Articles with TAG: project

Text: MIT SENSEable City Lab / Illustratiions: Jennifer Dunnam

 The past years have seen a rising interest for quality grown, fresh and local produce distributed through farmer’s markets, on-site-purchases or mobile vendors. Food markets and street vendors have existed since the earliest town settlements were formed and mobility was once a critical feature for adapting to seasonal changes and city dynamics. Today’s farmer’s markets operate around fixed schedules and locations, which limit their exposure and rarely reflect supply and demand fluctuations. As cities continue to grow in size and complexity with urban populations increasingly connected and mobile, there arises an opportunity to re-examine food distribution strategies and design the farmer’s market in a way that improves efficiency by enhancing communication between producers and consumers. MatchingMarkets is a mobile network of vendors using real-time communication to optimize distribution, increase awareness of local products, respond to seasonal activity patterns, and strengthen connections between local supply and demand.

The main ingredients of this project are a mythical and ambitious metropolis – London; one event – the Olympic Games; a dynamic and ambitious mayor  – Boris Johnson; a very powerful corporation – ArcelorMittal and its Chair – Lakshmi Mital; a cooperation between an exceptional artist (and always appealing to a broad audience) – Anish Kapoor and a visionary engineer – Cecil Balmond.

If the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao also works as a museum, and the “Bird’s Nest” in Beijing truly hosts competitions, then Orbit has no means but itself. It is a work of art – the tallest sculpture in the UK, and the only function is to offer platforms (quite large, that’s true) to view the panorama.

The success to the public cannot be assessed yet; it’s worth talking though, I think, about the reasons and the mechanisms of such an action and why the cities need these kind of gestures as well.

The Norwegian Government proposed one of the most impressive design themes in the past few years, worth more than 500 million EUR. Oslo Opera House was intended not only to become the most important cultural and architectural milestone in Norway, but also to bring a new approach to a classic theme – complete creative freedom in designing a building that has always been strictly dedicated to opera and ballet.

The result was astonishing, due to the fresh design solution and the small “surprises” reserved for the visitors, such as the possibility to have a picnic lunch on the roof of the building. The novelty was also the location itself, as the Opera is located in the city’s harbour. A very audacious technical solution allowed for half of the building to be erected on the surface of the harbour landfill and the other half on water.

URME (in Romanian language means footprints, tracks) proposes the reactivation of the urban memory of seven European cities, through multidisciplinary studies that re-create the cultural atmosphere at different moments in their historical development. Using contemporary methods, URME intends to signalize urban sites as part of the literary and cultural history of the city.