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The public art installation “Sea of Light” illuminates Manhattan’s Seaport District by use of spheres of various sizes. The light show transforms the historic cobblestone streets with warm-colored light from over 150,000 LED bulbs.
Design and technology company Symmetry Labs debuted the project to revitalize the Seaport District and rebuild a sense of community. Alexander Green, founder of Symmetry Labs, explains: “I want people to feel a sense of wonder from my work and engage the community so people would want to visit the Seaport regularly. I wanted something surprising and engaging that would change throughout the year.”
Interactive Installation
Symmetry Labs created an interactive installation where the lighting reacts to movement, clothing color and sound patterns. As a result each interaction provokes a unique lighting pattern. The light globes are equipped with lighting technology and surrounded by thermal cameras that capture movement from video cameras and send information to the spheres, allowing them to glow based on how close or far away people are.
Acrylic is used to Acrylic is used to produce the desired lighting effect: The light shines through the material. A complex undertaking: each sphere is made out of large-format sheets of acrylic. As Green points out: “There is only one company in the entire country that creates such large pieces and the company had never molded them into spheres before”.
You can catch Sea of Light on display from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., until March 2018.
A conference by Baumeister and international landscape architecture magazine Topos gets to the bottom of what makes urban centres attractive – now and in future. This is the kick-off for the Baumeister Topos Cities Initiative in Berlin.
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“Working on and in metropolis is a complex, integrated task involving creative thinkers of various professional backgrounds,” this might be the conclusion of the first edition of Baumeister Topos Cities Initiative. Both magazines of the Callwey publishing house had invited professionals to Berlin for a discussion on current guiding principles of urban design and their possible implementation. The participants concluded that the guiding principles are in place, but their implementation is still far off.
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According to its name, the initiative offers a platform for various key players in the field of urban development. The participating companies showed that they have exciting proposals up their sleeve; Malgorzata Wiklinska of suppliers ZF Friedrichshafen AG reports how her company redefines its role within the mobile society. “Precise user needs as well as technological shifts influence tomorrow´s mobility. We want to deliver solutions for this realm.” As we speak, Wiklinska is building up the think-and-do tank ZF Denkfabrik. The company is currently developing app-based solutions as well as a number of Car2Car and Car2X solutions.
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The second partner of the initiative, engineering company Obermeyer, is devoted to the mobile city as well. Stephan Jentsch, General Manager Asia of the Munich based consultancy, explained their urban mobility strategy in China and lined out the required high integration of urban design, development of infrastructure and transport planning especially in China´s new megalopolises.
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However, for the time being the car remains the prevailing paradigm as well for the European or American metropolis as for the Chinese mega city. Despite this fact the companies work on solutions, which supplement private transport – or make it more efficient. In the opinion of Olaf Schilgen, truly efficient solutions are the ones that meet with real consumer needs. Schilgen is e-mobility, energy and PR consultant at Volkswagen; from his point of view there is still no real run on shared mobility services such as Drive Now or Car-to-go. But he concedes that “we are keeping an eye on this and are prepared to ramp up our own service Quicar at any time.”
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One observation became apparent; cities often sustain or even strengthen their existing profile whilst undergoing transformation processes. Architecture and landscape architecture can be valuable assets in this development as Dutch architect and urban researcher Kees Christiaanse maintained. He explained why the former model of the concentric city is slowly being replaced by polycentric cities. These sub-centres have to be planned even more carefully and need to be effectively interconnected to prevent them from sinking into chaos. Last not least, timing is crucial here. Christiaanse as well as architect Urs Kumberger of architectural practice Teleinternetcafé stressed the fact that planning is a process consisting of consecutive individual phases. Overarching strokes of genius and homogeneous, deterministic grand solutions are an illusion.
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One thing remains true here and everywhere – both architecture and landscape architecture have to embrace the prevailing complexity and give up the idea of omnipotent master planning. The lectures of Gena Wirth (SCAPE Landscape Architecture, New York) und Martin Knuijt (OKRA Landscape Architects, Utrecht) showed what this might look like. Knuijt explained how his office works with existing fabric on projects in Moscow, Rotterdam, London and Athens.
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Brussels based office 51N4E shares this approach. Especially in their creative quarter in Kortrijk Freek Persyn focuses on using the existing building context as a catalyst for further development. An open planning approach is crucial here to bring users along and empower them to take ownership of the space.
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For each planning consultant it is important to set goals which can be objectively measured. Knuijt and his OKRA team for instance achieved to lower local environmental temperatures at the Syntagma square in Athens by three degrees by means of a planting strategy; this is resilience in a nutshell. Gena Wirth pinned down urban resilience in her own projects in New York City saying, “resilient cities are anticipatory, experimental, visionary – und engaged“.
