Two weeks ago northern European airspace was closed due to ash coming from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. Data analysts of ITO World took advantage of this major air traffic reboot and created a fascinating video, based on the data retrieved from Flight Radar 24, that shows how the northern European airspace returned to normal use after being closed due to volcanic ash from Iceland. As you can see, a small number flights took already place on April 18. Two days later all airports were opened again.

Please read our press release announcing the release of Al Manakh Gulf Continued in Abu Dhabi. Stay tuned for more information about events to introduce the book.

Despite our skill and experience in manipulating space and material, architects are incapable of addressing the needs of society unless they have first been explicitly asked to do so. Unsolicited architects do not wait to tackle the big issues often overlooked by the market. They create briefs where none are written, discover sites where none are owned, approach clients where none are present, and find financing where none is available. Unsolicited architecture offers an alternative to a reactive, service-oriented role, and instead calls for a new, more socially-motivated approach to procuring projects.

First introduced in issue 14 of Volume, unsolicited architecture is being re-presented at the extra/ordinary conference in Sydney between April 22-24, to continue spreading the unsolicited message. The bootleg, a transfusion of the Volume archive and new material, sketches out case studies and financial modeling along with interviews by unsolicited practitioners – and the essential twelve steps to becoming an unsolicited architect.

Don’t wait for the phone to ring, architects. Read the twelve steps and be on your way. The bootleg edition of Volume magazine, initiated by Anneke Abhelakh, Rory Hyde and Timothy Moore is now available on Issuu.

Click here to order on Amazon!

In a world buzzing with satellite aerials, news flashes and status updates, this second Al Manakh – a special issue of Volume Magazine – provides an essential and comprehensive guide to the Gulf region during turbulent times: the worldwide financial crisis.

The credit crunch is a ‘stress test’ for the different development models in the region as nations prepare for a post-oil economy. This transition provides several challenges: economic re-profiling, food security, environmental exposure, multiculturalism and demographic growth. Al Manakh delves into these challenges by profiling six cities in five countries bordering the Gulf (UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia). From this common ground, Al Manakh builds an inside-out perspective with local authors reflecting on their own situation and expectations. Guiding voices include editors Rem Koolhaas and Todd Reisz (OMA), Lilet Breddels and Arjen Oosterman (Archis/Volume), Daniel Camara and Mitra Khoubrou (Pink Tank), Ole Bouman (NAi). Al Manakh is for those seeking an alternating viewpoint on the growth of the Gulf – not one just from the air, but one also on the ground.

• 536 pages, 149 contributions, 140 contributors
• ISBN: 978 90 77966 23 5

Tomorrow Al Manakh Gulf Continued will be launched. In advance of its release Jonathan Hanahan created a series of data visualizations, of which this article is the last chapter.

All books have a table of contents, an introduction and an index to the document, but can it be more than just a directory? This third visualization in the series attempts to address an alternative view of the contents of a book, providing more than just title, chapter, and author. Here, the continent of where the article has been submitted from and the author’s perspective is also included. Working with a similar visualization strategy as in the previous sources visualization, the articles are distributed clockwise; each slice is proportional to the length of the article.

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Order your copy of Al Manakh Gulf Continued here, or subscribe to Volume magazine and receive Al Manakh 1, Al Manakh Gulf Continued and three Volume issues! (Please note: offer expires on July 1.)

‘Sources to Subjects’ explores the details behind how topics were developed for Gulf Continued and where the information guiding our conclusions came from. By breaking down our data archive to not only look at what news organizations reported the most frequently but also where globally those sources are committed and what types of perspectives they focus on. In light of perpetual media and political bias in the area, breaking down locations and perspectives help draw conclusions on how to address the overall presentation of issues within this edition of Al Manakh.

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—This visualization was created by Jonathan Hanahan.

Two-day conference, 3 and 4 May 2010, auditorium Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam. With Jolyon Leslie, Kai Vöckler, Sultan Barakat, a.o. Time: 9.30 am-5 pm (Mon), 10.00 am-5 pm (Tue). Language: English. Click here for the full program of the conference. Please scroll down for details regarding reservation.

Architecture of Peace is an international long-term research and action project in which a large number of stakeholders are involved. The project will consist of local case studies, interventions, university research studios, debates, publications and exhibitions. The public kick-off of the programme will be a two-day conference in Rotterdam, The Netherlands on the 3rd and 4th of May, 2010. Participants include architects, urbanists and professionals from the fields of development studies, sociology and conflict studies.

