Thursday 7 April at 4pm, Why Factory (TU Delft, building Bouwkunde, Oostserre). 2067: The Legacy: Looking back to the future of architecture in Rotterdam.

Special offer: During the presentation the book 2067: The Legacy will be available for € 15.00 (normal price € 19.90).

The event presents the outcome of Indesem 2007, where the potential of the architect to set the agenda was at stake, tested at 20 locations in Rotterdam. For this festive launch Winy Maas, Wouter Vanstiphout and Dirk Sijmons will debate on the societal role of the architect: research agenda’s, consequences for education and relationships with local politics. What profile can we think of for this figure, that oscillates between landscapes of the future and cities of the past?

2067: The Legacy contains lectures and inspirational input from Herman Hertzberger, 2012 architects, Ronald Wall, Floris Alkemade, ZUS, Wouter Vanstiphout, Michiel Riedijk, Winy Maas, Dirk Sijmons, Salomon Kroonenberg and Juhani Pallasmaa and reports on the discussions and results from the workshops to formulate a future agenda for architecture. Jeroen Musch created a photographic report and Maureen Mooren with Sandra Kassenaar signed for the special design.

The viability of a contemporary counterculture is defined through the sustainability of its oppositional stance. CyberAnthropologist Steven Mizrach argues that to find a countercultural voice, oppositional figures – hackers, cyberpunks, techno music makers – must liberate their niche, underground positions in the name of information dissemination. An anthropologist teaching at Florida International University, Mizrach focuses his research on the confluence of anthropology and ‘high technology’, or AnthroFuturism.

Not surprisingly, there is both continuity and change between the countercultures of the 1960s and those of today. The computer underground, the rave movement, the modern primitives, and other contemporary cultures can trace a lineage back to the Beatniks and Hippies of the 1950s and 1960s. Several key figures, such as Timothy Leary, John Perry Barlow and Stewart Brand, most obviously bridge this transition. However, rather than examining continuity, this essay will focus on evolving attitudes toward the natural and organic versus the artificial and synthetic. While the hippies were sometimes wary of advanced technology, today’s countercultures readily embrace it as a tool for countertactics.

Today’s countercultures don’t want to go back to nature; they want to upgrade its hardware. The hippies’ idealization of the ‘natural’ in food, clothing, music and lifestyle habits bears little resemblance to the modern day post- and trans-human desire to replace the organic body with a more efficient cyborg. Similarly, the slow, acoustic folk music of the 60’s has been replaced with the rapid techno-powered drumbeats of synthesized industrial music.  And while the hippies often turned to drugs derived from nature for their psychedelic trips, today’s ravers ingest laboratory-born synthetics such as MDMA and ketamine. Modern day psychonauts and cybernauts also engage with mind machines, biofeedback, computer-generated fractals and 3D stereograms to modify their consciousness.

If hippies were skeptical of the impersonal and inaccessible, as represented by mainframe computers, plastics, and other ‘artificial’ products of the 60’s, today’s counterculture embraces synthesis. They want their drugs designed by the molecule and their bodies remade into designer selves controlled by designer brains. Many hippies thought the Moon landings and the space program were a waste of time, but today’s psychonauts advocate affordable and accessible space travel for all, echoing Leary’s idea that the human race may only fully awaken outside of the Earth’s gravity well. The use of various technologies to extend one’s lifespan beyond that allotted by nature is also eagerly embraced through nootropics, cryonics and nanotechnology. Like death, intelligence need not be limited by nature; artificial augmentation seems possible by merging with electronic technology as a secondary nervous system.

While many embrace this cyborgian ideal, the cyberpunks among us are choosing to direct this destiny through personal autonomy. If the body’s hardware and the brain’s wetware are to be upgraded, the cyberpunk wants to be a subject in charge of that process, not an object given to receive. In this way, cyberpunk culture echoes 60’s hacker culture whose ethos to make the personal computer accessible, personal, user-friendly, and appropriate deeply affected the technology’s subsequent development. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built their phone phreaking blue boxes because they believed in a right to communicate beyond Ma Bell’s terms; this attitude drove the early PC revolution and, combined with local area networking and DARPA’s experiments in wide area networking (WAN), gave birth to the Internet.

