“The rooftop settlements are an urban legacy, telling the story of Hong Kong, of political upheavals in Mainland China, of urban redevelopment, of people’s hopes and their needs in the city.”

This sentence in the introduction perfectly captures the idea behind the 280 pages book, which contains 100 photos taken by Canham of the communities themselves and the interior of the informal dwellings, and 58 architectural drawings by Wu. ‘Portraits from Above’ aims to show self-built, informal settlements on the roofs of high-rise buildings to be an integral part of Hong Kong’s urban landscape. Very interesting is the in-depth unraveling of the rooftop communities. Both authors visited five different settlements for research and carefully described all elements these consist of, including surfaces and specific maps of the dwellings. Furthermore the ’soft side’ of the phenomenon gets attention — personal stories of the rooftop dwellers and descriptions of what happens behind the thin walls of their homes. No single person is captured on a photo. This might be due to the fact that their homes are built illegally, without the formal approval of the government. Nevertheless, rooftop settlements are also tolerated by the authorities.

The book links the rise of rooftop communities, which are mostly located in old urban areas, to the migration flows of low-income, marginalized people from Mainland China to Hong Kong. “With each of China’s tumultuous political movements in the 20th century, like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, there was a corresponding wave of Mainland Chinese migrating to Hong Kong.” Dr. Ernest Chui, Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong, explains that rooftop settlements have existed for more than 50 years and will most likely remain for at least another half a century, as Hong Kong’s critical shortage of land will not come to an end. Hong Kong has a very high population density of 6,410 people per square kilometer. The extremely high housing prices force “those who could not afford decent accommodation in the private market, or who were unable to meet the government’s eligibility criteria for public housing”, to seek for unorthodox solutions to maintain life in the city, resulting in renting of partitioned rooms in old tenement buildings or even cage homes/beds.

In order to decrease pressure on the public housing market, local authorities came up with eligibility criteria such as a seven year residency requirement and a means test. These kinds of exclusionary social regulations have led to alternative forms of housing, like rooftop dwellings for the people who “are not yet eligible for public rental housing, and who are unable to afford better private accommodation”. According to 2006 data, there were approximately 4,000 rooftop dwellers in Hong Kong, a group neglected by the rest of society with people that have to make their living in undesirable conditions in very small spaces.

‘Portraits from Above’ reminds of Jennifer Toth’s 1993 book ‘The Mole People’, which describes the same types of communities, but then on the other vertical end of the city — underground. Comparable to Hong Kong, New York City has a population density of some 10,606 inhabitants per square kilometer, and sky high ground prices, especially in Manhattan. Toth found out about more than 5,000 people living underground, down to seven storeys below surface. She discovered organized communities of urban outcasts and also smaller groups, ranging from homosexuals to entire families. The difference between the situations in New York and Hong Kong lies in the specific characteristics of the people. Whereas the rooftop dwellers in Hong Kong mainly consist of the migrant working poor, many of the underground people of New York suffer from mental diseases and consider themselves incapable to handle life ‘aboveground’. Nevertheless, in both cases the focus is on marginalized groups in two highly globalized cities on two sides of the globe, and both situations are rooted in wide income disparity and social inequality engendered by capitalistic development.

Wu and Canham have written a beautiful, thought-provoking document that not only provides complete insight in informal rooftop communities and life in light-weight structures on top of Hong Kong’s mass housing complexes, it also gives clear explanations on how a phenomenon like this has developed. Worth mentioning are Wu’s architectural explorations into the inside and outside of rooftop dwellings, which have resulted in beautiful spatial drawings.

Portraits from Above: Hong Kong’s Informal Rooftop Communities (2009)
Rufina Wu, Stefan Canham
Peperoni Books, Berlin
280 pages
100 photographs in color and duotone/58 architectural drawings
22,5 x 24,8 cm, hardcover with dust jacket

—Order ‘Portraits from Above’ at Amazon.

“Use your mobile phone to leave messages on your block, your street, at the coffee shop, or anywhere you happen to be. Respond privately or publicly to messages from people in your neighborhood. It’s easy: you don’t even have to sign up.”

Interesting about BlockChalk is that it allows its users to connect with people that are close-by at a specific moment. The app, that recently launched an API for developers, works well and enables push messages, which is necessary for these kinds of applications. As I’m one of the first four users in Amsterdam I can’t really report about interesting conversations on this platform, but there are some great ‘Chalk talks’ going on in New York City and Los Angeles.

