Virtual Conference, Hosted by Technische Universität Berlin
Since 2018, the collaborative research centre CRC 1265 “Re-Figuration of Spaces” has brought together more than 60 researchers from the disciplines of sociology, architecture, urban planning, geography, media and communication studies. Following the central hypothesis of the CRC that the radical changes in socio-spatial orders which have emerged since the late 1960s require a new concept and theories beyond globalisation, the forthcoming international conference will invite renowned international scholars and a wide-ranging academic audience to discuss preliminary research outcomes. How can the concept of the refiguration of spaces help make conflictual transformation processes more tangible and enable a better understanding of the underlying dynamics which shape new conflicts and challenges? How do these conflicts manifest themselves in spatial knowledge, in new forms of digital communication and decision making, or in knowledge circuits, mobilities and flows across globally connected societies.
Confirmed keynote speakers include Ulrich Brand, Robin Celikates, Keller Easterling, Serene Khader, Walter Mignolo and Raquel Rolnik.
Online Book Launch Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
Activism at Home offers a unique study of architects’ own dwellings; homes purposely designed to express social, political, economic, and cultural critiques. Through thirty case studies by architectural scholars, this book highlights different forms of activism at home from the early twentieth century to today. The architect-led experiments in activist living discussed in this book include the dwellings of Ralph Erskine, Paulo Mendes Da Rocha, Charles Moore, Flora Ruchat-Roncati, Kiyoshi Seike, and many others. Offering candid appraisals of alternative living solutions that formulate a response to rising real estate prices, economic inequality, social alienation, and mounting environmental and cultural challenges, Activism at Home is more than a historical study; it is an appeal to architects to use the discipline’s tools to their full potential, and a plea to scholars to continue bringing architecture's activist practices into focus—whether at home or elsewhere.
17.00 Presentation of the book by the editors, Isabelle Doucet and Janina Gosseye
17.15 Conversation about the publication with invited guest Irina Davidovici
Join us as Rafael Herrin-Ferri discusses his new book ALL THE QUEENS HOUSES with photographers Adolfo Steve Vazquez and -Ines Leong. Co-hosted by the Queens Foundation for Architecture.
The borough of Queens has long been celebrated as the melting pot of America. It was the birthplace of North American religious freedom in the seventeenth century, hosted two World’s Fairs in the twentieth, and is currently home to over a million foreign-born residents participating in the American experience. In 2013, Spanish-born artist and architect Rafael Herrin-Ferri began to paint a portrait of the “World’s Borough”—not with images of its diverse population, or its celebrated international food scene, but with photographs of its highly idiosyncratic housing stock. While All the Queens Houses is mainly a photography book celebrating the broad range of housing styles in New York City’s largest and most diverse county, it is also a not-so-subtle endorsement of a multicultural community that mixes global building traditions into the American vernacular, and by so doing breathes new life into its architecture and surrounding urban context.
This publication is made possible in part by the Queens Council on the Arts with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Conceived as a catalogue of notes and tools used in the field, The Things Around Us: 51N4E and Rural Urban Framework reveals how 51N4E’s and Rural Urban Framework’s architecture is less a series of finished objects than the manifestation of a series of processes. Landing somewhere between question and reaction, proximity and contrast, and assonance and distance, the project is a manifesto of a position, the story of two approaches to context, and a testament to the very possibility of making architecture with and within context today.
Join us for a conversation with 51N4E and Rural Urban Framework on how both offices see making architecture as a choreographic process. To register, click here.
Part of the #readCCA book presentations, this event will be moderated by Francesco Garutti and Andrew Scheinman.
The Frances Loeb Library and Spain GSD invite you to attend a Faculty Colloquium series webinar. Jill Desimini will talk with Sergio Lopez-Pineiro about his new bookA Glossary of Urban Voids (Jovis, July 2020)
Online Viewing via Zoom Webinar on Friday, October 9, 2020, between 1 pm and 2 pm EST (7 pm and 8 pm CET)
This event is free and can be viewed online, but advance registration is required.
About A Glossary of Urban Voids A Glossary of Urban Voids is a critiqued collection of over 200 terms regularly used to name the urban void, from the "terrain vague" to the "buffer zone," as the means to explore the role of urban voids as public space. As the landscape architect James Corner has pointed out, a void cannot be labeled because "to name it is to claim it in some way." By listing existing terms, A Glossary of Urban Voids is an attempt to name the unnamable, to define that which should have no precise definition.