How could we even begin to understand contemporary counterculture, much less any culture, without the Internet? It is how we communicate, organize and recruit new members and how we take actions to challenge social norms. The hippies self-organized around geographic centers such as Haight-Ashbury but today’s countercultures are trans-local and global, often linked only through electronic networks. Hacktivists act through the Internet, subverting the messages of other websites. ‘Flash mobs’ take street theater and spontaneous social action to new levels, self-assembling through electronic explosions of text messages, tweets, and IMs, dispersing before the authorities can intervene. And the computer underground will use the Internet and other networks to seize and disrupt the very infrastructure of normative society itself.

But are these tactics enough to call today’s countercultures oppositional? Given that today’s counterculture is as enmeshed with technology as ‘mainstream’ society is, how is opposition enacted? In other words, if today’s countercultures are not proffering an alternative to the ubiquitously synthetic world around them, where is the ‘counter’? In many ways it is manifest in conflicting visions of what technology should be used for, and who, if anyone, should own and control it. It’s little disputed that we are moving into what some have called a post-industrial or information economy, but if this is the case, do 19th century ideas of property still apply? The 21st century countercultural struggle may be over who owns the means of information.

The open source movement represents one locus of this battle by questioning whether software should be proprietary. Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation advocates the distribution of software under ‘copyleft’, which encourages widespread duplication, redistribution and user modification of code. On another front, music samplers such as Negativland and Emergency Broadcast Network are asserting a fundamental right to remix and modify the musical works of others. Such operations challenge our notion of creativity and ownership as individual enterprises. In the plastic arts, artists always borrow from others but we call this ‘inspiration’, ‘pastiche’, ‘homage’, ‘collage’. Yet when it comes to music, corporate industry cartels such as the RIAA step forward and squelch the process. But samplers claim that they are not trying to steal; like open source programmers, such musicians strive to upgrade, modify and improve upon the work of others. And in grabbing ‘found’ sound-bytes from various politicians, TV programs, or commercial advertising, samplers are doing as the Situationists did by detourning original intent. For culture jammers, this subversive and essential commentary on the culture stream warrants constitutional protection.

Cypherpunks and cyber-libertarians use technologies of encryption and digital anonymity to evade the Panopticon surveillance state and its centralization of power. Massive databases increasingly compromise our privacy by systematically cataloging our consumer preferences and tracking both our on- and off-line movements and actions. We allow Facebook to share our digital identities with strangers, cyber stalkers, corporate spammers and others who want to mine data. We seem to want to be instantly locatable through roving phone numbers and GPS chips that track us everywhere. Are cypherpunks the only ones who should be asking whether we should always allow ourselves to be found?

Timothy Leary’s belief that people should be free to change their own consciousness as they see fit has fueled the cognitive liberty movement of the first decade of the 21st century. But people should be also be free of attempts by others to control their consciousness. Our mental states should not be controlled by a psycho-pharmaceutical establishment whose increasing arsenal of psychoactive drugs is used to chemically manage perceived aberrations in behavior or displays of social dysfunction. Perhaps the so-called war on drugs needs redirection.

Even basic communication has come under increasing corporate control, long fueling the countertactics of the phone phreaks, pirate radio programmers and the Billboard Liberation Front. File-sharing peer-to-peer networks strive to subvert outdated 19th century ideals of intellectual property guarded by the RIAA and MPAA. Today’s post-millennial countercultures work to universalize the hacker ethic and to liberate information access, creating the ‘Matrix’s’ biggest fear: a world without borders and regimes of control.

This article is published as online part of ‘Volume #24: Counterculture’.

Excerpts from an interview conducted in March 2010.

Neil Spiller’s work — which spans his theoretical ventures and architectural practice, and was shaped by his training with both Cedric Price and Gordon Pask — explores the friction between media and reality, interrogating the oxymoron inherent in the notion of ‘virtual reality’ and how this divergent term informs the built environment. Here, he sits down with Volume to reveal the Surrealist methods latent in the dream state of the architect.

