On August 29th, Van Alen Institute and Environmental Defense Fund will host a roundtable discussion at the Venice Biennale US Pavilion to explore the environmental challenges faced by coastal cities throughout the world.
Titled Project Eco-Delta, the initiative is part of VAI and EDF’s ongoing collaboration in developing design strategies for the landscape surrounding New Orleans—the Mississippi River’s coastal delta. The forum will feature leading experts from the fields of design, engineering, public policy and environmental science, who will discuss innovative ways with which we can address the needs of fragile deltas and the communities living in them.
The Center for Ecoliteracy supports and advances education for sustainable living.
We believe that schools play a pivotal role in moving us beyond our growing environmental crises and toward a sustainable society. We recognize schooling for sustainability as a process that fosters abundant living on a finite planet and makes teaching and learning come alive.
We bring a passion to our work that stems from our conviction that the best hope for learning to live sustainably lies in schooling that returns to the real basics: engaging with the natural world; understanding how nature sustains life; nurturing healthy communities; exploring the consequences of how we feed and provision ourselves; caring about the places where we live and the people and creatures in them.
Barcelona has always been a place of transfer and exchange, as well as a permanent laboratory for urban proposals that reflect the reality of many cities.
Today’s new, plural, intelligent cities not only work in traditional areas affecting urban environments, such as infrastructure, land, networks, etc., but they are now also focusing on other factors that affect their growth and development. These factors include sustainability criteria, creating balanced communities, making use of new technologies in the areas of transport, energy and communications, and cultural and geographic matters that can help the city develop a unique personality.
The Master’s Programme RELATIONAL BARCELONA, organized by the ESARQ School of Architecture and the Faculty of Humanities at the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, provides students with a deeper understanding of the identity of cities, their origins and future developments, and how a critical, multidisciplinary approach can be taken to resolve unknowns regarding the projection, development and management of the cities of tomorrow. In particular, the Master’s programme is aimed at holders of undergraduate degrees who are interested in the growth, development and management of cities from the social, cultural, economic and urban perspectives. Candidates for enrolment in the programme include analysts, cultural managers, communicators, technical managers, technicians, environmental experts, political analysts and journalists.
AMUSEMENT is in context. That seems imperfectly meta and self-referential, but to find something funny or entertaining relies entirely on perspective and circumstance. Enjoyment is found in the heart of the beholder. It’s personal. And the person creating the event, the statement, the idea, the passage will, like any artist with an eye, see what he or she can get away with. J’amuse? You muse.
In the space of two years, the “2.0” meme has risen from obscurity to mainstream in Government policy, as the comparison between the EU Ministerial Declaration of 2007 and 2009 shows. Yet much of the debate is still on the potential opportunities and risks of Government 2.0, with evangelists emphasising the great benefits of crowdsourcing and of leveraging collective intelligence, and skeptics pointing to the risks of wishful thinking, to the limits of transparency, and to the hype about its impact. The question is then: has government 2.0 so far really provided visible benefits for citizens?
The Bauhaus SOLAR Award is being awarded for the first time at the 3rd International Congress Bauhaus.SOLAR in Erfurt on 10th November 2010.
Der Bauhaus.SOLAR Award for young talent is being sponsored by SolarInput e.V., Solarvalley Mitteldeutschland e.V., the German Solar Industry Association and the European Photovoltaic Industry Association. The award is being advertised all over Europe and is geared towards students and young graduates. It honours superb architecture and design projects from over the last two years which demonstrate innovative use of renewable energy and the award is endowed with 15,000 Euros. An international jury selected from architecture and industry assess the submitted works.
ANCB Re-act Lab Research Workshop
Call for Participants: São Paulo Architecture Experiment
informal realities shaping futures – mobility, housing and micro infrastructures
initiated with Elisabete França and the Secretaria Municipal de Habitação of the city of São Paulo (Sehab), S.L.U.M. Lab Columbia University and ANCB
ECOLOGICAL URBANISM: Alternative and Sustainable Cities of the Future
Conference at Harvard University Graduate School of Design
April 3 – 5, 2009
The conference, which ran from April 3-5, 2009, brought together design practitioners, students and theorists, economists, engineers, environmental scientists, politicians and public health specialists, with the goal of reaching a more robust understanding of ecological urbanism and what it might be in the future.
