A host of international experts from the world of justice, design, activism, conflict management, and politics will discuss how justice and design can either contain or ignite conflict situations. One of the important questions to address is: who’s law are we applying?
The Centre for Research Architecture in London sets the stage for Re-Cognitions, a MA Research Architecture end-of-the-year exhibition that features the work of Yasmine Abboud, Olympia Anesti, Nick Axel, Jacob Burns, Jesse Connuck, Rodrigo Delso Gutierrez, Yi-Hui Lin, Frank Mandell, Basima Sisemore, and Alan Yates. Opening is today at 6 PM.
As curators of 'Re-Creation – the Resilience of Architecture', Juulia Kauste and Ole Bouman would like to invite you to join the debate ‘The Culture of Making’ and celebrate the launch of Volume #39 as catalogue of the past Urbanism\Architecture Bi-city Biennale Shenzhen, and featuring the contribution of Anssi Lassila at the Alvar Aalto Pavilion of Finland, Giardini di Castello, Venice.
The Dutch entry to this year's Biennale will examine the work and ideas of the architect Jaap Bakema during the exhibition ‘Open: A Bakema Celebration’; a critical reflection on the idea of the open society through Jaap Bakema’s work and research. This Friday at 18:00 the exhibition will be officially opened.
This week, Volume's editorial team will be heading for Venice to visit 2014's Biennale. We will be attending and/or co-hosting several gatherings and events. This Friday, Volume editor-in-chief Arjen Oosterman will be interviewed during the launch event of the book Behind the Green Door at the Nordic Pavilion.
The unique Volume shopping bag is back in stock! Conceptualized by designers Daniel van der Velden and Maureen Mooren, the text was originally conceived as a T-shirt print, we couldn't resist re-publishing it now that it is again so actual. Get one of these limited edition Dutch Design icons for only €10, worldwide shipping included!
The Netherlands has two new prizes, the Geert Bekaert Prize for Architecture Criticism and the Simon Mari Pruys Prize for Design Criticism. They’re promoting ‘a vibrant design culture’ by stimulating writing and reflection and awarding the prize to one critique, not to a critic. Initiated by Archined and Design Platform Rotterdam they were awarded for the first time in Amsterdam on March 20th 2014. For architecture the award went to Plain Weirdness: The Architecture of Neutelings Riedijk, a text in El Croquis by the former Director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, now Director of the Cincinnati Art Museum, Aaron Betsky. The Simon Mari Pruys Prize went to Sander Manse for his essay on the use of models in designing design.
What is essential about the work of Neutelings Riedijk is its plain weirdness. The two aspects of this definition are essential. The use of form and materials that are familiar, simple, and sometimes even primitive grounds the strangeness, the baroque involutions, and the haunting quality that gives the work its power. These architects know how to mine the vernacular to find within it the material that both grounds us and connects us to something bigger, stranger, and older than we are. Their buildings use this basis to teeter between abstraction and reference, creating a blur that allows us to intuit forms, images and spaces that the designers only imply. Finally, Neutelings Riedijk’s buildings become stages on which we can act out the roles to which we would like to become accustomed, sometimes as masques in which both the structures and we are actors, and sometimes directly, when the buildings’ interiors become, more often than not, stages.
