ComplexCity is an exploration to find a concealed aesthetic by using the pattern formed by the city’s roads, which have been growing and evolving randomly through time, thus composing the complex configuration we experience today.The project started in Seoul, Korea, where designer Lee Jang Sub was born and has grown up. Now it is expanding to other cities all over the world. Lee Jang Sub now lives in Barcelona, Spain, and explains: “I perceive the city’s patterns as living creatures that I recompose to form an urban image.”
Rome and Paris
The ComplexCity design concept is screen-printed on different materials, such as wood, textil, or paper, each giving the design a different feel. For the final product, the screen-printing effects of the design are implemented on one of the materials listed above.
With a love for spaces in decay reused and delicately transformed, we like the plan for the old dairy barn transformed into a home by architect Charlotte Scene Cataling from Skene Catling de la Peña Architects .
Kjellgren Kaminsky Architects New Heden project transforms a vacant city block is a self-contained sustainable city interspersed with cycling paths and walkways. Envisioned as a “green lung” for Gothenburg, Sweden, the development will introduce a beautiful expanse of fresh green space to an area currently consumed by parking lots and football fields.
The skill to give an interesting lecture (on statistics)
It is a true skill to give an interesting lecture on something that normally would make most people fall asleep; statistics on world health. We present to you professor Hans Rosling from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden:
A brilliant communicator with a great message that could change how we view and inform ourselves about the world. I believe this kind of technology associated with the freedom of information Rosling advocates, and perhaps with future uses of the internet as a means for direct participation from individual citizens could dramatically alter the way we conceive of democracy.
Tuomo Siitonen Architects´ plan for apartments in downtown Helsinki
Cement accounts for 5% of the world’s CO2 emissions – more than aviation. Now British engineers have discovered a new form of cement that instead reduces CO2 emissions. Cement is the key ingredient in concrete. In Finland, concrete is the most common material for building bearing structures of high-rise apartment houses. Scientists predict, that worldwide, the demand for cement will grow by 50% in the years to come.
Cement, a vast source of planet-warming carbon dioxide, could be transformed into a means of stripping the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere, thanks to an innovation from British engineers.
Making traditional cement results in greenhouse gas emissions from two sources: it requires intense heat, and so a lot of energy to heat up the ovens that cook the raw material, such as limestone. That then releases further CO2 as it burns. But, until now, noone has found a large-scale way to tackle this fundamental problem.
The new cement, based on magnesium silicates, not only requires much less heating, it also absorbs large amounts of CO2 as it hardens, making it carbon negative. Set up by chief scientist at Novacem, Nikolaos Vlasopoulos and his colleagues at Imperial College London, the innovation has already attracted the attention of major construction companies and investors.
Butterflies exhibit vibrant colors and stay clean using nano-scale structures on their wings. Designers and engineers have emulated this strategy to create self-cleaning coatings, fabrics and paints, and electronic display screens.
What is Biomimicry?
Biomimicry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) is a design discipline that seeks sustainable solutions by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies, e.g., a solar cell inspired by a leaf. The core idea is that Nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with: energy, food production, climate control, non-toxic chemistry, transportation, packaging, and a whole lot more.
Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most importantly, what lasts here on Earth. Instead of harvesting organisms, or domesticating them to accomplish a function for us, biomimicry differs from other “bio-approaches” by consulting organisms and ecosystems and applying the underlying design principles to our innovations. This approach introduces an entirely new realm for entrepreneurship that can contribute not only innovative designs and solutions to our problems but also to awakening people to the importance of conserving the biodiversity on Earth that has so much yet to teach us.
The Finnish architecture office “JKMM” is planning an apartment building for Riga, Latvia. The project is a result of an international architecture competition for the building, that will be located in the famous art nuveau-district in Riga. The building could be categorized as nouveau art nouveau, new-jugend – still keeping it very contemporary.
A parecon workplace is possible. I have experienced one, and now I believe we can overcome capitalism.
The hierarchical workplace is an insidious institution. It is a powerful mechanism through which capitalism imposes and normalizes some of its most vicious values: It thrives on competition. It encourages authoritarianism and subservience. It rewards workers for their race, gender, education, output, age, conformity, and their ability to “work the system.” It is dangerous for individual empowerment and democracy, yet it is embraced even by most social-change organizations. It must be subverted.
The theory of Participatory Economics provides a framework for creating a new kind of workplace in present-day market economies. It shows us how to organize our work around a different set of values: equity, solidarity, democracy, and diversity.
Unlike some facets of the parecon vision, which may seem lofty and futuristic, the workplace model can to a great extent be immediately implemented. I say this with confidence because I have done it.
For four years, I, along with several co-workers, labored in a parecon-based workplace to produce a daily, online news publication called The NewStandard. TNS, as we called it, was 100 percent reader funded and not-for-profit. It upheld the highest ethical standards in the news industry and focused on the perspectives of people most affected by current events and government and corporate policy.
Our particular project was a less-than-ideal laboratory for parecon. At its peak, when there were six of us, we worked from four different locations, which made communication challenging. We worked grueling hours to meet daily publishing deadlines, leaving little time and energy for other aspects of our organization. And the funding pressures of the news and alternative-media industries kept our publication on the financial brink.
Yet we found even this to be a rich environment in which to stave off hierarchy. Using the parecon fundamentals—balanced job complexes, participatory decision-making, and payment for effort and sacrifice—we were able to experiment, invent, and reinvent until we found ways of operating that were increasingly efficient and fair.
