Author Archive for darrel

Final Presentations at the Berlage Institute - Watch Live

Berlage-Institute-Venice

Exhibition of the Berlage Institute at the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale; FlickR photo: Darrel Ronald

The final presentations of the 1st and 2nd year Berlage Institute students are scheduled at the school this coming week and next. All of the presentations are open to the public, and are without entry cost. On the 24th June, the 1st year students will present two studios, Rethinking the All-Inclusive, and the Saemanquem Project; while on the 1st July two other studios, Associative Design: Urban Ecologies, and Capital Cities, The limits of the City: A Strategic Project for Seoul will be presented.

You may also watch the Livestream Broadcasts online.
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Wolfgang Tillmans at the Stedelijk CS

WolfgangTillmans-Work01

© Wolfgang Tillmans

The latest exhibition in the temporary location for the Stedelijk Museum CS will be a show curated by Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968) which includes his own work situated amongst other artists. The show is entitled, Presence of Mind, and will run through June 20th - September 30th, 2008. While previous works will be included, the show will also include the museum’s recent acquisition, an installation by Tillmans titled, Stedelijk Room.
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Open Form Architecture @ Pecha Kucha, Montreal

Fellow dysturber, Darrel Ronald, founded Open Form Architecture in Montréal (Canada) with colleagues Maxime Moreau and Maurice Martel. We were recently invited to participate in the Pecha Kucha Montréal as our first public presentation. Following our 20 slides / 20 seconds at the special edition of Pecha Kucha Montréal as part of the Portes Ouverts Design Montréal festival, we have made the slides, as well as video available online.

The title of our presentation is, Simple Rules, Complex Behaviour, and illustrates a limited selection of our work over the past years dealing with generative design, cellular automata, simple programming and complexity. We have been particularly influenced by the work of Steven Wolfram and his book, A New Kind of Science. Having participated in two of his NKS Summer Schools, we’ve been fortunate to collaborate with him and a team of mathematicians and programmers in the United States using Mathematica software.

The presentation is bilingual French and English, just like our favourite city! Unfortunately the first words are cut off, and they are: WE ARE OPEN FORM, and WE LOVE OPEN FORM! We hope you enjoy! Below are our 20 slides, that accompany the video.
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archiCULTURE: The Film

A new documentary film, archiCULTURE, is in the works about the lives of student architects and the culture surrounding the daily life of design students. The film (trailer) is a grassroots project currently seeking money to finance the project.
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Stasi Spaces @ FOAM, Amsterdam

FOAM-Stasi-01

© Daniel and Geo Fuchs; Source: FOAM

Amsterdam’s finest photography museum, FOAM Fotografiemuseum, has what should be an excellent exhibition opening on the 14th March. The new exhibit by Daniel & Geo Fuchs: STASI – Secret Rooms runs until the 4th June 2008, and documents the interior spaces used by the East German Stasi.
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VVVV Real-Time Video Programming Toolkit

I have been hearing more and more about VVVV. If you are a fan of Processing, then you’ll surely be a fan of VVVV. The results are amazing, both the screenshots and videos, it is worth a look for its inspiration alone. And if you’re interested in a visual programming interface for real-time video creation, this is a fascinating software: Continue reading ‘VVVV Real-Time Video Programming Toolkit’

Free Trial Until May - Bentley’s Generative Components

Arup-Generative Components

© ARUP, Image source: Bently Systems

If you’re the type to follow the latest developments in architectural software (read: CAD Geek), then you’ll be excited about this announcement. Bentley Systems has released it’s industry-leading software, Generative Components, as a free trial until May 2008. The software has been making waves, especially in London, over the past few years. I was especially taken by the Generative Components plug-in when I heard Robert Aish speak (director of researcher at Bentley Systems) at the Game, Set and Match conference at the NAi in Rotterdam, 2006. Continue reading ‘Free Trial Until May - Bentley’s Generative Components’

Aaron Betsky to Curate the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale 2008

Venice Architecture Biennale

Arsenale Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale 2006 (photo: Darrel Ronald)

Ahhh, the Venice Architecture Biennale is coming again in 2008! The exhibition runs from the 14 September to the 24 November and I’m totally stoked for another visit to the magical city.

