citymovement

Maps, for easier legibility are simplifications of actual places. Through mapping projections – the practice of transforming the three-dimensional surface of the earth onto a two-dimensional plane – the graphic description of the landscape generally represents a version of a landscape that is greatly distorted from reality. Perimeters and cartographic grids constitute a network of lines on the landscape that determine and define place. Borders really only exist on maps. The geographic boundaries that they demarcate are conceptual and political, not, even when they hug a defined and specific geographic feature, are not defined by any force in nature. They are drawn by humans and only traced on the cartographers map. A line that looks so neat and precise on a map can be much more complicated on the ground. An example of this complexity is the international ‘line’ that runs through the community towns of Stanstead, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont. The towns…

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Exhibition: ‘Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), Photographs’ at Jeu de Paume, Paris

Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive

Exhibition dates: 21st February – 29th April 2012

 

 

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
New York Stock Exchange, New York City
1933
Gelatin silver print
24 x 19cm
Ronald Kurtz / Commerce Graphics
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

 

 

It is not her portraits or the road trip photographs, nor her scientific work for which Berenice Abbott will be remembered. Firstly, she will always be remembered as the person who photographed Eugene Atget in 1927 just before he died and who bought the remainder of his negatives (after the French government had bought over 2,000 in 1920 and another 2,000 had been sold after his death). She then tirelessly promoted Atget’s work helping him gain international recognition until her sale of the archive to the Museum of Modern Art in 1968. Secondly, she is remembered for her magnificent photographs of New York City and its urban environs, photographs…

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European Prize for Urban Public Space

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The European Prize for Urban Public Space is a biennial competition organized by six European institutions with the aim to recognize and encourage the recovery projects and defense of public space in our cities. The award, created in 2000, celebrates its seventh edition in 2012.

 

http://www.publicspace.org/en/prize/2012

The Suburban Home as Vehicle for an Architectural Manifesto.

dpr-barcelona

When talking about the suburbs, we can think on many concepts: urban sprawl, area outside a town or city, inner political boundaries, and consumption among others. The first well-known suburbs were born in North America exploded during the post-World War II economic expansion. In the current times the most obvious economic expansion worldwide is the Internet, and for Andreas Angelidakis, the internet is the new suburban home we’re living in, represented by the accumulation of all the things we do on-line. The relationship between capitalism and utopia has been on the focus of architects interest starting with Manfredo Tafuri until the most recent project by WAI Think Tank. All of these concepts and ideas are part of Angelidakis’ main focus on his project Domesticated Mountain, exhibited at GloriaMaria Gallery. We can read the following description:

Domesticated Mountain is the story of citizens grewing up in an undefined…

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‘Fake’ Estates

citymovement

Gordon Matta-Clark, Reality Properties: Fake Estates, 1973-74

Uranculturalstudies’ recent post, « Deconstructing Reality: Gordon Matta-Clark » highlighting Matta-Clark’s well known body of work ‘building cuts’ (architectural interventions consisting of the strategic removal of building parts) got me thinking about Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates. In 1973 and 1974, Gordon Matta-Clark purchased, at New York City auctions, fifteen « gutterspace » properties – unusually small slivers of land from the city through anomalies in surveying, zoning and public works expansion. The fifteen properties were scattered throughout Queens with one located on Staten Island.

The properties are fragments of the city grid, patchy pieces of land that remained after the city was mapped out and land use designated. The left over spaces were along curbs, between houses, even inside a building. They were available to Matta-Clark because their location or size made them virtually unusable for any form of commercial real estate development – nothing could be…

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The Funambulist

This image is an excerpt from the short film The Road to Jerusalem created by artist Jeremy Hutchison. The movie shows him riding his bike in Ramallah in direction to Jerusalem. When approaching the sadly famous separation barrier, the biker seems not to see it and continue his route as if the road was still open like few years ago. That is when the wall unfolds all its literal violence as he crashes into it in a strong manifestation of the border. Rarely an image has been so literal in what I have been calling the violence of the line, this line on the map which materializes into a wall and splits two milieus. The wall, as the paradigmatic architectural component illustrates the hurtful power contained by architecture.

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Total Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space – Miodrag Mitrasinovic

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WANDERLUST

Total Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space employs the theme park in identifying, dissecting and describing the properties of PROPASt – privately-owned publicly accessible space in a themed mode – a hybrid form of public space emerging in urban environments worldwide Mitrasinovic does not propose that theme parks and PROPASt are, or will ever become, desirable substitutes for democratic public space, but deliberately cuts across the theme park model in order to understand the principle of systematic totality employed when such a model is used to revitalize urban public space in the United States, Asia and Europe. In doing so, Mitrasinovic has created compelling and multifaceted inferences out of a plethora of minute details on the design and production of theme parks across continents. Mitrasinovic s central argument is that the process of systematic totalization that brings theme parks and PROPASt into the same conceptual framework is not only obvious through…

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Henri Bergson and Henri Lefebvre Mashup on Cities_Space (part 3)

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urbanculturalstudies

 

Here’s the last one. Which lines are from Bergson’s texts, and which are from Lefebvre’s?

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Henri Bergson and Henri Lefebvre Mashup on Cities_Space (part 2)

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urbanculturalstudies

Here’s the second of three. Which lines are Bergson’s and which are Lefebvre’s?

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Henri Bergson & Henri Lefebvre Mashup on Cities_Space (Part 1)

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urbanculturalstudies

Philosophers Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) said some remarkably similar things on space if not also cities (despite the fact that Lefebvre « hated Bergson’s guts » as scholar Andy Merrifield has accurately reported) [see article here for more].

