In psychology, "entgleisen" refers to lines of only tangentially related thought. This weblog will serve as an outlet for abstract curiosities in the fields of architecture and design. Though the individual entries are not sequential in their discourse, they occupy a thick miasma containing deeper inquisitions raised by the superficiality of a media-centric world.

Weekly, daily, monthly...Exploring the urban context of buildings, between buildings and public spaces through a lens. Hoping to create a dialog about the details that make up the city and how that creates and effects our interaction with it.

BLOG OF IDEAS AND PROJECTS WITH THE PURPOSE OF ARCHITECTURE TO INVESTIGATE, AND LEAD TO CREATE SOLUTIONS FOR POTENTIAL LOCATIONS IN CITIES.

http://www.ica.org.uk/33267/Talks/Culture-Now-Eyal-Weizman.html

11 May 2012

£5 / Free to ICA Members

Join architect, scholar and curator Eyal Weizman for this lunchtime talk in which he discusses his approach to politics and philosophy.

A key figure within the study of contemporary humanism and architecture, Weizman’s most recent book, The Least of all Posssible Evils (Verso 2011) investigates the genealogy of human rights, from classical and Christian ethics through to modern political philosophy and contemporary theory.

Weizman is also a founding member of the collective, Decolonising Architecture Art Residency (DAAR) in Bethlehem, and is Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London where he directs the Centre for Research Architecture.

Since his PhD at Birkbeck College (in co-operation with London Consortium), Weizman has published numerous articles and books (Hollow Land, Verso 2007; A Civilian Occupation, Verso 2003; Yellow Rythms and the Territories 1,2, and 3 series. In addition to sitting on the board of numerous councils worldwide, he also manages the ‘Forensic Architecture’ project, funded by the European Research Council.

Personal work starting from 2010 exploring ideas of the balance between function and beauty, work and play, minimalism and detail. Includes studio work completed at Tulane School of Architecture as well as personal explorations in design and fabrication.

Filter_Funnel is a sample of FOLDED OCEAN, an on-going experimental research project into the organizational and spatial logics of the Indian Ocean world, a fluid, anti-geographical space where many transnational systems, practices and imaginaries intersect. It is about Lamu, a former slave trading city, Islamic seaport and world heritage site on the northern coast of Kenya, where a new deep-water port is under construction. I examine the proposed port infrastructure as a spatial formula with magical powers, in which many of the wider political dynamics, strategic interests, networks, alliances and machinations re-shaping the contemporary Indian Ocean world are entangled.

Tuesday 12 June – 10am @ CRA – RHB 312 Goldsmiths Main Building — all welcome

Readings:
Keller Easterling, “Zone,” in Urban Transformation, ed. Ilke and Andreas Ruby (Berlin: Ruby Press, 2008), 30-45.

Ridwan Laher,“Resisting Development in Kenya’s Lamu District: A Postcolonial reading”, Africa Institute of South Africa Policy Briefing No. 48, April 2011.

Mikey Salter and Johanna Von Braun, “Bio-cultural Community Protocols: Bridging the Gap between Customary, National and International Law.” , in: Effectius Newsletter 14, 2011.

Website: http://www.savelamu.org/

Dr Lindsay Bremner is Professor and Director of Architectural Research at the University of Westminster. She was previously Professor of Architecture in the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia and, before that, Chair of Architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She is an award-winning architect and writer and published, lectured and exhibited widely on the transformation of Johannesburg after the end of apartheid. Her work on the city include Writing the City into Being: Essays on Johannesburg 1998 – 2008 (2010), Johannesburg: One City Colliding Worlds (2004), and chapters in Johannesburg – the Elusive Metropolis (2008), The Endless City (2008), Desire Lines: Space, Memory and Identity in the Post-Apartheid City (2007), Future City (2005), Under Siege: Four African Cities. Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos (2002), blank___architecture apartheid and after (1998) and contributions to Domus, Public Culture, Social Identities and Cities. In her design work, Bremner takes on projects having a socially or culturally transformative agenda, such as her third placed entry for a Cyclone Shelter in Bangladesh (with Jeremy Voorhees, 2011), award winning Sans Souci Cinema project in Kliptown, Soweto (with 26’10 South Architects, 2004 – 2007) and second placed entry to the Freedom Square Competition (with Mashabane Rose Architects, 2002). Bremner’s current research, Folded Ocean is investigating the impact of global mobility, trans-nationalism and environmental change on the Indian Ocean world. Bremner holds a B. Arch degree from the University of Cape Town and M. Arch and DSc. Arch degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Complex Scale: Within architecture the idea of scale has a relatively stable meaning typically referring to size, proportion or some form of spatial regularity. This is contrast to the vigorous reconceptualisation of scale taking place in geographical disciplines, where for the last 30 years scale became one its most contested terms. This seminar will introduce students to key moments within the history of scalar thinking and suggest that scale is one of the most critical intellectual and practical concepts for engaging with complex environments.

May 22 – 10am @ CRA – RHB 312 Goldsmihts Main Building — all welcome

Adrian Lahoud is an architect, urban designer and researcher. Through private practice, teaching and research, he explores the disputed, conflicting and often paradoxical transformations of cities.