This year’s 11th International Architecture Exhibition will be curated by Aaron Betsky, the former director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute and now director of the Cincinnati Art Museum. You can find an interesting interview from 10.2004 between Archinect and Betsky here.

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[CG Textures] Will Rock You

CG Textures-Splatter

Source: CG Textures - Splatter Set

If you busy creating 3D digital models and don’t know about the Netherlands-based CG Textures database, it is worth the look. Run by a friend, Marcel Vijfwinkel, he generously has an open source attitude to the content. You can read the license here. A lot of the material comes from Marcel himself from his work in the gaming industry, and the site now has many content contributors. If you or your office are able to pay for a year-long membership, it will support the site and give you multiple perks.

One Version of What it’s Like to Work at OMA

© Blue Eye Productions

I had to laugh when I found this video linked from the OMA website. After OMA won the BNA Cube award in the Netherlands, this video was produced by Blue Eye Productions to portray the working atmosphere within the office. I really hope you guys (that work there) respond to this. I can tell that some things are true, but others are misleading, like the fact that the teams in the office “are not competitive.” Also linked from the Blue Eye Productions website are other videos and topics concerning architecture.

And if you get the urge to work for OMA, and haven’t applied all ready, they’re (always) looking for people.

The Best of 010’s Upcoming Publications

010 publishers

For the last 25 years, Rotterdam’s 010 Publishers (Uitgeverij 010) has contributed to the larger debate about design both within and without the Netherlands. There are three books that stand out from the mix of forthcoming titles, to be published this spring and summer:

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Berlage Institute: You Only Have Two More Weeks to Apply!

Berlage-0809

If you were thinking of applying to the Berlage Institute for the 2008-2009 school year (PDF), well, hopefully you’ve done it already. The deadline is for applications is the 29th February, 2008. The prospectus is as good as usual, and if you’re new to Berlage-Institute, it is the best place for post-graduate study in the Netherlands.

Postcardware: The Ultimate AutoCad Shortcuts

Maxwan ACAD Shortcuts

ACAD Options Interface - Notice the Shortcuts folder is at the top.

As we always try to make the world a better place, we bring you the ultimate Autocad shortcuts. Maxwan a+u (the office where Thomas and I work at) are notorious in the Dutch architecture scene for efficiency. The shortcut scripts have been developed since 1992 and have spread around dutch offices using Autocad. Started for Autocad 10 (when you still had to type ‘LINE’ to start drawing one) by Paul Hogendijk and Rients Dijkstra at OMA the shortcuts are at the moment developed by Harm te Velde over the past years.
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International Design Salaries

Coroflot Design Survey 2007

© Coroflot

There are countless conversations among architects about pay, and how architecture is (apparently) poorly paid. Now there’s some good proof. An awesome online survey and searchable database was shown to me today, assembled by Coroflot. You can view the datasets here, sort by country as well as occupation and job title. The few graphics are great too. It isn’t surprising that among the design professions (graphic, fashion, interactive media, and so forth), architecture has one of the lower ceilings.

Archinect has had a salary poll running for quite some time, and it has always been a fascinating read. But it has always been incomplete, has no sortable databases, and didn’t offer a comparative analysis. In comparison, the Coroflot survey boasts 4250 respondents from 73 countries. What is clear is that in most design fields the incomes are rising nicely. On top of this, you’re best paid as a consultant. Nonetheless there are some hard-to-explain anomolies that stick out. It turns out that designers in India are some of the worlds best-paid, up there with Americans and Australians. Hmm.

Touw & Barayazarra Art Opening at the Duende

Duende Presents

Exhibition Poster

Dutch artist Liesbeth Touw and Spanish artist Zigor Barayazarra will exhibit their recent work at the Duende artist-run studios in Rotterdam. Both artists have been working at the studio in the artist’s residency program. The exhibition opening runs between 19.00 and 22.00, Thursday the 20 December at the Duende studios (map).

The Dawn of Contemporary Dutch Architects

Y-Oevers-06

Y-Oevers Collage ( © unknown)

Back in 1992, the young and aggressive Dutch architects that we know so well today, came together to work on a large project in Amsterdam. The Ruimtelijk Scenario Y-Oevers Amsterdam (Translation: Spatial Scenarios for the Y-Waterfront Amsterdam) shows a long list of heavy-hitting architects and urbanists that now largely control the European architecture debate.

