Wednesday 19 May, 2010, auditorium Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam. Open: 4:30 pm, start: 5 pm. Entrance fee: € 5, reduction fee € 3 (students, Friends of the NAi). Register here. Speakers will include Ole Bouman, Hani Asfour, Rem Koolhaas and Reinier de Graaf, and Ronald Wall. Following the release of Al Manakh Gulf Continued, a special issue of Volume Magazine, the NAi will organize a debate in collaboration with OMA, Archis/Volume and Pink Tank. Al Manakh Gulf Continued offers readers another view of urban development in the Gulf region. This time focusing on how the cities remain re-invent themselves and about their position related to the rest of the world.

Al Manakh: Gulf Continued launches tomorrow at 6 pm at Sorbonne University in Abu Dhabi. Dubai Today spoke with Mitra Khoubrou, Partner at Pink Tank and one of the editors of Al Manakh. Listen to the first part of the interview with Mitra Khoubrou below. Click here to listen to the rest of the interview.

Please read our press release announcing the release of Al Manakh Gulf Continued in Abu Dhabi. Stay tuned for more information about events to introduce the book.

Despite our skill and experience in manipulating space and material, architects are incapable of addressing the needs of society unless they have first been explicitly asked to do so. Unsolicited architects do not wait to tackle the big issues often overlooked by the market. They create briefs where none are written, discover sites where none are owned, approach clients where none are present, and find financing where none is available. Unsolicited architecture offers an alternative to a reactive, service-oriented role, and instead calls for a new, more socially-motivated approach to procuring projects.

Tomorrow Al Manakh Gulf Continued will be launched. In advance of its release Jonathan Hanahan created a series of data visualizations, of which this article is the last chapter. All books have a table of contents, an introduction and an index to the document, but can it be more than just a directory? This third visualization in the series attempts to address an alternative view of the contents of a book, providing more than just title, chapter, and author. Here, the continent of where the article has been submitted from and the author's perspective is also included. Working with a similar visualization strategy as in the previous sources visualization, the articles are distributed clockwise; each slice is proportional to the length of the article. Download PDF version Viewbook Order your copy of Al Manakh Gulf Continued here, or subscribe to Volume magazine and receive Al Manakh 1, Al Manakh Gulf Continued and three Volume issues! (Please note: offer expires on July 1.)

‘Sources to Subjects’ explores the details behind how topics were developed for Gulf Continued and where the information guiding our conclusions came from. By breaking down our data archive to not only look at what news organizations reported the most frequently but also where globally those sources are committed and what types of perspectives they focus on. In light of perpetual media and political bias in the area, breaking down locations and perspectives help draw conclusions on how to address the overall presentation of issues within this edition of Al Manakh. Download PDF Version —This visualization was created by Jonathan Hanahan.

Two-day conference, 3 and 4 May 2010, auditorium Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam. With Jolyon Leslie, Kai Vöckler, Sultan Barakat, a.o. Time: 9.30 am-5 pm (Mon), 10.00 am-5 pm (Tue). Language: English. Click here for the full program of the conference. Please scroll down for details regarding reservation. Architecture of Peace is an international long-term research and action project in which a large number of stakeholders are involved. The project will consist of local case studies, interventions, university research studios, debates, publications and exhibitions. The public kick-off of the programme will be a two-day conference in Rotterdam, The Netherlands on the 3rd and 4th of May, 2010. Participants include architects, urbanists and professionals from the fields of development studies, sociology and conflict studies.

As a team coordinating from multiple time zones, the most effective way to collect and distribute relevant articles into the pool of collective research was to use the online bookmarking service Delicious as a universal reference location. By the conclusion of research in March 2010, we had over 1200 articles and 143 different tags. This by no means qualifies the entirety of the research but presents a cross-section of materials utilized to the research community. Delicious provides a simple means of collection, but lacks the ability to view the material from an alternative perspective. The Al Manakh Research calendar is the first step in the development of a tool to investigate these relationships, a way to understand the volume of our research database. While still in its infancy of development as a research tool, it prompts insightful questions about both the content and our individual research activity. Viewbook Download PDF version —This visualization was created by Jonathan Hanahan.

16-18 April, 2010, Villa Sonsbeek, Arnhem, The Netherlands. With Arjen Oosterman (Publisher/Editor-in-Chief of Archis/Volume) and others. More information here. O.K. Festival is the first event in the Netherlands that offers a survey of independent magazines from all over the world. Under the title 'Welcome Magazines' O.K. Festival presents the energy and the visual explosion of strange, beautiful and original magazines. One by one they present an answer to the uniformity of the mass media. The printed media are falling victim to increasingly strict formats. Sales figures reign. In the gaping hole they leave behind the independent magazine manifests itself. Everything that is excluded by the mainstream media finds its place here. In this sense, the independent magazine offers a sanctuary to designers, illustrators and writers. It is at times defiant and headstrong, but always brimming with energy and playfulness. Readers from across the world are increasingly drawn to its versatility, originality and creativity. O.K. Festival offers an insight into the full spectrum of independent magazines through various activities.

25 March-2 July, 2010, Pacific Design Center (PDC), West Hollywood, CA. Superfront, an L.A. based exposition centre presents the exhibit Unplanned: Research and Experiments at the Urban Scale. The exhibit boldly presents a collection of radical methods for envisioning and producing space at the urban scale. Unplanned is a group exhibit with more than twenty participants a.o Ae-i-ou, Tomorrows Thoughts Today and Alex Delaunay. It spans architecture, urban design, industrial design, conceptual art, and cartography to present an array of experimental work at the urban scale. Multi-disciplinary practitioners address emergent urbanism, 'wild building', and other alternatives to conventional urban planning. "Just as the discipline of architecture faces a re-imagination of itself in this era of slow-motion global capitalism, the human population finds itself crossing the threshold to a predominantly urban existence. Many of the basic tenets underpinning urban planning – Cartesian geometry, programmatic taxonomy, contextualism – have been subject to skeptical investigation and rebellion in architecture throughout the past decade. Yet conventional urban planning continues, the discipline of urban planning operating much as it has since the 1960s (if not the 1860s)."