This autumn, the Vlaams Bouwmeester Team and the Flanders Architecture Institute are joining forces for an exciting program around 40 years of architectural competitions. The traveling exhibition 'Open Call' will be shown one last time, in an expanded version with new audiovisual material. It accompanies the 'Coming of Age' exhibition, which the Flanders Architecture Institute is devoting to architectural competitions in Flanders and Brussels in the period 1980-2000. On this occasion, two new publications will be published, also in partnership between the VAi and the Team Vlaams Bouwmeester. Register now for a special opening night!
Vernissage and opening talk 40 years of competition culture On November 26, we will present both exhibitions and present two brand new publications.
Following the Open Call exhibition, a series of interviews took place with, among others, Team Vlaams Bouwmeester. We let these voices have their say in a video.
We conclude with a lecture on the role of the Open Call procedure within the architectural culture in Flanders and Brussels and an announcement of the side program.
Program Welcome by Sofie De Caigny (Flemish Architecture Institute) Explanation Open Call expo Explanation Coming of Age expo
Book presentations More than a competition - The Open Call in a Changing Building Culture and Celebrating Public Architecture Intro lecture by Erik Wieërs (Vlaams Bouwmeester) Lecture by Irina Davidovici (ETH Zurich)
Publication Celebrating Public Architecture The lavishly illustrated English-language book 'Celebrating Public Architecture' will also be published by the Berlin publishing house JOVIS. The German architecture critic Florian Heilmeyer examines the built results of two decades of Open Call there. More information
Exhibition 'Open Call. 20 years of architecture in public order' After presentations in Ghent, Brussels, Hasselt and Kortrijk, the exhibition 'Open Call. 20 years of architecture in public commission' one last time. She was supplemented for the occasion with new video testimonials. More information
Exhibition 'Coming of Age' Under the title 'Coming of Age', the Flanders Architecture Institute highlights the most controversial architectural competitions in Flanders and Brussels from the period 1980-2020 on the basis of original documents and objects. More information
Publication More than a competition On the occasion of the opening of the two exhibitions, the new publication 'More than a competition' will also be published. The book includes a series of essays on the evolution of the public building culture in Flanders, and the role played by the master builder and the Open Call in this.
Goethe-Institut New York 30 Irving Place New York, NY 10003 USA
Home office, undertourism, online shopping - the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have changed how we engage with our cities. Is the dense urban center already a thing of the past, an object of nostalgia? How can cities cope with the inevitable states of emergency we'll encounter because of climate change?
In their new book The City After Corona, authors Doris Kleilein and Friederike Meyer explore the pandemic's effects on urban development and examine which architecture, infrastructures, and public spaces are suitable for crises. Join us for a conversation presenting their findings, moderated by Mariana Mogilevich, the Editor in Chief of Urban Omnibus and author of The Invention of Public Space (2021).
COVID Policy In an effort to ensure the safety of our staff and audience, we are limiting the capacity for this event to 50 people - please register to attend. Proof of vaccination is required to attend, and we ask that all attendees wear a mask.
Virtual Conference, Hosted by Technische Universität Berlin
Since 2018, the collaborative research centre CRC 1265 “Re-Figuration of Spaces” has brought together more than 60 researchers from the disciplines of sociology, architecture, urban planning, geography, media and communication studies. Following the central hypothesis of the CRC that the radical changes in socio-spatial orders which have emerged since the late 1960s require a new concept and theories beyond globalisation, the forthcoming international conference will invite renowned international scholars and a wide-ranging academic audience to discuss preliminary research outcomes. How can the concept of the refiguration of spaces help make conflictual transformation processes more tangible and enable a better understanding of the underlying dynamics which shape new conflicts and challenges? How do these conflicts manifest themselves in spatial knowledge, in new forms of digital communication and decision making, or in knowledge circuits, mobilities and flows across globally connected societies.
Confirmed keynote speakers include Ulrich Brand, Robin Celikates, Keller Easterling, Serene Khader, Walter Mignolo and Raquel Rolnik.
