December 28, 2007
Category : ⚐ EN + architecture + downloads + eu:abierto
Today we introduce Antonio Jiménez Torrecillas, an architect I had the opportunity to meet at the Jornadas Internacionales de Intervención en el Patrimonio Histórico that took place in Logroño last month. His work has stricken me as spectacular for combining economical resources and powerful beauty. Without a doubt, it is one of the most creative and interesting works I have seen recently. I hope you agree.
download: [download#10]
December 26, 2007
Category : ⚐ EN + eutv + sustainability + video
Here is a spot made by Surconsciente. These guys never stop amazing us with their original proposals.
Category : ⚐ EN + design + technologies + urbanism
Last Wednesday, I (Domenico) had the chance to attend the event held at Medialab (Madrid) about Wikis and Knowledge Standards. I could only watch the round table chaired by Adolfo Estalella, who was joined by Antonio Lafuente, Platoniq and Juan Freire.
Antonio Lafuente talked about the capacity of new virtual communities to generate knowledge that would never be possible without the use of new technologies, such as wikis. He talked about the production process of lay knowledge, which obtains a percentage of “error” of 6%, that is, lower than what is obtained in normal scientific processes.
Platonig talked about some of their most interesting projects, such as the BCC Banco Común de Conocimientos (Shared Knowledge Bank), concerned about favouring free broadcasting networks and free contents (education p2p).
What I most liked about Juan Freire (who I finally met) was his thoughts about the wiki technology: it allows us to generate knowledge while we design it, something that previously couldn’t be done. I’d like to add that it also allows us to associate a static element (design) to a dynamic element (knowledge). He also talked about the concept of standard, describing it as something arbitrary, something that doesn’t depend on nature and that isn’t inevitable.
Talking about Wikipedia, he pointed out how the whole debate about its functioning is taking place with full transparency, thanks to the very essence of the wiki system. All this is new, very new. We were used to standing aside this kind of debates between a few “chosen” ones.
Wikis are introducing transparency standards never seen before. I think we could take example and start thinking about the possibility of similar standards applied to public spaces. Is there a public space where one can enjoy the same transparency standard as in wikis? What would this space be like? I will carry on thinking about this topic, see if something interesting comes up… what do you think?
Ps. I met Marilo from La Fundacio, who told me about a very interesting project: http://projecte3.pbwiki.com/ I will write more about this in future posts.
Category : ⚐ EN + architecture + findings + internet + research
Newspaper ELPAIS published some weeks ago an article about the setting up of a vast data base of 20th Century buildings in Spain. You can access this catalogue from the website http://www.archxx-sudoe.es/, where you will find 5600 buildings in Spain, as well as Gibraltar and the South of France. This ambitious project sounds very interesting – it’s a shame the website doesn’t seem to work very well… (at least we have tried and weren’t successful). We will see how useful it can be, how much information it gives, etc. You can read more about it (in Spanish) from ELPAIS digital, where you can also see some pictures (beautiful lavadero de Betanzos, 1901)
December 24, 2007
4th December 2007 to 5th January 2008
Medialab Prado – Plaza de las Letras, C/ Alameda 15, Madrid
Tuesday to Friday: 10:00 to 20:00h
Saturday: 10:30 to 14:30h and 17:00 to 21:00h
Sunday: 11:00 to 15:00h
Medialab Prado is hosting an exhibition with the outcome of 10 projects developed during the workshop Visualizar, a creative space that brought together, for more than two weeks, international authors, collaborators, lecturers and outstanding figures of the field of data visualization.
The audience will have the opportunity of exploring the transformation process and current situation of the projects in an interactive and dynamic exhibition.
Human Flows (Miguel Cabanzo, Colombia): migration flows in the 20th Century; Mail Garden: Human Centered Data View (Kjen Wilkens, Alemania): personal data contained in digital communication applications; tweedPad (Elie Zananiri, Canadá): Twitter feeds, modifiable in appearance and meaning by the reader; Spamology (Irad Lee, Holanda): spam in an email account throughout 10 years; Barriblog (M Luz Congosto, Madrid): neighbour relationships between blogs; Cascade on Wheels (Steph Thirion, Barcelona): trafic in streets in Madrid and interaction with levels of acoustic pollution; Casastristes.org (Mar Canet, Reino Unido): number of empty houses in large cities and economical impact on mortgages, renting policies, etc.; foodcultura.org (Natalia Muñoz, Colombia): data base for works included in the virtual museum of culture and food; Memory Islands (Miguel Albadán, Colombia): connections between cave paintings and indigenous legends in South America; Metabolicvisualizer.org (Ricardo Carvalho, Hernani Dias, Miguel Cardoso; Portugal): representation of the bio-chemical reactions within a cell.