Canadian Centre for Architecture 1920, rue Baile Montréal, QC H3H 2S6
TEMPORARILY CLOSED
Embedded in politically and economically charged sites in the Pearl River Delta, Mongolia and the European Union, Rural Urban Framework (Joshua Bolchover and John Lin) and 51N4E (Johan Anrys and Freek Persyn) operate in expanded ecologies of architectural practice, questioning the role of the architect today. By collaborating with policymakers, local contractors and NGOs and engaging their respective labs at the University of Hong Kong and ETH Zürich as key sites of research, both offices investigate new forms of cooperation and dialogue as crucial design strategies.
RUF and 51N4E work at the seams of urbanization, with projects situated in transitional settlements in Ulaanbaatar, in the new vernacular of rural China, in the transforming centres of Western European cities and in Albania’s shifting public spaces. Comparing their research and design processes, this exhibition and publication question the extents and certainties of architecture against backdrops of indeterminate notions of citizenship, unstable stages of urbanization, and insecure economies and ecologies.
Curator: Francesco Garutti, CCA Concept: Johan Anrys, Joshua Bolchover, John Lin, and Freek Persyn Curatorial research and coordination: Irene Chin with Andrew Scheinman and Jann Wiegand Exhibition design: 51N4E (Freek Persyn with Roxane Le Grelle and Sebastian Roy), Brussels; Rural Urban Framework (Joshua Bolchover and John Lin with Chiara Oggioni), Hong Kong Design development: Sébastien Larivière, Jasmine Graham Graphic design: Something Fantastic (Julian Schubert, Elena Schütz and Leonard Streich), Berlin
More information, video material and introductions: www.cca.qc.ca
Have you heard about Julius Posener, Tel Aviv’s original architectural theorist? Posener, a pioneer of modernist architecture in Israel, was a member of the Architects Circle and editor-in-chief of its magazine, Habinyan. Celebrating the launch of Typisch Posener, a book dedicated to Posener’s life and extensive work, we host a discussion with the author, Katrin Voermanek, Dr. Zvi Efrat, and Dr. Edina Meyer-Maril, one of Posener’s students in Berlin.
Whitechapel Gallery 77-82 Whitechapel High St E1 7QX London UK
From Ballykinlar in Ireland to Ekumfi-Ekawfo in Ghana, international artist collective Myvillages explore the rural as a space for and of cultural production. Founded by artists Kathrin Böhm, Wapke Feenstra and Antje Schiffers, Myvillages counters the assumption that culture is an exclusively urban phenomena. This exhibition collects material from the course of their career and runs in dialogue with the research and events programme on The Rural hosted by Whitechapel Gallery from 2017-2019. Through long-term approaches embedded within the existing activities of communities, they question who is producing culture,. By committing to work in the rural, their projects subvert established power relationships between the city and the country.
ALSON GALLERY 5vie District via San Maurilio 11 Milano
The big can be understood through the small. When it comes to atmosphere, a room works according to the same principles as a house, a square, or a whole city. “Spatial atmosphere, no matter on what scale, is the result of reduction and materiality,” insists Max Dudler in a discussion with Simone Boldrin. The Sale e Tabacchi, Hambach Castle, and the Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm-Zentrum have gained international renown. Narrating Spaces approaches Dudler’s architecture through the interior spaces and furniture he has designed. Five contributions discuss the atmospheres of the interiors, the physical appropriation of the spaces, and the sensuality of the way they are furnished. Light and shadow, geometries, materials, and surfaces unfold in a photographic essay by Stefan Müller that makes it possible to visually experience their special atmospheres and haptic elements.
University of Prishtina Modelarium, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Architecture Filipa Višnjiča bb 38220 Kosovska Mitrovica
Book Presentation: Troch, Pieter & Janssens, Thomas. Layers of Time in the Urban Landscape: Visions of Socialist Urbanity in Mitrovica (Berlin, jovis verlag, 2018).
This book represents a unique cooperation of photography and history to document the legacies of socialist urban transformation in Mitrovica. It forcibly shows that the material remnants of socialist urbanity are more than passive leftovers of a lost age. They continue to give meaning to post-socialist, post-industrial, and post-conflict lives in the city.
Public debate: The book presentation will serve as an occasion for debate between academics (history, sociology, architecture) and civil society on the legacy of socialist urbanisation in Kosovo. Participants will share thoughts on failures and successes of socialist urbanisation, on the place of socialist urban infrastructure in contemporary urban development, and the memory of urban life under socialism.
Participants: Prof. Dr. Vjollca Krasniqi (University of Prishtina, Faculty of Philosophy) Prof. Dr. Arta Basha-Jakupi (University of Prishtina, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Architecture) Prof. Dr. Florina Jerliu (University of Prishtina, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Architecture) Dr. Pieter Troch (Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies)