[A Dutch version of this review can be read at Archined]

For once it is nice to be on a biennale that is not exclusively visited by a cynical art-crowd and intellectuals only. The Korean Gwangju biennale is visited by people from all strata of society, and with its half a million visitors in two months the best visited biennale in the world. It is hart warming to see the school classes shuffle by following the guide of the educational program who patiently explains the biennale. The biennale was once established as a living monument to remember the hundreds who have fallen in the democratization movement of 18 May 1980. The biennale is truly a festival of the people.

The thesis this biennale poses is that: Everything is design and everybody is a designer. Designers are those that draw and write a D.I.Y instruction for peaceful protests in Egypt, those that supply the screens of stock traders with numbers and graphs, and they are those athletes that submit their body to very specific training programs.

Various D.I.Y strategies for peaceful protest explain what to wear and how to behave. Photo by Christiana S. Chae


Athletic Body Design by Howard Schatz and Beverly Ornstein. Photo by Christiana S. Chae

The departure point of this forth Gwangju Design Biennale is as radical and progressive as it is problematic. The slogan ‘design is design is not design’ is a reduction of 圖可圖非常圖 (do-ga-do-bi-sang-do), meaning “design that can be spoken of is not the eternal design” and is a play on the words of the 2500 year old classical Chinese text, the Tao Te Ching (道德經) by Lao Tzu (老子).

With her theme the biennale has chosen a very ambitious point of departure: to break open the definitions of the design discipline and an attempt to redefine it. In the West the term design triggers a range of rather established but still vague associations, design is mostly recognizable as adjective, as in “design sofa” or “designer dress”. Brendan McGetrick, one of the curators of the Unnamed section explains: “[the idea of design is] Western-centric, commodity-driven, and wealth-dependent. It is hugely influential–much copied and frequently referenced–but it somehow loses depth with each incarnation.”
In Asia the term design is newer and less defined, an opportunity the curators seize to liberate the term from her Western straightjacket. McGetrick: “Ours is an exhibition about the power of ideas, a salvo in honor of the millions of acts of imagination that occur beyond the bounds of design”

Nobody will contest that outside the bounds of the design-world an infinite amount of creativity and imagination exists, but if the project of the biennale is to redefine design, then you have to expand your argument. A clear and explicit new definition about what design is or should be is missing, although the exhibition gives some clues in what direction the curatorial team is thinking. Firstly the exhibition shows that a new design definition should move away from the artifact or object towards defining systems and rules, form is consequence of design, but not design itself. It’s about designing frameworks, instead of infills. It’s about the design of process instead of product.

An overview of what is needed to make Improvised Explosive Devices. Photo by Christiana S. Chae


An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Cockpit. Photo by Christiana S. Chae

Secondly, the makers behind the designs that are presented are divided in the categories Named and Unnamed. Unnamed doesn’t state if something is done by a designer or not, it rather indicates that the designer is unknown, that he or she doesn’t consider themselves a designer, or that design was the result of invisible (sometimes unconscious) processes like bureaucracy or tradition. For example, the dress-code of Swiss bank employees, or the various veils and body coverings of muslim women. Or a wall exhibiting an inventory of diverse Improvised Explosive Devise (IED) designs including a workbench with the necessary parts and tools to make them. Across from the IED workshop a cockpit for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), monitors and ‘joysticks’ with which one can control one of the many drone airplanes flying over afghanistan. The designers in the Named category are known (and sometimes famous), but often play the role of researcher. Like the curators of the exhibition their objective is to show something, to surface a hidden design, pattern or even intention. With We Feel Fine, Jonathan Harris shows a emotional weather map of the blogsphere. With the Acacemy of Work, Partizan Publik and Arne Hendriks build a laboratory in which the body can be transformed and conditioned for new forms of labour, from farmer to factory worker to knowledge worker, inspired by Soviet engineer-poet Aleksei Gastev.

The Academy of Work. Photo by Reineke Otten

A problem that remains unsolved is that in principle one can see everything as design, but this doesn’t mean that everything is design. The designer that researches, studies the world as designer, has a tendency to see the world as design. It is the familiar metaphor that with a hammer in your hand everything starts to look like a nail. This also seems the case at this biennale, the world is read as design, which doesn’t mean it is the result of a design process. The practices and methods of scientists, artists, engineers, squatters, athletes, architects and policy makers will perhaps have similarities, but what these similarities could be remains obscure.

