About Batman and other Chinese characters

"Lonely Planed Mandarin Phrasebook". Image via amazon.com

If you think about China, what comes first to your mind? Which icons represent the Country in our western collective imagination? The "Lonely Planet Mandarin Phrasebook" summarizes our idea of "Chineseness"with: a rickshaw, a bike, taijiquan, the Forbidden City and... Rem Koolhaas' CCTV headquarters. The CCTV building (blessed by fire in 2009) can be considered iconic architecture in one of its purest forms.

Skyscraper-bulimia. Shcreenshot from a R. Koolhaas' presentation.

Skyscraper-pastiche in the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum. Image by jesabele

In fact, China (not differently from Dubai) seems now very fond of iconic buildings, collecting patchwork- or collage-skylines. As one can easily imagine, the results are often both interesting and dreadful. In Shanghai some examples of this skyscraper-bulimia can be: "the Batman", "the Chinese pot", "the bottle-opener" and "the upside-down duck" (a sort of Venturian reinterpretation).

"The Batman". Image by Ol.v!er [H2vPk]

"The Chinese pot". Image by iferneinez

"The bottleopener". Image by HBarrison

"The upside-down" duck. Image by Augapfel

The "venturian" big duck. Via wikipedia.org

Fixed'n'floating

Here a recent project at Tongji University in collaboration with Zheng Wentao. The urban design proposal deals with aging society issues and is located in Chuansha New Town, at the outskirts of Shanghai.

Fixed'n'floating

On "quotation" and "translation"

New Academy of Art, first phase, Ningbo.

During some recent trips to Hangzhou and to Ningbo I had the opportunity to experience Wang Shu's architecture in closer detail (Ningbo Museum of Art, Ningbo Historic Museum, New Academy of Art among others). Wang Shu is known for his contextual approach, especially regarding local materials and culture. From What impressed me is the fact that he sometimes "quotes" building techniques, other times he seems to "translate" them.

Ningbo Historic Museum. Facade's cladding.

One might wonder how he came to the decision to clad the Ningbo Historic Museum with used bricks and tiles of various kinds. In fact, in many villages and towns like Cicheng, some 10km away from Ningbo, you can see how locals used diverse materials to build their walls, out of necessity reasons. Of course the main difference between the two uses is that this heterogeneous pattern has originally a structural function, while Wang Shu employs it as cladding.

Informal wall in Cichang.

An example of "translation" might be some openings in the New Academy of Art's second phase development. In one of the teaching building an inner courtyard is separated from the outside by a perforated wall, which openings remind me of some traditional Chinese garden gates, like the ones in Yuyuan in Shanghai.

New Academy of Art, second phase, Hangzhou.

Garden gate in Yuyuan, Shanghai.

Here more high-quality photos.

Biodivers/City

Here a landscape architecture and urban design project that Eleonore Harmel and I produced last semester at TU Berlin. Theme of the studio was the "productive urban landscape" and we chose biodiversity as a theme for our project site in Köln-Ehrenfeld.

Here high-quality pictures.

Biodivers/city

We were already, already bored

I am sure you have not missed the last album by Arcade Fire "The suburbs" and the marvelous video by Spike Jonze "Scenes from the suburbs" that follows here:



Does it really represent suburban living? Well, check-out this 2006 Canadian documentary movie about suburbia, "Radiant city": though we know already the ills of suburbia, director Gary Burns and journalist Jim Brown did a good job showing an average middle-class family in its everyday life in "Evergreen" neighborhood. You can get a pretty precise idea about the appeal that suburbia holds, but also about the most common negative externalities and disillusions that people soon have to face. Be patient till the end of the documentary, you will get a surprize!

