#ILoveVancouver: A Temporary Outpouring Of Love
With a little help from other Vancouver-loving folks, local entrepreneur Graham Anderson put out the call for I Love Vancouver Day on Facebook recently. The idea was to recreate the iconic images of renewal from last year’s riot clean-up, where boarded-up shop windows were covered in written confessions of love and apologies to the city that so many adore.
Dutch Designers Turn Dumpsters Into Little Bars
Bye bye Cradle to Cradle, hello Dumpster to Dumpster! As part of their Foundation Projects, Rikkert Paauw en Jet van Zwieten transform dumpsters into little buildings with public functions, with the aim to show that urban waste can be re-used as an inspiring construction material.
The Hong Kong Hawker As Muse
Here is a twist on the beloved street food trend. Hong Kong artist Kacey Wong's latest sculpture, 'Transform Bar', is inspired by his local hawker culture.
Smartphone App Wander Connects Strangers Around The World
Ever wanted to get acquainted with 'real' local cultures? Smartphone app Wander does just that by randomly connecting users from different parts of the world. The originality of the app is the way it connects people as it provides them with daily photo-based missions that are used as a communication tool. Don't worry if you can't speak your interlocutor's language, communication is made easy using a built-in translator.
Cargotectural Futurism: New Designs For New Dilemmas
Pop-Up City’s resident container expert here with yet another report on shipping container urbanism. We love shipping containers, or, at least, re-using them: whether it’s making offices, hotels, or coffee houses, we’re ardent supporters of the cargotecture trend. But the logical end point of container urbanism appears to be on the horizon: shipping container cities.
Population Of 590 Cities In One Fantastic Flowchart
How do you cram 100 years worth of population growth over 590 cities into a single visual? Barcelona-based Bestiaro does it beautifully, integrating nifty web-based interactive elements. The flowchart runs on an application called Impure, the product of five years of interactive visualization research.
#IABR — An Urban Rooftop Farm In Downtown Rotterdam
Meet the Dakakker. As part of the 5th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, the Rotterdam Test Site has included the city’s first rooftop garden on top of the Schieblock building. The garden houses vegetables and herbs (and some bees, too!), with the produce heading to local restaurants and a soon-to-be-opened shop.
São Paulo’s Secret Tea Shop
Nothing's more exciting than hidden elements in the urban fabric. Brazilian architect Alan Chu must have thought the same when he designed this remarkable secret shop for a local tea brand in a shopping center in São Paulo.
Data-Driven Urban Citizenship
With networked infrastructures mixing with physical fabric of the cities (check out iPavement, paving tiles with embedded microcomputer), there is a gradually growing body of urban data. Often this data is not collected or not stored. Often it is stored without being shared. A steady trickling out of this urban data, however, is taking place through open data platforms and various public-private data partnerships. While there emerges a political demand for rights regarding networked objects (see Adam Greenfield and Bruno Latour and Near Future Laboratory), a range of products, services and platforms are coming up that offer to enrich citizenship with accessible and visualised data.
The Playground: Parkour And Architecture
The London Festival of Architecture is rapidly approaching and has a fun theme: The Playful City. The avid pop-up fan knows that we dig play, and it’s been a theme this spring in Amsterdam: be it playful public art or making urban planning more fun for participants, there’s a lot of talk about playfulness in urban space. It’s not a surprise, then, that our friends across the Channel are taking play so seriously.
Artful Tanks: New York’s Water Tank Project
Commencing in spring 2013, New York's Water Tank Project will transform the cities rooftop water tanks into canvases for a huge array of artists, including some people you might know like Jeff Koons (see: dangling trains), Devendra Banhart (see: Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon), and some guy named Jay-Z (who’s having a pretty sweet year design-wise).
China’s Rooftop Velodrome
China will soon add an elegant new bicycle structure, designed by Amsterdam-based office NL Architects, to its southernmost city Sanya. The Bicycle Club's architecturally stunning roof is designed to sit upon a base of glass to give the illusion of floating above ground.
Woven Spaces: Changing The Urban Fabric
Artist Nicolas Feldmeyer recently unleashed untitled-but-still-totally-titled piece ‘Untitled (Woven Portico)’. The piece is made up of PVC mesh and weaves in and out of the central building of the University College London, recreating a new sheltered space on the portico and giving the portico a new image from the square in front of the building.
VertiCrop Takes Rooftop Farming To The Next Level(s)
A parking garage in downtown Vancouver has recently signed an agreement to install VertiCrop's vertical greenhouse system on its rooftop, making it the first of its kind. VertiCrop's system effectively transforms the 6,000 square feet rooftop into 16 acres of productive farmland by incorporating numerous 'levels' within the greenhouse.
Talking Stumps: Starting Conversations In Public Spaces
One of the biggest problems in huge, hyper-dense places is a receding sense of community. It’s surprisingly hard to get to know people when you live in a large, faceless tenement block. To play with this idea, Tisch School of the Arts students Lynn Burke, Stefanie Kleinman, and Tak Cheung have created a piece called ‘Branch Out: Start a Conversation with a Stranger’ as part of last month’s spring show.