Today everybody can design, states artistic director H-Sang Seung, independent of the question if this results in good or bad designs. Information technology has given everybody access to means of production and distribution, this privilege isn’t anymore solely for the design professional. Seung points out that uniqueness and diversity in design have attained priority over universality. If designs do not constantly update they will be forgotten. The biennale exhibition answers this observation with a return to designs that wan’t to be universal projects, that are about everything except fashion or trends. It’s about problem solving, designs that actually want to make a societal difference. Sometimes naive, but mostly practical and provoking. Design as objects of desire are largely absent, but at the same time all contributions are clearly rooted in material and technical culture. A culture that was once more exclusive than it is today. The design of the professional is juxtaposed with the hack or the solution of the amateur (the UAV next to the IED). Both require a deep rooting and literacy in our ubiquitous technological culture although the ‘training’ behind both design-practices are radically different.

The question that the biennale implicitly poses, but does not answer is: What is expertise, the practice necessary for ‘creating a human environment within a certain medium.’ Clearly ‘designing a city on paper’, the original meaning of 圖/do (the Korean character for designing) is not anymore the way to mange the wild expansion of Asian cities, and perhaps it is also not anymore the way to deal with the stagnation and shrink of the West. But that we’ll keep making and remaking the world with technology and through media is a fact. It requires courage when one as a designer actively looks for an answer to the question this biennale posses, because it could turn the conception of your vocation up side down. What it does for sure, is open up the narrow conceptions of what design is and could be for an Asian audience to whom the idea ‘design furniture’ isn’t as ingrained yet as it is in the West.

Update 17 October 2011: Brendan McGetrick’s insightful blog-post on the experience and agenda that was pursued wit the curation of the Un-named section of the Gwangju Design Biennale.

You can still visit the Gwangju Design Biennale until 23 October

Hello, you probably know me, not necessarily me (Edwin Gardner), but at least you’ve been confronted with me one way or another. Through the Archis/Volume newsletter, posts on the Volume blog, bookmarks, tweets and facebook updates, in other words the whole social media arsenal which is at every web-editor’s disposal these days.

But alas, it is also Goodbye. In 2005 I started at Archis/Volume with a summer internship, and by making my first contribution to the Broadcasting Architecture issue (#3), and surely that won’t be my last contribution to the magazine, I’ll stay on the team as editorial consultant, I’ll stay blogging on the Action! blog (together with mr. Hyde), and dumping the occasional link through one of the before mentioned channels. Beside that you can follow my ongoings @edwingardner.

Then there is another Hello! A hello i’m proud and pleased to give. I would like to introduce you to Jeroen Beekmans and Joop de Boer from Golfstromen who will take over the helm of the Archis/Volume web-machine. Perhaps you know them from their blog prolific blog The Pop-Up City or Amsterdam’s Pecha Kucha night, If not you will become very ambiently aware and digitally intimate with them soon enough.

For now, adieu!

Just in time before Christmas we launched Volume 22, The Guide and Beyroutes at the Athenaeum magazine shop. There were ‘bitterballen’, sparkles, booze and a spectacular last minute arrival of the issue straight from the printer. Enjoy the photo’s together with the warm wishes from the entire Volume crew for a happy christmas, good parties, and a incredible new year.

Signed; Lilet, Arjen, Valerie (who made the pictures) Rory, Timothy, Jonathan, Christian and Edwin

Vast urbanizations in developed, developing and under-development countries have one common denominator: an immediate need for quality housing. Housing the billions: never before were those involved in architecture and construction confronted with such a challenge. A one-fits-all solution seems unthinkable since most mass housing schemes in the past failed and originated in dictatorship or total absence of power. Based on an analysis of one of the housing experiments of the past, the Soviet Microrayon, Volume proposes a new prototype. A housing block, which is custom-made but mass-produced and conceived via open source standards.

