Bauhaus City – Get on Site!
The Bauhaus Dessau calls students from around the world to attend its anniversary year Summer School.

From 22 – 31 July, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation will hold an international Summer School entitled ‘Bauhaus City – Get on Site!’. On the occasion of its 90th anniversary, the institution invites young artists, architects, designers as well as the interested public to come to Dessau and explore the Bauhaus architecture on site. Parallel to the anniversary exhibition ‘Modell Bauhaus’ which will be shown in Berlin at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, the Summer School in Dessau offers students from all over the world the opportunity to deepen their knowledge of the Bauhaus at one of its original sites.

In six workshops the examples of Classical Modernism built here will be examined through performative actions and urban interventions. Hidden traces and connections will be brought to light. The Summer School will look at the experimental housing estate Dessau-Törten, the Bauhaus buildings, the Masters’ houses, the employment office and the restaurant Kornhaus. The workshops are run by INTERBORO, New York; MUF, London; Michael Zinganel, Graz; Wochenklausur, Vienna; Kuehn Malvezzi, Berlin and Gods Entertainment, Berlin. A series of public lectures accompanies the Summer School programme.

At the heart of the programme lies the question of how to define the Bauhaus City: Is it a centre of innovative architecture, an outstanding educational infrastructure or a place for creative entrepreneurship? In the 20th century, Dessau changed continuously due to destruction during the war, societal developments after the German reunification and the collapse of the industry. Many of the Bauhaus buildings, however, are now under a preservation order, have been restored accordingly and are open to the public.

Summer School Fee: 150 Euro

Deadline for application: 30 June 2009

For further information visit the website: bauhauscity-summerschool.de
and/or contact: Ina Goegel: goegel@bauhaus-dessau.de / sommerschule@bauhaus-dessau.de

On Friday June 5th, 2009 Al Manakh’s series of international Debates on Tour took place at the ADACH Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale of Art. For this occasion architect Rem Koolhaas and curator of the ADACH Pavilion Catherine David engaged in a conversation with Ole Bouman on the curiosities and conditions that has drawn their practice and vision to the Gulf cities such as Abu Dhabi. In this, they discussed the specific urban conditions of cities in the region, and how these influence and are determined by the social/economic make-up and cultural manifestations of the city itself. Also discussed is how exposure to these circumstances has influenced the practice and personal perspective of these two internationally acclaimed cultural producers.

Comments and questions from audience members – such as Mishaal Al Gergawi (of the Dubai Culture & Arts Authority) and Kaiwan Mehta (Mumbai based architect and particpant in the ADACH exhibition) – supplemented the discussion with further insight to the relationship between the cultural ambition and political will, as well as the relationship between cultural frameworks and the actual urban plan of a city.

Detroit. Image via Sustainable Cities Collective

In 1972 the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth in which they explored the scenario of what would happen in a world driven by limitless growth using finite resources. About 40 years later we are experiencing the clash of these colliding vectors. The bigger the boom the worst the bust, and there is no place on the globe were the spatial implications of the unfolding scenario of The Club of Rome is more evident: Detroit, Michigan.

Detroitification is the fear of every American city. But Detroit is also giving birth to the ideas that will perhaps transform it from a symbol of despair into a beacon of hope. Detroit and other cities in the Rust Belt area have abandonned the idle hope for another boom. In the Detroit areaa a new paradigm is emerging that can help to break the negative spiral. This new spark that has entered the Detroit mind is the shrink paradigm. The spatial implications of this paradigm will be such that the urban landscape will become less urban, a hybrid between a rural landscape and the metropolis, a type of ’21st century countryside’.

“You have high-density development on one side of the street and cows on the other, quite literally.” The team’s recommendations, contained in a draft report by a committee of the American Institute of Architects, are the latest in a flurry of ideas for dealing with Detroit’s growing vacancy. Detroit’s population is less than half of its 1950s peak, and an estimated 40 square miles of the 139-square-mile city are empty. The committee suggests that Detroit could recreate itself as a 21st-Century version of the English countryside. “Isn’t that basically what’s happening? Even without any plans or strategies?” Mallach asked.” But he added, “It’s happening in a sloppy, destructive fashion where you get areas that are essentially abandoned, but they’re not useable open space, they’re not environmentally sound, so they’re basically wasteland.”
- Alan Mallach
(via Landscape + Urbanism / source Detroit Free Press)

Image via Detroit Free Press

In Flint, Michigan they’re already putting the shrink strategies into practice. You can read about it here:

US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive (Telegraph)
Dozens of US cities may have entire neighbourhoods bulldozed as part of drastic “shrink to survive” proposals being considered by the Obama administration to tackle economic decline.

