TOO MUCH ARCHITECTURE

Documentary in Seville

2011-10-06T00:57:00.000-07:00

Back to Seville!! After some months without good weather, we come back to the city of the sun and the joy.

During two weeks, we will come along with creative AdolfomartiN and Silent Media thinking core, Jose Infiesta, to practise what we have already talked about many times: 'Do!'

We just put ourselves two limitations:

1) The idea should be finally expressed through a video.
2) Have fun, enjoy the whole creational process. Because we will never be able to control all the parameters that have an influence in the final result, at least let's take control of the only one, who knows if even the most important: our mood.

We will keep you informed!

manifesto

2011-08-15T00:59:00.000-07:00

This is the beauty of internet, you begin looking for information to write a post about ‘Delirious New York’, and you finish writing a post about manifesto...life is beautiful!...if you know how to manage it.

Due to our temporary lack of a physical space on which hanging anything, we want to take advantage of this virtual space to put some manifesto not to forget. None of them has been written by us, but in this age of the hyperinformation, often it is better to listen than to add noise to this already noisy environment.

Enjoy!

- Keep a journal. Carry a notepad.

- Draw everywhere.

- Don´t complain about what you do.

- Excercise.

- Go out and experience things/people, on rare occasion.

- Execute dumb ideas beautyfully.

- Turn off the internet.

- Read fiction.

- Don´t worry about how good it will be. Just make it and do your best.

- Say NO to people, even if you like them.

Written by illustrator Lisa Hanawalt (via Multido Arquitectos)

- There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.

- Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.

- There is no editing stage.

- Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.

- Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.

- The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.

- Once you’re done you can throw it away.

- Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.

- People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.

- Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.

- Destruction is a variant of done.

- If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.

- Done is the engine of more.

The Cult of Done Manifesto, written by Bre Pettis (via ecosistema urbano)

1. DO
Design by doing is architectural beta-testing. Build 1:1 models in the public domain that function as immediate site analysis, architectural test case and social condenser. Put your practice to theory. Do the unthinkable: Build a manifest, write a building.

2. MAKE IT BEAUTIFUL
People like pretty things.

3. USE NEW OLD MATERIALS
Celebrate mass consumption. Reveal the beauty of the everyday, by using ordinary objects in a different manner. Look beyond traditional construction materials, and re-introduce old crafts with new fabrics. Create social value from worthless stuff.

4. COOK
Food is social construction material. It unites people. Cook, drink and dine together. A mere cookie can be the answer to a big brief.

5. CREATE A PUBLIC
Shakespeare said it: 'the world is a stage'. Architects have the world's largest audience. Discover for whom you are designing and respond to the res publica with the proper act. Public architecture is the staging of all events of life, and our tools can be those of performance artists.

6. MIND THE DETAILS
All details contribute to the architectural atmosphere. If you want people to meet, tie the drinks together and hand them out in pairs. A piece of rope is architecture too.

7. ACT UNSOLICITED
Reprogram the brief, the building and the profession. Consider re-use of vacant office buildings rather than designing new ones. Use your own office 24/7 and program the space as club at night. Partake in society, rather than architecture competitions.

8. BE PERSONAL
Establish human relationships. This social construction material is just as important as bricks and mortar. Communicate and educate. Host an excursion and exemplify the unknown. Step onto the street and speak the language of those who will live in your buildings.

9. PUT EVERYONE AROUND ONE TABLE
Different people have different agendas. Place the client, manager, municipality, resident and neighbour around one table and they will communicate. Everyone is amateur and professional. An amateur can be a true expert at ?residing?, and a professional client may have no knowledge of architecture. Make the architecture at the table the subject of conversation and catalyst for the process. This creates mutual understanding, and speeds up the design process remarkably.

10. DESIGN THE RULES AND THE GAME
Arrive early. Architectural decisions are made in the urban planning process. Design this process and ensure a great outcome.

11. PLAY THE CITY
Play the city, don?t plan it. Cities are shifting. Incorporate existing bottom-up initiatives and let these inform the top-down. Design a script rather than a blueprint; be the director. Reserve space for change and celebrate the informal.