Saturday, 19 September, 7-9 pm
Studio-X, New York

Please join us for the launch of “Volume 20: Storytelling,” edited by C-Lab on Saturday, 9/19 from 7-9pm at Studio-X. Mark Wigley will offer an introduction and comments on the occasion of Volume’s milestone 20th issue. Drinks and music to follow. Sponsored by Studio-X.

With Contributions by: Lewis Lapham, Tom McCarthy, Bjarke Ingels, Neil Denari, Nicholas Lemann, Roger Dean
Catherine Hardwicke, Smiljan Radic and more…

Studio-X
180 Varick Street, Suite 1610
Between King and Charleton Streets
1 train to Houston Street
212 989 2398

23 to 25 September, Westergasfabriek, Amsterdam
PICNIC 2009

PICNIC is a cross-discipline platform for creative conversation and collaboration. It’s a unique festival featuring a strategic conference, complimented by hands-on workshops and matchmaking sessions.

One of the themes sounds especially interesting when considering the built environment: Exploding Media

Exploding Media will showcase the latest changes in media technologies impacting user interaction, engagement, and communications with a special focus on gaming, connectivity and real-time social media.

This is the story of the extraordinary transformation of Media from all the creative and technological aspects. From traditional storytelling to the impact of gaming on education, from city interaction and augmented reality to the Metaverse, this narrative will feature the latest innovations and disruptions that the media industry is facing. We will look at the emerging opportunities and business implications for the creative industry that these changes will bring. Speakers will be the creative geniuses pushing the envelope on these new developments.

For a more elaborate analysis of what this years PICNIC has to offer those interested in the spatial implication of technology check out The Mobile City

1 & 2 October 2009, Westergasfabriek Amsterdam
Tommorrow, International Urban Planning Congress Amsterdam

Metropoles – world cities – are lead players in the global economy. Though they cover just 2 percent of the earth’s surface, cities consume 75 percent of the resources utilized by humankind.

In the early 20th century, when Alderman F.M. ‘Floor’ Wibaut (1859-1936), a pioneering steersman of Amsterdam’s urban development and social housing policy, was politically and professionally active, the growth of major cities around the world seemed to attain an absolute peak.

Endeavouring to steer the city’s ongoing development was therefore an exercise as urgent as it was logical. It was at this time that town and regional planning emerged in a fruitful interchange of knowledge and experience between administrators and specialists.
Half the world’s population now resides in cities. Metropolises are sprouting up in Asia, Africa and South America at an unprecedented rate. Within 20 to 30 years some three quarters of the world’s population will be living in cities, giving rise to new issues. Cities elsewhere will over that same time-span need to find a response to population growth that is levelling off or even shrinking populations. The fields of urban development and spatial planning, now a century old, are faced with new challenges.

‘The future governance of Amsterdam will be focused on the material prosperity and mental welfare of the great mass of workers. Tomorrow the meaning of the word “prosperity” will be something quite different to what this word meant to Amsterdam in bygone times as chronicled by our historians and eulogized by our poets …. The advancement of prosperity as a responsibility of governments will in future entail the implementation of governmental provision of collective amenities across an ever-broader range of that great multitude’s collective needs, in every domain where collective services prove to be more efficient than individual provision. …

‘We are seeing the emergence of the view that the promotion of welfare – as far as this can nowadays be a task assumed by government – must be based on the exertion of governmental powers to introduce collective amenities for acknowledged needs wherever social expediency requires it.’

Dr F.M. Wibaut in his ‘Tomorrow’ speech (1925)

With: Ken Livingstone, Maarten Hajer, Hermann Scheer, Tim Lang, Eric Corijn, Dieter Läpple, LaDonna Redmond, Michael Madison, Kees Christiaanse, Irina Ivashkina, P.K. Das, Edi Rama

more info can be found here and in this PDF

This is the first of the FWD series, which summarizes hand picked content I find elsewhere on the web and would like to share with you.

from the In the Shadow of Progress a picture show on the GOOD website.

The stark reality of this moment in time is that many people are losing their jobs, their homes, and their ways of life. Yet amid what can seem like ceaseless news of loss, there are those who refuse to surrender hope. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Tent City, a temporary encampment below a freeway in Nashville, Tennessee, where hard-pressed and otherwise homeless strangers have come together to form a community.