Online Book Launch Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
Activism at Home offers a unique study of architects’ own dwellings; homes purposely designed to express social, political, economic, and cultural critiques. Through thirty case studies by architectural scholars, this book highlights different forms of activism at home from the early twentieth century to today. The architect-led experiments in activist living discussed in this book include the dwellings of Ralph Erskine, Paulo Mendes Da Rocha, Charles Moore, Flora Ruchat-Roncati, Kiyoshi Seike, and many others. Offering candid appraisals of alternative living solutions that formulate a response to rising real estate prices, economic inequality, social alienation, and mounting environmental and cultural challenges, Activism at Home is more than a historical study; it is an appeal to architects to use the discipline’s tools to their full potential, and a plea to scholars to continue bringing architecture's activist practices into focus—whether at home or elsewhere.
17.00 Presentation of the book by the editors, Isabelle Doucet and Janina Gosseye
17.15 Conversation about the publication with invited guest Irina Davidovici
Join us as Rafael Herrin-Ferri discusses his new book ALL THE QUEENS HOUSES with photographers Adolfo Steve Vazquez and -Ines Leong. Co-hosted by the Queens Foundation for Architecture.
The borough of Queens has long been celebrated as the melting pot of America. It was the birthplace of North American religious freedom in the seventeenth century, hosted two World’s Fairs in the twentieth, and is currently home to over a million foreign-born residents participating in the American experience. In 2013, Spanish-born artist and architect Rafael Herrin-Ferri began to paint a portrait of the “World’s Borough”—not with images of its diverse population, or its celebrated international food scene, but with photographs of its highly idiosyncratic housing stock. While All the Queens Houses is mainly a photography book celebrating the broad range of housing styles in New York City’s largest and most diverse county, it is also a not-so-subtle endorsement of a multicultural community that mixes global building traditions into the American vernacular, and by so doing breathes new life into its architecture and surrounding urban context.
This publication is made possible in part by the Queens Council on the Arts with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Conceived as a catalogue of notes and tools used in the field, The Things Around Us: 51N4E and Rural Urban Framework reveals how 51N4E’s and Rural Urban Framework’s architecture is less a series of finished objects than the manifestation of a series of processes. Landing somewhere between question and reaction, proximity and contrast, and assonance and distance, the project is a manifesto of a position, the story of two approaches to context, and a testament to the very possibility of making architecture with and within context today.
Join us for a conversation with 51N4E and Rural Urban Framework on how both offices see making architecture as a choreographic process. To register, click here.
Part of the #readCCA book presentations, this event will be moderated by Francesco Garutti and Andrew Scheinman.
Canadian Centre for Architecture 1920, rue Baile Montréal, QC H3H 2S6
TEMPORARILY CLOSED
Embedded in politically and economically charged sites in the Pearl River Delta, Mongolia and the European Union, Rural Urban Framework (Joshua Bolchover and John Lin) and 51N4E (Johan Anrys and Freek Persyn) operate in expanded ecologies of architectural practice, questioning the role of the architect today. By collaborating with policymakers, local contractors and NGOs and engaging their respective labs at the University of Hong Kong and ETH Zürich as key sites of research, both offices investigate new forms of cooperation and dialogue as crucial design strategies.
RUF and 51N4E work at the seams of urbanization, with projects situated in transitional settlements in Ulaanbaatar, in the new vernacular of rural China, in the transforming centres of Western European cities and in Albania’s shifting public spaces. Comparing their research and design processes, this exhibition and publication question the extents and certainties of architecture against backdrops of indeterminate notions of citizenship, unstable stages of urbanization, and insecure economies and ecologies.
Curator: Francesco Garutti, CCA Concept: Johan Anrys, Joshua Bolchover, John Lin, and Freek Persyn Curatorial research and coordination: Irene Chin with Andrew Scheinman and Jann Wiegand Exhibition design: 51N4E (Freek Persyn with Roxane Le Grelle and Sebastian Roy), Brussels; Rural Urban Framework (Joshua Bolchover and John Lin with Chiara Oggioni), Hong Kong Design development: Sébastien Larivière, Jasmine Graham Graphic design: Something Fantastic (Julian Schubert, Elena Schütz and Leonard Streich), Berlin
More information, video material and introductions: www.cca.qc.ca