Although BlockChalk pretends to be a neighborhood app, the whole idea essentially has nothing to do with neighborhoods. To the contrary, if BlockChalk is to become a huge communication platform (which as always depends on a ‘critical mass’ of users), it will be used to redefine the neighborhood from a static into a flexible concept. A neighborhood is about the coincidence of people living together within a certain spatial area (static). BlockChalk deals with the coincidence of people sharing position at a certain moment (flexible). The new BlockChalk-based neighborhood refreshes each minute and has boundaries based on GPS reach, not on administrative borders. BlockChalk will open doors for location-based communication within certain ‘interest groups’ as well as for very temporary messages and calls such as “Who can help starting my car?”. The importance of these kinds of messages does not depend on neighborhoods (implying local community sense), but on geographical positions at a certain moment. Therefore I think it’s a waste to combine this potentially great application with the concept of ‘neighborhood’. BlockChalk goes beyond that, as soon as users and makers understand its real potential. And as soon as people start using it.

In addition, it’s interesting how VentureBeat compares BlockChalk with other efforts to stimulate communication and cohesion within local communities. More specifically, the anology with the early ‘notificator’ is brilliant.

This interior combined with an underground setting, experimental music, innovative beer brands and stylish folks, makes these places subcultural living rooms. They are places to hook up for a pre-clubbing beer or a hang-over cup of coffee. Although the Wohnzimmer bars are mostly official places, which means they a license to serve alcohol, they’re pretty informal and relaxed. Wohnzimmer bars could be considered good indicators of upcoming neighborhoods. This last conclusion is definitely not based on a comprehensive research after gentrification, but rather an subjective observation. To find a great Wohnzimmer, you should wander down the streets of some typical German big city neighborhoods such as Friedrichshain, Prenzlauerberg and Neukölln in Berlin, and St. Pauli and Schanzenviertel in Hamburg.

Because of our passion for this type of bars we own what might be one of the most comprehensive collections of Wohnzimmer bar pictures, all taken during late night or early morning visits with a small pocket camera in dark circumstances. Here we’d like to share our collection in a Flickr set, check it out. Of course we’re always interested in receiving images of other Wohnzimmer bars from all over the world to add them to our collection.

It seems that the entire world is speculating on the future these days. (For a critical reflection on this phenomenon, the Dutchies among us should read this.) From this perspective, Nokia organized a design course around the question ‘What might the future of phones look like?’. This question is relevant, as every mobile phone manufacturer currently seems to be rashly copying Apple’s shiny iPhone OS interface and information organization, while real innovations still derive from thinking differently, ‘out of the box’.

After some intense user research, the team around Little World found out that the massive overload of features in modern phones was actually pushing away the human element in it — making interactions between people easier. Therefore the two designers explored new ways of grouping, messaging and organizing contacts, approaching these issues from an intuitive way. Little World creates “a more intuitive virtual world from which you can manage friends and contacts as opposed to the generic and alphabetically ordered lists we are used to today”, and according to Cannon it “allows you to group people in a natural, analog way, placing your work colleagues in a different area to your football mates, and using your phone in a more natural, subtle and playful way”.

Little World is built around three themes. First, the interface is people-centric. Second, it aims to allow for more subtle, non-verbal mode of communication, instead of only ‘active’ communication such as texting or talking. And third, Little World is built upon the principle of playfulness: “People naturally play, fiddle, fidget, doodle with pens, pencils, cords, bottle labels, so why not allow that type of behaviour to exist in the phone itself?” In the video you will notice that although the organization of information has the potential to work more intuitively, actions such as adding people to your contacts and dragging them around as well as sending out messages are still time-consuming matters. Nevertheless, the interface design itself is beautiful and even cozy. Little World was a finalist at the IxD10 student competition. Click here for some more information about the project.

In case you’re interested to see more fresh user interfaces for mobile phones, you should definitely check out the Swedish company TAT. Their YouTube channel features plenty of interesting UI concepts, such as ‘Juggle UI’. A very interesting interface is TAT’s ‘Abstract UI’, in which “we go from very precise information to the idle screen as an entity, an abstract map of information. The idle screen will paint and evolve during the day and once you’ve learned its language you will get a whole lot of information just by giving it a glance”.

Comparable to the initial argument of the modernists, one of the main advantages of this new fabrication method is its price. According to a BBC video it will cost only 40,000 British Pounds to produce a flexible one-family house like this one. Interesting here is the question whether people in the future want to live in a plastic house — a question which never has been thoroughly put forward at one of modernist CIAM conferences in 1928. Nevertheless, I think people will, in the end. One of the main reasons for this preoccupation is the fact that the designers have done everything to approach complete dullness in their architecture, which generally is what people expect a house to be. As long as the neighbors do not see you’re living in a plastic house it’ll be okay for most of us.