- see the entire picture show on GOOD

From the harsh reality of Tent Cities we move to how the instruments with which we engage these problems are changing. In his piece The End to Movements on arthurmag.com(via Burak Arikan) Douglas Rushkoff poses a theory that the phenomenon of ‘movements’ as a means of civil activism has reached its limits. (Also check out the recent interview with Ruskhkoff and Kurt Andersen on Design Observer)

(…) Between the 1960s and today, however, the mediaspace through which these causes disseminated ideas and gained momentum has changed. The best techniques for galvanizing a movement have long been co-opted and surpassed by public relations and advertising firms. Whether a movement is real or Astroturf has become almost impossible for even discerning viewers to figure out. The question often becomes the new content of the Sunday morning news panel, taking the place of whatever real issue might have been addressed.

But the problem is not simply that we’ve lost the ability to distinguish between real movements and cynically concocted fake ones. It’s that they are functionally indistinguishable. They may as well be the same thing. (…)

- Douglas Rushkoff

Rushkoff argues that clinging on and promoting ideals or brands disconnects us from the real. “(…) by creating and branding a movement, even the most well-meaning activitsts are disconnecting from terra firma, and instead entering the world of marketing, public opinion, and language selection.”

Besides bringing culture, and the search for meaning back down to earth, also money needs to be connected again to more earthly matters, argues Woody Tasch, author of the new book Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms and Fertility Mattered and founder of the burgeoning Slow Money Alliance,

The topic on hand: How to bring money back down to earth. Literally. How to slow money down from its dizzying (and destructive) speed where all it takes is seconds for “collateral” to get parsed into pieces, distributed as “debt” that no one is responsible for, or understands where it actually ends up. The world of finance has been like playing a high-priced game of “Musical Chairs”—with no chairs. And in this world, there is no place that’s “here.” Investing is perplexingly abstract and has little to do with place or relationships. Externalized this way, few grasp the implications of financial dislocation, of a financial system where money is nomadic and wanders un-rooted—until, as we’ve witnessed with the meltdown, the game ends abruptly and we’ve all landed on our butts wondering where the chairs went.

- continue reading on Track Changes

Not everyone appreciates the ‘slowing down’ propaganda. Previously we promoted Michael Pollan the writer of The Omnivores Dilemma. Blake Hurst wrote the article The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals
being fed up with the farmer bashing and a one-sided view on industrial farming. “Farming has always been messy and painful, and bloody and dirty. It still is. This is something the critics of industrial farming never seem to understand.” Make up your own mind and read the article at The American.

During summer some of us had the chance to read some of the classics, Jason King read Learning from Las Vegas and reflects on the relevance of the book today. When we go beyond cities being shaped by the automobile, we should take a look at $20 Per Gallon: How The Inevitable Rise in the Price of Oil Will change Our Lives For the Better. Read the review by Jebediah Reed on The Infrastructurist. Finally, if you’re still doubting if you should buy Volume 20 on Storytelling, check out Regine Debatty’s review on WMMNA

From the NL Architects blog: “A long time fantasy: cad drawing in a game arcade: drafting with a joy stick. Now finally Master Gen seems to have succeeded in hooking up a game console to drafting software…”

To wrap up this first FWD, i’d like to shine a light on architecture/design practices who are blogging! It’s great to see architects and designers sharing their inspiration, office pictures, how project evolve on site and of course the occasional promoting of their own lectures and exhibitions. Take a look at the blogs of JAJA Architects, JDS and Bruce Mau Design. But in a category all in its own is NL Architects, where Kamiel Klaasse is personally running the blog and writing original posts, with gritty mobile phone pics, real world inspiration and the occasional office fun. Love it!

