Bruxelles Underground

EASA

I guess some of you guys already know this (i joined it two times already and it is worth going at least one time)
This year it is in Manchester (always in August).

http://www.easauk.net/easa/

AFFR

Let's behave like architecture students should do, and set our minds to architecture in our spare time! Who's interested to join to the Architecture Film Festival in Rotterdam this weekend? I must warn you that there's a lot of nerds out there wearing fancy 50's imitation designer glasses and tuxedos with sneakers under it. But this will not spoil our joy; I'm sure we can make it awesome!

I was thinking about saturday night, or sunday. Of course the film festival may very well be combined with having drinks or dinner.

As is the case in every (thematic) film festival, the AFFR too has an awful lot of terrible, experimental films, as well as boring documentaries/biographies. But there are also some good films! I have very high expectations of Malls R Us on sunday night (though there's no rating at IMDB), and good expectations of Bomb it on saturday night (rates 7.5 at IMDB, which is good), but I'm open to other suggestions (on saturday night/sunday).

Check the schedule here

just casual morning

Toon uw Hart :)

Workshop: Con temporary footprints

ExploreLab: The band

First attempt explorelab band

Toon and Jan, since your subject is informality, I found an article that I post here and its subject is "slums" by Lebbeus Woods.

SLUMS: What to do?

It must be said at the outset that no enlightened political leaders in any part of the world can legitimately believe in the practice of what is called ‘slum clearance,’ which refers to the demolition of slums and the displacement of their inhabitants without a thought about where they can go. This is not to say that the brutal practice of bulldozing slums and driving out their inhabitants with armies of police is not being carried on—it is. Recent examples in Africa and Latin America only testify to the persistence of despotic political leaders in places where people have little voice in public affairs. Elsewhere it is well recognized that such an approach simply relocates the problem at a high human cost, postponing the day when it must be dealt with more humanely, and on a more enduring basis.

Secondly, it must be said that the idea of ‘urban renewal,’ which is a less blatantly brutal but still violent approach to the elimination of slums, simply does not work. The practice of demolishing slums and then imposing large-scale housing projects has generally failed, for the reason that slums do have social structures, however misunderstood they may be to those of the higher socio-economic strata from which come the urban planning professionals and bureaucrats who design the renewal projects. It has been shown by many tragic examples that simply replacing slums with planners’ ideas of what people should be living in destroys much of human value that can never be replaced, and causes untold human misery. Slums are inhabited by human beings, many of whom, even at the desperate edge of survival, have invested themselves in their families and communities, and want a better life for themselves and their children. Not unlike many others who are at the lower end of the economic chain, they need help in coping with their circumstances, help that comes from those who control the wealth and resources.

The burning question is: exactly how—in practical terms—is an enlightenment of the ruling, or at least the managerial, classes to come about? What are the best possible scenarios?

At the top of the list: the increased availability of information will make politicians and business leaders aware of the human catastrophe of slums, and this will mobilize them to improve the slum dwellers’ living conditions. In short, government and corporations will make the elimination of poverty a high priority.

This is a most unlikely scenario. The availability of information has done little to mobilize leaders in the past, from stopping the Holocaust to the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, the famines in Africa and Asia, the ‘death squads’ in Latin American countries, and many other human tragedies that could have been stopped by the intervention of political leaders. Knowledge of slums is today widely disseminated in the print and electronic media. Leaders give occasional lip service to this problem, but little else.

Another possibility: elected officials and business leaders will recognize that the vast, interconnected webbing of the global economy cannot carry permanently the burden—financial, political, moral—of burgeoning slums. As a result, government and corporations will find more effective ways of employing the slum’s under-utilized human resources.

This is a somewhat more likely scenario, given the right conditions. The costs of slums, like those of a deteriorating environment, are often hidden because they are purposely overlooked, but they are enormous, and cumulative. Slums are increasing in many urban areas already the most afflicted by them, and so is the economic drain they cause. This drain comes from the costs of ‘containing’ slums, which includes the costs of policing at least the perimeters where they abrade with more acceptable urban areas; the costs of dealing with humanitarian crises caused by outbreaks of contagious diseases that might spread into the wider urban population; and of water pollution from untreated sewage, including human waste, being dumped into rivers and streams that must be shared by all; the costs of lost city services, such as potable water and electricity, that are appropriated by slum dwellers without paying for them; the costs of keeping order when unrest or mass violence occasionally breaks out in the slums for whatever reason; the costs—often indirect—of maintaining a large population of illiterate and uneducated human beings, who nevertheless require not only food and shelter, but also intangibles like personal dignity and social justice, which must be ‘paid for’ by somebody, usually elsewhere, in the social network; likewise, the costs—psychological and moral—of having to live with slums, costs paid for by the other social strata in the society afflicted by them. Slums drain a society’s resources, and are a form of entropy that threatens, in the long run, the society’s survival.