Attention all Porto-dwellers and beyond! In collaboration with cirdodeideas, Arkinet are giving away two tickets to the Open Source 2010 seminar featuring renowned engineer and architect Cecil Balmond, taking place on June 12 from 2:30pm to 8pm at Porto’s spectacular Koolhaas-designed Casa da Musica. The seminar focuses on the concept of “open source” in relation to the exploration of architecture through diverse perspectives and professions, and includes speakers from artistic to scientific fields, such as TED speaker andethno-mathematicianRon Eglash, and Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno.
Objective
The aim of this project is to make people aware of the increasing amount of rubbish we throw away and choices for its disposal. How many times have we thought to ourselves “What a pity to throw this away!”. It just shows how often people throw away items which can still be used. RCA wants to change our attitude towards these objects and offer them a second life: if we throw away something “with love”, then someone else may “love it again”. What has become useless to someone, can become useful to someone else.
RCA enables the public to think twice before getting rid of unnecessary belongings and points out the importance of “wasting” in a critical and conscious way.
Climate change is an urgent global challenge. In response to the Stern Report, the RIBA Trust launched “International Dialogues: Architecture and Climate Change|”, a major programme of symposia exploring climate change, ecology, architecture, design and urbanism. Inaugurated by Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai, Founder of the Green Belt Movement, the series brings together visionary thinkers and practitioners from a range of disciplines to consider new possibilities, design innovation, technologies and partnerships in the global effort to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
Our current everyday lives reflect a panorama of global, political, social and economic uncertainties and therefore raises the need to respond with imaginative initiatives that might help to develop new models in response to the economic downturn and the new paradigms and opportunities offered by the digital age.
We would like to tell you a little bit about the multipurpose street furniture we designed for the Madrid pavillon at the Shanghai Expo 2010. Around the air-tree you can now find 200 chair elements in red, orange and violet color.
As part of its ongoing multimedia exhibition project ‘Endless City’, MAMA is launching an open-submission competition: ‘Reclaiming the Street’. ‘Endless City’ is a multi-part project, initiated in the summer of 2009, in which MAMA explores the relationships between skateboard culture, the public realm and (visual) art, with a wink to the heritage of the Situationist International.
‘Reclaiming the Street’ is an open-submission competition aimed at established and emerging artists, architects and skateboarders who have or wish to establish a relationship with skateboard culture. We are looking for unpublished and unrealised concepts for the (re)organisation of urban public spaces in order to create a place for multiple user groups including skateboarders. Whereas in the past skateboarders were driven away from public spaces and then ‘caged up’ in purpose-built skateparks, we envisage a new phase in which youth culture and skateboard culture will be integrated within the public realm. In addition to our wish to provide a valid place for skateboard culture, we see skateboard culture as an instrument for improving the quality of certain public spaces.
‘Reclaiming the Street’ takes the idea of skateboard culture as ‘homo ludens’ as its starting point for building bridges between the all those who make use of the public realm.
Regione Calabria (Italy) - Town Planning and Territorial Governance Department – announces the first “Zero Emission” international competition, Solar Park South, fully managed online by means of the portal www.newitalianblood.com.
Participants are requested to provide economically, energetically and culturally sustainable projects and innovative ideas for the reuse of an imposing 10-km highway stretch, between the municipalities of Scilla and Bagnara, soon to be decommissioned.
Participation is open to architects, landscape architects, engineers, designers, artists, scientists, researchers and students worldwide.
Post-ownership living may be closer than we think. We see the evidence all around us, in the form of innovations from community kitchens to emerging mobility solutions. So, if people are recognizing the practical potential in social solutions, why aren’t even more models for collaboration, sharing and product-service systems thriving? According to architect Stephanie Smith, spurring the movement may be a simple matter of providing the tech support.
This week Smith, who heads WeCommune, plans to launch the first software platform designed specifically for, well, communing (if you visit, you may get a splash page while they transition). The platform’s services will allow groups of three or more people to self-organize a “commune” defined by a shared interest or shared zip code, and will provide tools for communicating, organizing and managing projects, and sharing resources.
In the context of the extensive process to develop the Innovative and Creative Urban Strategic Plan (Plan Estratégico de Innovación y Creatividad Urbana), Cacéres City Council is calling INTA to help make its project a national and international reference.
