Jopo Helsinki bike meeting

A City of Jopos

For a long time car owners have had yearly gatherings for special brands. Now bike owners are catching up. The first bike gathering for Helkama Jopo-bikes was arranged in Helsinki. Photographer Roni Rekomaa took a cool photo of the bikers on their Jopos. Talk  about ultra-cool! /aitoa

More> HBL

Photo Roni Rekomaa

Helsinki the Design Capital 2012

Helsinki and Eindhoven competing for becoming Design Capital 2012

UPDATE 25.11.2009> Helsinki will be the Design Capital 2012!

Two cities, Helsinki inFinland and Eindhoven in The Netherlands are competing about the prestigeous title of Design Capital 2012. The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design will choose the winner in November. The judges will visit the two cities in August.

If Helsinki is chosen there will be big opening and closing events and several festivals and happenings organised around Design and Architecture in the city during the two-year capitalship.

Will the establishment of Iittala, Marimekko, Fiskars, Aalto, Artek, Helsinki art nouveau- and modern architecture, and designers like Ilka Suppanen, Harri Koskinen, Valvomo bring the price home, or do the judges look for new design ideas of  non-commercialism, ecology, ethics and mysticism like Hel Looks, Globe Hope, Hollmen-Reuter-Sandman Architects, Marcus Copper, or -since the almost total death of free graffiti culture in the city-, the risign culture of guerilla gardening in Helsinki?

Marimekko

Alvar Aalto

art nouveau architecture

Snowcrash Globlow lamp

Hel Looks: Colin (33)

Hollmen Reuter Sandman

Archangel of the seven seas - Marcus Copper

Guerilla Gardening

Urban pattern

Complex City

Urban pattern as inspiration for textile design

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.

The artist Lee Jang Sub

More> Complex City by Lee Jang Sub

From> www.dailytonic.com

http://www.gdcomplexcity.com/

Work concept inventions

The new standard: A Parecon workplace is possible

by Jessica Azulay at ZNet

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.

> continue ZNet

> Radical Office Design Book

Shopping uniformly

Our cities are malls

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 a decade 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

Helsinki Hietalahti fleemarket clothes

link> Wardrobe remix

The street flow of architecture

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 surrounded by 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”.

Keywords:

-Genuine

-Humble

-Scenography

-Noice

-Interaction

-Entity

-Street space

-Flow

-Choise

-Intimacy

-Freedom

-Tolerance (to balance your own freedom)

//aito

> www.urbanphoto.net

How to make a community as well as the space for it

To transform temporary available and under-used spaces

A renewed approach to architecture and urban planning cannot be initiated solely by centralised structures and governmental bodies. Doina Petrescu highlights the importance of ‘other spaces’, the temporary appropriation and use of leftover spaces and urban interstices, spaces of relative freedom, where rules and codes can still be redefined.

continue>www.re-public.gr

Important events

Things happening soon in Helsinki worth checking out:

1) This year´s Megapolis 2023 on date 27.9.2008 at Vanha Ylioppilastalo in Helsinki

2) Carrotmob is coming to Finland: Saturday 27.9 (at 18.30) in Ravintola Juttutupa in Hakaniemi.

Concept idea presented by the founder Brent Schulkin on youtube:

The result in: Talous Sanomat

3) Thursday 2.10.2008 (at 17.00)

HUM:ARC (Architecture for Humanity) exhibition opening at A-Guild´s Gallery “Mom, whats´s architecture?” Neitsytpolku 8 in Helsinki

www.new.facebook.com/EVENT

www.new.facebook.com/GROUP

Punk my street

Reclaim the streets

“Reclaim the streets” is a worldwide phenomenon, where people take over the streets and set up a party. Yesterday in Helsinki, Punk took over. The organization was excellent; one second – people fill the street, two seconds – traffic is stopped and anarchist black flags put up, and a red blanket constructed to hinder cars from passing. Three seconds – the tent is up. Four seconds – the instruments are orderly put up and the spontaneous stage is ready. Five seconds – a small aggregat is carried in to give power to the loudspeakers. Next the bar is up and punk music fills the neighbourhood. //aito

Punk my neighbourhood

Malminrinne reclaimed

The police watching over

Concert

Red skeleton banner

< VIDEO

Inflatable plastic bag subway art

Artist Joshua Allen Harris´ plastic bag polar bear

Polar bears, polar bears. Those ubiquitous symbols of climate change. Cute and cuddly, ethereal and majestic, they’re popping up everywhere – including atop subway grates on the streets of New York City. Artist Joshua Allen Harris has created quite an online buzz with his puppy-like inflatable plastic bag polar bear: it inflates and deflates with the passing of subterranean subway trains, springing to life and then fading away in a vital commentary on global warming.

From Inhabitat > www.inhabitat.com