The Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers (formerly known as the Young Architects Forum) is an annual juried competition and series of lectures and exhibitions organized by the Architectural League and its Young Architects and Designers Committee. The Prize was established to recognize specific works of high quality and to encourage the exchange of ideas among young people who might otherwise not have a forum. The lecture series and exhibition by winners of the competition provide a lively public forum for the discussion of their work and ideas. Winners’ designs are also on display on the Architectural League’s website and illustrated in a catalogue published by Princeton Architectural Press. For a complete list of past Young Architects and Designers, click here. To view the Young Architects 25th Anniversary website, click here.
The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) presents Actions: What You Can Do With the City, an exhibition with actions that instigate positive change in contemporary cities around the world. Seemingly common activities such as walking, playing, recycling, and gardening are pushed beyond their usual definition by the international architects, artists, and collectives featured in the exhibition. Their experimental interactions with the urban environment show the potential influence personal involvement can have in shaping the city, and challenge fellow residents to participate.
Architecture Live Architecture Live! opens November 19th with reception 5pm – 8pm and will be on view through December 16. The English version of Ay Caramelles! has been possible thanks to the generous contribution of Andrew Chappel and Daniel Ruiz Esquiroz’s voices, techniques, technologies and patience.
The 30th of November, Fake Industries Architectural Agonism will be lecturing at the John H.Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto on architectural research methodology and research on architecture without methods.
The Young Architects Forum exhibition will open to the public on the first evening of the lectures on May 14th at the Urban Center, 457 Madison Avenue, New York City, and will remain on display through July 17th. The gallery is open Monday through Saturday (closed Thursdays) from 11 A.M. to 5 P.M. Admission is free. The exhibition will also be open on the evenings of the lectures.
What matters right now is how to deal with the consequences. Think backwards, recall. Earlier foresights offer a bygone sort of delight: none got closer to this extension of capitalist disaster. Architects’ honeymoon with economic power is over and it is becoming an unfriendly divorce. We are left with its cost: no thrust, overpriced assets to dispose off and a traumatized progeny of users striped from their home ownership. For the time being the State mediates, but the various stimulus packages avoid architecture. In these conditions, we would prefer not to offer conciliatory solutions or moralized futures, nor even dystopian cynicisms. Rather, this portfolio arranges architectural operations in a tripartite array: foreclosures, real estate and credit, which refer as much to their original meaning as to last year economic reorganization, i.e. the dramatic increase of foreclosures, the burst of the real estate bubble and the extreme lack of credit. Nothing but to the conditions in which we operate. In fact, what follows is the map of the opportunities we found under such conditions: alternative forms of domesticity emerged from foreclosures, planning strategies that take advantage of the burst and prevent future real estate bubbles and forms of architectural implementation whose main requirement is to bypass credit agencies. Our humble contribution to the disclosure of the discipline’s future is a set of architectural operations tested against the present conditions. It is for the daring fool or the impudent soothsayer to draw images of the future with such materials.
Next Tuesday April 21st, 2009 at 6.00 pm, Cristina Goberna and Urtzi Grau (a.k.a. Fake Industries Architectural Agonism) will lecture on foreclosure fantasies, real estate nigtmares and credit dreams presenting the FINAL COLLECTION ever to be reproduced, renovated o redesigned, of the immature, generally ill-conceived and fairly sentimental DESIGN EFFORTS crafted by the architects, who none the less, despite their youth, really tried hard to create something of modest value and genuine emotion, and ever since have tried to stay interested enough to assemble, again, once and for all this EXHAUSTIVE SURVEY of the documentation regarding the famous works: Free NYC Apartments, House for Cesar, Khlebnikov’s (musical) Boxes, The Illegal Hotel, Chunks!, Golf!, Superphosphates!, DCR Department of NYC Citizenship Recruitment, Circuit 9 Move (on), Circuit 8 Shine, Reijkiavik Up Circuit 7, Circuit 6 Acuatic, The Log-In Prject, I Love Japan, The Invisible Monument, Ay Caremelles! and other selected projects to finally satisfy the requests of the audience.
In February 2nd, 2009, the architectural festival Eme3 Collapse commissioned Fake Industries the design of an installation meant to activate and re-appropriate Caramelles Square for the people of Barcelona historic neighborhood el Raval. Since a fence —owned and operated by Barcelona City Hall— restrains the public from the square Fake Industries proposed get rid of this fence, recovering the square for the citizenry; an option presently unviable for Barcelona city officials and the neighbors of the square.
It is our pleasure to introduce www.fakeindustries.org, the archive of Fake Industries Architectural Agonism, a conglomerate that explores potentials of architectural agonism and false constructions. As it happens, there is a rather perplexing dearth of suitable entries. We, Cristina Goberna and Urtzi Grau, core and archivists of Fake Industries Architectural Agonism, like productive ecologies, pet cars, streamline hydrophonic orchards, subversive vegetables, superhighway chunks, speculative inhibitions, suburban sheeps, Bartlebys, micro rents, mobile parks, catalogues of urban items, floating architecture schools, false identities, free Nyc apartments, flagsticks and holes, funnel autonomies, illegal sleeping lamps, invisible monuments, uneasy golf courses, upside down gardens, log-in projects, gradient landscapes, verbena packs, electric suits and neon dusk. However, it has been ultimately adjudged by the committee that only those projects that explore extreme intensification of urban environments, technological perversions via sustainability and the seductive marriage of architecture and politics -i.e. sex & power- fit in the archive. Giving Fake Industries Architctural Agonism’s sprawling collection of activities and collaborators, www.fakeindustries.org remains intrinsically unstable and is subject of continuous revisions. We would like to apologize in advance for its probable incongruence.