The material is said to be stronger and more sustainable compared to concrete. And, above all ,the house can be built in approximately four days, which implies giant flexibility. Altogether it brings a lot of advantages here that might change the future of building forever. Therefore I propose to organize a conference to rethink architecture: CIAM Plastic Edition.

“A visitor will walk from room to room and experience a sequence of baths, panoramic saunas, chill and relax areas. From the interior, the frame the constructed landscape and give access to outdoor terraces and pools. From thereon paths continue over the hills and through the valleys connecting different spaces. The persons who walk here, will see a combination of water, vegetation and architecture, which gratifies the human desire for a world that is visible and tangible.”

The proposal is currently on show at the ‘Architecture of Consequence: Dutch Designs on the Future’ exhibition at the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) in Rotterdam.

This idea paves the way for a more modular approach for the newest district of Amsterdam. In IJburg a floating neighborhood has already been built, containing 38 private floating water villas and a couple of floating apartment blocks made by social housing association Eigen Haard. Although this experiment is one of the first big-scale water housing projects in the Netherlands, it is hardly recognizable as an inspiring hybrid district. New initiatives such as a floating wellness park as proposed here could help this new district to really become a flexible, more plug-in like modular floating city, as Archigram would love to see.

The idea of a floating garden is one in a series of international floating ideas to make cities more sustainable and definitely more flexible and interesting. Some days ago we wrote about Rietveld Landscape’s proposal N A P — a floating park made out of shipping barges. Smaller projects that have been carried out already are the works of the floating garden people, a group that has been experimenting with floating gardens in Amsterdam’s canals since the sixties. Last year we reported about their floating plug-in park and the floating campsite at the beach of Almere.

One of the great ideas in the proposal by Anne Holtrop is the hilly structure of the park. “The architecture makes the walls and ceilings the outer for hills and valleys. Inside the interior follows the counter form of the landscape. Amorphous areas with faceted ceilings, all of different sizes and heights, blend as one.” The floating garden/spa wellness island uses the availability of plenty of fresh water at this location close to the city center of the Dutch capital. “A floating sustainable biotope, using recycled materials with a vegetation coating that from its pores literally breaths oxygen and wellness is unique for our planet.”

According to Springwise cargo bikes like de ‘Vrachtfiets’ will become immensely popular for short-haul urban transport. The bike is primarily created to help people move house without renting a van. The idea of de ‘Vrachtfiets’ is enabling people to collaborate in moving the bike forward. Usually moving heavy furniture isn’t a solo effort, as proclaimed by the makers. Therefore the bike is a two-person vehicle equipped with two sets of pedals. The bike also includes an electrical assist, which will be solar-powered in upcoming versions. The cargo bike can become a huge contribution to a cleaner city with less emissions, taking the fact that at some hours half of all local traffic looks to consist of white vans transporting whatever. In addition, last week the city Amsterdam announced the plan to organize future light distribution and retail suppliance by bicycles.

The cargo bike facilitates a mobile lifestyle. Whereas most people still prefer to buy as much stuff as they can, another group attempts to create a new minimalist stuff-independent lifestyle. Instead of a cupboard full of heavy books and pretentious CDs, these people have taken their material footprint back to a notebook and a Kindle. This makes it lots easier to move house when necessary or pleasant.

“Metropolis is a quirky and very abridged narrative history of the city of Charlotte, North Carolina. It uses stop motion video animation to physically manipulate aerial still images of the city (both real and fictional), creating a landscape in constant motion. Starting around 1755 on a Native American trading path, the viewer is presented with the building of the first house in Charlotte. From there we see the town develop through the historic dismissal of the English, to the prosperity made by the discovery of gold and the subsequent roots of the building of the multitude of churches that the city is famous for. Now the landscape turns white with cotton, and the modern city is ‘born’, with a more detailed re-creation of the economic boom and surprising architectural transformation that has occurred in the past 20 years.”

Using the title Metropolis, Carter gives us a sign that his animation is meant to be a critical response to Fritz Lang’s dystopian film (1926). Although I’m not sure if this is meant to be the point, you can definitely recognize the same kind of emotion in this animation — the city has become a machine, developing unstoppably in only one almost predefined direction. Considering the desert storm in the last part of the animation, it can be seen as a prediction for a bankrupt Dubai as well.

For the occasion of Transmediale 2010, F.A.T. members met in Berlin and produced a series of projects dedicated to the topic of the week: FUCK GOOGLE. In addition to free software, browser add-ons, live streams, communiques and on-site workshops, F.A.T. Lab built a fake Google Street View car and shared the ‘how to’ guide online: click here to check it.

