Filed under: ****GO*******, architecture, film & video, talk/ lecture, urbanism
Architecture on Film
In The Pit (En El Hoyo)
28 September 2009 6.30pm 
In The Pit (En El Hoyo)
Winner of Best International Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, this intimate and affecting look at the construction crew behind Mexico City’s Periferico Freeway charts the social reality at the core of over 10 miles of soaring reinforced concrete. Through objectively compassionate portaits of a miscellaeny of characters such as the wolf-whistling El Voyeur and the brusquely realist El Grande, the film charts the coarse life and camaraderie of the workers involved in the creation of a huge slab of the city, both floating in the air and submerged in the pit. The private life of urban infrastructure envisioned through a uniquely personal take on direct cinema, full of humour and grace.
Mexico 2006, Dir Juan Carlos Rulfo, 84 min
Trailer:
This screening will be introduced by Gareth Jones, Senior Lecturer at the London School of Economics and an Associate Fellow at the Institute for the Study of the Americas.
Tickets
£7.50 online
(£9.50 full price)
AF Members
£6.50 online
(£7.50 full price)
Concessions £7.50
Telephone
020 7638 8891
(9am-8.00pm)
Venue
Filed under: ****GO*******, architecture, art, exhibition, ideas, performance, technology, temporary, urbanism
It’s back! Info from Artangel below..
Photo: Courtesy Corvi-Mora, London
SEIZURE, sculptor Roger Hiorns’s brilliant blue crystal cave within a low-rise modernist development re-opens this summer on a housing estate near the Elephant & Castle. Over the course of several weeks, Hiorns encouraged the total crystal takeover of a one bedroom council flat. Blue copper sulphate crystals have grown over every surface of the space – walls, ceilings, floor and bath – to create a strange and compelling new world. SEIZURE, Hiorns’ first major sculptural project in an urban site, has earned him a nomination for this year’s Turner Prize.
Thursday – Saturday 11am – 7pm
Sundays 11am – 5pm
Closed Monday – Wednesday
FREE ADMISSION
For further information see artangel.org.uk SEIZURE is commissioned by Artangel and the Jerwood Charitable Foundation
Filed under: ****GO*******, Barbican, architecture, exhibition, performance, temporary, urbanism
Went to the opening last night – well worth checking out!
Look out for Celine Condorelli & Alexandre Bettler’s contributions. More info from Barbican below.
Barbican Takes Radical Nature to Hackney
Part of Barbican Art Gallery’s current exhibition Radical Nature – Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009, the experimental architectural collective EXYZT has created The Dalston Mill, turning a disused railway line and waste ground in Dalston into a vibrant rural retreat for the people of the area and beyond.
The fully-functioning, 16 metre mill is accompanied by a 20 metre long wheat field, a restaging of environmental artist Agnes Denes’ original 1982 pioneering piece.
Come and participate in one of the events or workshops, from theatre performances and bread-making to pedal-powered music and tea-time talks with artists.
DALSTON MILL EVENTS
Events are free and open to all unless otherwise stated
Capacity is limited to 20– 30, on a first come basis
Thu 16–Sat 18 July / 7pm and 8pm
Arcola Academy present: Kontakt
A series of one to one performances between 12 young actors and 12 audience members, Kontakt presents a unique opportunity to have an encounter with someone you’ve never met before and will never meet again. Tickets £5 available from the Arcola Theatre box office on 020 7503 1646.
Sat 18 July / 3pm
The Dalston Slice – Bread Currency
Come along and bake local currency made of bread, which you can spend only in a small selection of local restaurants, cafes, cinemas and theatres in Dalston. Join artisan baker Dan Lepard and the Collaborator’s Guide collective for this unique local event.
Free
Sun 19–Fri 24 July / 3–8pm
Dalton Talking
A series of Urban Psychoanalysis sessions, using a Talking Mill, by the emergency urban psychoanalysis commando unit, UPIA. This investigation into the urban unconscious of Dalston will be the first step in an extensive analysis of the city of London.
