REsource OPEN CALL official website

Architectural League website

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.

Ay Caramelles! on What Can You Do With the City?

What Can You Do With the City? official website

at the CCA

at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts

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.

Ay Caramelles! ing beta 2.0 from fake industries on Vimeo.

SUPERFRONT LA website

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.

Sarah Maslin Nir “The Decline and Fall of the Bachelor Pad” at the New York Times

University of Toronto John H.Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design website

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.

Architectural League of New York Young Architects Forum website

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.

Architectural League of NY Young Architects Forum website

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.

Download poster

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.

ay caramelles from fake industries on Vimeo.

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.

Subsequently, Fake Industries decided to invest the trifling budget hiring citizens —10 Euros an hour—activating the square and saving the people of Barcelona from the tedious spectacle of yet another temporary intervention in their streets. On Thursday March 19^th 2009 , from five to seven in the afternoon, the community was invited to activate the square for an hour. During the event, documented in the film “Ay Caramelles!,” the participants were required to: (1) repeat in front of the camera the following sentence “I earned 10 € for activating this public space during an hour” and (2) wonder around the square during 60 minutes doing whatever they felt like doing.

Enjoy the show,

Yours Faithfully,

For Fake Industries, Architectural Agonism

Cristina Goberna and Urtzi Grau

Ladies and Gentlemen,

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.

Enjoy the show!