The park is designed to exist at least 10 years and facilitates relax and event spaces for Amsterdam’s inhabitants. Furthermore it offers green spaces to the surrounding neighborhoods. An exciting water labyrinth consisting of water alleys and squares is generated by different elevations of the barges and distances in between them. The labyrinth experience will be enhanced by strategically chosen vistas through the barges at the 0-NAP level. Standing on big grass hills, reaching out of the barges, people can always enjoy the view over the IJ.

“N A P connects the port with the citizens of Amsterdam and creates a new public domain in the heart of the old city. A grid of 30 large barges (90 x 11.40 x 5.5 m) creates a hidden water world on the river IJ. The grid generates flexibility because it can easily be expanded and decreased in size by changing the number of connected barges. The 30 park spaces are offered to different initiatives, ranging from the park’s neighbors, city government and various (sub)cultural initiatives. The park spaces will be publicly accessible. N A P can be reached by public boat traffic-lines, private boats and a pedestrian bridge form KNSM Island.”

Although the project is meant to give place to different interest groups in the city to organize their own specific activities, an opportunity is provided to get aquatinted with other lifestyles. A system of stairs and openings provides a labyrinth-like experience enabling people to surf around in the different barges. The whole is to become a collection of different sub-clubs having a more less separated space to work out an rather exclusive atmosphere. This idea of separating different interest groups is really interesting to me, because it sheds a new light on the role of public space, which in standard policy terms should always be made to facilitate everybody.

“If all objects of daily life, from yogurt to an airplane, are equipped with radio tags, they can be identified and managed by computers in the same way humans can. The next generation of Internet applications (IPv6 protocol) would be able to identify more objects than IPv4, which is currently in use. This system would therefore be able to instantaneously identify any kind of object.”

From this viewpoint, Pachube is an interesting phenomenon as it is one of the first initiatives to make the Internet of Things more concrete by attempting to bring it to the people themselves. Pachube is an open source platform enabling developers to connect sensor data to the Web and to build their own applications on it. Furthermore, the platform provides opportunities to embed dynamic real-time graphics in websites or blogs. Richard MacManus explains that Pachube enables automation of your environment, “for example controlling the lighting in your house, via sensors and the Internet”. Using a notifications feature called ‘triggers’, Pachube can cause a specific action in external applications or devices.

“Pachube can be difficult to understand at first glance. At heart it is about connecting environments. However it’s more than just connecting sensors to the Internet. Pachube wants its users to interact with sensor data and use it to actively engage with their environment.”

Needless to say, the Pachube platform is still at an early, experimental stage. “Its website is very much focused on developers and prototypers right now.” Nevertheless, to provide little insight in its potential, here is an example which live Pachube data is displayed in real-time in an Augmented Reality application built with Arduino, an open-source electronics prototyping platform.

It’s still a long way to go for the Internet of Things, and for the present, the Pachube platform will retain a playground for geeks. The next step is to make the Internet of Things more tangible for John Doe. By then our proclaimed “cooperative sustainable behavior” based on smart use of ICT will make a new step towards reality.

Wolf’s pictures show a tremendous visual rhythm of concrete and glass. It’s hard to believe that people actually life behind these facades. But in the article of Friday we’ve seen that people in fact do. Wolf explains his fascination while looking out of the window of his apartment in a 22 storeys high skyscraper — a treehut in a forest of high rises: “When it gets dark and the lights go on in the tens of thousands of apartments that surround me, I often sit at my window and look into the rooms of my neighbors, intimate and anonymous at the same time.”

Next to the brilliant pictures the book contains information about Hong Kong’s development scheme and spatial vertical strategy.

“In its quest for striving to become a ‘World City’, Hong Kong, like other major cities in the world, has made strenuous effort in constructing flagship or landmark buildings. Constrained by the limited space, Hong Kong, unlike major metropolis in other countries that could afford to build monumental buildings that could have a horizontal spread, has resorted to a ‘vertical’ strategy by building skyscrapers instead. Among the 100 tallest skyscrapers in the world there are about half that are located in Hong Kong.”

Hong Kong Inside/Outside (2009)
Michael Wolf
With texts by Natasha Egan, Hoyin Lee, Lynne DiStefano, Ernest Chui
Peperoni Books
2 books in a slopcase
352 pages
31 x 24 cm.

Although the book doesn’t contain much text or interpretation, it does contain some positions and statements. I consider it as an invitation to bloggers and book reviewers to dig those up. Real life goes on behind the facades of the massive amount of skyscrapers that lack any from of personality and identity. On a couple of square meters, complete families have to make a real life, which definitely won’t be always easy. All facilities that are needed to run a decent household, are packed together in one room.

