Newsletter November 2019

For the German Federal Cultural Foundation we developed Co-Creating Hybrid Culture that addresses the augmenting of physical cultural sites and practices through digital spaces via transdisciplinary co-creating events.

Research & Concept  @ German Federal Cultural Foundation, Halle an der Saale, Germany, 1 April 2021

Concept Development @ German Federal Cultural Foundation, Halle an der Saale, Germany, 1 April 2021

The notion of a circular city has taken to occupy center stage as a main concept for sustainable zero-waste urban futures. And yet, as one takes a closer look, the circle expands in multiple ripples and loops, revealing the sheer complexity that envisioning – let alone developing – circular cities entail.

Lectures, Workshops, Symposium, FieldLab @ Hybrid Space Lab, 2022 – 2024

Convers(at)ions engages creatively with exchanges over border phenomenology and performativity, it transforms negative spaces such as military demarcations and borders by adopting a ‘more-than-human’ perspective and taps into the potential of nature and environmental conservation activities.

ReWild Autobahn proposes a hybrid (natural and artificial) landscape on a dismantled urban highway in Berlin as a green corridor for humans and non-humans.

Grow Your Green City is an international campaign creating awareness of the fundamental role played by urban green. Grow Your Green City is committed to the idea that a Smart City should be a climate-conscious city, exploring how digital and media technologies can contribute to address urban climate adaptation and water-conscious urban development, strengthening and promoting sustainability cultures.

Concept Architecture @ Floriade Almere, The Netherlands, 25 February 2021

In the Anthropocene, the juxtaposition between nature versus artifact and designed environment is becoming obsolete. In the dissolution of this polarity lays a great chance: architecture (which in the allegorical depiction of the Vitruvian Primitive Hut by Marc-Antoine Laugier and Charles Eisen of 1753 had emerged from nature) merges with nature once again.

Water is the necessary resource for life. Human settlements have always been dependent upon access to clean water and its relative scarcity – freshwater makes up only 2.5% of water available on the earth – has awarded it the name ‘blue gold’. If world population increases as expected, hitting the 9 billions threshold by 2050, will water resources be sufficient?

Embassay Lab Water Conscious Fashion, @ Neonyt, Kraftwerk Berlin, 16 January 2019

Recent developments such as Internet of Things, Big Data, and Machine Intelligence have ambition and the potential to algorithmically manage life, including urban nature. These developments in technology and media are supporting the development of a new hybrid architecture where Architecture and Nature fuse: NatureTecture!

GRÜNMANIA decorates the front of the pavilion, transcoding and transcoding the GERMANIA characters. The small “shifts” bring about a transformation of meaning and open up a wide range of ideas: the pavilion is no longer just Germany’s shop window, but a container in which the joint global challenges can be tackled together.

Recent developments such as Internet of Things, Big Data and Machine Intelligence will algorithmically organize life, including urban nature. These developments in technology and media are supporting the development of a new hybrid architecture where architecture and nature fuse.

In the Sisyphus work of the day-to-day struggle for survival of the offices, in the traineeship of the next generation, the crisis of architecture is now directly experienced. Even in the architectural discourse there is a perplexity. Excesses from the crisis are sought through escapades into atmospheres or through bonds from post-bicentenary courses, such as the communication for “architecture pop” or the urbanist in the shrinkage discussion.

Publication Landscape BOTOX @ Stadt+Grün, Germany, September 2006

Transforming the facade of the Humboldt Forum into a living organism.
The special art edition of Der Tagesspiegel, the German newspaper, publishes interview on the changing role of design in times of crisis.

A vertical jungle in a greenhouse pavilion clings to the Berlin Humboldt Forum. A trail leads from the underground to the roof of the Humboldt Forum, opening up stacked gardens and pop-up restaurants dedicated respectively to world flora and world cuisines.

A workshop focusing is the revitalization of the generic Greek modern apartment buildings “polykatoikies”

Poly Garden City is a participative project integrating green into Athens built environment, fusing building and gardens into new hybrid urban typologies, and reinterpreting modernist urban heritage and a strategy for participative climate adaptation for cities in semi-arid climates.

Rethinking design in order to address the changes of our future needs in our increasingly service and knowledge based society and economy.

Research @ Dutch Design Foundation, Premsela Stichting, Amsterdam, 15 June 2015