12. SHOW THE GENIUS OF THE LOCI
Reveal the potential of the place by building a temporary building overnight. Hand it over to the public, accompanied by one simple rule: a free stay in exchange for a personal contribution to the building. The qualities will show on site.

13. CONFUSE
Create architecture that is mutable and open to multiple interpretations. People will discover it and thereby make it their own. Architecture that confronts each person?s imagination creates opportunities for communication between the private and public domain, and between individuals.

14. BE BIASED
Carry a strong signature and be opinionated. Who wants to listen to someone with no ideas?

15. ABSTAIN FROM AUTHORSHIP
Celebrate change. See architecture as an open source; a gift in which others are challenged to participate. In order to bring about social relationships through architecture, one has to give up copyright claims.

16. BE THE CURATOR
Urban renewal is the future. Within extant city layouts, new architecture is about reprogramming; about social planning, temporary events, sports, education, art, and media. Find the right experts in these fields and curate the environment in which they can act together.

17. BE AN URBANARCHITECT
The public domain is the future. Real architectural quality often does not lie in the building, but in the public domain. Design this domain as if you would a façade.

18. BUILD MENTAL MONUMENTS
There?s always a need for places for people to gather. Combine the real with the virtual in pop-up buildings; like an analogue facebook or a physical webforum. Make momentary monuments: one-day events can last a lifetime in the collective memory of the visitor.

19. SMILE
Enjoy what you do and have fun.

Momentary Manifesto For Public Architecture, Dus Architects

AGENDA AUGUSTUS 2011

2011-08-02T01:04:00.000-07:00

Workshops

Urban planning: from strategy to local action. Berlage Institute.+info

Expositions

Blueprints of Paradise. Afrika museum. t/m 30 okt. 2011+info

Ontdek het IJ! Tolhuistuin zondag 28 augustus, 14u+info

ARTZUID 2011. Internationale sculptuurroute t/m 28 augustus 2011+info

Movies

Uitmarkt: Cineville films in De Balie.+info

Eyefilmmuseum programma.+info

Kriterion weekly programma+info

Rialto dayly programma+info

Studio K weekly programma+info

Outside Amsterdam

Fusion. Exposition in Architectuurcentrum Haarlem t/m 18 september+info

Nai agenda+info

Museum Beelden Aan Zee

2011-08-02T00:59:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I was quite impressed about the Museum Beelden aan Zee, in Den Hague. Both the museum itself and the expositions it showed.

Architectonically, the museum could be unterstood as the typical extension of a former museum sit in an old house in which the extension remains underground in order not to contend with the main building (a lot of this subject can be studied in the Serlachius Museum competition). In this case, the underground extension stands around the main building, allowing it to reassure its presence in the massive main building line parallel to the coast not by adding a volume but a void. In fact it is the only place where there is no building at all in the long building line what attracts your eye.

The only characteristic that seems not to be solved is the fact that the main building, not being part of the museum itself, remains the most important element in the composition, as the center or the main axis around which the extension spreads. This makes the entrance, which in a natural way should be placed in the main axis, to be moved to a corner to allow the beginning of the exposition route begin not from the main building.

Regarding the expositions, the first one was about the chinese artist Sui Jianguo. Worldwide known for his sculptures of Mao suits, in the exposition were there a version of this theme, two of the slaves Michelangelo created wearing Mao suits. There were also some examples of his stage in which he focussed on the stones, again as a metaphor of the chinese society. But the most impressive and powerful ones were an installation placed outside in a courtyard of the museum and a work made specially in collaboration with Den Haag, “Den Haag onder de hemel”, a collection of different typically dutch characters hanging from the ceiling not vertically but forming an angle of six degrees, the same angle between the two lines that link each country, China and the Netherlands, with the center of the Earth, symbolizing how the Nederlands would be seen from China.

The second exposition was ‘Denkeiland’ from the dutch sculptress and photographer Eveline van Duyl. It consists in around fifteen caricature-like busts of the most important western filosophers. Each sculpture is made with different surprising materials, as if she would like to express her personal different opinion of each one. It is incredible how she manages to sculpt with materials such as leather, textiles or wood.