This inevitably leads to uniformity in lifestyle, as if the building style of the skyscraper requires people to live their life like this. There’s no room left for personal particularities, hobbies, design ambitions or crazy collections. The building style inevitably leads to a mess. At all pictures we find the same interior elements. Apparently every dweller in such an apartment needs an electric ventilator. Only 1 of the 50 pictures lacks one. When the thing is not hanging from the ceiling or standing on a table, a box in one of the cupboards is a sign of its presence. Less obviously, the rice cooker is an obliquity in a Hong Kong household.

Interesting is the question that is implicitly asked in Wolf’s book. What will Hong Kong’s street life look like? When not having room to really live in your apartment, one would expect people to claim their part of public space. The restaurants must be loaded if no-one can cook at home, and public spaces must be crowded 24/7. I’m curious after what a neighborhood is worth in these communities. Will these skyscrapers work as small cities on their own? Will there be any social activity in the collective spaces of these buildings?

To conclude, we’ve a cliff hanger. Tomorrow’s article on this blog will be about ‘Hong Kong Outside’, which describes the counter-side of a great photographical research.

Hong Kong Inside/Outside (2009)
Michael Wolf
Peperoni Books
2 books in a slopcase
352 pages
31 x 24 cm.

Video art is a fast emerging phenomenon in public space. Over the last years its development took a giant jump into a serious form of permanent or temporary expression. Since 1967 (as I learned while reading the book) video art plays its game in the urban landscape. There’s an incredible number of projects with different approaches and quality — too much, in fact, to mention in one book. Last years its presence and therefore importance has been rising fast. Therefore a question is put forward: which aspect of video art is relevant? The discipline of video art in the urban context varies from temporary spectacular manifestations, comparable with a firework show (and with a lot of “Whoow!” and “Ooahh!” sounds produced by a massive audience), to the hardly understandable artistic and extremely exclusive contributions on LCD panels hidden in a forest of commercial expressions. In regard to the first category, the recent work of Seeper and the Graffiti Research Lab have been mentioned on this blog before. These examples are mainly based on a technological frontier in light technology. Examples in the second category are Pipilotti Rist’s ‘Open My Glade’ and William Kentridge’s ‘Shadow Procession’. In this case, video art is about an artistic frontier — a new medium at a new place.

More than 80 video works, initiatives, organizations and artists from The Netherlands and abroad are described in this book. The moving images enrich, transform or mask the public space and inject the city with a healthy dose of imagination.

But is video art great because it’s video art? As concluded in the book, still a lot of video projects focus on the medium itself. The interactive and innovative status of video art makes companies and governments interested. Using video in public space, these institutions try to lift up their creative and innovative image, which sometimes turns video art into a gadget. Or as Allan Kaprow said in 1974, “until video is used as indifferently as the telephone, it will remain a pretentious curiosity”.

This point emphasizes the need of the publication ‘Pixels and Places’ as a thorough investigation separating projects with a real cultural significance from the hopeless efforts. Video art in general has been suffering from its freedom and status of being a form of avant-garde art, which generally means that criticizing its output is swept away with arguments about conceptual understanding.

With the new works that were mentioned above, video art has developed beyond this avant-garde status. As Schreuder explains, new reasons for using video art in public space are emerging. For instance creating a wonderful experience, or facilitating community understanding. Which means that video art as a discipline has reached a critical point. Therefore I believe it’s not a coincidence that this book is published right at this moment in history. There’s a lot more to discover in the field of video and the technical possibilities and affordability will rise. According to Schreuder, this discipline will develop even more into a natural component of regular urban spaces.

The book tells us in the first place what video art was meant to be by its makers by reconstructing the initial ideas behind it. Here, Schreuder distinguishes three different varieties of context and meaning. First, video art as a museum activity. Public space here is seen a a new platform for artisticly autonomous art. Second, a street art-based discourse in which video art connects critically with its surrounding. Third, video art as a modern form of a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ — a close collaboration between artists, architects and urbanists exists.

Speculating on the position of the built environment, it’s realistic to state that architecture is slowly changing into a canvas. Buildings get dressed up with a flexible layer of images and information, and facades in contemporary architecture become changeable and interactive, being a platform for cultural exploration and exposition. Video is used to comment on architecture and to reveal inconsequences, ugliness and boringness in the built environment. Above all, it sets great experiences and will develop even more.

Pixels and Places: Video Art in Public Space (2009)
Catrien Schreuder, Jorinde Seijdel, Noud Heerkens
NAi Publishers
Design: Kummer en Herrman
Hardback, 160 pages, 16.7 x 23 cm.