In 2010 he edited a special issue of Architectural Design titled Post-traumatic Urbanism. Forthcoming in 2012 is Project for a Mediterranean Union on speculative transport, energy and media infrastructure in North Africa and the Middle East. His architectural work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. In 2011, his work was exhibited at the Prague Quadrennial, Gwangju Design Biennale Seoul curated by Ai Weiwei. His theoretical research work, The Life of Forms in the City explores the problem of scale and complexity in architecture and the city. In 2012 he will be Guest Curator for the Think Space Competition Cycle – Past Forward.

There are few exemplars of capitalist modernity more loaded with atavistic symbolism than the skyscraper. These Taylorised Towers of Babel have continued to mark the skylines of 21st century cities, often with the original functional, pecuniary or utilitarian justifications through zoning codes and land values disappearing, in the form of the deliberately wasteful likes of the Burj Khalifa. This paper looks at the various skyscraper proposals made by Soviet artists and architects as a way of implying that this capitalist dream-image had a neglected socialist underside, where from Tatlin onwards Marxists and/or Utopians attempted to reclaim these constructions for some kind of socialism.

May 15 – 10am @ CRA – RHB 312 Goldsmiths – all welcome

Reading material:
Vladimir Paperny – Architecture in the Age of Stalin – Culture Two
Rem Koolhaas – Delirious New York
Moisei Ginzburg – Style and Epoch
This blog: http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/

Owen Hatherley is the author of the acclaimed Militant Modernism, a defense of the modernist movement, and A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. He writes regularly on the political aesthetics of architecture, urbanism and popular culture for a variety of publications, including Building Design, Frieze, the Guardian and the New Statesman. He blogs on political aesthetics at nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com.

Savage Objects is part of the project Objectology – a wide research on the emergence of non-human actors within a pos-humanist thought. By framing this new paradigm not only within academic discourse, but also within object-research in fields ranging from legal forums, territorial narratives and artistic practices, speculation about objects and things becomes a discussion about conflicting ecologies of thought. This project started taking shape in early 2010 after a cicle of seminars and performances by the name of Urban Totemism organized by SOOPA in Porto, and was particularly informed by the discussions that took place within the colective residency Terror of the Object, in April 2011, organized by DETRITOS as part of Ghost, a residency in Atelier Real, Lisboa. From these encounters and collaborations the idea of bringing together some of the exciting contemporary research into objects and things begun to emerge, and ultimately became the project Objectology, within Guimarães – European Capital of Culture 2012. Objectology consists of the production of a book edited in both Portuguese and English, around the idea of material resistance entitled Savage Obejcts; and of a seminar, Objects, Practices and Territories, focusing the role of non-human agents within legal and political forums.

http://www.savageobjects.com/

BOOK

Book Launch

2012 May, 3th – 17:30

Sociedade Martins Sarmento, Guimarães

Presentations by editor Godofredo Pereira and writer Ken Hollings

What is to be gained by arguing that objects speak? What do recent turns to the non-human and to things have in common? And what conflicts are emerging within the apparently consensual removal of the human from the centre of the problem of knowledge? Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in objects, things, and the non-human – a gradual departure from the domination of text, language, and discourse in previous decades, or, as is often said, a move away from the human as the central point of reference for thinking the world. The claim that there is a consensual turn is compounded by the emergence of numerous publications on non-human actors in fields as diverse as archaeology, science studies, anthropology, philosophy, history, art, and architecture; works in which the divide between nature and culture or between humans and non-humans is effaced, where complex assemblages of people and things challenge thought procedures, and where the ground upon which modernity itself was founded becomes the object of contention. However, if we look closely at the different ways in which these topics are being discussed, the image of a uniform turn immediately disappears; we find that recent attempts to emancipate objects are contingent upon and differentiated by the practices in which they emerge. With this in mind, the present book tries for the first time to bring together several different forums in which objects are being discussed anew, suggesting that the conflicts arising from fortuitous encounters between researchers might be more productive than a consensual turn to post-humanism

The book takes as its point of departure two well-worn notions, objects and savages, specifically in reference to a Savage Thought that we provocatively twist upon itself, bringing to light not the thought per se but its object and the resistance this object holds to thought. We invited contributions from very different fields to respond to this provocation – from philosophers, archaeologists and anthropologists, to activists, architects and artists – to focus not only on objects themselves but also on the practices within which they are constituted and the territories they refer to. By framing these discussions within object-research as well as academic discourse – in fields ranging from textual production, legal forums, image migration, state performance, and acoustic exploration – speculation about objects and things also becomes a discussion about conflicting ecologies of thought, thus providing insight into often overlooked pragmatic and political dimensions. Ultimately, our hope is that, by bringing such diverse practices together, new lines of thought can be suggested and spaces for new alliances be forged.

Contributors: Martin Holbraad; Ayesha Hameed; Michael Taussig; Graham Harman; Bjørnar Olsen; João Maria Gusmão; Eyal Weizman; Susan Schuppli; Reza Negarestani; Jonathan Saldanha; Regina de Miguel; Marcello Maggi; Paulo Tavares, Godofredo Pereira.