Free
Sun 19 July / 3–4.30pm
Feral Trade Tea Service
A talk and tea afternoon with Kate Rich featuring delights such as hand-traded tea from Bangladesh and sweets from Montenegro, accompanied by a travel report tracking these products from their source.
Free
Sun 19 July / 5–10pm
Magnificent Revolution
Pedal-powered music performance by Barbora Patkova. Bring your own iPod to eco-share your favourite tunes.
Free
Mon 20 July / 7pm
Elioth + Encore Heureux
Presentation by the Paris-based engineers and architectural collective who devised Wind-it, a project in which vertical wind generators are used in place of large horizontal windmills. Wind-it presents two solutions: either grafting the generators on to the electrical network or setting up new electricity pylons integrated with a renewable production unit.
Free
Thu 23 July / 2–5pm
Gahu Dramatic Arts
Dalston-based artists, Gahu, in association with the Trinity Centre Summer School and Tenants of the nearby Rhodes Estate, will use the Dalston Mill to create delicious African dishes followed by performances of African dancing, drumming, acrobatics and fire eating.
Free
Fri 24 July / 9pm
Dalton Talking presentation
A lecture about London’s unconscious based on the results of recent sessions at The Dalston Mill by UPIA, the emergency urban psychoanalysis commando unit.
Free
Tue 28–Thu 30 July and Mon 3–Wed 5 August / 2–5pm
Hackney Young Carers workshop
A series of creative workshops and events with members of Hackney Young Carers investigating issues surrounding sustainability, the natural world and the Radical Nature exhibition at Barbican Art Gallery. The event is closed to the general public.
Sat 1 August / 3pm
Full Dinner Design
Participants in this workshop by Alexandre Bettler (www.aalex.info) will be able to design everything from the cutlery to the baking trays which will then be used at a dinner cooked and served that evening.
Free
Sun 2 August / 3–5pm
Cake Decorating workshop
Jagdish Patel from the shop ‘Party Party’ on Ridley Road will lead a cake decoration masterclass. Participants need to bring their own cake.
Free
Sun 2 August / 6.30pm
EXYZT in Conversation
Nicolas Henninger (EXYZT) and architect/artist Celine Condorelli will discuss ‘pirate architecture’ as the practice of occupying a site, and how the inhabitation of space is a response to existing conditions.
Free
Thu 6 August / 5pm
muf architecture/art
Value what’s there, nurture the possible, define what’s missing. What is the role of public space in Dalston’s cultural life? An evening of celebration and debate.
Free
The Dalston Mill
Entrance by the Peace Mural on Dalston Lane, between Ashwin Street and Hartwell Street, E8
Bus: 30, 38, 56, 67, 76, 149, 236, 242, 243, 277
Rail: Dalston Kingsland
See some of EXYZT’s visuals on Flickr here
If you cant make it to the Radical Nature exhibition before 19th October you can see some of the exhibition in the video below:
Filed under: ****GO*******, design, exhibition, ideas, urbanism, wanted to go but didn't.. (or couldn't!)
Torino 10122
A project and competition, Torino Geodesign is first and foremost an idea which defines an extraordinarily large and productive field of action: self-determined design, produced in limited series by communities inside huge globalised metropolises.
Design arising from a community of users organising restricted mass production to rapidly meet specific sorts of limited demand destined for instantaneous diffusion.
Vital, energetic and deeply experimental design, produced using poor materials and technology deriving from informal economies, and often full of symbolic content.
Highly creative design, which moves beyond the restrictive boundaries of international luxury production and meets precise needs linked to immediate survival or to lifestyles under constant change.
The project Torino Geodesign revolves around the collaboration between 40 communities in the area and a similar number of international designers and Italian companies.