Karsten Schmitz and Urs Kumberger surely may agree here. The two architects, too advocate participation in urban space. Schmitz introduced the Baumwollspinnerei in Leipzig – Germany’s most famous creative quarter – whose co-founder he was. He concludes that without movers and shakers such as the well-known art dealer Judy Lybke things don’t progress. Also the currently evolving creative quarter Munich needs supporters of this kind. Urs Kumberger whose office is responsible for the master plan of the quarter confirmed this. Such supporters, however, are only attracted by typological heterogeneity. Kumberger claims „diverse typologies for diverse people“.
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After all it is this sort of diversity that makes a metropolis attractive. Clark Parsons, Managing Director of Berlin School for Creative Leadership confirms this viewpoint. His advice for creative cities is to actively combine Large and Small, Old and New – and to communicate the own advantages with verve and confidence to the outside world.
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The fifth edition of the Oslo Architecture Triennale (OAT) is currently being held in the Norwegian capital and continues through 1 December. The main exhibition of the biggest architecture event in the Nordic region takes a look “Behind the Green Door”. Rotor, the Belgian curators of the show, investigate the connection between “Architecture and the Desire for Sustainability”. Lionel Devlieger and Maarten Gielen of Rotor have spent one year looking in detail at how the notion of sustainability has influenced architecture and urbanism. As the starting point of their research they took the widely recognized definition of sustainable development given in the now famous Brundtland Comission Report released by the UN in 1987: “development that meets the needs of the present without comprising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Even if nowadays most building and planning projects are presented as meeting criteria of sustainability, the transposition of the new standards into altered construction practices remains an admittedly difficult undertaking. The curators therefore made use of a stratagem – or, one could say, they chose an easy way out of the dilemma. Besides being selected by the curators, projects included in the exhibition needed to meet only one other criterion: the architects or planners had to claim that their building or planning concept was sustainable.
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For the exhibition, the curators collected more than 600 objects, featuring the work of more than 200 architectural offices, environmental organizations, and companies worldwide. The objects exhibited are ordered, firstly, along a timeline, the so-called archive, and secondly via thematic tables. A project index containing articles on individual pieces offers additional, more detailed information on them. Among the exhibition objects are models, photographs, and videos as well as individual pieces of materials and prototypes, publications, toys, and various devices and apparatuses. The gamut runs from a Popular Science cover (March 1949) to the greened high-rise in Milan by Stefano Boeri Studio to a plan of the Duisburg Nord landscape park by Latz + Partner, from individual buildings or objects to a complete urban masterplan. Each of these objects tells its own story. The curators raise questions to which the visitors will have to find answers on their own. The exhibition is as much a random collection of interesting artefacts as it is a chamber of wonders exuding all kinds of inspiration – provided one is willing to engage with the objects shown.
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Basic problems of sustainable (construction) projects are explicitly addressed in the catalogue that accompanies the show. Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, planned by Forster + Partners, is a case in point; it was designed to be a showcase city: car-free, using renewable energy sources, zero carbon, zero waste system. Yet the limits were clearly defined. “Never mind what happens outside these boundaries, the car is parked outside the city wall,“ John Roberts, principal of the engeneering and environmental consultancy firm Arup, is quoted to have said. In an analogous contradiction, many of the sustainable and energy-independent luxury residences have a sports car or an SUV parked in front of them. Apart from telling of sustainable attempts in an unsustainable world, the catalogue (and the exhibition) also point to the negative repercussions of specious or ill-conceived sustainability goals: for example, the demand for used teak wood in the US led to the dismantling of traditional teak houses in Asia, thus destroying part of the region’s cultural heritage.
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A wide variety of about 70 events accompany the Oslo Architecture Triennale. The exhibition “Far out Voices” at the National Museum of Art, Architecture & Design deals with the pioneers and precursors of what we today call green design.
Photos by Marte Garmann
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The 8th Barcelona Landscape Biennial will take place from September 25th to 27th, 2014. The motto of this year’s event is: a landscape for you. The announcement of this topic suggests interest in the discovery of new ways of action while exploring inhospitable areas. This has raised discussions regarding the rethinking of old certainties and the provision of new security measures. A landscape for you wants to inherit a role in the discussion of what landscape design and planning should consist of nowadays. It aims at providing a plausible (and exciting) future. As it was the case of last year’s Biennial, Topos is the media partner and will be involved in the organization of the conference.
The Rosa Barba Landscape Prize will be announced during the Biennial. The competition is open to all kinds of landscape and planning projects which were designed around the globe from 2009 to 2014. The deadline to submit a projectis April 11th, 2014. There will be one prize with a prize money of 15,000 euros. The winner and the finalists will be presented during the symposium. The projects which will be selected by an international Jury are then published in the 8th Landscape Biennial Catalogue and shown in the Rosa Barba Prize exhibition.
More information and an online registration form can be found on www.coac.net/landscape.