Finally, if the perspective is altered to a purely capitalist one, slums can be seen as an unused pool of human potential–that is, of cheap labor–that could be employed in the global economic system. Businesses, supported by government trade policies, have recognized for many years the advantages of cheaper ‘offshore’ labor in the making of many consumer products. As nations such as China and India and Indonesia develop their domestic economies and expand their global influence, the demand for cheap offshore labor will dramatically increase, even as the present ‘outsources’ dwindle. New sources of skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled labor will have to be found—or created. With the same sort of investment made in training workers in the garment and other consumer products industries in Southeast Asia, present-day slum dwellers could take a first step up in the economic chain. The main impediment to this happening is that government and business would have to cooperate in a coordinated way, and, so far, neither social sector has shown any real interest in doing this.

However, the idea of turning millions of people who have been held down in abject poverty into millions exploited in subsistence-wage sweat shops and factories is far from an ideal solution to the problem of slums. It might be an economic step up, and a point of entry into the game of capitalism, but it amounts to a type forced labor, where the slum dwellers would have little choice but to accept it, considering the alternative of continued abjection and destitution.

An intriguing hypothesis–advanced by a number of people–emerges: what if the slums could be improved from the inside, rather than from without? Or, to put it another way, what if the interventions coming from without were aimed at empowering slum dwellers to find—or invent, using their ingenuity to adapt—the ways to transform their own conditions? After all, they understand these conditions better than anyone, where they work for them and where they do not. If the slum dwellers have admirable ingenuity in surviving under the most terrible of conditions, why should this same ingenuity not be the key to transforming slums and eventually eliminating them?

The biggest task would be addressing the problem of changing the terrible physical conditions of slums. How might the vast pool of human energy embodied in the people who live in slums be liberated to engage the physical transformation of their place of living–their habitat? Answering this question will take much more than political good will, and more than the commitment of money by public and private institutions to such a project, even in substantial amounts. It will require new ideas about how to effect real changes in conditions, and from within.

This is where architects come in.

[To be continued]

LW

A new view on diving centres

For Anouk: The first governmental underwater meeting ever, at the Maldives. An agreement was signed for taking action for the reduction of greenhouse gasses, since the Maldives are only 1.5m above sea level and are threathened to entirely disappear as sea level rises. (source: Volkskrant)

This opens up a whole new perspective on the possibilities of diving centres!! You could even include conference rooms underwater ;)

fall of the wall

hey gang

interesting films regarding europe since the fall of the berlin wall and it's future...

http://www.sica.nl/pdf/Flyer_89_Amsterdam.pdf
http://www.sica.nl/pdf/Flyer_89_Denhaag.pdf

Lecture: City and Fear NAI

This thursday there is a lecture about Fear and the relation to the city at the NAI.



you have to subscribe on the website. it starts at 20:00.

please vot ASAP fot this project

hi all,
some small advertisement for a project of mine:

http://www.venlovernieuwt.nl/kazernekwartier/revival-of-the-fittest

please vote, it takes only half a minute... and it might get me 1000 euro!!
thanks!

Space and Democracy - the Un-Built, Athens 2008

While searching for something concerning my project, I found a site that is called "The space of democracy - The democracy of space".There was a conference from this network in Greece the previous year. I will post a text here and the link of this conference in the end, so whoever wants can be directed at the site. It has some videos, but the majority of them is in Greek (sorry for this!)

UN-BUILT - 2008 international architecture research events

www.byzantinemuseum.gr/unbuilt/unbuilt.htm

The Athens Byzantine and Christian Museum

in collaboration with SARCHA (School of ARCHitecture for All)

organize the international conference

Negotiating the Un-built

Interdisciplinary Interactions on Space and Democracy

an Athens event of the Space of Democracy and the Democracy of Space network supported by the

ESRC (Economic and Society Research Council) UK

Athens, December 19-20, 2008

During the last decade of the 20th century the concept of space/place has entered several debates in the humanities and social sciences in what has been summarized as ‘the spatial turn’. For other disciplines, such as architecture, space has been a central operative tool since the 19th century. Practitioners and theorists have approached it in a variety of ways in different periods of history, and it still remains today a valid concept with a constantly changing content. Within the general context of the spatial turn, this event aims at highlighting the problematic of the un-built in both its dimensions, as a limit to be negotiated and even marked and acknowledged as well as an incarnation of the promise of architectural/political imagination and socio-spatial construction. The dialectic and/or disjunction between these two angles seem to stand at the centre of any attempt to discuss the relation between space and democracy.

