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