For years Niemann has been working successfully as an illustrator and graphic designer in New York City. He used to design covers for the The New York Times and is known for his distinctive and subtly humorous illustrations. Besides that he runs the Abstract City blog on the New York Times website.

“Designed to not only delight palates, but also evoke emotion and stimulate the senses, the three design concepts – Lunar Eclipse (bowl), Fama (long plate) and Bocado de Luz (serving plate) demonstrate how unobtrusive new functions can be incorporated into familiar objects to dynamically alter the sensory experience during a meal. The simple act of placing food on the plates or pouring liquid into the bowl triggers sensory stimuli and causes them to react.”

Feeding the Senses (check the animation at the website) is a form of multi-sensorial gastronomy. Philips Design has explored how the integration of light, conductive printing, selective fragrance diffusion, micro-vibration and a host of other integrations of sensory stimuli could affect the eating experience in subtle ways.

Last summer I came across a ‘Bratwurst’ selling girl close to subway station Frankfurter Allee, in the district of Friedrichshain, Berlin. Observing her for a couple of minutes, her business seemed to be running quite well. Which surprised me, as it was incredibly hot that day, and every single fibre in my body shouted for lemonade instead of a hot fat ‘Bratwurst mit Senf’. But each culture needs its abnormality and the girl didn’t seem to suffer from the heat, thanks to the umbrella that’s part of the installation. The ‘Wurstel’ that cost € 1,20 are freshly prepared on a special feather light electric grill hanging around the girl’s neck, electricity is provided by a generator on her back, while a cool box keeps the sausages fresh. The walking grill is hosted by a brand called Wurst König.

Throughout history moveable retail has always been more important than it is now. Already in ancient times, the city was a central place were the vendors of food had to come to, due to a high concentration of people. Food came to the customer. Being a youngster, I used to live in a small rural village in the very north of The Netherlands. The village didn’t have any serious shops, but the so-called ‘SRV man’ came by with his truck on Mondays and Thursdays for home-to-home elementary deliveries. The shop came to the people and each time he dropped by, something was happening in our street. People came out of their front doors and started having little chats. The ‘SRV man’ was the entrepreneur, servant, deliverer, and driver of the bus at the same time. Somewhere in the history of Western Europe we decided collectively that the customers are the ones that have to travel, and not the vendors. Don’t ask me why, but retail became more and more attached to place, with IKEA as most significant example. IKEA occupies a huge location somewhere in the ‘Edge City’, and becomes a true, almost touristic attraction on a regional scale, even causing its own weekend traffic jams in the middle of nothing.

Moving retail concepts from the past are gone, and I’m the last to speak about revitalizing those. But I’m fascinated by the question what moveable retail will look like in the future, within a market economy that depends on the power of demand?

The walking grill is the corporate version of traditional sidewalk merchandising. Sidewalk merchandising is a clever system of personal initiatives seeking clients while adapting a custom strategy each minute when necessary. In Moscow, the old Russian woman with a little table in front to sell raspberries grabbed my attention. More flexible than that is hardly possible, although she might not earn that much. In Milan, a daily spectacle is caused by the street vendors selling imitation Louis Vuitton and Prada bags. That’s illegal, and somehow the Italian police considers this incredible crime as a priority. As soon as the Carabinieri arrive the vendors immediately fold their blankets and start running into a subway station. Very entertaining. The point I want to make here is that all this action makes our cities great places full of human interaction.

One step higher, in the domain of kiosks, we find a lot of new formulas trying to widen the range of products that can be sold in flexible spaces. The founder of KiosKiosk in London wants to address the difficulties young creatives have to deal with when starting a company in London. For instance, retail space is barely affordable. Another pretty example is the Salakauppa in Helsinki which stands for ’secret shop’. This is the place where designers Aamu Song and Johan Olin sell their products, ranging from fashion to furniture and books. Right on the street, in a kiosk.

More profound and corporate are the pop-up stores that have emerged during last years as an urban trend. Interesting here is that also these shops follow their customers, while already having an online customer base that can be informed about new location. The position of the brand is strong enough to attract curious clients to the most unusual but inspiring places. One of the biggest pop-up stores is Puma City, a Puma flagship store that traveled the world along with the Volvo Ocean race, visiting raw harbor areas around the globe. Puma City is a three level indoor-outdoor structure, consisting of 24 steel shipping containers. Designed by New York-based architecture office LOT-EK, the flexible building acts as a store, lounge and mobile home base. The structure is designed to be easily taken apart, shipped and reassembled anywhere in the world.

