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Beyond mapping : projecting the city
- 2006
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Samlingsverk (redaktörskap) (refereegranskat)abstract
- Mapping urban reality has become the fashion. Many of the strange shapes of contemporary architecture, design and art can be attributed to the devotion of mapping and the authorial absolution diagrams grant. Subjective vision is not the touchstone here. Instead, this trend is an addiction to extreme realism, yet a realism intended to show no theoretical or political mediation, a kind of degree zero of the political with no awareness of the consequences regarding reality’s social construction.What’s failing, in our age of radical modernization, now that the old rules and basic distinctions within our global civilization are renegotiated, is how architects might conceptualize the city beyond mapping.The Berlage Institute believes that after mapping the fascinating changes, contradictions and paradoxes radical modernization introduces, society urgently needs to develop new approaches to the city.The time of universal urban visions belongs to the past, but new architectural models have yet to rise up in replacement.The urgent question the Berlage Institute researches regards the kind of cosmopolitan future the discipline of architecture can project now that the majority of the world population lives in the city.The Berlage Institute explores two alternate positions that emerge from this question. One hypothesis finds maneuvering space in the realm of micropolitics and through complicity, rather than in the conception of all-encompassing visions or confrontational strategies.The studiosof PeterTrummer (Associativity), Markus Schaefer (Scripting) andYushi Uehara (Negotiation) follow this route.Their approach finds the architect concentrating his efforts on riding the external forces to the discipline in an attempt to obtain the necessary energy to produce new prototypes and regimes.This approach tends to have a holistic outlook where disciplinary genres and scales of operation become blurred, open-ended and inter-related. Housing neighborhoods become populations tested on an urban scale.The economic processes of urban transformation becomes, in itself, an object of profound analysis. Not just urban complexes, but whole citiesare explored as components of world-wide processes, rather than as discreet units of identity, culture or lifestyle.The alternative approach by PierVittorio Aureli (Representation) is skeptical of the open-endedness of this first form of engagement and makes an ideological stance to define the direction of research, maintaining that it is impossible to transform reality without establishing certain ideals and external models that will enable to shift the city into new directions. In this approach, architecture and urbanism are not just a problem of opportunity, growth or technology, but a theoretical problem of representation.The subject of Capital Cities, or cities which, beyond their mere performance as urban systems, need to become vehicles to represent a culture, a nation and a set of values.This situation is the ideal field for an approach that understands a city is more than its factual performance as an urban system.TheVenice Biennale exhibition and this special hunch “Beyond Mapping. Projecting the City” attempts to present these two extreme paths of pro-active investigation into the contemporary city through the presentation of four, of many, architectural expertises: Associativity, Representation, Scripting and Negotiation.Via this specific architectural knowledge, andthe inherent ideology contained within each expertise, alternative projects re-envision six paradigmatic urban conditions: Madrid, Moscow,Tirana, Brussels, Ljubljana and unknown urbanity in China.In the exhibition, an evocative video installation “CityTalk” positions the studio professors’ various expertises in a conversation and opens the Berlage’s ongoing debate and discussion to a wider public, in line with the nature of the Institute’s idea of ongoing dialogue and exchange of viewpoints. In addition, seven poster-books of the research reports have been printed especially for the exhibition to give more detailed information on each studio, along with this oversized Biennale hunch magazine, including the Berlage approach to research, manifestos of expertise on the city, interviews with the studio professors, studio report order cards and the Berlage Institute prospectus.
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| 2. |
- Bouman, Ole, et al.
(författare)
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Architecture is too important to leave to architects : A conversation with Giancarlo de Carlo
- 2005
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Ingår i: Volume. - Amsterdam : Archis. - 1574-9401. ; 20:2
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Giancarlo de Carlo has a long career as an architect and writer behind him. As an architect he has been self-taught, having mastered the profession during the war while at the same time being involved in the resistance. In those days he was an enthusiastic admirer of the masters of the modern movement. Later on, however, in the fifties, together with contemporaries such as Aldo van Eyck, Jacob Bakema and Ralph Erskine, he founded Team 10, a group that was fiercely critical of the rigid functionalism of the CIAM. Since that time De Carlo has not ceased to analyze and criticise new developments and trends in architecture. In his public appearances and in his writings De Carlo denounced the anonymity of bureaucratic clients, the frivolous concern with symbolism in architecture that ducked any attempt to discuss its content and the prevalence of special interest groups in the field of architecture. A constantly recurring theme was accountability in architecture. In the eighties architecture went through a phase of being depoliticised; now in our own age his approach has again become amazingly topical. One article of his that is particularly striking is entitled Legitimising Architecture (Forum Vol.III, 1972, no. 1, pp. 8-20). In it he accused the profession of surrendering to the interests of people without any principles (‘the expert exploiter of building areas, the manipulator of building codes, the cultural legitimator for the sacking of the city organised by financiers, politicians and bureaucrats’). This article deserves to be quoted in detail.
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| 4. |
- Lerup, Lars, et al.