When I first started writing, the big buzz was full body immersion in cyberspace and Mondo2000. Since then, a lot of us have realized that our intelligence is literally embodied. Our intelligence is made out of virtual and real things, and the synthesis of the virtual and the real is where my explorations lie. Certainly the idea of living in a pod with my bodily functions wired up to the sink is not a good thing. For me, architecture is embodied in a series of reflexive objects or narratives. I often say that architecture can exist from the microcosmic and the nanoscopic to the cosmographic. I’m interested in the blurred boundary as a place from which to speculate, in both architecture and drawings. I’m always kind of sniffing and licking them a bit, not sure if they’re any good yet.

I spend a lot of time talking about, perhaps reassessing, the spatial protocols of Surrealism as a way of finding methods to  expand aspirations and knowledge of the digital world. Specifically, the Paranoiac-critical method, as Salvador Dalí’s psycho-sexual approach, is how I re-interpret the world. People have described my drawings as a kind of myth-making, and certainly my work over the last ten years has become very mythic. So I try to link to his body of work, which I think was brave for its time, and uses it to question some of the assumptions we (architects) have about our role in the contemporary world … Soon we’ll be able to start to make spaces that aren’t dictated by the tyranny of the planner or the aesthetic tyranny of the architect.

What has disappointed me is the way the architecture profession has taken to virtuality by one particular route, which has now been exploited to the point of ubiquity. There is a lot more of the virtual world that rubs up against architecture that needs exploring. I am interested in what I call architecture of the second aesthetic, which is essentially algorithmic. I think there is a place for algorithmic architecture, but to explore it properly we might have to leave the computer behind.

I think I’m an ‘optimistic Futurist’; I’m much more interested in what’s going to happen a year or five years hence as opposed to thirty or fifty years from now. Scientists call that ‘deep future’ and it’s actually almost entirely unpredictable. When you’re a student, you’re like a heavy metal guitarist: you want to rush up the fret board as fast as possible. And when you’re my age, you want to play the blues, because it’s about the emotional content of the work. So blues is the thing. [Laughs]

Excerpts from an interview with Volume, March 2010.

Originally trained as a mechanical engineer, Michelle Addington, now a professor at the Yale School of Architecture, approaches the field of architecture through the application and manipulation of technologies in terms of discrete environmental systems. Arguing against the corralling of forms and ideas into fixed stations, Addington proposes that, similar to work she was doing at NASA in the late seventies and early eighties, architects should approach their practice as the development of malleable, passing events – that which is material though not necessarily visible. Addington recently co-authored Smart Materials and Technologies for the Architecture and Design Professions (Architectural Press, 2005).

“We are learning how to have abstract conceptions of an environment no longer defined by straightforward output. I think we’re getting closer – through digital models that embed transience – but not fast enough. Technological development starts as a discrete phenomenon or single property. Then, the pushback follows. We, as a profession, are the wrong ones to be deciding what property we need; this is how we have been frozen. We should be generating the proof of concept, by testing and pushing back. Our way of exploring and understanding will open up ideas beyond the normative sequence of technological development, which is parsed down and atomized. The first step is to accept that the existing building, even the new building, is a dumb armature. The building itself becomes dumber, and cheaper and more of a commodity as we are able to focus on changeable and interchangeable technologies.”

“We also need to stop zealously guarding our territory. The more we try to maintain control over it, the more it continues to shrink. Ours is one of the few fields in which the profession (Architect) completely circumscribes the discipline (Architecture). Our desire to have everything defined by professional practice, as opposed to a disciplinary canon, is becoming obsolete.”

“An intelligent environment might no longer be an environment; it might be a set of autonomous and transient and discrete responses that will happen once and disappear. We need to get comfortable with the body as the entity that negotiates with our surroundings. That is our new baseline. That’s an architectural question – it won’t come up in neurobiology or physics or engineering.”