The project was carried out by the teams of: OMA, Neutelings, van Berkel & Bos (now UN Studio), Christiaanse (now KCAP) and West8. The model was built by De Rijk Parthesius (including Vincent de Rijk). Even more impressive was the line-up of the teams and to see where each of the members went on to. At times, they started their own offices, as with the case of Alejandro Zaera (Foreign Office Architects), Winy Maas (MVRDV) and Rients Dijkstra (Maxwan). The final booklet for the project reads as a whos-who of contemporary Dutch architecture, and the designs and presentation methods within are absolute precursors to the styles developed by each of the offices throughout the rest of the 1990s until today. You can almost tell which architects worked on which drawings, it’s an amazing period just prior to the launch of the many offices we see today in Rotterdam.

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Dysturb International - The 2nd Wave

Dysturb International 2

If you’ve thought that Dysturb is a bit quiet in terms of posts lately, please forgive us. We are growing through an exciting phase and our energy is poured into the many changes in our personal lives as well as into the direction of Dysturb itself. Over the past months, the core Dysturb writers of Claudia Strahl and Darrel Ronald and Thomas Stellmach have been moving around the world. Claudia relocated to Cologne, Germany; Darrel has relocated to Montréal, Canada; and Thomas has temporarily relocated to Aleppo, Syria. Given this shift, we asked ourselves how to go forward with Dysturb.Net.

Our conclusion is to grow the site to fit the team. Build a network of architects, urbanists and designers that can cover the design capitals around the globe with first-hand experiences and views into how design is embedded into our daily lives, daily cultures, and cities. In this sense, we will continue the strategy of Dysturb, but we will enlarge its geographical scope to cover more cities than just Rotterdam, where us core writers originally were located. Rotterdam has inscribed itself into this blog, and the architectural energy of the city was instrumental in our creation of this project and our desire to contribute to this debate. That said, we do plan to keep the calendar Rotterdam specific, because this fills a specific need locally; perhaps at some point we introduce local calendars, but for now we will not.

This is still an experiment, and we hope that you feel free to comment on our work, and its ability to share interesting and appropriate content. Of course, we do this for fun, and as I’ve written before, we aren’t CNN. To quote one of our original posts on the goal of Dysturb:

This website is our way to reflect, propose, challenge, get excited about, and SHARE the architecture world around us. We’ve made all the web 2.0 goodness available to you: you can view our pictures via our flickr page, you can subscribe to our links via delicious, you can hook our dates into your google calendar or integrate it in your ical. And there are RSS feeds of all our content, be it the articles, the photos, or the calendar events. But we’d love even more to hear what you think, so comment on our articles, send us that design that made you cry, or be a guest writer!

The core writers and editors are and will continue to be:
Thomas Stellmach (Rotterdam, NL + Aleppo, SY)
Darrel Ronald (Montréal, CA)
Martin Sobota (Rotterdam, NL)
Claudia Strahl (Cologne, DE)

We would like to already welcome these new writers and the list is growing:
Edgar Gonzales (Madrid, ES)
Cornelia Redeker (Munich, DE)

So that you know our direction, we are currently attracting writers in these cities:
Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Dubai, London, Los Angeles, Moscow, New York, Paris, Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Stockholm, Tokyo, Toronto, Zurich and wherever the architecture and urbanism content pours in from. If you feel the desire to be a part of this project, please feel free to contact us through the info page.

Publiek: Take a piss here!

Monica Bonvicini-site

Don’t Miss A Sec, Monica Bonvicini (Photo: Darrel Ronald)

Sculpture International Rotterdam has just opened this years public art installations, Publiek, showing the work of Ugo Rondinone (CH), Monica Bonvicini (IT/DE) and Germaine Kruip (NL). The work is clustered around Rotterdam’s historic City Hall along the Coolsingel, and activates the city on multiple scales, from the interior space of the recently closed Postkantoor, to the rooftop signage of the Generale Bank, to the doorstep of the City Hall. The outdoor exhibition will be open daily, and is on display until the 18th November, 2007. Above and below Monica’s amazing piece Don’t Miss A Sec, a public toilet made entirely of one-way mirrored glass, causing its user a disconcerting feeling of exhibitionsm or inverse voyeurism.

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