The future of retail will be in flexibility. To serve a new generation of customers, entrepreneurs have to be keen on finding the right patterns of their clients. The current Internet provides another place-related dimension here. Kogi Korean BBQ, for instance, is a Korean taco restaurant on wheels. Kogi sells its food primarily from two trucks moving from place to place in the Los Angeles metropolis. The people of Kogi set up a Twitter channel in order to inform customers about where to find them… with a load of followers already.

“The City of New York is improving the way it provides information and transparency to citizens. But delivering great information requires great tools. The NYC BigApps Competition will reward the developers of the most useful, inventive, appealing, effective, and commercially viable applications for delivering information from the City of New York’s NYC.gov Data Mine to interested users.”

To me, the winners are somehow surprising, especially when taking the other apps into account. Although I didn’t try the winning WayFinder app yet and although the interface is pretty, I believe other competitors created more useful applications. The mean reason is the fact that the same service is already provided by Nearest Subway, a corporately developed application using Augmented Reality technology. I never understand why governmental organizations in general oftentimes want to reinvent such private initiatives for themselves. This proves a ‘me too’ mentality which mostly leads to sadly failure in the phase of real implementation.

Although the developed apps are interesting enough to spend government money on, somehow they show to be pretty much the same. They’re generally about finding something in public space, whether it’s about schools, trees, or subway stations, these services are technically pretty much comparable. To be honest I expected more creativity. Taxihack, a cabdrivers evaluation app that won the second price is a positive exception. It combines customer opinions and collectively shared information. I may be wrong, but I heard Amsterdam (the city that is world-famous for its impolite cabdrivers) is also busy developing such a service.

“Taxihack allows users to post live comments on NYC taxis and their drivers via email (alert@taxihack.com) or Twitter. Users send messages to the system, including either the medallion number (like 1A23) or the driver’s number (located on the driver’s id visible in the backseat).”

To some extent this project fits with Partizan Publik’s Moonshine Bus developments that are taking place here, around our headquarters at the Staalvilla in North Amsterdam. The Moonshine Bus is a former city bus from Cologne that will be transformed into a mobile coffee and sandwich bar, night club, exhibition room, lecture hall, flexible workspace, cinema, and illegal brewery. The bus is expected to open this Spring. We’ll keep you posted!

“Hemeroscopium is for the Greek the place where the sun sets, an allusion to a place that exists only in our mind, in our senses. It is constantly moving and mutable, but is nonetheless real. It is enclosed, delimited and suggested by the horizon, though it is defined by light and only takes place in a precise moment of time.”

To me it would have been equally great when the house would have been introduced as a collection of concrete elements carefully arranged into a gorgeous home. But somehow architects need concepts, therefore I like the comments on Tropolism that call the building post-OMA. The villa is prefabricated and constructed in one day as you can see in the video below.

A few years ago I earned my living by working for people who needed help in their household – because of their age and/or their physical condition. Shopping, cleaning, watching TV, many cups of tea, and… a joint now and then! One of the ladies I worked for had Multiple Sclerosis (MS), and in order to relieve the pain in her muscles she was allowed to smoke medical cannabis. For medical reasons cannabis is available on doctor’s prescription in Holland, just like in California. Talking about the quality of this stuff, she claimed that regular cannabis was much better. “Have a look in that closet”, she said…

It was amazing — the closet revealed two sealed bags of approximately 100 grams each, filled with marihuana! This is pretty much and will cost close to 700 euros when buying it in a normal coffeeshop. To my obvious question where she got it from, the answer was surprising and stunning at the same time. These huge green bags originated from a mate of hers who lived in the same nursing home, revealing a network of cannabis dealers within the walls of this building! Thus illegal green connections not only exist among the mob, but also among decent elderly people, and finally we get to understand why old people sit together playing cards, bingo and shuffle board games the whole day… they are just doing business!

According to Ridder, the idea of the project is to show that you need others to go ahead in your life. On his trip Tjerk collects ‘fresh resolutions’ from the people who give him and his caravan a lift. These personal good intentions are conserved the old fashioned way in tin cans, and given to people as a present for their kindness and as a memory of their fresh resolutions. The expiration date is printed on the can and represents the date by which the resolution should be realized.

While traveling, Tjerk writes songs in order to produce a new guitar album when returning. The route and progress of this trip can be checked here. Updates about experiences are collected on a blog, on Flickr and on Twitter. One can support the caravan trailer experiment by donating, by pulling the caravan through Germany or by hiring Tjerk for a special travel story concert when he’s back. There’s also the possibility of buying the songs he makes produces while traveling, for every chosen amount of money.

Recently Tjerk presented at Pecha Kucha Night Volume 16 in Cologne. Hereby we’d like to invite him for our Pecha Kucha Night Amsterdam as well. For now good luck and we hope to see you soon!