I was sitting on the tram number 6 trough the center of Helsinki on my way to Hietalahti, and it crossed my mind, how similar the businesses in metropolitan areas are becoming. It doesn’t matter if its Paris , Madrid, Stocholm or Helsinki, but in the core shopping district you always find Prada, Gucci, Hugo Boss, Hästens, Hennes et Mauritz and Zara occupying all of the downtown rental spaces. It’s the same verywhere! Cities need to stand out and find their own character again.
We used to imagine this was a phenomena only concerning shopping malls; that is where you find the shops and enterprises composed of specific pre-organised compounds of shops. Shops that do not enter into each other comfort zone too much to create real competition in prizing, shops that tend to the needs of the average IMAGINED shopper of a specific targeted area. You have malls targeting middle class; these are the malls on the ring roads and perhaps the malls in city center targeting the offspring of the wealthy (those who can afford to live in the city)…so we get for example Kamppi Mall in Helsinki centre that attracts mainly teenagers. (The Kamppi Mall is by the way the busiest mall in Europe –insert ad here-). But as I watched the well known brands pass by my tram window, I realised this has happened to our city centres outside the malls as well. Our cities are becoming a malls.
So what will happen if the turbulence on the financing market continues? Would it possibly create new opportunities to reclaim the liveliness and dynamics of the city centres? When people stop spending on luxury, and the brand shops have to close down, is there a new dawn for experimental enterprises in the centre? Perhaps we will see sprawling young entrepreneur businesses find a niche in our cities. I remember the attraction and excitement of for example Barcelona adecade back, that lay in the possibilities to create things, live from it, change your mind if you felt like it and go in another direction, and succeed again. This was the creation of young students, immigrants, of refugees, of local people using the buzz…all of this both gave opportunity to business to establish and to the atmosphere of that your life lay at your feet to create, whatever age you were. The centre of Barcelona was full of unknown designer shops, small clubs popping up everywhere, record shops, cafés, restaurants. The huge number of tourists consequently flocking there gave way to a lot of trendy hostels. Forget Gaudi (however fantastic), forget the MACBA Museum…the city grew its fame out of the will to do things of people living there. If the city centre would not have supported low enough rents for small new businesses, if the rent levels would only allowed brand names there, the famous Barcelona we know today would not exist.
History, Catalunya, beauty of architecture…all of this would prevail, but we would not have our imaginary City of Life. A lot of `city´ is in the minds of its inhabitants and its visitors, and like the rug under the feet of the financing market, it is also easily shaken if not tendered.//aito
Does architecture shape our surroundings and our behaviour
-or do we collectively shape our architecture?
The street was not wide, maybe four meters wide, and it was sloped up towards a small bell tower. The level change was realized as steps, so that street felt like an interior– a part of a public building or a church. And indeed at the fond of the street there was a the local church, to which outrage the local gay bar on the street set up a fiesta every Sunday at the same time as church sermon took place.
The space of the street was surroundedby four-five story buildings, that seemed to grow out of the same material as the street. Their architectural qualities were humble, one had an over proportioned balcony off center that was full of dry plants like a hairy mold on your face, another had bad cracks in the plaster of the façade resembling a very old woman´s skin. There were also new-builds in the street. One lot on the street had as an economical venture sold building right to wealthy Russians from Novosibirsk, and the Russians had built a luxurious, but slightly tasteless apartment building on the lot. Still something – undefined still by our modern architectural theories – kept the streetscape together like glue and made it hole.
What we noticed after a while after settling in at our rented apartment on third floor, was that the street was never quiet. Even by night you could hear apart from some traffic here and there, also sound of heels tapping the stone pavement, strange shouts you could not locate, and dogs barking.
By day the street was a stage for activity. There were small shops that poured out their products on the street for display, cramped by the small space they had inside. People stopped and talked to the shop owners while passing by. The butcher on the street had a peculiar way of greeting all elderly ladies with a bit too intimate hugs. White collar workers rushed pass the street on their way to work and home. The homeless loitered around. Young men played football on the street. There was a sense of liberties taken and given, an unpronounced allowing code of conduct.
The above writing is freely adapted from professor Panu Lehtovuori´s lecture “Calzada de sant´Ana”, but it could be a description of any street in Europe admired in travel brouschures for its genuinity. Why are we as trained architects unable to design a street like this today?
It’s a steet that encourages, not just allows people to be themselves. It forces to interaction with other people. Interaction is one of the main keys to happiness, if not one of the most crucial. All humans have a need to define themselves and their identitiy through others , through their reaction. Be the reaction admiration, schock, indifference, but we all crave that in some form. When the possibility to interact is taken away from you, you seek it trough the internet, through books, or through meditation or other. Human life is an exodus for recognicion, reaction or the lack of it. But it has to be tested. Every single human being seeks interaction. What architecture needs to do, is to give space for people to meet on the terms they define. Individuality wants liberty to have the freedom to choose who and how it interacts with, but individuality always needs to define itself trough others; if it only observes from the balcony above the street, if it stays in the shadow of the doorway, timid to step out into the limeligh, of if it takes center stage and becomes the hero or the antihero of the show called Calzada Sant´Ana.
Give and get in return.
The above is a story of a street in Lisbon Portugal – Europe. Thanks to professor Panu Lehtovuori and his “Calzada de sant´Ana”.