‘Schoolyard’ (Aernout Mik, 2009)

Cities in the post-conflict rebuilding phase have recurrent, comparable problems. Political power vacuums at the national level and the absence of civil self-monitoring generate uncontrolled forces which seriously damage the cities’ chances for recovery. For this reason it is necessary to scrutinize the aid and planning strategies we have used and intensify the search for possible alternatives. We call upon all those working in the field of politics, aid, architecture, and community work and development cooperation to share their knowledge and experience and rethink how to rebuild the community by a smart reconstruction of the city. The integral approach will provide innovative insights to create new tools and methods to approach reconstruction. The outcome will be an inventory of case studies and good practices as well as an inventory of clear themes for further research and proposed partners to conduct that research. These themes are not only relevant for post-war areas, but also for conflict situations within societies in transformation.

Reconstruction is a highly political process in which every step that is seen to favour one side over another can ignite new violence. Unbalanced reconstruction can create new inequalities, which would lead to new grievances. How then can reconstruction also be an instrument of peace? This project concentrates mainly on the second phase out of the three phases of reconstruction that can be distinguished:

• In the first phase, provisional shelter and other forms of temporary construction dominate, from make shift refugee camps to large-scale relief infrastructure. The military still plays a large role.
• In the second phase, people try to resume everyday life. There is no real coordination yet, and the lack of control and process often leads to ethnic enclaves, gated communities, illegal settlements, and urban sprawl. It is in this phase that structures get shape which later on, when regulatory institutions start to function, constrain interventions. It is especially in this phase that rebuilding takes place in a form that, later on gives rise to new conflicts. But this phase could also offer a window of opportunity to advocate positive interaction and reduce the chance of a resumption of conflict.
• In the third phase, institutions have been created that start a more coordinated process, in which space is allocated, property titles are acknowledged, and longer-term infrastructure development is planned. This phase resembles more closely the normal processes of city planning, in which outcomes are negotiated between different groups and authorities, and less the result of spontaneous actions of inhabitants.

Registration
The first lecture day of the conference is open to all. Click here to register.
The second workshop day is limited to a group of 50 people. If you wish to join the workshop please sent an email indicating your specific interest to rsvp@archis.org before Wednesday April 23 and we’ll get back to you before Monday April 26. The conference will be free of charge.

As a team coordinating from multiple time zones, the most effective way to collect and distribute relevant articles into the pool of collective research was to use the online bookmarking service Delicious as a universal reference location. By the conclusion of research in March 2010, we had over 1200 articles and 143 different tags. This by no means qualifies the entirety of the research but presents a cross-section of materials utilized to the research community. Delicious provides a simple means of collection, but lacks the ability to view the material from an alternative perspective. The Al Manakh Research calendar is the first step in the development of a tool to investigate these relationships, a way to understand the volume of our research database. While still in its infancy of development as a research tool, it prompts insightful questions about both the content and our individual research activity.

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—This visualization was created by Jonathan Hanahan.

16-18 April, 2010, Villa Sonsbeek, Arnhem, The Netherlands. With Arjen Oosterman (Publisher/Editor-in-Chief of Archis/Volume) and others. More information here.

O.K. Festival is the first event in the Netherlands that offers a survey of independent magazines from all over the world. Under the title ‘Welcome Magazines’ O.K. Festival presents the energy and the visual explosion of strange, beautiful and original magazines.

One by one they present an answer to the uniformity of the mass media. The printed media are falling victim to increasingly strict formats. Sales figures reign. In the gaping hole they leave behind the independent magazine manifests itself. Everything that is excluded by the mainstream media finds its place here. In this sense, the independent magazine offers a sanctuary to designers, illustrators and writers. It is at times defiant and headstrong, but always brimming with energy and playfulness. Readers from across the world are increasingly drawn to its versatility, originality and creativity. O.K. Festival offers an insight into the full spectrum of independent magazines through various activities.

25 March-2 July, 2010, Pacific Design Center (PDC), West Hollywood, CA.

Superfront, an L.A. based exposition centre presents the exhibit Unplanned: Research and Experiments at the Urban Scale. The exhibit boldly presents a collection of radical methods for envisioning and producing space at the urban scale. Unplanned is a group exhibit with more than twenty participants a.o Ae-i-ou, Tomorrows Thoughts Today and Alex Delaunay. It spans architecture, urban design, industrial design, conceptual art, and cartography to present an array of experimental work at the urban scale. Multi-disciplinary practitioners address emergent urbanism, ‘wild building’, and other alternatives to conventional urban planning.

“Just as the discipline of architecture faces a re-imagination of itself in this era of slow-motion global capitalism, the human population finds itself crossing the threshold to a predominantly urban existence.  Many of the basic tenets underpinning urban planning – Cartesian geometry, programmatic taxonomy, contextualism – have been subject to skeptical investigation and rebellion in architecture throughout the past decade. Yet conventional urban planning continues, the discipline of urban planning operating much as it has since the 1960s (if not the 1860s).”