Edited by Godofredo Pereira

This project is a Student Led Design/Build Initiative of a brand new Recycling Center in Nosara, CR. It will be a community-run recycling and education center for Nosara, a small village in Northwestern Costa Rica. The project is ready to be built this summer with our team eager and willing to add to this already amazing beach town a symbol of recycling for all of Costa Rica to see. Together with professional filmmaker Ayana de Vos, we also plan to culminate the whole process into a movie.

I will be transferring to University of Florida on August 2012. New start, fresh start.

Artist as Ethnographer: Workshop with Karen Mirza (& Brad Butler)

Tuesday, May 8 @ no-w-here

One of the early interests of our anthropological film “The Exception and the Rule” (2009) was whether we could make a work that invited the viewer to make theory, and not just consume it. That is, to create a filmic space where a viewer actively works through politics of representation for themselves. This mirrored our questioning of the very foundations of our own artistic practice, our imagination, our processes of withdrawal and our political perspective during the making of “The Exception and the Rule”. As a result we began to manifest a context that would envelop, extend and provoke our ideas: a “forcible frame”. The resulting body of work ‘The Museum of non Participation’ is a confluence of 15 years of artistic practice across disciplines, platforms and physical locations. It sits both inside and outside of our long term film practice, offering both a position to speak from and a way to elicit our (common) struggle ‘to speak’. Recent articulations of the Museum have taken place at the Arnolfini in Bristol, and in Spring 2012 we will present a new permutation of this work at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

In this talk I will overview key questions and concerns of this museum and how these have manifested into a variety of Acts in Art, Anthropology, Pedagogy and Film.

“Inseparable from economic advantage was the superiority of knowledge. Ownership involved greed, and the advantaged tried as long as possible to block the road to education to the have-nots. The privileges of the ruling class could not be eliminated until we gained insight into the conditions and acquired fundamental knowledge. We kept getting repulsed over and over because our ability to think, deduce and conclude was insufficiently developed. This state of affairs began changing with the realisation that the upper classes essentially opposed out thirst for knowledge. Ever since, our most important goal was to conquer an education, a skill in every field of research, by using any means, cunning and strength of mind. From the very outset, our studying was rebellion”. (Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance)

‘Deep State’ is a film by Karen Mirza and Brad Butler that has been scripted in collaboration with author China Miéville. The film takes its title from the Turkish term ‘Derin Devlet’, meaning ‘state within the state’. Although its existence is impossible to verify, this shadowy nexus of special interests and covert relationships is the place where real power is said to reside, and where fundamental decisions are made – decisions that often run counter to the outward impression of democracy.

Amorphous and unseen, the influence of this deep state is glimpsed at regular points throughout the film – most clearly surfacing in its reflexive responses to popular protest, and in legislated acts of violence and containment, but also rumbling and reverberating, deeper down, in an eternally recurring call-and-response between rhetorical positions and counter-languages, in which a raised fist, a thrown rock, a crowd surge, an occupation provoke a corresponding reaction in the form of a police charge, a baton attack, a pepper spray, assassinations.

A powerful undertow in the ongoing tide of history, this push and pull of competing forces is deftly illuminated in a vivid montage of newly filmed and archive footage. Collided together, past, present and future trace a continuum, in which the same repetitive patterns are played out. Against a backdrop of momentous, historically resonant demonstrations, an eternal rioter, or ‘riotonaut’, is picked out, as if by a searchlight, ever-present at each and every flashpoint. On a moonscape, confronted with a picket that becomes a riot, an ur-dictator, personification of the ‘Deep State’, blurts stupefying, hot-air abstractions of neo-liberalism.

9 May, 7pm @ http://www.picturehouses.co.uk/cinema/Hackney_Picturehouse/film/Deep_State/

‘Deep State’ is commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella. Funded by Arts Council England and London Councils.

A window into MIT's M.Arch program and other goings-on in the Boston architectural community from the perspective of an incoming student.

Vancouver, the City of Glass. It’s a city of shinning skyscrapers and cardboard homes: a city of spectacular natural beauty, crushing rain, award winning livability and a frightening income gap. It’s a city of contradiction—and it’s growing. This blog will follow Vancouver through its coming of age. It will highlight the city’s search for new forms, its attempts at new urbanism, and its struggles and moments of success within the world of architecture, planning and design.

who can a foreign architect work in the U.S? FIND THE WAYS THAT CAN HELP A FOREIN ARCHITECT TO START WORK IN THE U.S HOW LONG IT TAKES TO GET LICENCE? is exist good future for a foreign architect in the U.S?

Comments on the online interior design industry by HMDhome.com's Principal Designer, Amanda Zettel CID

Blog dedicated to criticism and disclosure on architecture books and publications. Here you can learn about the new books, read reviews on classic and modern texts or find reference bibliographies and articles on architectural literature.

a look at design's inspiring encounters

Through photography as the primary medium, York documents spaces that often go unnoticed to capture fleeting moments of quietness in natural and built environments. Fascinated by neglected, post industrial and post communist landscapes, York documents the transition of social spaces after the fall of a dictatorship, thriving industry or over developed past.