FLOLO: January 2010

flogo

Posting my logo, its a flogo here. Made as collage from earlier projects. In that sense its as well a portflogo. ?

and inverted, which gives a more grave aspect to it.

Palisade Bay Masterplan envisioned

i was very excited last thursday during Guy Nordenson's lecture at HKU, faculty of architecture about a research based approach to design which is usually missing in practise.

the lecture featured a straightforward research project 'On the Water - Palisade Bay' by Guy Nordenson and Associates, Catherine Seavitt Studio and students from Princeton University, Center for Architecture, Urbanism + Infrastructure.
they aimed at illucidating the effects of sea level rise on greater new york harbor and the adjacent landscape (where millions of people reside;).
mapping of the landscape palimpsest was complemented by scientific modelling of possible severe floodings in the harbor area. this CFD modelling of waterflows under hurricane conditions was done with a seamless landscape model of bathymetry and topography.

model of bathymetry and topography developed in the 'Surface Water Modeling System' (SMS). copyright: Princeton University, CAUI.

this research currently informs the development of a visionary masterplan for the bay area. regarding stormwater management, the strategy (in a nutshell) is to take out energy from the inflowing water during storm events. therefore, the roughness of bay and shoreline should be amplified (see pic below). this will be an opportunity to create an interconnected land- and waterscape as breeding ground for 'the living' in greater new york.

Finite-element model of the New York / New Jersey Upper Bay incorporating Latrobe masterplan islands, detached piers, and reefs. copyright: Princeton University, CAUI.

during the last months, five design teams, constituted from architects and landscape architects, were busy designing this vision of transforming the bay area into a 'contemporary central park' for the new york metropolitan region. mitigation climate change effects and the necessary clean-up of industrial artifacts may thereby lead to a new urban environment in which synergies are the norm and ecology understood as lived complexity.

you can find more and updated information about the design proposals the MOMA 'rising currents' blog. and await the MOMA exhibition starting this spring (@ The Museum of Modern Art; March 24-August 10, 2010).

see also worldarchitects and changeobserver for more information.

check out as well the homepge 'on the water - palisade bay' and surf to Princeton University, Center for Architecture, Urbanism and Infrastructure.

Timothy Morton - Ecology without Nature

quoted from timothy morton's BLOG

'One of the things that modern society has damaged has been thinking. Unfortunately, one of the damaged ideas is that of Nature itself. How do we transition from seeing what we call “Nature” as an object “over there”? And how do we avoid “new and improved” versions that end up doing much the same thing (systems theory, Spinozan pantheism, or Deleuze-and-Guattari type worlds of interlocking machines, and so on), just in a “cooler,” more sophisticated way?

When you realize that everything is interconnected, you can't hold on to a concept of a single, solid, independent thing “over there” called Nature.'

URBANUS Shenzhen

Shortly after their 10th anniversary I visited the Urbanus office in Shenzhen, China for discussions within the symposium 'Knowledge as Infrastructure' which was hosted by Urbanus as part of the 'Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism'.

"Founded in 1999, Under the leadership of partners LIU Xiaodu, MENG Yan and WANG Hui, URBANUS is now based in Beijing and Shenzhen, The completed works including Urban Tulou, Dafen Art Museum, OCT Loft Renovation, Tangshan Urban Planning Museum, OCT Art & Design Gallery, Maritime Museum of Art ,Tower of China Merchants Maritime & Logistics Ltd, Shenzhen Planning Building, Metro Tower etc. URBANUS has been exhibited internationally in prestigious shows and presented in prestigious newspapers and magazines, including New York Times. It was featured as one of the ten global “Design Vanguards” by Architectural Record in December, 2005, and has been awarded with many prestigious architecture prizes" [source]

Li Xiadu and Meng Yan in the early years of Urbanus.

Urbanus hosted an exhibition to celebrate their anniversary which showed collected works from ten years, models and multimedia presentations.

And some impressions from the life in the office (I didnt hazzle the extremely busy associates of Urbanus).

Dafen. Capital of Oil Paintings On Demand.

Xiao Du showed us DaFen today, a 'village' in Shenzhenwhich developed into the world's biggest source for copied oil paintings as an article on GlobalVoicesOnline is reporting. We visited DaFen in the late afternoon and all galleries were opened with busy vendors selling copies of any artistic style or depiction you can imagine. From empress Sissi to Andy Warhol, all is available.

Remarkable also the urbanistic layout of the village. It is extremely dense with the ground levels reserved for the vending galleries and the second and third floors for studios and residential uses on top. What sprang to my nose was the smell of oil paint which was sitting in the streets. Find some images here which dont show any vendors as they had some problems with me taking pictures of them.

Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture @ Shenzhen - Civic Square

During the conference 'Knowledge as Infrastructure' we had the opportunity of seeing the indoor part of the Biennale exhibition in Shenzhen's Civic Centre. Some impressions below.

Built to Wear
Installation at the entrance of the exhibition by Ball Nogues.

Shenzhen 1980

Telling about the rapid development of Shenzhen within the last 30 years were the images exhibited by Leroy W. Demery, jr about the times when Shenzhen was still a tiny town in the South of China.