TED in Amsterdam

2011-07-20T01:05:00.000-07:00

TED is back again in Amsterdam! It will take place on November 25th. I was completely unaware this event took place in different cities around the world. But I am delighted to find it out!

It seems to be difficult to get a ticket to follow it on real life in the Stadsschouwburg, the place that this time welcomes the event. Not for the prize, because it is free, but because the organization will choose the guests depending on a criteria based on the talent of the person that applies for it. Fortunately, for the rest of us that will not be awarded with one, there will also be some other places that will organize the vision in streaming, as a branch of the official event.

For those who do not know anything about the TED conferences, it would be interesting to have a look at their web page where you can watch for free a high number of conferences shorter than 30 minutes. What I personally find really interesting about this format, besides the quality and interest of the themes treated, is its short extension, that allows you to watch one or even two meanwhile you are eating that nice bread with something at lunch. All of them have subtitles, not so important for dutch people, but a reason to be able to follow them for a Spanish guy, believe me.

I came across these conferences watching the one of Ken Robinson about the educational system, if I do not remember wrong, in which he defends a different education that would support the creativity of the human being since the childhood, instead of teaching everyone with the same method that do not allow them to express themselves and develop their own and different skills.

After it, and in a non systematical way, I watched some other interesting conferences, such as the one Steve Jobs gave in an university, (I do not know why this also belongs to TED), ‘how to use experts, and when not to’, by Noreena Hertz (no idea who she was) or the one in which the artist Janet Echelman explains her work with fishing nets.

It is always inspiring to watch people with a clearer mind and opinion about a subject explaining it in an entertaining way. I highly recommend it.

Serlachius Museum Gösta

2011-07-19T01:00:00.000-07:00

As you could expect, being one of the 570 teams that were involved in the Serlachius Museum extension competition, we were not the winners. Not even being one of the selected, there were around ten, or at least seeing one image of our project in the minutes, makes it maybe a bit more dissappointed, but at least we congratulate for the architecture itself, if we do not appear in any selection must be because the level was really high, and consecuently, the winner project superb.

Here we will try to make an analysis, subjective of course because we will try to know what we did wrong and in which aspects we did right, comparing it with the jury criteria, but trying to be objective in evaluating the strong and weak points of the winners, in order to begin an architectonic debate that we hope you will continue.

For those who do not know anything about the competition, here you can read the backgrounds and objectives explained in the programme. As a short explanation, the objective of the competition was to design a extension for the Serlachius Museum......

A competition with 570 entries is a luxury, even more if you are a witness and not a competitor of course, for debating about architecture. This competition had one exceptional aspect compared to others, that was the freedom given to choose a location for the extension, maybe the first decision you had to face in the project. From the minutes you can also notice that was the first criteria to evaluate the entries, being in our opinion not a reason to exclude any of them, though. In general, the entries formed mainly five groups regarding the location of the extension: in the west side, in the north, in the west, in the south and in the island, by better choice order. Having the main connection to the city from the east and gardens in the south, placing the extension in the west makes the Manor keep its predominant position and character, as well as allows to maintain the gardens and the views towards the lake behing them. The other locations did not accomplish one of this points. The possibility of place the extension in the island was a curious situation, it appears that just because it was said in the programme that you “could” place the new building in the island, you should seriously think about it. But the reality, as it is quoted by the jury, is that this option made a lot of problems to be solve, instead of solving the problems that were already there.

In general, the jury has been quite conservative regarding the relationship between the extension and the actual building, the Manor, giving more value to those proposals who were really sensitive with it and with the gardens behind it, and taking a character of really “extension” toward the Manor, treating it as a construction with a almost piece of art character.

The competition area is extensive, and there seem to be many alternatives for the location of new buildings. However, when the existing values are taken into account, the range is reduced. When one approaches the area from the east, the Joenniemi manor and its surrounding garden form an elegant sculptural entity: the main building and the trees around it can be seen as the background for an open lawn area. This view, as well as the view to the south-west toward the lake, should not be blocked with new construction.

But, regarding the shape of the new building, it has been quite contemporary, without falling in a void modernism.