On April 15, 2010, President Barack Obama announced an ambitious strategy for expanding human presence out into the solar system. On the way to Mars, the nations of the world will demonstrate solution for living in deep space indefinitely, and for building on planets. The discovery of water on the moon fundamentally changes the practical value of our nearest neighbor. After learning about where it is and how it is concentrated, we can learn to collect and purify it. And then we can use it to support human life and for rocket propellant. Now is the time to re-think the moon as a destination for human enterprise.

Photo: NASA

What could be a better study model for renewable energy – thinking about how to build a self-sustaining city on the moon may help us break free of our dependence on fossil fuels here on Earth. How about the moon as a laboratory to prepare for exploring other planets and as a new tourist destination? SHIFTboston calls on all architects, artists, landscape architects, urban designers, engineers, and anyone else who would like to tackle the question: what if – what, when – these things happen on the moon?

This competition is intended to collect and inspire. Through sources such as blogs, editorials, advertising and exhibition, SHIFTboston will promote the most radical ideas gathered in this competition. The goal is to attract greater public interest in future possibilities for human expansion into the solar system, and in elements of self-sustaining cities of the future – efficient cities – that no longer rely on fossil fuel.

The honorary recipient will receive a cash prize and present at the SHIFTboston Moon Capital Forum celebration in Boston on Thursday, October 21, 2010. The winning entry will be displayed in a new online virtual moon tourism world, in addition to a post cards series and book. All eligible entries will be promoted on the SHIFTboston blog and website and will become part of the SHIFTboston Moon Capital Exhibition.

Submission deadline is September 3, 2010. Click here for more information about the Moon Capital Competition.

Exhibition at Architecture Center Amsterdam (ARCAM), 17 July – 11 September, 2010. Free entrance.

Last week the exhibition Fashion & Architecture kicked off with a good party at the Amsterdam Architecture Center (ARCAM). Along with ARCAM and office for architecture and urbanism V2A, fashion label OntFront has challenged four creative duos to enter into a design process. Each duo comprises a fashion designer and an architect who have teamed up specially for this occasion. The results are interesting and impressive.

Cross-over projects are common in the world of fashion as well as in the world of architecture. However, intensive collaborations between fashion designers and architects are pretty new, while there are lots of similarities between the two professions. Both deal with creation of volumes and take constructive principles in mind. At the same time, more and more fashion designers aim to make timeless products that fight high turnover rates, and architects attempt to create buildings and structures that are increasingly flexible, fluid and responsive to the environment. Mutually inspired, the designers cut through the dogmas of their own discipline and allow the visitor an insight into the creative process. The exhibition shows which new design statements have derived from an intense and extraordinary collaboration between professions that have not much in common at first sight. That makes this exploration very appealing and definitely worth visiting.

The four teams involved in the project are Iris van Herpen and Jan Benthem/Mels Crouwel (Benthem Crouwel Architekten), Mattijs van Bergen (MATTIJS) and Anouk Vogel (Anouk Vogel Landscape Architecture), Farida Sedoc (Hosselaer) and Nicole/Marc Maurer (Maurer United Architects), and Kentroy Yearwood (Intoxica) and Jeroen Bergsma (2012 Architecten).

Starting September 19th, Sukkah City will pop-up at Union Square Park, New York City. Sukkah City consists of twelve radically temporary structures built by competitors form all over the world. Anyone is invited to submit designs. The sukkah is an ephemeral, elemental shelter, erected for one week each fall, in which it is customary to share meals, entertain, sleep, and rejoice.

“New York City will re-imagine the ancient Sukkah phenomenon, develop new methods of material practice and parametric design, and propose radical possibilities for traditional design constraints in a contemporary urban site. Twelve finalists will be selected by a panel of celebrated architects, designers, and critics to be constructed in a visionary village in Union Square Park from September 19-21, 2010. (…) One structure will be chosen by New Yorkers to stand and delight throughout the week-long festival of Sukkot as the Official Sukkah of New York City. The process and results of the competition, along with construction documentation and critical essays, will be published in the forthcoming book ‘Sukkah City: Radically Temporary Architecture for the Next Three Thousand Years’.”

More about the Sukkah and about the competition:

“Ostensibly the sukkah’s religious function is to commemorate the temporary structures that the Israelites dwelled in during their exodus from Egypt, but it is also about universal ideas of transience and permanence as expressed in architecture. The sukkah is a means of ceremonially practicing homelessness, while at the same time remaining deeply rooted. It calls on us to acknowledge the changing of the seasons, to reconnect with an agricultural past, and to take a moment to dwell on — and dwell in — impermanence. (…) Historically, the sukkah’s permanent recurrence is not as a monument, archetype, or typology, but as a set of precise parameters. The basic constraints seem simple: the structure must be temporary, have at least two and a half walls, be big enough to contain a table, and have a roof made of shade-providing organic materials through which one can see the stars. Yet a deep dialogue of historical texts intricately refines and interprets these constraints–arguing, for example, for a 27 x 27 x 38-inch minimum volume; for a maximum height of 30 feet; for walls that cannot sway more than one handbreadth; for a mineral and botanical menagerie of construction materials; and even, in one famous instance, whether it is kosher to adaptively reuse a recently deceased elephant as a wall. (It is.) The paradoxical effect of these constraints is to produce a building that is at once new and old, timely and timeless, mobile and stable, open and enclosed, homey and uncanny, comfortable and critical.”

Oberhausen Gasometer, 2 April – 30 December, 2010. Project of the European Capital of Culture Ruhr.2010.

In the amazing big Gasometer in the German city of Oberhausen, the exhibition ‘Out of this World – Wonders of the Solar System’ is currently taking place. The exhibition sheds a light on the world beyond this world, with particular attention for the effort of mankind to find out more about it. As the Gasometer is enormously big and dark, one really feels like being in outer space, which sets a great contextual atmosphere for the exhibition. Particularly spectacular is the enormous artificial moon hanging down from the roof of the 126 meters high gasometer. It’s said to be the biggest moon on earth, and honestly, I indeed can’t imagine another fake moon to be bigger.

The exhibition ‘Out of this World’ takes its visitors off on a journey into the cosmos. It shows our solar system as a huge process of growth and decay. Spectacular reproductions of the planetary system, extraordinary images of the sun, of the planets and their moons, precious historical instruments and the most modern technology of space research graphically present to us the drama of the birth and development of our solar system – up to its end. The exhibition ‘Out of this World’ combines natural science, cultural history and artistic points of view. In the spirit of the ‘International Year of Astronomy 2009’, ‘Out of this World’ invites visitors to marvel, wonder and reflect – this exhibition offers us a cosmic experience inside the unique industrial cathedral that is the Oberhausen Gasometer.”

The exhibition starts in the area below the former gas-pressure disc with a space-filling scene: the sun and its planets hover there as if on a disc in a 68 metre-wide room. Large format images, obtained during the latest American and European space missions, show our solar system, its development and its wonderful multiformity. On the gas-pressure disc, cult relicts, historical telescopes, measuring instruments, astronomical charts and old globes – and beside them the most modern instruments of space research are to be found. Here it becomes clear how findings concerning cosmic happenings always made progress when new observation technologies revolutionised the gaze into the depth of the macrocosm and the microcosm. On the basis of the exhibits, it is, moreover, shown how the ideas about the origins and the development of the solar system changed from the myths of primitive peoples up to our scientific age.

Finally, the arena provides a unique experience of space over which the roof extends at a height of 100 metres. As a gigantic sculpture here the largest moon on Earth, with a diameter of 25 metres, is shown. The installation passes through, with a soft background music, all of the phases of the moon from new moon to full moon. The romantic character of this moon experience supplements the scientific part of the exhibition in a moving way. The exhibition ‘Out of This World – Wonders of the Solar System’ is jointly organised by DLR (German Aerospace Center) and Gasometer Oberhausen GmbH to mark the International Year of Astronomy 2009. It offers unique items on loan from important international space companies as well as museums of technology, cultural history and art. Beyond the exposition the Gasometer itself provides a great view at the Ruhr Area’s industrial heritage and is worth paying a visit.