“The mode we should be working in? I don’t know yet. It’s tragic that the kind of open-ended imaginative thinking that I remember from thirty years ago when I was at NASA is pretty much restricted to the military now, to the Defense Advanced Researched Projects Agency (DARPA). Things they are doing with the human body are particularly interesting – it’s open-ended but designed to be implemented soon. This is something that I wish we, as architects, could get ourselves a little bit more involved in.”

This article is published as online part of ‘Volume #24: Counterculture’.

A seminal proponent of sustainable architecture and green design, Sim Van der Ryn approaches architecture as an ecosystem, an ever-evolving, responsive organism. An unruly civil servant – both as Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and as the official State Architect under Governor Jerry Brown – Van der Ryn has published his visions of collaborative design and ecological principles in, among others, The Integral Urban House: Self Reliant Living in the City (The Sierra Club, 1974) with Bill and Helga Olkowski; The Toilet Papers: Recycling Waste and Conserving Water (Chelsea Green Publishing, 1986) and Sustainable Communities: A New Design Synthesis for Cities, Suburbs and Towns (New Catalyst Books, 1986), both with Peter Calthorpe; Ecological Design (Island Press, 1996) with Stuart Cowan; and most recently in Design For Life: The Architecture of Sim Van der Ryn (Gibbs Smith, 2005). Here, Van der Ryn discusses his radical seminars at Berkeley in which he developed a classroom-as-commune approach, eventually leading to the founding of the Farallone Institute and the ‘birth of green’.

Jeffrey Inaba: How do you think that the prevailing ideas about modern architecture played out at Berkeley in relation to the idea of alternative modes of design? Was it a response to various institutions or was it not really conscious?
Sim Van der Ryn: The problem with architectural ideology was that it was ideology [laughs]. But I wanted to know how architecture really related to human beings, and I didn’t see any answers in the ideology.

I wrote an article in Landscape Magazine called ‘Architecture: Art or Science?’ in which I interrogated the existing knowledge about how buildings address people. Most people think buildings are sculptural objects or works of art, but my view has always been that buildings are organisms and ecosystems, and humans make up an important part of those systems. Architecture critics never review buildings in terms of humans.

JI: Can you talk a little bit about the type of work you were doing in the 60s and to what it was responding?
SVDR: In 1961, Berkeley’s new hi-rise dormitories received great reviews from architecture critics. They were great and were modern, but I was really interested in the human response to them. I wanted to create some kind of science, so my research seminar and I implemented simple techniques to get a handle on this very question. We observed and interviewed students over one year and immediately found problems: they had big lounges that were never used, and the double-loaded straight corridor was noisy as hell. We then wrote a monograph of our findings in simple, non-scientific language. I wanted to call it The Ecology of Student Housing, but the head of the Facilities Lab suggested that no one knew what ‘ecology’ was yet – it was too arcane. So we called it Dorms at Berkeley. It was really the beginning of post-occupancy evaluation.

People’s Park

JI: Can you talk about how you began your research on communes and participatory design?
SVDR: Around 1967, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) gave me a grant to study alternative institutions. I travelled around California and New Mexico just as the first communes were springing up and as the idea of participatory designwas just emerging. After seeing the communes, the whole bureaucratic junkyard of architecture was just bullshit. Still is, as far as I’m concerned.

I had taken a year off to teach at Princeton and UPenn with Louis Kahn and Ian McHarg, respectively. When I came back to Berkeley, a whole scene had just taken over: drugs, hippies, Grateful Dead [laughs]. It was like coming back to a whole other city.

JI: How did you become involved in People’s Park in Berkeley?
SVDR: As a result of the monograph on dorms at Berkeley, they set up a new campus life committee on housing and environment, and I was the chair. Around that time, the Executive Vice Chancellor wanted to tear down four blocks of dense urban fabric right near campus, on Telegraph Avenue. It was a university-owned write-off not on the campus proper, actually about a block from where these dormitories had been that I had studied. There didn’t seem to be any good reason for what he wanted to do, and there were no budget projections. So we said no, but he did it anyhow. And they just demolished the block and left the site empty; it became another vacant lot. In April 1969, people started showing up with shovels to begin to make something themselves [laughs]. So I told my graduate seminar that we would study this, because this was really participatory design in action, and it was right here in our backyard just like the dormitories. And we did.

