantic, including Halifax) features daily dispatches from the streets of these places on “just about anything that involves the [continue …]
At a conference in St Etienne next month ‘Cities of Design’ including Minneapolis, Montreal, Quebec, Toronto, Seoul, Portland, Eindhoven and Dortmund will all be represented. Personally I think either that all cities should be design cities – or perhaps that none should if the [continue …]
Doors of Perception helped to organize Four Days Halifax – a time-compressed mini-festival whose aim was to help the city get its hands muddy in a green economy
Our starting point in Four Days was that many elements [continue …]
Fui So means “ability to rejuvenate” in Mandarin. I learned this from Wong Lai-yin, a Chinese participant in last week’s Transition Towns event in London.
[continue …]
Conditions for my talk on Monday were sub-optimal: there was a typhoon *and* a high-energy dispute between students and The New School, parts of which were occupied recently. [Fond memories: I, too, was a revolting student once; during one sit-in I became a dab [continue …]
This blog first proposed the replacement of trophy buildings with street art back in 2002. In a piece called “Trophy buildings are over” we argued that because they are conceived as spectacles, so-called signature architecture would be subject to [continue …]
This morning I received an interesting email from Transition Towns. “We recognise that out in transition land there’s a great diversity of web tools and processes currently in use and under development” the mail begins; “some of these will be resilient and adaptable enough to support the changing needs of [continue …]
Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, asked 10 architects to project 20 years into the future and dream up “the world’s most sustainable post-Kyoto metropolis”.
[Project for a bigger and greener Paris by French architect Roland Castro]
Architects are usually [continue …]
“What is a sustainable lifestyle? What will our daily lives become if we agree to change some of our routines? How do we reduce our environmental impact without lowering our living standards?” A new book, edited by Francois Jegou and Ezio Manzini (with a chapter [continue …]
The criminal over-development of the Canary Islands – and the loss of biodiversity and social capital that followed – was financed by the same banks and speculators that our governments are now trying so desperately to save.
Given the desecration of these [continue …]
An interesting event for our London readers: “No understanding between the brain and the hands” is a collaboration between Pocko photographers and illustrators. Inspired by Metropolis, the 1927 silent science fiction film, created by the famed director Fritz Lang, five photographers have collaborated with nine [continue …]
The Sugoroku project, designed by Catherine Beaugrand for the Saint Etienne Biennial, took a fresh look at ways media games might connect people with neglected assets of a city – physical, social, biological.
In recent times, media artists have expored numerous [continue …]
City Eco Lab was a two-week festival of projects that took place in November in St Etienne, France. These 50-plus projects involved productive urban gardens; low energy food storage; communal composting solutions; re-discovery of hidden rivers; neighbourhood energy dashboards; de-motorised courier services; and a [continue …]
Shown below, Exyzt’s hang-out that they built for themselves at City Eco Lab. Not very Design – but the coolest corner in the shed.
Exyzt next project, which is called Monumento that they’re about [continue …]
With allotment waiting lists in the UK massively over-subscribed, and people right across the country keen to grow their own fruit and vegetables, a new project called Landshare aims to make British land more productive and fresh local produce more accessible to [continue …]
Like all that soil? One of the key ideas in City Eco Lab is to make eco-systems, earth and water the basis of re-imagining the city – not “the economy”.
The lower photograph shows jonggi, or [continue …]
The received wisdom for a decade has been that the world will continue to urbanise, and that power and money will continue to congregate in a handful of megacity regions. The Megacities Congress in November begins to question these once-comfortable certainties. [continue …]
…only we’re pouring earth not concrete See you in our little shed!
This is what it looked like when three of the best critics in the Netherlands set out to write an online book in five days at the Venice Architecture Biennial (which was two weeks ago),
Did I say concentrated?