editorial to Volume #20 by Jeffrey Inaba

Storytelling communicates facts, but it also builds upon real-life accounts to enrich public expectations and elevate beliefs. To these ends, it is worthwhile to get reacquainted with the children’s story. Although regarded as a vehicle to escape reality, the children’s story, and in particular the fairy tale, could again help to elucidate larger social and political storylines. This issue of Volume responds to the global crisis, continuing a series of inquiries started in Volume 9, Urban China 31, Urban China Bootlegged by C-Lab and Volume 19. Here, we present storytelling as a means of understanding our time and constructing a narrative of response.
Crisis creates confusion. It is a situation in which all avenues of recourse fail. Actions taken to remedy catastrophe have little tangible consequence. There is no discernable correlation between cause and effect, and as a result disorientation arises. In some cases the environment may continue to look the same, yet because its behavior can’t be grasped there is a perplexing disconnect. A crisis is when space can’t be explained.
After the immediate shockwaves, when the unpredictable events ebb and the climate regulates, there is much that is left to be explained. Gathering information and forming it into descriptions is the first step towards regaining bearings. Narratives explain space.
Stories are important to architects because they form the foundation of architectural proposals. It is through these episodes that a project’s general challenges and constraints are outlined and an architectural strategy and formal outcome are determined. For this reason, we need to know how tales are told. Journalism experts Nicholas Lemann and Jay Rosen lend a helping hand by discussing the particular challenges of writing stories about our precarious times. Lemann notes the inherent contradiction involved in analyzing facts and constructing a coherent narrative, while Rosen describes data collection resources and our social obligation to explain. Both encourage us to engage stories with indulgence and scrutiny. They offer practical suggestions for crafting timely stories while remaining skeptical of received reporting and conscious of actions an account may provoke from its readers.
Storytelling could involve writing a new public script about space. In addition to the classic narrative elements that Gustav Freytag observes on page four – including the statement of a problem, an exposition of its context and a proposal of resolution – such a script could make probable complications known through disclosure and qualification. As interest in new infrastructure grows and as cases for its realization take shape, now is a good time to create a planning narrative that borrows lessons from earlier, problematic propositions made in the name of technological advancement and urbanization. With the help of Christopher A. Scott, Stephanie von Stein and Jiang Jun, C-Lab breaks down general claims made for the implementation of large-scale technology.
In professional contexts there is little incentive to disclose a project’s cons along with the pros. Instead, there is almost an expectation that a proposal makes unqualified positive claims. In ‘The Technostrich’ and ‘The Technology Narrative’, we contend that it would not be so bad to make the potential problems of new technologies publicly known. It may behoove proponents to come clean and to build trust by divulging technology’s limitations. Moreover, it would be opportune to write a script that avoids grandiose promises and instead solicits experts to help solve problems that may arise along the way. The disclosure of possible complications, conflicts and the particulars of the decision-making process may in fact contribute to a project’s realization rather than its demise.
In the following pages, C-Lab shows the ability of the children’s story to make sense of hard-to-describe events, given that its format addresses emotionally difficult, morally complicated and ethically charged issues with concision. We argue that such constructions are especially relevant today since simple public narratives set the tone for actions in response to the very events (like crisis) which challenge our ability to distinguish fact from fiction.
While truthfulness has it value, the same can be said for fantasy. The children’s story is well suited to counteract the resignation and incapacitation that often accompanies trauma, since its fantastical plots aim to summon the imaginative potential of the reader’s captive mental state. Rather than try to discern reality from fantasy, contributors like Lewis H. Lapham, Neil Denari, Catherine Hardwicke, Dave McKean, Tom McCarthy, Smiljan Radic, Lucia Allais and Roger Dean would encourage us to cycle between conscious and unconscious states, work-life and dream-time, desire and disappointment, material reality and history because to do so is essential to an enhanced experience of the physical environment. For good reason, people say a story isn’t worth telling if it can’t be told to a child. A simple, distilled story that clarifies the crisis, and that aids the formulation of policies to better understand and animate the physical environment, is definitely worth telling.

This past year numerous dramas have competed for our attention: sub-prime mortgages, banking meltdown, bailout, stimulus, pandemic, bankruptcy. The all-consuming effort to follow these events seldom leaves a moment to contemplate the explanations themselves. What is the stated dilemma, context or motive for any one of these problems? And most importantly, how does a problem’s formulation determine its proposed solution? Volume 20 is dedicated to the art of storytelling. It presents the storylines of current events and architecture to show that while the truth is important, so is the ability of fiction to elevate fact. Perhaps the best way to understand our era is through narratives that distort, pervert and animate reality?