People’s Park was pretty amazing; hundreds of people would have spontaneous meetings. They would start to dig a pond and then someone would say, ‘Oh wait a minute, if we dig a pond a kid could fall in it and drown. Maybe we shouldn’t do that’ [laughs].

But soon, the park became a hot-button issue, and Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, said it was anarchy and illegal seizure. In response to Reagan, flyers began to be circulated that said ‘Illegal seizure of university property? They stole it from the Awani Indians’ [laughs]. I got the College environmental design faculty and the dean to agree to take it over as an experimental field space, and then Reagan said, ‘You’re just a bunch of commie, anarchist bastards, so I’m going to get you fired from the university’. The Chancellor called me up and told me that our committee had to negotiate with them. I told the Chancellor that there was no way the authorities would recognize the legitimacy of the leadership of People’s Park. I asked him if he had been down there, and he said he didn’t have time. I told him he should, but he never did. The inevitable happened: Reagan called in the National Guard, and Ed Meese, his legal advisor and later his Attorney General, called in the Oakland Sheriff thugs, and one night it was just shut down.

You know, 1969 was kind of an unraveling of the counterculture. People’s Park was of major importance for the whole movement, and for its opponents. When Reagan ran for re-election, he said he was going to shape up the University of California because was becoming an anarchist scene, and he was re-elected largely on that basis. The counterculture had become really wild in response to recent events. There was the 1968 Chicago Convention, and then the assassination of Martin Luther King. It was a chaotic time, and it’s hard to imagine unless you were there.

After that all happened, I was so traumatized that I moved with my wife and kids out of Berkeley Hills and into our cabin in Inverness. I realized when I was writing Design for Life that when I left Berkeley I had flashbacks of leaving Holland as a young child just before the Nazi invasion. When you see brute force exercised the way it was…a lot of people were just sickened by it and said, ‘Fuck this. I can’t do this anymore’.

The first year I was out here, I got a Guggenheim fellowship and wrote a self-published book called Farallones Scrapbook. I also self-published a book called Changing Space and Changing Places. I had done it on the cabin floor with my kids, but I sold 5000 copies in Berkeley alone. And then Random House picked it up.

JI: After People’s Park, did you move away from the university because you regarded it as another dysfunctional institution?
SVDR: I told the department that I had had enough, and that I wasn’t coming back to teach on campus. They asked me what I planned to do. I had just bought five acres near the Point Reyes National Seashore, and I said I was going to conduct a Berkeley class out there, with the students living there four days a week, and we would call it ‘Making a Place in the Country’. So we started building this little commune, which turned out to be a rehearsal for creating the Farallones Institute. And we did the Integral Urban House in Berkeley in 1974, which Fine Homebuilding called ‘the birth of green’. So it was actually an experiment in communal living and creating the entire infrastructure that we needed for all of that with practically no money. I learned how to forage salvaged materials, since at that time they were tearing down half of Oakland and half of San Francisco.

JI: You operated on both ends of the spectrum of the 1960s, both as an official – as the state architect for Governor Jerry Brown, as a member of the university administration, and through the institute – but also as an activist and a self-starter. How did you mediate between these seemingly opposing roles?
SVDR: You know, I was just an activist, an advocate. I wanted to question all institutional forms, as well as the role of architects in what I saw as extending the life of institutions that I thought were dysfunctional. So I started the Farallone Institute, and we did a lot of work in school classes in the 1960s. We found teachers that were trying to do things differently. I was friends with Ant Farm, and we’d go into schoolyards and make inflatables. I was also involved with Essalen; I became friends with Michael Murphy and I mostly just hung out there, but I eventually became their architect. Then I started another Farallone center; we had the Berkeley location already, and then I became interested in a rural-based center where we could see how far we could go towards growing our own food, producing our own energy, reducing our water use and using intelligent passive solar design.

JI: Would you consider that project to be part of the Back To The Land movement?
SVDR: Yeah, it was part of it, yeah. As a child, I spent summers working on farms and even when I was much younger than that, I would find haggard pieces of leftover nature in Queens [laughs] that were left from when the construction had stopped at the beginning of World War II. My connection with the natural world really began very young.

