Articles published by: Nickname

The urban life exploration lab has moved from America to Europe, proving to be a model of public dialogue and active participation.

After the BMW Guggenheim Lab New York cultural project was launched in New York last summer, the mobile lab came to Berlin where it ran from 15 June to 29 July. The open-air pavilion designed by Atelier Bow-Wow (which was presented in Zeppelin #98) is hosted in one of the inner courtyards of a former 19th century beer factory: the Pfefferberg complex in the Prenzlauer Berg district (Schönhauser Allee 176).

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Stefan Tuchila climbed over 80 buildings and took several thousand photographs of Bucharest: another kind of urban research, a methodical and spectacular urban mapping. And a support for the recollection of a city that is constantly reinventing itself.

It seems as if with the passing of days, we are more and more conservatives here in Romania; including about architecture. Somehow, this is understandable. On the one hand, constant destruction can bring people closer to the past than to an aggressive present; on the other, crises always cause things to fall back into place, bringing about a return to strong identity landmarks and an even stronger nostalgia for the good old, safe days. 

Right from the end of the ‘60s, apocalyptic topics broadened up in a cultural genre mixed with SciFi, urban myths, real environmental disasters, blockbuster movies, TV shocking documentaries, the statistics of ending resources and the maps of pollution..

The mission – is a project initiated by Eurodite and part of the DISC (Dutch Initiative for Sustainable Cities – www.disc-network.eu) activities. Together with Emil Boc, the Mayor of Cluj, Vice Mayors in Bucharest, Cluj, Constanta, Timisoara and Head Architects of Cluj and Bucharest, a representative of the port of Constanta, as well as other professionals in the connected ministry, we have been in an intense and dense visit to Rotterdam, Eindhoven and Utrecht.

It is clear that technology progresses at a higher speed than our ability to adapt and use the new materials or systems at their full potential. Beyond inevitable collisions, we observe in real time the reconfiguration of social interactions in a space mediated by digitalization, which leads to a higher change of cultural paradigm.

Minor, ephemeral and (only apparently) quasi-banal interventions did not truly find their places in the histories of architecture, being inflated rather by the aesthetic imagination and the technical courage of one could call Grand Projets, that is grand edifices or expensive projects.

In „Space of Flows, Space of Places: Materials for a Theory of Urbanism in the Information Age”, Manuel Castells lets us know he does not build urban theories based on other theories, but rather draws relevant theoretical conclusions based on the observation and interpretation of current social and spatial transformations.

In every big industrial company there are research and innovation units or innovation-labs focused on the study of tomorrow’s habits, needs, and tendencies. Such labs are strikingly different from design offices, since they do not draw in there; as a rule people from all over the world, professionals in anthropology, sociology and from a wide range of other sciences and arts talk about future.