Wednesday 15 February, 6-7 pm, at ARCAM, Amsterdam. Make a reservation at rsvp@premsela.org.

Premsela, the Netherlands Institute for Design and Fashion, will host a panel discussion on design and trust at the architecture centre ARCAM in Amsterdam on Wednesday 15 February at 6 pm. It takes place in connection with the conference Social Cities of Tomorrow.
 Coinciding with the discussion will be the launch of Volume magazine’s fourth and last Trust Design supplement. The series has been produced in cooperation with Premsela. The Arcam discussion and magazine supplement will focus on the private vs the public.

Over pizza and drinks, Premsela’s Tim Vermeulen will speak to the researcher and writer Scott Burnham, project manager of Premsela’s Trust Design project; Michiel de Lange, co-founder of The Mobile City and a new media lecturer at Utrecht University; and Henry Mentink, co-founder of MyWheels. Come and listen, participate in the discussion, and enjoy a slice of pizza. Admission, pizza and drinks are free. Due to limited seating please RSVP to rsvp@premsela.org.

Trust Design is a Premsela research project set up to investigate the relationship between trust and design. How can design respond to the contemporary crisis of confidence? What are the components of trust? Can you design trust? And can you trust design? Trust Design 4 is supplement to Volume’s upcoming issue, Privatize!

The Broken Houses project by Tel Aviv-based artist Ofra Lapid is an impressive series of small, precise scale models of destroyed houses. Lapid says to base her “mock-ups of destruction” on photographs of abandoned structures neglected by man and destroyed by the weather.

“I find these photos on the web while pursuing an amateur photographer from North Dakota who obsessively documents the decaying process of these houses. His photographs are used to create small scale models. Afterward, in the studio, the models are photographed again, omitted from their background and placed in gray.”

Click here to check out the entire Broken Houses photo series.

Last Saturday, the Archis/Volume team visited two neo-traditional neighborhoods in the South of the Netherlands. Holland’s first neo-traditional neighborhoods are largely completed, and during this excursion led by Volume’s Editor-in-Chief Arjen Oosterman we had the opportunity to visit the most famous one of them, Brandevoort. The popularization of neo-traditional neighborhoods and vintage urbanism has led to intense debates in professional circles. Is this a good thing because people like it? Or is it fake because we are rebuilding the past without any historic anchor points?

Our first stop was Haverleij near the city of Den Bosch. This district by Sjoerd Soeters comprises approximately ten ‘castles’ situated in a natural and green setting. All castles, which are designed by different architects ranging from Soeters himself to Michael Graves, have a residential function and feel like gated communities, although there are hardly any fences. Many of the buildings have typical medieval elements, such as bridges and castle-like walls and towers. At the same time, the neighborhood hardly feels ‘fake’ due to the great variation in architecture and building materials. Nevertheless, one thing is clear: Haverleij and its residential concept makes a statement against the crumbling of social cohesion in the modern world. All castles breath social control, unity and safety.

The same goes for Brandevoort, our second stop. Brandevoort part of the latest generation of Dutch suburbs, the so-called Vinex neighborhoods. The state-led Vinex program regards nation-wide production of new large suburbs near almost all medium-sized cities in the Netherlands. Many Vinex projects have resulted in landscapes of monotonious houses in semi-modern building styles. But Brandevoort is a remarkable exception. This new neighborhood by Rob Krier, built close to the city of Helmond, looks and feels like a traditional medieval town. Brandevoort tends to breath history, although Krier’s plan has been existing for only eight years.

Most people would compare Brandevoort to ‘real’ fortress towns and medieval city centers and conclude that the streets are quiet and boring. But shouldn’t we compare the atmosphere to other Vinex-neighborhoods designed and built in the same period under the same conditions? In that case, Brandevoort is pretty lively and livable. People seem to be happy. After 40 years everybody could have been forgotten that this historical town is completely fake…

Click here for a Flickr set with more photos of the trip!
Photos by Valerie Blom

Josef Kellndorfer and Wayne Walker of the Woods Hole Research Center recently worked with the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Geological Survey to create an extremely detailed map of all the trees in the United States. It took the team six years to collect the data for the map with help from a space-based radar, satellite sensors, computer models and a massive amount of ground-based data. They managed to visualize the American forests with an accuracy of 30 meters. Click here for the full map.

Remember our December Special? New subscribers to Volume magazine were in the running to win a unique Worldmoon jewel designed by DUS Architects. Watch the official lottery drawing by our Editor-in-Chief Arjen Oosterman and find out who’s the lucky winner!