Inspired by the recent burning-down of the Faculty [continue …]
I would like to think that the theme of this year’s Architecture Biennial in Venice – “Out There: Architecture Beyond Building” – was inspired by my book Beyond The Object. But as it was published back in 1987, I’m not going to demand [continue …]
A short final reminder that the Italian edition of In The Bubble will be launched at the Architecture Biennale in Venice this coming Saturday (13 September). The book moment on Saturday follows my lecture at the Dutch Pavilion in the Gardini which is scheduled for 15h-16h. My [continue …]
This two-week-long market of sustainability projects opens in 70 days from now in St Etienne, France. We have set out to design a scalable, reproducable event, at the level of a city-region, that will materially accelerate its transition to sustainability. As with Dott07 in North East England, citizen [continue …]
Next week the team at St Etienne City of Design returns from its vacation ready for a massive final push towards 15 November. That’s the date when when their biennial opens, and Doors of Perception has to fill its 5,000 square metre shed with a [continue …]
My new mates at Exyzt have built and opened the new Southwark Lido as part of the London Architecture Festival. Exyzt and Gaelle Gabillet are the scenographer-builders of City Eco Lab with me in St Etienne in November. Do go and say [continue …]
The following is an interview with me and Sunil Abraham for this month’s Cluster magazine in a special issue published for the World Congress of Architecture which opens later this month in Torino.
Cluster: What role does design play when it comes to creating [continue …]
I know it’s like standing in front of a large orange oncoming train, but may I please say something about this huge book? It’s wrong in its basic assumption. The assumption (as it says in huge letters there on the cover) is that 75% [continue …]
Roam, meet, share, map. There’s only a week to go before a gorgeous array of teams assemble in Durham for Mapping The Necklace (5-7 May). One group is interested in mapping the most beautiful cows in the park. Other teams will do [continue …]
This was the most interesting exhibit for me at the Milan Furniture Fair. Hidden away in a small courtyard, “Aqva Garden” functions as a distributed rain collector and water storage system. Unlike conventional recycling systems, which tend to be hidden away in clunky boxes, Aqva [continue …]
The following is the text of my lecture at the Global Place conference in an unseasonably warm Ann Arbor, Michigan. (Joshua Kauffman has posted an excellent summary of the event here).
THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT
Some of you may know Oliver [continue …]
Ashoka Changemakers has teamed up with Habitat for Humanity to stage a competition, “How to Provide Affordable Housing”. Judges from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Habitat for Humanity, and the International Housing Coalition, will review entries and select finalists. A public [continue …]
In this new book Karrie Jacobs travels America in a “quest for a house to call home in the modern world”. It’s not a conventional architecture book; rather, it’s an account of a road trip Jacobs took in 2003 — over 14,000 miles — to meet with architects and builders [continue …]
Too much media coverage of architecture focuses on the banal excesses of Shanghai and Dubai. The more interesting story these days concerns marginal, residual and abandoned spaces left behind when industry disappears. A new publication, Talking Cities is all about “Guerilla Architectureâ€, “An-Aestheticsâ€, and “Architecture on the Edge’. Later [continue …]
“Steel City awakens a longing for for authenticity in of a world where networks and technologies are no longer palpable. Steel City is a place of physical presence, the presence of body, of the haptic, of patina and aging. Steel City can be touched and feltâ€. Thus, poetically, Professor [continue …]
Cluster is running a series of pieces on the spontaneous cities, favelas, bidonvilles and squatter cities that grow independently “creating their own networks without the help of traditional planning or design”. In the new issue Frederica Verona describes her visits to numerous dormitories, day centres, and soup kitchens in [continue …]
An intriguing story in next month’s Cluster magazine describes plans in China for the world’s first urban biomedical hub. Sascha Haselmayer, one of its advisors, writes that Fenglin Biomedical Centre will concentrate life science, medical care services, medical education, business incubation, and medical exhibitions, in the Xuhui district of [continue …]
AV Festival 06 is the UK’s newest, and largest international festival of digital arts, music, games, film & new media. With the theme of Life, it explores what happens as expectations rise that we might be able modify and improve our bodies and/or minds. More than 90 events will take [continue …]
JOHNTHACKARA designing for life
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