March 17, 2010
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.
March 9, 2010
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.
March 1, 2010
Category: architecture+ english
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.
February 27, 2010
Category: architecture+ english
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.”
February 24, 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.
February 14, 2010
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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.
February 10, 2010
Category: english
‘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.
January 19, 2010
Category: competitions+ english
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.
December 7, 2009
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
December 2, 2009
Barcelona, 18th to 22th december 2009
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.
November 27, 2009
The Barcelona Institute of Architecture present its forthcoming BIArch Dialogues “Reviewing Architectural Knowledge Formats” to which I am invited.
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
November 22, 2009
Category: architecture+ english+ eu:abierto
This post is by you.
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.
October 23, 2009
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.
October 22, 2009
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.
October 14, 2009
…and now we start with our weekly homemade playlists…
spotify:user:eiza1980:playlist:6G2Z28SrMPugyE2azJ0zDL
October 7, 2009
In a recent visit to Paris, I bought a French trade magazine that made references to “eco-neighbourhoods” built in northern Europe. Some, like BedZED, are already commented on this blog. Others were a total discovery for me. It is necessary disseminating these performances, some very good, so we can learn from these experiences. For a neighbourhood to convert into an “eco-district”, sometimes you only need a politician illuminated with appropriate buzzwords. Other times it is a collective work which has required joint efforts on the part of the public initiative, private, and of course some architects have responded to these concerns.
September 25, 2009
Today we present the work by Pablo Rica: Compact – Fabric Forming Component .
Fabric is a flexible and adaptable material with a soft appearance. In combination with a fill in material, the properties change from supple to hard, gaining structural and thermal qualities. The hardened material turns to have a soft appearance in reverse. This is where the ambiguity and discrepancy from solid fabric to elastic stone becomes interesting. And in that process of changing condition is where new possibilities of design arise. Compact is a research project about examining the potential of fabric as a construction technique and developing a modular system, in which material properties and environmental aspects are involved.
September 18, 2009
Today we present the work by Brynhildur Guðlaugs, an architect from Reikiavik, Iceland. Her proposal, called Sensual landscape, is a bathing facility for the hiking people who travel around the Torfajokull region in Iceland, an uninhabited area in the south and one of the most powerful thermal areas in the country, named after a glacier, Torfajokull. The structure of the facility is an adaptation of the already existing hot springs that are situated all around the area.
September 17, 2009
Competition to Tap Global Design Community to Develop Sidewalk Shed of the Future
Finalists to Receive $25,000 in Awards and Winner to See Design Built in Lower Manhattan
The New York City Department of Buildings (DOB) and the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIANY) today announced the launch of the urbanSHED International Design Competition with support from the Alliance for Downtown New York, ABNY Foundation, Illuminating Engineering
Society New York City Section (IESNYC), and the New York Building Congress.
September 15, 2009
Next 21th of Septembre [ecosistema urbano] will give a lecture in Paris, at 19.00 in Le Palais de Chaillot.
For more information see below.
August 26, 2009
Last July we presented a proposal for the new municipality of Eilat (South of Israel), invited by the Israeli architect Peter Keinan. It was very interesting to develop an office building with an open space in extreme weather conditions as South of Israel. We give you all the details of this project.
August 21, 2009
Jose Luis Vallejo and Belinda Tato have been tutors of one of the thesis projects group at the IAAC last June. There were 16 different students from many different countries such as Russia, Poland, Colombia, Turkey, India and so on. It has been very interesting and exciting to work with architects with such different backgrounds. The topics were chosen by them and there is a whole range of different ones from a very small scale to a large one.
We will be presenting some of these thesis works in the following weeks. Today we present the work by Rodrigo Toledo, an architect from Medellín, Colombia. His proposal is for his home city Medellín and he deals with the economic and social issues related to public space scene.
July 28, 2009
A group of architects, engineers and constructors have started to think (and design) how to refurbish the Empire State into a modern and sustainable building. The initiative is led by a special person, Amory Lovins, co-founder of the “Rocky Mountain Institute” in 1982.
July 27, 2009
“Now, the first thing we need to recognize is that this is not just a time of challenge for America’s cities; it’s also a time of great change. Even as we’ve seen many of our central cities continuing to grow in recent years, we’ve seen their suburbs and exurbs grow roughly twice as fast — that spreads homes and jobs and businesses to a broader geographic area. And this transformation is creating new pressures and problems”.