An Effort to Save Flint, Mich., by Shrinking It (NY Times)
Dozens of proposals have been floated over the years to slow this city’s endless decline. Now another idea is gaining support: speed it up.

And as a bonus: from the Archis/Volume Archive:

Shrink, cramp, narrow-mindedness – Ole Bouman (Archis #1, 2004 on Shrink)
People can’t stand shrinkage. Our thoughts and bodies have been focused on growth, expansion, renewal, innovation. But shrinkage is no longer deniable and seen as an overpowering reality. Shrinkage becomes a cramp. Unless one can find a new perspective in it.

Agnes Denes, Wheatfield - A confrontation (1982)

Largely hidden from the view of the city dweller, a worldwide network of food producers and supermarket chains takes care of our supply of daily food. This is very convenient, but it is also the cause of many problems. A handful of distributors decides what we eat. For the most part the people who produce the food are invisible. The natural seasons are passed by. Transport puts a heavy toll on the environment and climate. Supply is dependent on the amount of fuel available. There is hardly any knowledge of how our food is actually produced. The return of food production to the city might help to increase this awareness and might also create healthy and safe food within the boundaries of a more sustainable city. This requires a new way of looking at the city, where nature, the production landscape and the recreational landscape are linked to urbanism in a more ‘natural’ way. With Foodprint Stroom aims to explore the possibilities of The Hague as a production landscape and to develop utopian, appealing and feasible proposals.

Speakers
Henk de Zeeuw, Paula Sobie (CA), Debra Solomon, Katrin Bohn (UK), André Viljoen (UK), Jan Willem van der Schans, Janneke Vreugdenhil, Christina Kaba (ZA), Nils Norman (UK), Menno Swaak, Paul Bos, Onno van Eijk, John Thackara (UK), Bart Pijnenburg, Gaston Remmers, Tracy Metz, Christien Meindertsma, Joep van Lieshout, Nicole Hoven, Maarten Doorman, Will Allen (VS), Jago van Bergen, Vincent Kuypers, Dick Veerman, Carolyn Steel (UK), Gerwin Verschuur, Winy Maas, Annechien ten Have en Rob Baan.

Program
NOTE: the language at the symposium itself is mixed Dutch and English, for more information contact Stroom
A varied program focusing on the important role food can play in the design of a sustainable, healthy and green city, looking at this topic from various angles and disciplines.

Foodprint: Symposium
Friday 26 june 2009, 9:00 – 17:45 uur
Location: BINK36, Binckhorstlaan 36, Den Haag
Ticket: € 96,- (incl. lunch) reservations
(Very) Full Program [PDF]
Language: Dutch en Engels

UPDATE: Also check the Foodprint blog (in Dutch)

Drawings, photo-montages, renderings and models have always been powerful means to convey ideas, present scenarios and research the future. The publication Beyond Architecture provides us with a bulky collection of sometimes intelligent and mostly enchanting and simply stunning imagery of how artists are dealing in their work with architecture and the city.

A spread from 'Beyond Architecture'

For architects it is interesting to see ‘their’ subject approached by other disciplines. Many artists are using similar architectural techniques, but the difference lies in that for artists the drawing, model and photo-montage is the final product, where for the architect it is a means to an end i.e. to build. According to Lukas Feireiss the book: “charts novel ways of discovering and negotiating the potential of the urban in visual culture, thus also providing alternative and valid critical insights into understanding the city” Where architects in general produce their imagery as means to project the future, the artists in Beyond Architecture are investigating the potency and problematics of the present. The book presents the imagery without accompanying judgement or analysis. The absence of accompanying essays or a framing of the content is a missed opportunity and result in confusion. First of all confusion about the chosen title: Beyond Architecture. Beyond has become a buzzword, and especially when married to ‘architecture’ proven by the Venice biennale and architectural publications, and Volume feels personally addressed in this matter as well, with the ‘to beyond or not to be’ mantra on the cover. In the case of this publication from Gestalten publishers the relation between the title and its content remains unclear. Secondly, the missed opportunity concerns the theme of ‘fiction’ and ‘speculation’ is bubbling up in architecture today and not just in imagery but in architectural writing as well.

