The Answer Is Blowing In The Typhoon?
The third Urban Typhoon workshop was recently organized in Khirkee Village, New Delhi. Khirkee used to be peri-urban village on the South of Delhi, but in the last decades the expanding city has engulfed the village and a big shopping mall and planned housing development sit right next to the village. The workshop, jointly organized by […]
Tent City Of Mina
In these days, of the last month of the Islamic calendar, millions of pilgrims are gathering around the tent city of Mina for the pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca (Makkah). The Hajj, as the pilgrimage is called, is not only a challenging performance for the pilgrim, but also a complex infrastructural and logistical […]
Conquer The Neighborhood With Your iPhone
Described as the next step in social gaming, Shadow Cities is a location-based Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) that takes the urban environment as platform. Neighborhoods and familiar streets are part of the game world that is visible on the screen of the iPhone. Familiar to the purpose of psychogeographic games such as Serendipitor, […]
For Sale: Buckminster Fuller Dome
Who wants to own an original geodesic dome designed by the one and only Buckminster Fuller? Here is your chance! Since a couple of weeks the huge Aviodome, that used to function as the aviation museum at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, is for sale. The Aviodome was the first geodesic dome in Europe. The iconic building was built […]
Over The Under, Manhole Art In Milan
For the second time, the city of Milan organizes the nice public space project ‘Over the Under, Manhole Art’ in collaboration with the biggest optical fibers company in Europe. The project takes the cue from a Japanese habit and commissions the customization of some of the manholes in the city to five street artists: Shepard Fairey, Rendo, […]
The Last (City) Newspaper
The exhibition named ‘The Last Newspaper’, underway at The New Museum, New York since the last month, is extensively looking at the history of newspaper practices. It locates the newspaper within a globalised network of information flows, and competing forms of information surfaces (walls, screens, pads etc.), and looks in to the technological history of […]
Checkpoint Empty
Borders are intriguing. Sometimes they follow a very logical line such as mountain ranges, rivers, or obvious cultural differences like a language. Sometimes they are completely illogical, like the more or less randomly drawn borderlines in Africa. Some borders cut straight through a metropolitan area, creating special dynamics, for instance the Nieuwstraat in the Dutch […]
Nail Houses And The Stay-Down City
In the most recent issue of Monu Magazine, Human Wu — who coincidentally might have the coolest name in history — writes about the phenomenon of nail houses in China. A nail house is a Chinese term that relates to any building where an owner stubbornly refuses to vacate his or her property in the […]
Swimming Above A Submerged City
In order to raise awareness for global warming and its big potential consequences (and to promote itself as the first carbon neutral bank in the world), HSBC asked the Mumbai office of advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather to come up with a campaign in public space that addresses the danger of flooding. The ad men […]
Custom Bike Urbanism
If getting hungry, while strolling along the roads of Shanghai, it is not necessary that McDonald’s will be your eatery of choice. Certainly not if you are all crazed out about having your stomach filled with local street food. In this case you might choose the local chef providing freshly prepared meat-on-sticks from his hybrid […]
Play With Your City
This post is written as a conversation with ‘I, Eyes And JR’ By Ajantriks, ‘Pop-Up City As Museum’ by Alexandra Mientjes and ‘New York’s Underbelly’ by Anna Triboli. As we know, urban interventions in the streets differ a lot. Not only for the scale or the media used but also, as Jan Vormann already pointed […]
Talking Tree Wants To Be Your Friend
The Belgian science and nature magazine EOS is running a project which purpose is to give voice to a 100 year old tree located in Brussels by linking it to a complex system of cameras, wind sensors, solar panels and so on, that are constantly monitoring its activities and translate these into words. Talking Tree […]
Party At The Moon Tower
Austin, Texas is famous for breakfast tacos and Richard Linklater films. But it also home to a lesser known but equally great phenomenon known as the moonlight tower. Essentially an infrastructural anachronism, moonlight towers are 50-metre high lighting structures, designed to illuminate several blocks at a time. They were popular in North American cities at the […]
Urban Drifting
Use your iPhone to have a psychogeographical experience in your own city. Inspired by the Situationists, Serendipitor is a free app that utilizes Google Map’s API to “find something by looking for something else.” Begin by entering a destination, from which Serendipitor suggests various routes, which are shorter or longer, depending on how much time […]
Raumlabor’s Soft Solution
You may know the Berlin-based inflatable architecture gurus of Raumlabor since we have covered several of their projects in the past, such as the traveling bubble Spacebuster, or the Hovercraft, a translucent membrane wrapped around a modernist building. They are back with a new project. Under the name of Soft Solution, the Raumlabor people have realized a new installation for the 4th European Month of Photography in Berlin.
