This competition is organised by RIEAch in order to select authors for both the Riea Book Series and the Riea Concept series. Books submitted should emphasise new research in the field of architecture. The winner receives a contract to publish the book in the Riea Book or Concept Series published by SpringerWienNewYork.

For more details, go to www.riea.ch

Wallpaper* magazine (March issue) features a preview article on the forthcoming Town Hall Hotel in London exploring its impact on Bethnal Green and looking at the multi-scale design by rare architecture (practice of Inter 4 tutors, Nathalie Rozencwajg & Michel da Costa Gonçalves).

harvest-by-asif-khan

Harvest is a project developed for my current show at the Design Museum London as part of the Designers in Residence programme. This year five designers were invited by the museum to each develop context-specific proposals for their residencies which could communicate to the wide range of visitors to the museum.

The project’s starting point was to explore using London’s plant life as a raw material for everyday products. The process developed to create the furniture combines weaving, moulding, freeze-drying and hardening. An industrial freeze-drying chamber was used to preserve the moulded plant material through the extraction of the water content over several weeks. The furniture was then fused using a linseed oil based resin.

The process led to exploiting the plant’s existing branching structure and natural ability to aggregate and interlock. The structures though minimal, span and fill large volumes. Their forms are robust yet delicate. This project was a chance to reconsider our connection with everyday objects, the materials that surround us and with those we choose to live with. Asif’s installation appears in the Design Museum Tank on the riverside frontage of the museum. The exhibition also features new work from Bethan Wood and the design collective Farm.

Design Museum, Shad Thames, London SE1

SA magazine #254 features a four-year retrospective view of the AA Singapore Workshop, Breeding Design through Geographies. Calvin Chua examines the pedagogy and evolution of the event’s agenda through its different thematic cycles together with the workshop’s jurors and coordinators, M. da Costa Gonçalves and N. Rozencwajg (Inter 4 tutors).

See December 2009 issue 254

Eric Parry Architects' new films about working in Westminster. Collectively, these explore how the practice’s work has been shaped by the rich social, cultural and economic heritage of the area, noting how Westminster has continually adapted to create spaces where people want to live, play, and work.

www.epawestminster.co.uk

Sketch by Marcelo A. Espinosa Martinez (DRL '99, PhD H&T 06) for an Architecture Museum Competition in Monterrey, Mexico in 1995 selected as finalist in the Premio Fundamentos Tools for Architecture organised by Revista Arquitectura of the COAM in Madrid. The sketch was also shown in an exhibition held at the COAM in Madrid last December to January. 

Marcelo A. Espinosa M.

maespinosa@buro-ei.com

'In a decade of economic and social unrest, with creative rebellion in the air, the AA played a significant role in producing an energetic generation of architects, designers and thinkers.' 1970s: Recollection and Rebellion, part of the Design by Decade series at the Barbican will include discussion of the AA and London during that period.

For more details and booking information, please see the Barbican Art Gallery website and events details

www.tomorrowsthoughtstoday.com

Darryl Chen will also be presenting research at the Belfast Exposed gallery on the subject of Solving Conflict Through Urban Design, 8 April.

This event was the third Samaggi Academic Conference, organised by Samaggi Samagom, the Thai Association in the UK, in collaboration with Imperial College Thai Society.

Winyu Ardrugsa's paper investigates the recent winning design of the Thai parliament, arguing that the proposal’s return to a religious cosmological concept for its spatial and formal organisations runs the risk of constituting an undemocratic architecture.

The project was commissioned by Hotel Infante Sagres in Porto, Portugal and was firstly exhibited in Sao Bento metro station designed by Souto de Moura. The hotel invited a group of architects and artists, which included Alvaro Siza and Souto de Moura, to come up with a personal vision for a set of silver handles of a given tureen. Our proposal was inspired by the trip Portuguese ships did to China and the climax of their journey when circling the cape. The concept was phrased as follows.

Travelling lines
The Baroque tureens were the product of a consorted complicity between mutually foreign worlds, between the east and the west, between what was then known and unknown. Their story is the story of proud aristocrats and their opulent feasts, but also the story of old craftsmen and their ancient techniques, of greedy merchants and their trading plots and of merciless monsters and their vast seas. Their story is from here and beyond, and nothing short of surreal, this is the true fairy tale that we redraw today.

The concept is in the lines that meet and melt from across their worlds, rising in an arc from here and beyond, to a dénouement of wind and waves. In a cape that holds their hope and our fate, these are the pawns on the chessboard of Adamastor. Of mythical distances and distant languages, we draw the adventures of travelling lines.