State Architect/Jerry Brown

JI: What do you think were your greatest achievements in the work you started in Governor Jerry Brown’s office and as a teacher at Berkeley?
SVDR: We became, and still are, the most energy-efficient state in the country. We reduced energy consumption by 40% from what was then the standard. If you talk about LEED platinum and all this crap – we were doing it forty-five years ago!

Jerry Brown is running for governor again and his announcement said, ‘What we need in Sacramento is someone with an insider’s knowledge and an outsider’s mind’. And those are almost the very words he used when he asked me to come to Sacramento and run the state’s design and construction. For me it’s been a trajectory. Those wild years in Sacramento were a wave; we just were there at the right time. Working for Jerry, I was able to get a lot done. I never took it that seriously [laughs].

I had really good press, because reporters would call me up, and I’d just tell them the truth and journalists appreciated that. I wasn’t badmouthing; I was just being pretty honest.

I worked for some pretty good architectural offices but I was always asking why we were doing something a certain way. One day, my boss at one of these offices just exploded at me and said ‘You ask too fucking many questions and I don’t think you should be here!’ I asked what I should do, and he said I should go teach. And I think, at this point in my life, I would say what I’m proudest of is that I accomplished a fair amount of things as a teacher for 35 years.

This article is published as online part of ‘Volume #24: Counterculture’.

Tuesday 8 March, 2011, Impakt HQ, Utrecht. Open: 19.30, start: 20.00. Free entrance.

Today’s cityscapes are tagged not only with traditional graffiti out of the spray can, but also with what could be called ‘digital graffiti technologies’. RFID tags and Photos and Youtube videos placed on Google maps also mark and control virtual and physical territories. The big difference, however, is that these new media technologies are mostly used for entertainment and surveillance purposes and not for individual expressions and political statements. The fifth Utrecht New Media Evening features artists, activists, academics, and developers who discuss the new digital graffiti practices, and how they can establish alternative communicative systems that remain bottom-up and subversive.

Keynote speakers:

• Evan Roth (USA): co-founder of both Graffiti Research Lab and Free Art & Technology Lab (F.A.T. Lab). His ‘EyeWriter’, made a paralysed graffiti writer bomb again and Roth developed various digital graffiti analysis tools resulting in ‘Graffiti Taxonomy, Paris 2009′ and the ‘Graffiti Markup Language’, an XML based open file format designed to store graffiti motion data.
• Jeroen Jongeleen/Influenza (NL): internationally renown for his infamous interventions in public space under his alter ego Influenza, prosecuted for vandalism by the same Boijmans he later exhibited in, Jongeleen talks about the relationship between subversive markings on the streets and the web.

An impressive animation of satellite images taken before and immediately after the flood shows how rising water leaves a trail of destruction in Brisbane. A split second transforms the city’s colorful urban landscape into a brown quagmire. Monitoring changing landscapes using satellite images provides insight in various scenic transitions. The New York Times has made available a shocking series of aerial photos from GeoEye and Google that show Port-au-Prince before and after the January 12, 2010, earthquake. Specifically interesting to take notice of here is how Pétitionville’s tent city is organically constructed with an almost Medieval street pattern.

In just a few decades 80% of mankind will live in cities where more than 90% of our wealth is generated. And all that covers less than 3% of the earth’s surface. Cities are effective, they drive innovation, offer the best answer to overpopulation, and are the greenest answer we have on a planet where crisis and climate change are forcing us to find rigorous solutions. But then cities must be better managed, better designed, better organized, and better planned than they currently are. Only then can cities save us from ourselves.

With Making City, the International Architecture Biennale will therefore actively engage with ‘city making’ in the form of concrete projects in three cities: Rotterdam, São Paulo and Istanbul. For this, an international team of curators is engaged in a two-year research programme in these three cities. Their main goal is to redefine the role of and the relation between planning, design and politics and thereby contribute to a more effective toolbox for making the city. Open and new alliances among urban planners, scientists, businesses, developers and local administrators are the driving forces in this endeavour. It will culminate in presentations, exhibitions, lectures and debates in the three cities, after which it is the stated intent of all partners to see the projects realized.

