Event: “Berlin-New York Dialogues: Building in Context”
An exhibition called “Berlin-New York Dialogues: Building in Context” opened last week at New York’s Center for Architecture and will run through January 26 before traveling to Berlin in March.
Rather than focus narrowly on noteworthy buildings, the exhibition and related panel discussions explore issues like how Berlin is reasserting its role in European cultural and intellectual life and how New York is trying to maintain its reputation as a creative center, even as artists are priced out of neighborhoods they helped to rejuvenate.
“We didn’t really try to have one-on-one comparisons,” said Kristien Ring, the director of the German Center for Architecture in Berlin. “We tried to pick themes where one can delve into a dialogue.”
For example both cities seem to have rediscovered the potential of their waterfronts in recent years, with an array of commercial buildings and residential lofts rising near the Spree River in Berlin and architects drafting plans to enhance the East River esplanade in Manhattan.
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ISSI 2009
Welcome ISSI 2009 conference attendees. Feel free to leave comments regarding the conference and your projects or visit the official site. I look forward to seeing you in Rio.
The Denver Museum of Contemporary Art reopens this Sunday in a new location
The Museum of Contemporary Art | Denver reopens this Sunday in a new location [map]. Architect David Adjaye designed the shiny, new building [pictures]. Architectural Record has the details. I like the design, especially what I’ve seen of the interior walls:
Adjaye, known in Europe for his creative use of industrial building materials, employed tinted glass for the museum’s exterior walls but added an interior skin of MonoPan, a translucent material made of woven recycled plastic and used in the fabrication of trailers and storage sheds, among other products. “It was something I encountered at a trade fair of motor cars,” Adjaye says. “I was blown away by this material.”
If that’s not enough, I recommend the New York Magazine interview with Adjaye:
Your museum in Denver also seems like an attempt to make something more public than the traditional museum.
It is like a mini-version of a city.How is that done architecturally?
You never go from one exhibition space to another: You always come out into a kind of street and then you meander into another exhibition space. The way in which you are seeing art is almost like being in a little village or little town.What is the plus of that?
You have the ability to perceive art, digest it, then go on to the next thing. You get away from the exhaustion when you are relentlessly pounded with stuff.
A (slightly edited) passage from Lindsay Bremner’s draft for “Citiness as Literariness”
A (slightly edited) passage from Lindsay Bremner’s draft for “Citiness as Literariness” [PDF]. Found via Networked_Performance.
The city asserts its otherness in a number of ways.
Firstly, it exposes us to an excessive presence of others, of strangers, who call into question our ownership of the world.
Second…the city annihilates authorship. It is most certainly a made artifact, yet by whom? The very multiplicity of agency at work in it means firstly that it is not made by any one. In other words, it is made by no one, which is the same as to say by every one. Urban life is constantly made and unmade by multiple realities, and authorship, no matter how prominent, quickly disappears into obscurity, anonymity or cultural history. The city erases authorship for itself.
Thirdly, like the work of literature, the city brings its authors / writers into existence, not the other way round.
More information on Lindsay Bremner’s appearance in Slought Foundation’s Architecture Dejeuner Series may be found here.
ISSI 2009 / 12th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics
The 12th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics will be held in Rio de Janeiro from July 28-31, 2009. This past year’s conference was held in Madrid.
I hope to attend. The welcome page for the conference provides plenty of good information.
I’ve opened comments to allow for discussion of the event.
BarCamp Atlanta
I’ll be attending BarCamp Atlanta tomorrow, October 12th. I hope to be able to find somebody who can help me on my local government hyperlinks project. I’m not sure what I’ll present at BarCamp. Perhaps I’ll just host a conversation addressing the digital divide and similar issues arising from the inequitable distribution of ICTs within the city and the corporate commodification of the Internet.
Bricoleurbanism and Black Rock City
Bricoleurbanism’s post on Black Rock City is as good an urban design blog post as I’ve read in a while.
Manchester has an entire exhibition center devoted to city life; all I’ve got’s a web site.
Urbis is an exhibition center in Manchester, England, devoted entirely to living in the city. I like the footprint.
Factory fans take note: The Haçienda exhibit runs through February 17th of 2008; Peter Saville and Ben Kelly give a keynote next month, November 14th.