Spectacular architecture was one of the backbones of last Olympic Games organized in Beijing. Both the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube were meant to attract attention on the event and the city on a global level. This approach or discourse in architecture and city marketing provoked a lot of criticism worldwide. Questions were asked, such as what to do with a hugh mega stadium and an olympic swimming pool after the Olympics? And should buildings, this big and pretentious, be built to facilitate a four week event only?

Since the end of the Olympics in 2008, the Bird’s Nest hasn’t found a significant use. According to Wikipedia only two events were planned, both on 8 August 2009, the one-year anniversary of the stadium’s opening. One is a performance of the opera Turandot. The other is the final of the Supercoppa Italiana (Italian Super Cup). Football team the Beijing Guo was supposed to play at the stadium, but finally they didn’t want to use a 80,000+ seat venue for games that routinely draw only slightly more than 10,000 people.

“In January 2009, the venue’s owners announced the stadium would be turned into a shopping and entertainment complex in three to five years. The venue costs approximately $9 million to maintain per year. Due to a lack of use, paint is already peeling in some areas; plans call for the $450 million stadium to anchor a complex of shops and entertainment outlets in three to five years is being developed by operator Citic Group. The company will also continue to develop tourism as a major draw for the stadium, while seeking sports and entertainment events.”

To the contrary, the Beijing swimming pool seems to have found its new life in facilitating fun and entertainment for Chinese families. The great Water Cube is transformed into an amazing water theme park with the help of $50 million in renovations. The water park currently takes up half the space of the Water Cube and tickets costs about $30. CNN reports online:

“The water park, which takes up about half of the 12,000-square-meter complex and, according to state media, is now the largest in Asia, features a wave pool, lazy river, spa area and 13 water slides and rides, including the Bullet Bowl, Speed Slide and Tornado.”

This way the original atmosphere of the stadium is used in a great way. One can imaginarily enjoy being in between all the bubbles on the facade. The Water Park is like a fairytale in an underwater world that even Michael Phelps must enjoy more than a boring 50 meters pool.

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.

“On February 5, 1971, the crew of Apollo 14 touched down on the lunar surface in the Fra Mauro formation near Cone Crater. It was the second attempt to land at this site. Originally, Apollo 13 had been slated to land at Fra Mauro and Apollo 14 was to explore a site near Littrow Crater. The Apollo 13 accident had altered these plans…”

After the thrilling success of Google Earth, Google launched a brand new service: Google Moon. It consists of two components that work more or less the same as Google Maps and Google Earth, and provides the viewer with (luna)graphical information. The site offers diverse material to learn more about the moon’s landscape as well as constructions and activities performed by mankind. One can find and discover information such as tours of lunar landing sites narrated by Apollo astronauts, 3D models of rovers and landers, 360-degree photo panoramas, and rare TV footage of the Apollo missions. These new features are available in Google Earth 5.0.

We are happy to announce that Volume #25 will be dedicated to the challenges of living on the moon. The moon is a liminal condition, an ultimate test to human inventiveness and feedback mechanism on our ‘taken for granted’ assumptions down here. The Volume issue is being developed in close collaboration with Alicia Framis’ Moon Life project and the European Space Agency (ESA) in Noordwijk. Last month, the Moon Academy workshops started, gathering some 50 students from different backgrounds. The end results will be displayed in Shanghai, and also as a special companion to Volume magazine later this year. Click here to browse through the Moon Life handbook, which is part of the Moon Academy.

Over the past years the Canadian artist Ross Racine has designed a series of digital fake suburbs. All drawings can hardly be seperated from real suburbs and so are their names, which include Cherry Meadows, Walnot Village and Happy Hollow. The collection called Subdivision is undoubtedly inspired by maps of real suburbs, which have become real pieces of art when seen from the air. The critic on modern planning and urbanism behind these drawings is really sharp. Racine’s creations reveal the everlasting blueprint tradition of common planning practice. The paradox of neo-traditional planning is explicitly uncovered. New neighborhoods have to look organic and from above they do, but in fact they are carefully designed, according to modernistic principles.