“So what’s needed now is a new, imaginative, bold vision tailored to this reality that brings opportunity to every corner of our growing metropolitan areas” (Obama)
July 19, 2009
This post is totally from the “city of sound” written by Dan Hill
I’ve just finished working with Carlo Ratti and various cohorts on a great little project, which I hope might see the light of day here before too long. In the meantime, I thought I’d post this discussion I had with Carlo late last year, which was recently published in Architectural Review Australia. We met at the Metropolis Congress in Sydney, where Signor Ratti had just given a presentation on his work at the MIT SENSEable City Lab, an outfit whose work I admire hugely, working as they do across many of my interests: interactive architecture, urban informatics, responsive envronments, multidisciplinary design and other implications of real-time networked pervasive information systems for the city.
July 8, 2009
Category: architecture+ creativity+ english
L’Aquila – Italy, earthquake
Yes, we camp! It’s the cry to denounce the crazy conduct of the after earthquake emergency.
For the first time in the recent history of earthquakes, after three months, people are still living under tents and they will have to stay there for a long time, according to the Government’s plans.
July 7, 2009
Well, it’s time to make notes on that brilliant traffic-calming idea. The Intelligence Transportation Society of America (ITSA) kicked off a $50,000 “Congestion Challenge” today that seeks to pair social networking with innovative transportation policy-making.
July 5, 2009
The Clinton Climate Initiative, from the William J. Clinton Foundation, has decided to promote 16 good practices in sustainable urban growth. Everybody is making list, as Forbes, but they don’t present very well the meaning of thist list. Through the website, we can see that the Initiative push the urban regeneration and the improvement of green energy as goals to reach better cities and better life’s. From this first post, our aim is communicate information about those projects, receive comments from our community and in two weeks offer a critical overview and some strategic keys to understand why some of the presented projects are in this list, and why some have no reasons. I hope we will generate some group of discussion on the present of our cities and some positive criticism on the ways to improve them.
July 4, 2009
A few weeks ago we attended the opening of the exhibition “Green Architecture for the Future” at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, an institution which is working since the fifties in Humlebaek (a charming town half an hour by train from Copenhagen) . This museum was a pioneer in its time to set off in a rural setting and maintain its activity for over half a century. We recommend a visit (at least virtual) if you have the chance, because the landscape and its relationship with the architecture of the museum is probably something to remember.
June 30, 2009
This is our last daily playlist at the office, from now on we’ll post weekly or monthly playlists, so the first music brain-storming ends up here… the bright side is that weekly or monthly playlists are smoother and rested, and we have more time to select tracks for everyday work…
spotify:user:eiza1980:playlist:0iZq0jYXYYnqCggogvts9w
June 26, 2009
The European Urban Knowledge Network has published an interview with Belinda Tato (Ecosistema Urbano):
Many people, organisations and governmental bodies would agree that cities play an important role in reducing the negative effects of climate change. In the past few years, this role has been actively debated at conferences, summits and informal meetings. Some organisations have a very clear and progressive image of what cities can do to tackle climate change related issues and strongly believe in large-scale transformations. An example of such an organisation would be ‘Ecosistema Urbano’, a Madrid-based architectural research and design institute that is strongly committed towards ecology and sustainability. Belinda Tato, architect at Ecosistema Urbano, believes that far more can be done to make cities more sustainable. “In the last few decades cities have grown considerably, but nothing has been done to explore new urban models to improve their efficiency, especially in relation to the management of resources.” According to Ecosistema Urbano, the ideal sustainable city can become a reality if more creative and holistic solutions are sought.
June 24, 2009
It’s a rare day indeed when we see [specially in urban scale] a brave project that amazes all of us, and I think this is one of those…
Apart from the “cool” new-yorker look, is some kind of relief that one of many awesome urban-scale proposals has been carried out. It had to happen in New York and lead the way in the U.S. of recycling and not demolishing when a construction stops being in use or is not profitable anymore. I suppose this frecuent situation is due to a lack of legislation to protect buildings that has special interest, but I think this is a cultural issue…
June 17, 2009
Prezi has been founded by Adam Somlai-Fischer and Peter Halacsy. Adam, an artist and graphic designer had been building flash navigations mostly for architecture firms or science education sites since 2000.
June 12, 2009
Tomorrow [ecosistema urbano] will give a lecture at the Laboratoire Urbain Participatif.
Saturday 16th of June, at 16.30.
address: 56 rue Saint-Blaise, 20 ème arrondissement.
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