(författare)
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A to Z : Lars Lerup and Roemer van Toorn in conversation
- 2009. - 1
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Ingår i: Everything must move. - Houston, TX : Rice University School of Architecture. - 188523211X - 9781885232113 ; , s. 324-335
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Everything Must Move is a book documenting over a decade of propositions about the suburban city in general, and Houston in particular. This city – shapeless, polluted, traffic-clogged, water-logged, limitless – has been a workshop for testing ideas about operating in impossible situations. Everything Must Move is, in many ways, an archival project, however through the infusion of this archival material with new perspectives and projections the project remains poly-vocal, diverse, and open. This new material presented mainly in the form of short essays, written in response to the projects, photographs, and research that form the backbone of the project that Rice School of Architecture, under the direction of dean Lars Lerup, has undertaken in the last 15 years. Roemer van Toorn had an online conversation with Lars Lerup over a long period of time (by email) investigating Lars Lerup's position and architecture work both as a dean and writer.
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Reality demands a theory : Reader 1: What is welfare? The world today
- 2009
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Samlingsverk (redaktörskap) (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- An Architecture Theory reader for students and other scholars interested in contemporary theory, the social sciences and architecture.Excavating the real is no longer enough. Merely having all the resources and facts available doesn't mean, of itself, that they produce interesting answers. Intellectuals, artists, architects and other producers of cultural capital can no longer live the permanent myth of rhetorical and aesthetic poetry without being able to relate to the social and political problems of the world. What we need is a theory able to pose urgent questions for the future. Speculative models need to be developed; asking what it means to be Modern today, which can be grasped within the very domain of praxis, able to renew from within.
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Reality demands a theory : Reader 2: The complexity of our times. Issues and opportunities
- 2009
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Samlingsverk (redaktörskap) (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- An Architecture Theory reader for students and other scholars interested in contemporary theory, the social sciences and architecture.Excavating the real is no longer enough. Merely having all the resources and facts available doesn't mean, of itself, that they produce interesting answers. Intellectuals, artists, architects and other producers of cultural capital can no longer live the permanent myth of rhetorical and aesthetic poetry without being able to relate to the social and political problems of the world. What we need is a theory able to pose urgent questions for the future. Speculative models need to be developed; asking what it means to be Modern today, which can be grasped within the very domain of praxis, able to renew from within.
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| 7. |
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Reality demands a theory : Reader 3: What does it mean to be modern today? On politics and aesthetics
- 2009
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Samlingsverk (redaktörskap) (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- An Architecture Theory reader for students and other scholars interested in contemporary theory, the social sciences and architecture.Excavating the real is no longer enough. Merely having all the resources and facts available doesn't mean, of itself, that they produce interesting answers. Intellectuals, artists, architects and other producers of cultural capital can no longer live the permanent myth of rhetorical and aesthetic poetry without being able to relate to the social and political problems of the world. What we need is a theory able to pose urgent questions for the future. Speculative models need to be developed; asking what it means to be Modern today, which can be grasped within the very domain of praxis, able to renew from within.
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| 8. |
- Sigler, Jennifer, et al.
(författare)
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Projecting the city
- 2007
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Ingår i: Beyond mapping. - Rotterdam : Berlage Institute. ; , s. 16-69
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- An extensive article on the architecture exhibition in Venice Italy curated and edited by Roemer van Toorn, and Jennifer Sigler in commission of the Berlage Institute Postgraduate Library of Architecture, Rotterdam.
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| 9. |
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Towards an Anthology of the Tree : from the Garden of Eden to Beuys 7000 oaks
- 2009
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Samlingsverk (redaktörskap) (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This theory research book (150 copies), edited by Roemer van Toorn at the TU Delft, The Netherlands, Delft School of Design (DSD) and its research headed by Arie Graafland and with students of The Why Factory, run by Winy Maas, taps into the ecology of nature, the garden of Eden, the home of the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil, as well as the abundance of other vegetation that could feed from Adam and Eve. We start withe the essay of Marc-Antoine Laugier (1753) with his idea of the primitive hut, which refers to nature as a form of construction and symbol of shleter through what he describes as 'faults', and these faults include commentary on columns, the entablature, and on pediments. By creating a material anthology on the tree this volume taps into different concepts of nature and culture, while analysing differnt contempary and historical examplary works of architecture. The theoretical research and its comparative critical approach of architecture (landscape and urban) projects is undertaken by student is document in this publication under the leadership of Roemer van Toorn from 2007 - 2008. he was also teh editor of the book, while the students made de design for the book.
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| 10. |
- Van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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Aesthetics as a Form of Politics : University Library Utrecht, Wiel Arets Architects
- 2007
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Ingår i: Rethinking representation. - Rotterdam : Episode Publishers. - 9078525029 - 9789078525028 ; , s. 92-103
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Hunch 11 looks at representational labels from species (figure, logo, image, icon, diagram) to techniques (application, enlargement) to activities (practice, politics and work). As we've come to expect, Hunch delves deeply into the theories, meanings and practices of architecture and urbanism, providing a moveable feast of ideas.
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