The panel is intervening between the participatory and the design phases. INTA will involve its membership network in this challenging participatory process leading to an Innovative and Creative Urban Strategic Plan. INTA will expand on the proposals already made by several local working groups and comments received from external observers, providing a wider international input to the process.
Ecosistema Urbano, represented by Belinda Tato, will take part in this event.
Twitter’s users have got into the habit of selecting and suggesting someone interesting to follow. This action has become a weekly international event and it is called #followfriday.
As you probably already know, [Ecosistema Urbano] has been inspired by the Twitter #followfriday to create a new section known as #followarch focused on recommending interesting and innovative architecture offices.
Today we are glad to present the work of the Italian firm based in Rome StudioUAP.
studioUAP, in Rome, founded by Silvia Cioli, Luca D’Eusebio and Andrea Mangoni, works mostly on public spaces and participation.
Urban projects, architecture and landscape design are the occasions for experimenting models for the introduction of social interaction especially with children and low tech architecture. studioUAP, works as an independent office, consultant or together with other architecture firms. Research field on Rome, through Microcities (1999), Romalab (2005) and the Bilancio Partecipato (2009) together with architecture competitions focused mainly on the design of public space (1st prizes Parco Radicelli and Paesaggi Mirati, 2008) has offered the opportunity to investigate themes applied to public works such as the kindergarten in Quarticciolo, the youth center in Corviale (innovation and urban quality prize EuroPA 2009) and the prototype design for a sustainable low cost kindergarten for Bracciano and other sites.
Deadline: April 19, 2010
Dates of the event: June 7 – 23, 2010
With the participation of Platoniq, Douglas Repetto, and the working group formed by Andrés Burbano, Alejandro Araque, Alejandro Duque, and Alejandro Tamayo.
Interactivos?’10 is a workshop which develops projects gathering and putting into action collaboration and local urban knowledge networks using free software and hardware technologies and “Do It Yourself” (DIY) and “Do It With Others”(DIWO) methods.
web:http://medialab-prado.es
CITYVISION/ROME is a competition of ideas which challenges students, architects, engineers, designers and creative people to present their project proposals with the purpose of stimulating, joining and supporting the contemporary city, in this case Rome, through innovative ideas which can improve their connection between the historical and future fabric aimed to a correct evolution of the architectural historiography.
CALLING ALL ARCHITECTS, ECO-COMMUNITY DESIGNERS, STRUCTURAL ENGINEERS & IMAGINATIVE OTHERS:
Goal of the challenge is to design and build units of a model arts village in Ghana with a budget of $42,000-$62,000 and earth under the feet. The competition is a part of the Foundation’s ongoing project: tapping local resources for sustainable development in the African settings in the 21st century. We are interested in design solutions that integrate art into architecture for a more sustainable future. Join us! A grand prize winner and twenty top finalists and will be chosen. Show the world how to re-invent the African semi-suburb! Establish your name, and contribute your ideas and designs to a real need.
MAG LAB (Syria-Spain) in collaboration with Ebdaat Magazine (Architectural Creations), ALFA 301 (Spain) and Stardust* (Spain-Italy-Brazil-USA) is organizing the 2010 International Architectural Competition.
Mine the Gap: “An 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?” Submissions due: “anytime between March 22, 2010 and May 3, 2010.”
Within the IAAC Thesis projects series we started last year, we continue today by presenting the work by Gawel Tyrala, an architect from Wroclaw, Poland. As a thesis project he developed a project to enter a competition on Vistula River banks. Permanent activities around Vistula River banks forced the need to create temporary infrastructure for going on events.
The World Urban Youth Forum is undergoing a transformation, and it will now be called the World Urban Youth Assembly. This change is expected to help the youth to be better placed to meet the needs of an ever changing urban world.
This development follows the successful World Urban Youth Forums held in Vancouver Canada in 2006 and in Nanjing, China in 2008, where the forum bagged a number of achievements, including the adoption by the UN-HABITAT Governing Council of decisions important to the youth, such as resolution 21/6 which facilitated the establishment of a special fund for Urban Youth-Led Development and resolution 22/4, which provided for the Youth Forum to be an integral part of the World Urban Forum.
‘in January 2009 the uK government announced that a third runway should be built at heathrow. two days before this announcement greenpeace revealed that it had purchased a piece of land – airplot – on the proposed new runway site.
This marked the start of an epic battle.