Shape is part of the meaning

BVG. Image by haikus

Every Berliner faces them hundreds of times a day, every day... Signboards are part of a city's identity, and in the most fortunate cases they reach the status of collective monuments, like the blue-white-red underground sign in London. Why is it so easy in Berlin to find your way when you travel with public transport? Who is in charge of designing a sing like this one below to show you the right direction? Well, check it out in the following video, where German typographer and designer Erik Spiekermann, who recently won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the German Design Council, comments some of his work for BVG (Berlin's public transport company) and Die Bahn.

Mtro Potsdamer Platz. Image by Antoon's Footbar

Insulation III

Shrink by Lawrence Malstaf. Photo by Hanneke Wetzer

Third and last flash-post about insulation: we are at the body-scale. Belgian artist Lawrence Malstaf produced in 1996 a performance called "Shrink", in which visitors were given the opportunity of being wrapped in plastic in a vacuum-pack. In a recent interview the artist explained that the a desire of withdrawal from the world was the feeling that inspired this installation. "Exhibited" people float hung-up in the air completely still, apart from breathing thanks to a rigid tube, the only connection with the surrounding environment. Here follows a "making-of" video...



Related posts:
Insulation II
Insulation I

Insulation II

After the post about Tropical Islands featuring a gigantic, encapsulated amusement park, a smaller-scale "insulation" example: Haus-Rucker-Co was an Austrian group of architects and artists known for their use of inflatables in temporary installations and projects. Shown in this video, the '68 Gelbes Haus (yellow house) was a pneumatic structure for two people elevated from the ground, while in '71 with Ausstellung Cover (exhibition cover), the group covered the Haus Lange in Krefeld, built in '21 by Mies van der Rohe, with a white, pneumatic dome.



Recently, Raumlabor produced the Küchenmonument (kitchen monument), a sort of living-pod which traveled through many German cities in order to host temporary public events like conferences or collective cooking and dining, a mobile public space insulation.



Related posts:
Insulation I

New Town - 1948

Check out this animation movie about New Towns development in England: sponsored by the Central Office of Information for Ministry of Town and Country Planning, it is a very interesting document that shows how catchy the idea at the time was... In his poppy way, the movie touches though arguments still being debated: which urban form would our protagonist, Charley, propose today?



Related posts:
The City - 1939
Transportation System: New York 1940s vs. Beijing 2010s
The Changing City - mid 1960s
Urban Renewal: 1955 vs. 2006

The City - 1939

Commissioned for the 1939 New York World's Fair, "The City" is documentary film that celebrates Greenbelt, Maryland, a New Deal development project, both a reaction to industrial urbanity (overcrowded and filthy) and to sprawl (unregulated and unplanned). Lewis Mumford, who wrote the comments for the film, after showing an idyllic pre-industrial America, brings us to the chaotic, polluted and dangerous industrial city, before explaining his counter-proposal: settlements close to nature with plenty of green space, near to railway lines and highways, where low and middle density buildings are grouped around public functions and work place is reached by foot. If we discard the over simplistic tone that the film required, it is still worth watching, considering that it was shot in '39. The music score by Aaron Copland is just beautiful.





Related posts:
Transportation System: New York 1940s vs. Beijing 2010s
The Changing City - mid 1960s
Urban Renewal: 1955 vs. 2006

Insulation I

Tropical Islands. Image by cocoate.com.

I took inspiration for a small series of posts from some of Peter Sloterdijk's concepts, namely insulation and encapsulation, included in his comprehensive theory of Spherology: in the beginning of a recent interview, Mr. Sloterdijk says:

"We have to speak of space because humans are themselves an effect of the space they create. Human evolution can only be understood if we also bear in mind the mystery of insulation/island-making [Insulierungsgeheimnis] that so defines the emergence of humans: Humans are pets that have domesticated themselves in the incubators of early cultures. All the generations before us were aware that you never camp outside in nature. The camps of man’s ancestors, dating back over a million years, already indicated that they were distancing themselves from their surroundings."

Tropical Island on the left and the closest village on the right. Image from googlemaps.