2008: Out There, Architecture Beyond Building – 11th Venice Biennale curated by Aaron Betsky

2009: Beyond, short stories on the post-contemporary edited by Pedro Gadanho (SUN)

2009: Beyond Architecture, Imaginative Buildings and Fictional Cities edited by Lukas Feireiss and Robert Klanten (Gestalten)

One can read the operation of going beyond in many ways. One can go beyond the present (time), beyond the physical (space), beyond the disciplinary (professional) and one can go beyond many other area’s, but in general all the beyonds refer to the movement of crossing the boundaries of the familiar, from the known into the unknown. If we remain within the known, we’re not going beyond in any way. This is also where the notion of beyond has its connections to fiction, speculation and the experiment, but we have to realize that innocent fiction does not really exist. Within fiction there are intentions, agenda’s and signs of the time, either implicit (as coping mechanism/therapy) or explicit (as manifesto/utopia), so what are the intentions of all the beyonds that are circulating in architectural discourse? What are we looking for? What truths do we seek to find? Why is there a necessity to move beyond the familiar? This question is not addressed in anyway by the book, in this sense title and content seem to be completely disconnected. Volume’s slogan: ‘to beyond or not to be’ contains the existential drive associated with the flight forward, into the beyond. The subtext: legitimations of the architecture discipline shouldn’t be searched for in the known, but in engaging the unknown. In order to deal with the unknown we cannot merely trust on the disciplinary body of knowledge we already have, but we have to move beyond disciplinary boundaries to acquire other knowledge that hands us new instruments and tools for thinking and making in an rapidly changing world.

A spread from 'Beyond Architecture'

The merits of the book lies in that it illustrates that architectural imagination is not the sole privilege of architects and that we can find the amazing in the ordinary, in the existing, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going ‘beyond’ in any way. While the book correctly registers the emergence of fiction and speculation in architectural discourse, epitomized my blogs such as BLDG BLOG. These fictions are usually liberated from the utopian dimensions and activist manifesto’s formerly associated with photo-collages and grand urban vistas. Of course we have learnt our lessons concerning utopia, but is an attitude that is merely saturated with fascination enough to engage reality seriously?

A spread from 'Beyond Architecture'

Beyond Architecture
Imaginative Buildings and Fictional Cities

Beyond Architecture is the first publication of its kind to document the creative exploration of architecture and urban propositions in the contemporary arts. The projects collected in this book demonstrate how not only architects and designers, but also artists are taking architecture as a starting point for experimentation. They range from performance, installation art and crafted sculptures to architectural models, alternative ideas for living spaces and furniture, as well as illustration, painting, collage and photography. Through stunning photography, visuals and complementary texts, these visionary concepts reveal the hidden creative potential for architecture and urban environments in inventive ways.

Editors: R. Klanten, L. Feireiss

Release: February 2009
Price: € 44,00 / $ 65,00 / £ 40,00
Format: 24 x30 cm
Features: 208 pages, full colour, hardcover
ISBN: 978-3-89955-235-5

get Beyond Architecture

16 June 2009 – 26 June 2009 at Berlage Institute – Botersloot 25, Rotterdam

Imagining Recovery is an exhibition based on an international competition charging designers to collectively imagine innovation recovery through design. Designers were asked to offer their expertise in designing a means of getting from the present to the image of recovery.

On 20 January 2009, the first day of the Obama presidency, began the current administration’s commitment to transparency, participation and collaboration in government. On 17 February, President Obama signed the Recovery Act into law and launched Recovery.gov, a website publishing the spending of recovery funds in the name of transparency, offering “maps, charts, and graphics” to illustrate the distribution of funds.

The exhibition calls upon designers of all types to imagine the futures these maps, charts, graphics and accounting figures serve to anticipate, and to interpret for the public the lived experience of this future by producing an image of recovery.

This moment of change offers an opportunity for designers to rethink their role in our society. Imagining Recovery promotes collaboration by pairing designers with policy makers to collectively write the competition brief, proposing a model wherein designers can actively participate in the initial imaginings of the policies they will be called upon to implement.