This mash-up is a result of the fact that I evidently had too much time on my hands and decided to work my way through some internet problems: file conversions, uploading audio, text2speech…

See if you can tell which lines are Bergson’s and which are Lefebvre’s… (as spoken by computerized voice, ‘Alex’)

I intend to post parts two and three later and then the script.

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Psychogeography

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citymovement

Urban Cultural Studies posted « The City as You’ve Never Seen it Before » and it got me thinking about mapping and the Situationist Interntional. The Situationist International, an international group of revolutionary artists, philosophers and architects, was founded in 1957. The S.I. fought against the capitalist system and advocated for an alternative life style. In response to the city model Parisian urban planners were developing, the S.I. used the map of Paris to reconfigure the experience of the city by constructing situations that playfully and inventively explored the urban.  Psychogeography was one of the particular strategies that the S. I. used to lead pedestrians off their predictable passageways and conduits within the city and  surprised them with new experiences or insight of their urban landscape. By manipulating the map itself, they intervened in the logic of the city, constructing an alternative geography as well as a providing a different perspective of…

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The Tokyo Zoo Project

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WANDERLUST

CHALLENGE:
The “nav-u” U35 is a personal navigation device you can put on a bicycle.
We wanted to demonstrate the device by using the attractions of Tokyo, a city whose roads developed in irregular and complex ways.

IDEA:
Using the running log function of the bicycle navigation system, we started the project by drawing gigantic animal geoglyphs over Tokyo. People tweet what animals they want us to draw. From their requests, our staffers draw animals over the map.
The bike group rides all over Tokyo, logs the routes and uploads the drawing to the website immediately. Progress status with drawing and running footage are posted on Twitter in real time every day.
Fifteen animals are completed in 40 days.

RESULT:
The project was featured in TV news shows, newspapers, magazine articles, and over 80 online news articles. In addition, it was mentioned innumerable times on blogs and tweets. Moreover, it…

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CONCERT URBAIN : pour une citoyenneté créative

Via Scoop.it – The Architecture of the City

Alors qu’en province les grandes villes se soulèvent, en Algérie une insurrection réclame la Commune ! Le Père Trankil, croisé ce matin dans le XIIIème arrondissement, se félicite du communiqué des insurgés algériens qui a été publié ce matin. Déclarant « adhérer de façon la plus absolue à la Commune de Paris », il déplore que cette déclaration datée du 28 mars ne soit pas parvenue plus tôt à Paris. « Ainsi le peuple algérien a pris les armes à son tour, nous aurons bientôt la république universelle ! » Dans le texte, les délégués expliquent leur révolte en ces termes, inquiétants pour la réaction : « L’Algérie toute entière revendique les libertés communales ».

Via www.raspouteam.org

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Nohista || Globale surveillance

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mavideoz blog

DISPOSITIF THEATRAL COMMUNIQUANT & INTELLIGENT

Nous vivons dans un monde sous surveillance : plus personne n’oserait en douter. Mais quelle forme prennent aujourd’hui les nouveaux dispositifs de contrôle et en quoi sont-ils différents des pratiques du siècle dernier ? Comment modifient-ils notre rapport au monde et aux autres ? Vont-ils jusqu’à menacer le droit à la vie privée ? Globale Surveillance dresse une zone spatiale hypersurveillée, à l’intérieur de laquelle acteurs et spectateurs sont soumis à quantité de procédures de traçabilité rendues visibles, a contrario de nombreux mécanismes quotidiennement à l’œuvre et marqués par le phénomène angoissant de l’invisibilité.

Texte & mise en scène Éric Sadin
Avec Laure Wolf et Gurshad Shaheman
Architecture scénique FABRIC | CH
Création vidéo et sonore Nohista
Création lumières Abigail Fowler
Opérateur système Alban van Wassenhove
Assistant à la mise en scène Jean-Charles Remicourt-Marie

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The Social Life of Small Urban Places

Kurt Perschke’s RedBall Project

WANDERLUST

The RedBall Project: Artist Statement

Through the RedBall Project I utilize my opportunity as an artist to be a catalyst for new encounters within the everyday. Through the magnetic, playful, and charismatic nature of the RedBall the work is able to access the imagination embedded in all of us. On the surface, the experience seems to be about the ball itself as an object, but the true power of the project is what it can create for those who experience it. It opens a doorway to imagine what if? As RedBall travels around the world people approach me on the street with excited suggestions about where to put it in their city. In that moment the person is not a spectator but a participant in the act of imagination. I have witnessed it across continents, diverse age spans, cultures, and languages, always issuing an invitation. That invitation to engage…

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# CURATING, WRITING, DESIGNING /// Current Opportunities (Canadian Center for Architecture, The State, Architecture for Humanity)

The Funambulist

Philippe Rahm. Interior Weather installation made for the CCA exhibition environ(ne)ment. 2006.

In a recent article, I was quoting Jill Stoner who writes that what she calls minor architects have to enlarge their spectrum of skills and functions (I am paraphrasing) in order to propose a real consistency to their discipline. This post introduces three opportunities involving different mediums and talents.

CURATING:  2012 Curational Opportunities Program proposed by the Canadian Center for Architecture: The Young Curator Program offers the opportunity to propose and curate a project on the contemporary debate in architecture, urbanism, and landscape design during a residency of 3 months at the CCA beginning in Fall 2012. In parallel the Power Corporation of Canada Curatorial Internships proposes the opportunity to become acquainted with the CCA’s collection, exhibition, and research programs through a 6 to 9 month internship beginning in Fall 2012.

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Metropol Parasol by J. Mayer H

NEEDLE & GLOBE

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Sidewalk Science

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The peculiar habits of the pedestrian, explained.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/walking/2012/04/walking_in_america_what_scientists_know_about_how_pedestrians_really_behave_.html

 

The Future, according to Google Search Results

WANDERLUST

Via XKCD

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