The two distinct dimensions are evident both in political theory/practice and in theorisations/enactments of space and architecture. The un-built, for example, has been historically associated with unrealized projects that may be attributed to a wide range of reasons; from the ‘circumstantial’ ones related to financial or construction technology restrictions, building regulations or policy particularities, to the less apparent social, historical, political issues, and the cultural stereotypes operative in a given context. On the other hand, the un-built also denotes so-called utopian or visionary spatial/architectural projects and the operation of drawing or writing as a critical tool. The un-built is that which cannot be built or awaiting to be built as much as that which is drawn and discussed but not meant to be realised. It indicates a state of abjection and repression, designates a condition of potential conflict and, at the same time, holds the promise of transformation. The un-built is therefore more than a mere void or empty space. If we consider it as ‘an agitated state of a seemingly balanced immobility in which all possibilities remain open, and all states of attachments can be potentially enacted’, it might form a basis for thinking the contemporary relation between democracy and space. This is especially the case given the prominent theorisations of dynamics between emptiness and fullness in democratic politics (as highlighted by a series of contemporary theorists from Claude Lefort and radical democratic theory onwards), psychoanalytic theory (mostly in the Lacanian tradition), theories of space, etc. Here emptiness and lack is not an accident or anomaly that needs to be masked and covered over but a limit, a mark of contingency and finitude that needs to be ethically negotiated and politically marked. At the same time it stimulates the desire for the new. In these traditions the problematic of the un-built meets that of the unconscious, the abject, the unrepresentable, raising the issue of exclusion and its ‘administration’ in democracy and post-democracy (locally and globally). The event will assume the form of a series of interactions between theoreticians, urban theorists and architects that will theoretically address issues related to the democracy of space in historical and contemporary contexts, and activist groups/teams or initiatives that work within the conditions of the un-built to create a space for democratic exchange and mobility in the current circumstances. ‘Speakers’ and ‘groups’ will be provided with equal time (30 minutes) to develop their arguments. The conference language is English.

The conference took place as the December insurrection was unfolding in Athens.

School Building in Patras, Greece by Papaioannou & Isaias

Hello everyone!

I know that Chica is doing a project for a high school, but my post is irrelevant. I wanted to share some pictures of a school built in my home town by two very known architects in Greece and professors at the National Technical University of Athens. Their names are : Tasis Papaioannou and Dimitris Isaias. It is a school and because it is semi-private (it's name is Arsakio) it has many facilities inside, things that are not obvious at the pictures.

Im sorry Benny, i've 'baggsed' (not sure if this is a kiwi expression or not, but nevermind), the next movie night for Eagle vs Shark

And I forgot to share a link that has to do with innovative ways to communicate information through graphs and images. Sometimes it has some very interesting graphs.

It is called "visual think map".

Hello everybody!

Sunday is close, and I suppose most of us are waiting for the dinner to test who is cooking well.:P Kidding of course! However, still the reactions were few on the blog - as far as I remember only eleven people reacted to the previous post. Only Joeri suggested to bring drinks and it won't be of course enough for everybody! So, let's see how we could also split the drinks between us, so as to be able to drink something while eating. Toon, there will be for sure two vegetarian dishes! (we thought of you!). We already have two desserts (Toon and Felicity). So far, Mike and Jan suggested to make a dutch soup, Anouk had said that she would make a salad (is that right?) and Willem today was thinking that pancakes would be a good idea. Greek mousaka will also be on the table and a greek vegetarian dish that still is not decided.
I am making the list, in order to make sure that food will be enough, desserts not more than the food and of course we have to see what we will do with the drinks!

See you all! (please react! :) )

Dear explorers,

This afternoon you all can fill out the days you can not join our enormously amusing, common workshop the Road Trip, to Holland. There’s a list on the BiG Orange Cave/Hill. Without filling out dates your participation will be set. Locations and content is top-secret. One think is for sure, each activity during this week is related towards all of us.

Regards,

On behalf of the Workshop Comity, EXPLORE LAB 9

movienight; A Stanley Kubrick film 'A Clockwork Orange'

Without arguing Tokyo, maybe a good alternative towards the upcoming movie night (next week):

A Stanley Kubrick film; A Clockwork Orange

The film’s central moral question, is the definition of “Goodness”. After aversion therapy, Alex behaves like a good member of society, but not by choice. His goodness is involuntary; he has become the titular clockwork orange organic on the outside, mechanical on the inside. In the prison, after witnessing the Technique in action in Alex, the chaplain criticizes it as false, arguing that true goodness must come from within. This leads to the theme of abusing liberties personal, governmental, civil by Alex, the Government, and the Dissidents manipulating him for their political ends. Concording with Kantian ethics, this critically portrays the “conservative” and “liberal” parties as equal, for using Alex as a means to their ends: the writer Frank Alexander a victim of Alex and gang wants revenge against Alex and sees him as a means of definitively turning the populace against the incumbent government and its new régime

Watch the trailer, and enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n2NXuQ5ako

Filmnight, THURSDAYnight!

If the Greeks give up on democracy, then who are the Dutch to judge it.. Tokyo it is! The trailer is very promising.
Thursday it is!

Koolhaas about architecture

This video is a lecture by Rem Koolhaas where he explains is way of dealing with architecture - something that goes really beyond the build artifact. I think this guy really is a forerunner when it comes to redefining our profession, especially when it comes to the role of architecture in the megapolis and the influence of global capitalism. The good thing about Koolhaas attitude towards it - in my opinion - is that he takes this condition as a given, not politically correct withdrawing himself from it, but trying to see what the possibilities are to intervene in it.
Well have a look for yourself and maybe we can later on have a discussion about it.

Hallo! I want to democratically suggest that we don 't vote for a film for next week but we just pick my suggestion :P

Have a look

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TUbDzB7m5U