“As designers, we all strive to build products that will be relevant 50 years from now. But, since none of us knows what that future will really look like, design flexibility and reusability is essential. You might think of Grid beam as a structural glue that allows us to mix, match and mate different technologies together in new ways. This means that all of the components and custom parts that we make, or purchase and use together, share the same hole spacing as the Grid beam. This creates maximum parts interchangeability and design flexibility.”

The Grid Beam design group is an accomplishment of Buckminster Fuller’s challenge (“Good hardware is one of the few irrefutable proofs of clear thought”) and largely inspired by the ideas and techniques presented in Ken Isaacs’ book ‘How To Build Your Own Living Structures’, which is available in our online library. The great advantage of this system is the fact that it’s very simple to use. It doesn’t require any special hubs or connectors to make a strong frame.

To me, the Grid Beam system looks like the Meccano construction set that my father used to play with when he was young. I never really did, but heard a lot of good stories about it. I preferred to spend the long, dark Dutch weekends with Lego. In addition, I owned a hardly used set of Sio Montage — another almost forgotten construction set for kids.

In 2008, a book about Grid Beam was published, containing a collection of constructions produced using the system. One of the authors, Phil Jergenson, is one of the main developers of the grid beam building system. The other authors, Richard Jergenson (who’s been playing around with Grid Beam since 1977) and Wilma Keppel are convinced users.

“Based on the simplest form of giving someone directions (pointing) it lets you share the places you love, or tells you about the places others love. When the signpost is live it constantly turns and shows the distance and direction to new Good Things. Submit your favorite cafe, an upcoming concert or a rare record store and the signpost will automatically turn in the right direction and the giant LED screen will light up.”

Nevertheless, the funny thing is that the crane itself is controlled by crane drivers, in a room, behind a bunch of monitors. “There we get the title, description, location and through some mapping magic we find out the direction and distance. When the Good Thing is ready we push it up on the signpost and turn it in the right direction.” You would have expected something more innovative. Watch the video below to see the thing in action.

Soundpiece should transform the Schouwburgplein into the cultural foyer of Rotterdam. It connects the different spaces in which Rotterdam’s cultural life takes place by facilitating audio snapshots of the city’s cultural program. This implies a lot of upcoming performances on Soundpiece that are streamed from activities that already take place in theaters, clubs and festivals in the city. Soundpiece creates an own program of interesting audio experiences. There’s an open call for artists and other sound performers to contribute  and get heard by a massive and broad audience. Applications and ideas could be sent to soundpiece@rotterdamfestivals.nl.

Great about this project is the way public space is programmed in an a-physical way. A new layer (this time not augmented) of experience, emotion and meaning is introduced at a prominent spot in the city. Soundpiece will be launched during the annual Rotterdam Film Festival.

“Using video-tracking technology that exchanges pattern markers for augmented 3D animations, Hungry Hungry Eat Head is a fun and playful experience for the wider public to engage with – and the first time this technology had been used at any of the UK towns and cities in the expanding Big Screen network. By relaying a live overhead camera feed of the public space upon the 25-metre square LED monitor, the effect is that of a ‘magic mirror’ where the viewer’s own reflection shifts and changes before their eyes. Markers were distributed on site during the event and by holding these up facing outwards, the heads of participants were replaced by grinning monsters, spotted frogs and a strange array of abstract creatures.”

In 1938, Johan Huizinga published the book ‘Homo Ludens‘ about ‘the playing man’. The book by the Dutch historian discusses the importance of the play element in culture and society. The theory of situationists such as Huizinga and Constant Nieuwenhuys are often used in predictions of a future in which man will be able to spend all energy and time in creativity and fun within a societal context of a complete mechanical production process where no time and effort of labor are needed. Related to these predictions we often reported about ‘Age of Experience’, as a speculation for the future city beyond the Creative Age. This rather decadent concept quietly seems to become a huge discourse in contemporary urban practice, which leads to a stream of projects to improve urban space. Additionally, Volkswagen launched the Fun Theory, a series of great projects with the purpose to use the fun element in getting people to do things better. Huizinga was quite right in his observation. Will we become Homo Ludens?

Childress about his preparations:

“I used Google Earth to check out the views from several large buildings in downtown Raleigh, N.C.  Since none of the letters could fall on areas that were inaccessible by foot, the requirements for the vantage point were very specific.  I finally found the perfect spot – the top of the Clarion hotel.  Luckily, the Clarion has a restaurant that is open to the public on the top floor. I went up one afternoon and snapped some pics for reference.”

Read the whole story here.