Publikationen

PARKitectOUR, is a book which documents the three student workshops held in Italy and Switzerland by the University Of Applied Sciences of Bern. The task was to show Parkour and architecture within urban projects. Parkour is a new sport that was created in the suburbs of Paris. A ‘Traceur’ (the runner) moves smoothly, acrobatically and quickly through impenetrable, typically urban terrain. The Traceurs motion creates the urban free flow. This urban free flow is what the students had to trace in their designs. This was completed along with urban planning tasks in the surroundings of a Luigi Nervi building in Turin. The workshop was organized in cooperation with the Politecnico di Torino. The other two workshops are part of the freshman curriculum at the university where Guy Lafranchi is the dean of studies of the architecture department.

Digital technologies influence architecture, art and design. These new technologies are generally used for preliminary design work and presentations, which hardly tap their experimental potential. Advanced 3D and animation software was originally developed for PC games and the film industry and offers strong algorithms. These algorithms make it possible to simulate reality as we know it, but the challenge lies in creating new realities with them. The new volume in the RIEA Concepts Series introduces the UrbanLobby project by MRGD, the young London architecture office started by Melike Altinisik, Samer Chamoun and Daniel Widrig. The office recently won the SwissArtsAward 2007 for its work and their projects have been shown in a number of AA Gallery exhibitions.

The London-based NaJa and deOstos architecture office was founded by Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo de Ostos as a platform for experimental architecture. The architects run their office as a studio that tackles the challenges arising from the manifold possibilities presented by urban situations and social dynamics by developing alternative urban concepts. One of their projects is the Hanging Cemetery of Baghdad”, which they have continuously developed since 2004. In his introduction, Peter Cook says that as an architect, one could essentially go into denial in view of the harrowing situation in Baghdad. NaJa and deOstos research the situation and react with the language of experimental architecture.

Nature, landscape, cities, suburbs and sub-suburbs as well as cities and dissolving locations, lines that densify, transform themselves and re-dissolve. Cities grow beyond borders. New locations grow out of nothing, are created by the convergence of differing lines (escape lines, commuter lines, leisure and consumption lines, dream lines…). Entire cities are erased by natural occurrences, by sudden natural movement. Cities with millions of inhabitants disappear due to the construction of dams (China)… and are rebuilt at other locations, wandering cities of millions. Transient Sedimentation” is an exploration of city movement, landscape and of unknown, invisible spaces.

The experimental and partly realized work of Sotirius Kotoulas, an architect living in New York City, has often attracted attention in the USA, being written about and awarded prizes. He is, however, less well known in Eurpoe. He is presently working on a design for a house in Seriphos, Greece. Lebbeus Woods on Kotoulas’ work: … This is not an inhabitable site-specific architecture but one that is translatable, a numerical transference outside the material realm of building as an architecture about architecture.”

The site and subject of the workshop was Lower Manhattan in New York City. The underlying theme combined ground” and the German word Grund” referring to the foundation of ideas that give a rational structure to urban activity. Over an intensive twelve-day period, the workshop explored the nature of the Gr(o)und” consisting of pavements, sidewalks, streets, plazas and other street furniture regulating the flow of the street. The workshop designed and constructed new tectonic elements with the aim of making changes in the Gr(o)und” for a particular, brief period of time. The installation of these new elements in Lower Manhattan on a hot, busy day in mid-August is documented and analysed in this latest addition to the RIEAeuropa concepts series.

HISTAORMINA presents new concepts of architectural education and urban design through the lens of an intensive two-week workshop held in September of 2001. With the unique coastal hilltown of Taormina, Sicily as both subject and setting, the authors lead a team of European and American students in an exploration that combines visual and conceptual design, historical references, critical discourse, and both local and global issues with innovative new methods of individual creativity and collaboration. The results are documented in an extensive series of photographs of experimental models and constructions and the working process that produced them. These are accompanied by comments from the students and a text by the authors explaining the concepts behind this new approach and describing its implications for the future.

The museum is a typology long overdue for change. New museums proliferate, with sometimes spectacular innovations in form, but their underlying conceptual structures remain much as they have been for the past two hundred years. They are Faustian incarnations, young bodies with old and weary souls. In Guy Lafranchi’s view, the museum has become a prison, where critical ideas have been locked away from sight, without trial or appeal, by generations of directors, curators and scholars jealousy guarding a canonized version of the evolution of art. As severe a change as this is, it is only part of the story. The greater part, and by far the more serious, is the effect that the museum has on the production of art.” (Paragraph out of the introduction by Lebbeus Woods)