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.”

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).”

Royal Haskoning, the Delta Alliance and the City of Rotterdam invite students from all over the world to enter the third edition of the DeltaCompetition and develop practical, innovative, sustainable solutions to the threats facing delta cities. The organization is looking for new, inspiring and daring ideas and practical solutions from a wide combination of disciplines that integrate urban development and flood risk reduction, fresh water provision and energy production, housing and sustainable infrastructure development, (water) transport and rainwater catchment, and/or smart tools to improve urban development policy, implementation and enforcement and water governance in delta cities.

The best three will receive an award with a prize of € 3,000 each. Furthermore, the three winning participants are invited to present their ideas to an international audience of decision makers and experts during the Deltas in Times of Climate Change symposium, to be held in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, from 28 September to 1 October 2010.

Yesterday a new remarkable hotel opened doors in the Dutch city of Zaandam. The building embodies anew chapter in modern architecture making a solid design statement: modern design does not necessarily have to look modern and traditional design does not have to look traditional. We would call it neo-neo-traditionalism.

The new Inntel hotel is already the main eye-stopper in the revamped town centre and a building that has set many tongues wagging in the Netherlands. The iconic green wooden houses of the Zaan region were the fount of inspiration for the hotel’s designer, Wilfried van Winden (WAM Architecten, Delft). The structure is a lively stacking of various examples of these traditional houses, ranging from a notary’s residence to a worker’s cottage.

Wilfried van Winden envisages the hotel as a temporary home, alluding to that transience with the stack of houses. Visually speaking the structure is built up from a varied stacking of almost seventy individual little houses, executed in four shades of the traditional green of the Zaan region. The hotel is unique, familiar yet original and idiosyncratic. It is a design that could be realized only in Zaandam but at the same time transcends and reinvigorates local tradition. Interesting is  the fun element in the design. It makes one think and wonder. It adapts to traditional regional style elements while ridiculizing it at the same time.

—On Thursday March 25, the Netherlands Architecture Institute will be hosting a debate on the role of traditionalism in current architecture practice. Volume Editor-in-Chief Arjen Oosterman is one of the seven debaters. More information here (in Dutch).

Sketches for future cities and utopian buildings are often circular-shaped. Apparently a huge group of futurists, architects and urbanists prefers society to be rounded-up and dome-like. It’s hard to find out why, but one of the main reasons might be that the future city in essence has to stay away from current urban forms. A utopian sketch containing family houses in a row would be pretty boring and not really interesting as a futuristic vision. Here’s a way to create your own circular utopian future city in 3D. The ForCG website hosts a great tutorial explaining step by step how to make a utopian dream into a pretty render while using Autodesk’s 3DS Max. Here’s part 1 and part 2 of the tutorial.

What to do with the big hole in downtown Chicago? That essentially is what the Chicago Architectural Club wants to know. Therefore they announced the competition ‘Mine the Gap’.

“‘Mine the Gap’ is a single-stage international design ideas competition dedicated to examining one of the most visible scars left after the collapse of the real estate market in Chicago: the massive hole along the Lake Michigan shore that was to have been—and may yet be—the foundation for a singular 150-story condominium tower designed by an internationally-renowned Spanish architect, a tower which was to have become a new icon for the city and region. What to do with the gap? Whether or not the project is resuscitated, what else can we do with this strategic and highly-charged site? Once the motor of real-estate speculation has stalled, what can we use to propel ourselves, and the discipline, forward?”

More information about entry fee, jury, deadlines and registration can be found at the Chicago Architectural Club’s webpage. Competitors may submit material online anytime between March 22, 2010 and May 3, 2010. Registration is open, and may be completed anytime before the deadline. The first prize is $ 3,500, the second is prize $ 1,500 and the third prize is $ 750. Up to 3 Honorable Mentions will be awarded.