 
So, let's go with the first insulation from the surrounding: Tropical Islands is a wellness resort in Brandenburg, 60 km south from Berlin, housed in a former airship hangar. The airship that it was supposed to be host there was never built, the company went bankrupt in 2002 and the structure was bought by a Malaysian Company which turned it into an amusement park, opened in December 2004.
It can contain up to 6000 people in a day and it is the largest hall without supporting pillars in the world. Through a special plastic membrane it is possible to sunbathe inside (UV-proof), swim and spend some days in a tropical forest at 26 degrees (needless to say that the energetic balance of this building is a disaster...).

So far, so good; let's have a look inside...



And the Brandenburger area outside (from a friend of mine, the filmmaker Alessandro Cassigoli)...

65 years and 10.000 km distant...

Tokyo in 1945 after firebombs. Image from yk.namiki.

Houston, Texas, 2010. Image from bing.com.

Blankenfelde-Mahlow: the butterfly effect

BBI airport as east European gate.

I post a recent two-weeks-long joint project between TU Berlin, Tsinghua University Beijing and BUCEA University Beijing: together with my colleagues Ella Aminaldin, ZHAO  Hǎi  Xiǎng, Wáng  Wén and Enric Carol Suades, we tackled the problem of noise pollution in Blankenfelde-Mahlow, a small town south from Berlin, which will have to face the close-by expansion of the new BBI airport.

B-M distances to Berlin, Potsdam and BBI airport.

The concept
The so-called "butterfly effect" (i.e. in a complex system, initial small interventions cause relevant effects as time unfolds) was taken as a motto to define our proposal.

Analysis of site
Noise patterns and existing physical and social infrastructure were a starting point: we focused on noise pollution, walking distance to train stations and improvement of public/business services. Growth expectations (10.000 new inhabitants in the near future) and the peculiar suburban life-style framed our work: reevaluating the natural environment would be a good opportunity both for living and experiencing the countryside. There is a potential near the river to enhance the waterside access; the Rangsdorfer forest could be integrated with a new future development, emphasizing thus its relationship with the countryside.

Noise patterns from plane-routes: the darker, the more affected (>60 dB).

Walking distant to train stations: 5 to 15 min.

Inputs
We have to respond to two problems: what to do with the existing buildings under noise threat? Where and how to design new expansions? We propose a strategy in five steps that turns problems into a potential.

Diagram of successive steps.

Proposal
1. Noise protection of existing households via winter-gardens might offer new space, neither interior nor exterior, from the level of single houses to shared winter-gardens for (sub)urban agriculture and leisure, a retrofitting of the dispersed town’s fabric.

Grouping medium-compactness.

Communal winter-garden for low-compactness.

Existing situation.

Renovation proposal.

2. As a consequence to this new situation we transform a former military site into a covered farmer’s market, integrating an elderly house and new businesses dedicated to sport and leisure, since the site lays close to Rangsdorfer lake and forest.

An abandoned military area is converted to elderly houses and farmer's covered market.

3. Reacting to these new functions, a redesign and improvement of the green paths leading to the lake-shore is needed, building a new bridge and resolving the crossing under the A10 highway.

The green "heart".

4. The town is now ready for expansion: we concentrated on the south part of the town, less affected by noise pollution and close to an S-Bahn station, to the new covered-market and lake. Compact typologies assure enough critical mass to have commercial/public services at ground floor: we designed both winter-gardens on the roofs and shared-protected courtyards.

Masterplan 1:2000.

General view.

First typology.

Second typology: gardens on the roof.

5. With enough inhabitants and businesses the town could cover the railway lines, reconnecting its four split parts, and build a station to link directly with BBI airport: a mixture of functions could host hotels and services relating to the airport’s function.

Linear park.

Vision
In conclusion, these strategies aim not only at protecting the current and future inhabitants from noise, but also at improving daily life and providing opportunities for economic growth.

Some high-quality pictures here.