The OPEN SOURCE HOUSE design competition started on January 15th, 2010 and is open for team or individual participation. The challenge is to design a sustainable, flexible and locally embedded one family house for a specific location in Ghana. The modular construction should be suitable for local implementation and affordable for its future owners. The winning design(s) will be built in Ghana.
Every year, the Festival of Lights welcomes the “Rencontres de la Lumière” organised in collaboration with the LUCI Association (Lighting Urban Community International). These meetings provide a forum for discussions on the theme of urban lighting and the associated social and environmental issues. The 2009 edition will focus on light planning developments in various countries over the past 20 years and will question the social and economic sustainability of urban lighting.
9.00 a.m – 12.45 p.m.: From public image to public space: developments in lighting masterplans over the past 20 years
Since the 1980s, urban lighting and masterplanning have been the focus of attention for urban communities. Urban lighting has changed significantly, from an aesthetic vision to a vision more linked to city rythms, the habits of inhabitants, public space and social issues. The City of Lyon’s celebrations for the 20th anniversary of Lyon’s lighting masterplan is a fitting occasion to reflect on its positive and negative aspects and to compare it to the masterplans of other cities in Europe and beyond, taking into consideration different cultural contexts and methodologies.
Speakers:
- Antoine Bouchet, Public Lighting Department, City of Lyon, and Michel Bouit, former Director of Public Lighting, City of Lyon
- France- Rong Haolei, Beijing Institute of Urban Planning and Design – China
- Jens Jacob Bierring, Architect, Urban Design Department, City of Copenhagen – Denmark
- Margherita Suss, GMS Studio associato, Milan – Italy
Moderator: Alexandre Colombani, Director of LUCI Association
2.30 p.m. – 6.00 p.m.: Social and economic sustainability of lighting
For several years, technical and economic aspects of sustainability have greatly influenced lighting practices and policies, while environmental, social and cultural factors were generally dealt with in the context of thematic approaches. Taking these factors into account in this way does not offer a sufficiently global approach and many issues are left unexplored. The ‘Rencontres de la Lumière’ do not claim to exhaustively examine sustainability issues but will, through the presentation of diverse case studies, demonstrate the value of taking the environmental, social and cultural dimensions of lighting into consideration.
Speakers:
- Horacio Valencia, Urban Lighting Architect, City of Medellin – Colombia
- Tim Edensor and Steve Millington, Senior Lecturers in Human Geography, University of Manchester – England
- Michael Moradiellos [ecosistema urbano], and Juan José Garcia, Light Engineer, Madrid – Spain
- Chanyaporn Chuntamara, Professor at the School of Architecture and Design, Thonburi, Bangkok – Thailand
Moderator: Jean-Michel Deleuil, Lecturer HDR, EDU-EVS, INSA of Lyon – France
The conference will serve as a meeting point for art, creativity, and innovation. It will also raise institutional, entrerprise and social awareness, nationally and internationally, of the challenges and threats that new information and communication technologies bring for the construction of a Knowledge Society that will define the future of Spain and the whole world. It is directed to institutional representatives within the art world, technology business, university, research centres, communication media, foundations and other social organisations.
As the title suggests, the dialogues will focus on issues regarding the generation and dissemination of architectural knowledge and content, through print and digital media, institutions and curatorial practices, and the establishment of pedagogical agendas. This way, BIArch hopes to open a field of inquiry that complements the Institute’s fundamental theoretical, technical and academic concerns. Through the shared reflection of scholars, critics, independent publishers, digital media entrepreneurs, curators, and cultural activists, the dialogues hope to establish a framework that might provide some of the answers to a context in which knowledge is permanently evolving.
Where: Barcelona, Spain – Passeig de Gràcia, 92
When: Saturday, November 28, 2009
Hi,
I am an architecture student from Germany and would like to share my last semester\’s urban design project with you. It was a group work focusing on the revitalization of a city quarter in the UNESCO-listed Old Town of Damascus, Syria. We proposed up-to-date housing in the traditional courtyard houses and a new cultural center on what has been urban wasteland for centuries.
This interview is in the framework of a Phd research about new technologies and hybrid cities. It aims to demonstrate how this new tools can revitalize public spaces at the city.
The exhibition What if…? cities is ongoing until the Climate Change Conference 2009 in Copenhagen. Meanwhile the staff of Louisiana organise workshops with several schools from Denmark.