More information at http://medialab-prado.es
Category : ⚐ ES + educación + eu:abierto
La educación es fundamental para el buen desarrollo de una sociedad. Hoy os presento un proyecto educativo que me parece espacialmente innovador. Se trata del projecte3, que conocí en una mesa redonda en el Medialab-Prado de Madrid. Para los que quieran saber más le invito a visitar la pagina de la Fundició que promueve el proyecto.
projecte3* propone llevar a cabo junto a los estudiantes una investigación sobre la relación entre las disposiciones espaciales y la distribución del poder de manera que se desactiven las relaciones jerárquicas entre profesores y alumnos, estableciendo una red de trabajo auto-gestionada en la que estudiantes, artistas, profesores y arquitectos puedan compartir su propio bagaje en un proceso colaborativo, horizontal y mútuo de construcción de conocimiento.
El proyecto propone ensayar nuevos modelos educativos y en este sentido, los estudiantes ha seguido diferentes procesos y estrategias de aprendizaje auto-organizado:
*Lecturas en grupo y grupos de conversación: Tanto estudiantes como miembros de LaFundició llevaron a clase textos o materiales audiovisuales relacionados con varios aspectos del sistema escolar. Los textos, canciones y clips fueron abiertamente discutidos en la clase de un modo dialógico e informal. Algunos de los asuntos que salieron a relucir fueron: “distribución de mesas y sillas”, “conocimiento legitimado exclusivamente por el profesor”, el sistema de vigilancia al que están sometidos, desde la distribución de los espacios hasta las reglas que les prohibían permanecer en los pasillos o la sirena que regulaba la entrada a clase, la “prohibición de teléfonos móviles y mp3 en la clase”, la escasa representación de sus intereses dentro de la escuela, un currículum impuesto que nos les interesa…
*Proyectos personales de investigación: Proyectos de investigación centrados en temas de su interés personal que van desde la cultura popular juvenil hasta asuntos de macropolítica como: series de televisión para adolescentes, bandas de pop-rock, el tuning, la agoge, las relaciones de pareja, la ocupación, el G8, la pornografía…; esta investigación, así como todo el proceso de trabajo, noticias y otros materiales relacionados con el proyecto son publicados en un sitio wiki (http://projecte3.pbwiki.com/). El wiki ha sido también un punto de partida para integrar el proyecto en una red más amplia de iniciativas educativas, culturales y/o sociales a escala local y global.
*Peer learning: En colaboración con el colectivo de arquitectos Catarqsis, los estudiantes han desarrollado un completo estudio de los usos del espacio tomando en cuenta parámetros tales como la vigilancia, el estudio, la libertad, la oportunidad, el odio, la diversión/placer o la prohibición, trazando una especie de cartografía psico-geográfica de la escuela.
December 23, 2007
Last week, I (Domenico) had party at my house. It was pretty good, I met a couple of really nice people. I also had a surprise. I suddenly bumped into Eduardo from BiciMad. He happens to be a friend of a friend. We hadn’t met before. I had been wanting to meet someone from BiciMad for some time. We talked about the bike lane in Madrid and other possible projects… however, this post is about something else. Eduardo told us about this project he is doing using pallets. Jana, from our office, has done some search and has found this site with a few examples of architecture built using pallets: pallet house. Hope you like it….
Category : ⚐ EN + ecosistema urbano + internet
This month we have received a nice surprise: our blog has more than 6000 visist a month and we have reached the number of 4000 visitors a month. We are also happy to have 140 people subscribed to the Spanish version and 59 to the English version – they receive our news daily in their mail or in their favourite feed. This is really a wonderful surprise. We are very happy with the blog. We would like it to become even more participative, a catalyst for creative and innovative people, ideas and projects. We are open to all your proposals – just write to us. We want to offer this space to (interesting) people for publishing their ideas and projects.
I also want to introduce some new projects. We are very interested in the new phenomenon of Social Network, specially sites like Facebook, which we are already using for our community (eu:abierto). Well, we have just launched another community in facebook for students. All students are welcome to join (write in English as you please!!).
Today we want to welcome Ethel Barahona Pohl to eu:abierto.
‘I am an architect from Salvador and for the last 9 years I have lived in Barcelona. I have attached my professional development to technical publications on architecture and construction, such as Constructiva and Waterdrops magazines. I am dedicated to publishing and with the project Caja Negra: (www.caja-negra.com) I carry out activities for various international firms.
I have recently published the book Arquitectura Sostenible. I am a co-writer, together with architects César Reyes and Claudio Pirillo. You can have a look at it from:
www.editorialpencil.es
www.ribabookshops.com
I am particularly interested on sustainable architecture and all novelties and topics that enable a more adequate social, environmental and economical development of our profession.
Category : ⚐ EN + city + sustainability + video
Our friends from basurama have been working on their blog for a few months. It is becoming more and more interesting each day. There, we have found an eye-opening report by la2 (Spanish public tv channel). In the words of juan from basurama: a well rounded, realistic report. Not softy, nor mushy. Gives voice to those who speak without slant or external opinions. It doesn’t become patronising, nor dogmatic (something out of the ordinary in this time of the year, and we are pleased about it).