For more details, see http://www.hotelinfantesagres.pt/PT/terrina8b.html

Twelve workshops each proposed an intervention in one of the 2014 World Cup's hosting cities. Together with a coordinator and two other  architects, she tutored the intervention in Manaus, the capital of Amazonas, where most of the Amazon Forest is situated.

The British Council has selected London’s muf architecture art to curate the British Pavilion at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, from 29 August to 21 November. This is the 12th international architecture exhibition and is being overseen by Kazuyo Sejima from Sanaa, who said: ‘The idea is to help people relate to architecture, help architecture relate to people and help people relate to themselves.. This biennale’s theme is ‘People in architecture’.

muf’s pavilion is titled  Two Way Traffic, and aims to ‘make connections’ and ‘enable knowledge exchange between Venice and Britain’.

The project was developed with CHORA as part of their Taiwan Strait Incubator. It is an interactive 4 x 4-metre model that acts as an interactive diagram and planning tool for the scheme. The model is constructed of 122 rapid prototyped tiles that model the city at 1:10000 and a network of 650 LEDs that display the information via variable ‘light animations’. The model will be on display until 20 March.

For more details, see http://www.ifa.de/en/exhibitions/dt/rueckblick/2009/post-oil-city/)

In passing will be published by Jap Sam books, designed by Joost Grootens. The publication is supported by the Fonds BKVB.

Mark Pimlott will exhibit his work at Projektraum-Bahnhofstraße25, in Kleve, Germany, from 17 April to 9 May.
Mark Pimlott is a senior lecturer in Architecture, chair of Interiors, at TU Delft.

The article 'Innovative Material Systems' was recently published in Mimarlikta Malzeme, the journal of Turkish Chamber of Architects.

Sevil Yazici will also be holding a workshop in Istanbul Technical University from 17 February to 24 March, on freeform structures and materialisation processes.

Angeliki Koliomichou (AALU 2006/07) presented her MA project on Urban Morphology and Transformation at the International Seminar on Urban Form (ISUF 2009) co-hosted by South China University of Technology and Guangzhou Urban Planning Bureau, in September 2009.
Read more at www.urbanform.org

1 ecoLogicStudio shortlisted for ‘oxigen italia' in Abitare magazine competition, results published in December issue.
2 Their studio profile will be featured in next issue of AD.
3 The practice is currently submitting a planning application for AqvaHouse in Turin, a refurbishment for a four-storey housing complex, featuring a 3D facade/roof system working as water collector and vertical garden. ecoLogicStudio has been completing 'tropic playgrounds … towards playful collapse?' workshop and exhibition for Linz University.
4 AAInter10 students’ first term work 'coral gardens' exhibited in shelter gallery in DUBAI. The exhibition opening was followed by a roundtable with members from the local authority, local architects and representatives from Nakheel, developer of 'The World'. The exhibition featured the students’ project, an onsite installation and a series of critical films about Dubai. The exhibition brief questioned whether instability (such as the current economical and environmental crisis) can become a generative design opportunity rather than a limiting constraint.
5 AAinter10 has been re-describing this issue though a series of visionary design proposals, the Coral Gardens, sited in ‘The World’, the artificial lagoon in Dubai. Each project investigates specific architectural mechanisms of co-existence and co-evolution within the local marine habitat, prefiguring future scenarios of development whereby the lagoon is transformed into a population of urban artificial coral reefs.

Read article in National Dubai magazine:
thenational

Deadline for papers 15 February, for posters 15 May

IFW2010 is looking for the ‘key words’ for Interiors. What are they? How many are there? What are they about? What stories, people, projects, architectural spaces and shapes do they conjure up? Are they declarations of intent? Or cultural manifestos? Are they words from the past that have survived into the present, or words of the present in which the future is germinating?
Words tell stories, specify things; words also open on to other worlds and different ways of thinking. We want to understand, discuss, and compare notes, without having to classify: for words generate ideas, not ideas words. Not only that: as they are passed around, words spread ideas, stimulate other ideas to germinate, constantly reinventing themselves because they are never definitive, but free and open to change. Words also represent things, and things can be a means of making new stories, new ideas. As words transform themselves over time in any given society, country or economy we should look for the ‘key words’ for Interiors: let us freeze-frame certain ideas, clarify them, assert them – but always remembering they belong in an open panorama of thought.

The premises laid down by IFW2010 is that in our globalised world it is possible to construct a single unified narrative – though one with different facets – or to describe/specify a complex constellation of Interiors by means of the words that characterise them.

For further information, email Cristina Colombo at IFW2010@polimi.it or go to
www.interiorsforumworld.net