The IABR calls for submissions of projects that advance innovative responses to today’s most pressing urban challenges. Municipal, metropolitan and national governments, cultural organizations, researchers, designers, and other parties are invited to submit design projects that rethink the existing interaction between politics, planning and design. The selected projects will be integrated into the 5th IABR’s overall research and development process and they will be presented in Making City, the 5th IABR’s main exhibition at the Netherlands Architecture Institute, opening in April 2012. Projects can be submitted until 1 April 2011, 12:00 CET. Click here for submission guidelines, the complete Call for Projects and more information on the 5th IABR — Making City.

The Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize is a biennial international award to recognise individuals and organisations that have made outstanding contributions to the creation of vibrant, liveable and sustainable urban communities around the world. It seeks to recognise individuals and organisations responsible for urban initiatives that display foresight, good governance or innovation in tackling the many urban challenges faced by cities. These urban initiatives can include (but are not limited to) urban planning projects, urban policies and programmes, urban management, as well as applied technology in urban solutions.

These urban initiatives should incorporate principles of sustainable development and demonstrate an ability to bring social, economic and environmental benefits in a holistic way to communities around the world. The Prize will also place an emphasis on practical and cost effective solutions and ideas that can be easily replicated across cities. Through this prize, Singapore hopes to facilitate the sharing of best practices in urban solutions among cities and spur further innovation in the area of sustainable urban development. The Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize Laureate will be presented with an award certificate, a gold medallion and a cash prize of S$300,000, sponsored by Keppel Corporation.

Deadline for submissions: March 31, 2011.
Click here for more information.

Midway December we kept on fighting on through the snowstorms for a short stopover in Shanghai. Voyager 3: A group of Western and Chinese architects, designers and artists, presented their proposed contribution for an imaginary third Voyager space probe in the format 20 x 20 (20 images of each 20 seconds), amounting to 7-minute presentations each.

Alicia Framis presenting the Moonlife Concept Store in Shanghai.

The event was organized by Volume and the Platform for Urban Investigation in conjunction with the official Chinese launch of Volume 25 – Getting There, Being There: Architecture on the Moon with The Moonlife Concept Store catalogue inside. The evening was followed by a creative industry event with food/drinks/music.

The first two Voyager capsules, sent into space in the seventies to take images of several planets in our planetary system, venture on into deep space and (potentially) encounter other intelligent life one day in the future. For that reason a representation of life on Earth was selected by scientist Carl Sagan and his team. These sounds and images included greetings in 55 languages, animal sounds etc. Not only was this a rather narrow subset of life on Earth but it also represented a strictly western point of view. 

Daan Roggeveen of the GoWest Project presenting a very long distance telephone to go along with Voyager 3.
 
Voyager 3 intended to revamp the discussion about design in its broadest sense and how to communicate that design beyond our stratosphere. The theme Voyager 3 evokes a discussion not only on different design approaches, but also more fundamentally on what earthly values and norms are worth keeping. A wide range of objects, inventions and designs were presented to go with Voyager 3. Western and Chinese perspectives were juxtaposed and ideas were exchanged on the future of design and the design of the future.

While Arjen Oosterman discussed the concept of the ‘Faculty of Architecture’ Daan Roggeveen of the GoWest project introduced a red telephone connecting random callers from east and west to exchange ideas, creating new links between them while Emiliano Armani proposed the placing of a household mirror in Voyager 3 as a non-narcissistic method of ‘letting-go’ of our objects, subtracting instead of adding in the process.

Crowd at the Dutch Design Workspace in Shanghai attending the Voyager 3 presentations and the official Chinese launch of Volume 25 on December 19.

The event was presented at the Dutch Design Workspace, an incubator program and office space for Dutch creatives companies setting up in Shanghai. The project was generously supported by the Dutch Design Workspace, the Dutch DFA and the Consulate General of the Netherlands in Shanghai.