Focusing attention on people instead of objects, Torino Geodesign aims to trigger off new forms of business enterprise in various local communities by setting up an intricate network of relations in which there is a blurring of the distinctions between customers and users, manufacturers and beneficiaries of design. In a dynamic system, a far cry from the idea of free aid or support, the designer becomes the catalyst of all kinds of experiments and reactions deriving from new forms of interaction.
The challenge behind this complex mechanism, where the traditional division of roles between the commissioning client, the designer and the consumer are tested, subverted and recomposed, is of an obviously political and social nature. The project aims in fact to seek out new energy for the world of design and new models for the relationship between city dwellers and city administration based on activating collective energy.
The designers, artists and architects, chosen through an international idea-seeking competition, work together with the communities in a series of design workshops on varying themes identified through a flexible, experimental process (magazines, packaging, brand images, objects for large-scale production such as clothes horses for council housing, the reorganisation of public areas).
The prototypes – together with sketches, designs, film and photos of the entire process – flow into a major show, the evidence of a new systematic way of organising design.
OPENING HOURS:
Sunday – Wednesday 10-19
Thursday – Saturday 10-23
free entry
Filed under: ****GO*******, art, exhibition, film & video, photography, urbanism
Post-it City. Occasional urbanities exhibition at CCCB (Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona) until 25th May.
Image: Artificial Arcadia. Bas Princen
‘The Post-it City. Occasional urbanities concept designates different forms of the temporary occupations of public space, be they of a commercial, leisure, sexual or any other kind, that share the common feature of barely leaving a trace and of self-managing their appearance and disappearance.
By using the idea of Post-it City as the crux of this investigation we are trying to underline considerations of two kinds: the political potential the idea in itself has, and its methodological effectiveness for studying very disparate social and urban contexts.
Post-it City phenomena emphasise the reality of the urban territory as the place where distinctive uses and situations legitimately overlap, in opposition to the growing pressures to homogenise public space. In contrast to the ideals of the city as a place of consensus and consumption, temporary occupations of space reaffirm use value, reveal different needs and lacks that affect given collectives, and even promote creativity and the subjective imagination. Behind the reality of Post-it City, the metropolis reappears as a territory traversed by numerous dynamics and processes, but also by numerous subjects with a genuine political dimension thanks to the imaginative strategies of survival of their licit actions?intrusive and parasiticalones that often involve recycling.
From another standpoint, the temporary activities that contaminate public space with numerous para-architectural artefacts enable reflection on urban experience to redirect its attention towards the minuscule, thus correcting the arrogance of traditional architecture.’
Filed under: ****GO*******, architecture, art, book/ magazine, design, exhibition, symposium, talk/ lecture, urbanism
Filed under: architecture, art, design, education, festival/feria, ideas, photography, travel, urbanism, web
Situated bang in the centre of Mumbai, Dharavi is otherwise known as the largest slum in Asia. With a population estimated at over 600,000 people, the informal settlement turns over an estimated £700 million per year in it’s formal and informal industries.
The land itself is worth over US$2 billion in real estate.
The Urban Typhoon Workshop will be held in March 2008, and will focus on Dharavi’s Koliwada community as part of a global workshop on participatory design, brainstorming potential development strategies for Koliwada.
Further information regarding context, data, workshop schedules & how to participate can be found at Urban Typhoon’s website: www.urbantyphoon.com
Photos Ⓒ Antonia Halse 2007
Video from the conference is now online http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=UrbanAge
Filed under: architecture, book/ magazine, education, film & video, talk/ lecture, urbanism
lecture by MIT’s..
William J. Mitchell
Alexander W. Dreyfoos Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences
Director, Smart Cities research group, MIT Media Lab
Mitchell talks about his book covering topics such as ‘the death of particular architectures’ (phone boxes) due to new wireless technologies..
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/170/
also….
iTunes have quietly launched iTunes U in the U.S. where you can access free lectures from American Universities, including David Lynch’s ‘Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain’.