In later years highly speculative real estate operations have surrounded the abandon mining complex of Aldea Moret, a nineteen century industrial development in Caceres, Spain, endangering its mayor urban and architectural values. In 2007 the burst of the real estate bubble stopped the private plans to redevelop the site. Caceres City Hall took over the site and asked for an alternative model of development that had to integrate advanced preservation ideas, energetic and ecological sustainability, participative planning polices and the declaration of the abandon mining complex as National Industrial Heritage Site. Continue reading Superphosphates!
Bed-room, a bed that is a room, that is a space. It floats (positioned on four blue wheels) but only when it is pushed hard since it’s heavy; but still – a “portable habitat”.
Or how to question the representation of a collective memory chosen by the authorities and carried out by the architect. Continue reading The Invisible Monument
“The Illegal hotel” is an installation of sleeping pods for interns disguised as the lighting system of an architectural office. It unveils the precarious life and the economic regime that the recently graduate architecture students confront when they leave the school. Continue reading The Illegal Hotel
This time-line offers a concise scan of the entire publications output of OMA since its foundation. This production ranges from one monograph every ten years in its early stages, to averaging one monograph every couple of months. The resulting graph reveals a massive body of publication which grows exponentially both in intensity and complexity and it distills from this production a number of models worth closer analysis, such as the ‘Project-Books’, ‘Book-Projects,’ and the ‘Monographs’.
The ‘Project-Book’ model, found in the cases shown in the lower half of the time-line; identifies the in-house production of books, brochures, dossiers, booklets or pamphlets which foreground the office’s designs in parallel with the concepts driving them.
The ‘Book-Project’ model, found in the cases shown in the upper half of the time-line, identifies both in-house and out-sourced production of books, brochures, dossiers, booklets or pamphlets where the publication itself is the objective. In these instances, a broader cultural discourse and its implications is explored independently from the architectural design.
The model of the ‘Monograph’, found in the cases along the dashed red line in the middle of the time-line, is feed from the previous two models through a kind of porous boundary. The yellow background producing the skyline behind the covers charts out the exact monthly page-count kept by the office in the articles published about OMA, offering a sense of the relationship between writing in the studio and writing about the studio. Continue reading OMA-AMO on paper
“Login Project” explores how to plug in the New York architectural scene by investing reduced amounts of cash. It delineates the connections, floodgates, speeds and behaviors that construct the city’s architectural network.
How to refute the idea of architectural success as a straight consequence of talent?. In times of crisis, why not look for a shortcut to gain success in New York in exchange for money? Continue reading The Log-In Project
Cesar lived in a brand-new, high-ceiling, over-windowed apartment in the old city of Barcelona. A loft, they called it. However he was incapable to enjoy, work, cook, disrupt, practice, procrastinate, eat or fuck comfortably in the room he lived in. Continue reading House for Cesar
“Free NYC Apartments” explores three different ways of to get an apartment for free in NYC, specifically a loft in Soho, a flat in the projects in Queens or a studio in Brooklyn, by faking to be homeless, practicing prostitution or eventually becoming a successful artist, i.e. Enrolling in the Right to Shelter Program of the city of NY. Answering one of the craigslist’s adds promising a free apartment in exchange for sex. Becoming a renowned artist and living for free in an apartment pay by a landlord sure that your presence will raise the rents. Continue reading Free Nyc Apartments
The Department of Citizenship Recruitment was a New York-based network of underground academies for illegal aliens to be trained to succeed in the process of becoming US citizens organized after the approval of the US law HH4437: Continue reading Nyc Department of Citizen Recruitment
“Reforma Urbana”, XXI Concurs de Projectes Fìnal de Carrera de les Escoles Tècniques Superiors D’Arquitectura de Barcelona i el Valles, Madrid, Dragados, 2002.
“La Casita”, EMRGTS, Sevilla, Caja san Fernando, 2001.
Eme3density, Barcelona, CCCB, 2001.
“Eme3”, Barcelona Plus: Barcelona’s new creative Catalogue, Barcelona, Ayuntament de Barcelona+Actar, 2000.
Eme3, Met.2, Metapolis 2, Barcelona, Actar, 2000.
“Subway depot”, Mies van der Rohe Chair with Dominique Perrault, Barcelona, Fundación Mies van der Rohe + ETSAB, 2000.
“Eme3”, FIDAS 6.
“Eme3” Quaderns no.224.
“La Casita”, Pasajes de Arquitectura y Crítica, no.32.
“3000 Viviendas”, Acerca de casa 2, Sevilla, Baeza University, 1998.
Acción 4, La Casita, Madrid, Ministerio de Obras Publicas,1997.
