Soft Urbanism @ University of the Arts Berlin

The way people communicate and connect around the world today, is being radically redefined by digitalization.
With the acceleration of digitization as one of the most obvious consequences of the pandemic, the use of digital tools is experiencing an unprecedented rise among arts and cultural institutions and practices.

Publication @ tanz Yearbook 2022, Germany, 15 August 2022

Investigating and speculating on the future of social and cultural spaces requires considering physical spaces in combination with digital media networks, emphasizing the hybrid qualities of spaces in the interplay of the digital and the physical.

Publication Hybrid Space @ @ Regeneration [and its Discontents], Lithuanian Architectural Foundation, Vilnius, Lithuania, 4 June 2021

In our globalized world the accelerating speed of socio-political and cultural change collides with the longue-durée of heritage sites and territories. As social and political contexts around places with a public meaning change, controversies often arise.

Publication Re-Charting Places @ Contested Spaces – Concerted Projects: Designs for Vulnerable Memories, Lettera Ventidue Edizioni, Syracuse, Italy, April 2021

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of digital instruments is rapidly increasing.
As the possible consequences of digitization are more sharply outlined, this opens new possibilities for spatial organization.
This urges us to reconsider the guiding principles and models for the urbanization of technology we want to follow and what our city visions are.
We can still choose.

Publication Post COVID-19 City @ KHM #0 Magazine, Academy of Media Arts (KHM), Cologne, Germany, 1 July 2022

Kiez Lab is a hybrid (combined physical-digital) low-threshold cross-sector neighbourhood lab with inclusive co-creative formats to permanently bring local perspectives and civil society experiences into the digital transformation of the City of Berlin.

Publications, Presentation, Lectures & Workshops @ Alliance Digital City Berlin, Marlowes Online Magazin for Architectur and City, Berlin Science Week, Mein Berlin,Utopolis Federal Association for Social Culture, Academy for Media Arts, Berlin Cologne, Stuttgart, 2019-2022

Article “Creative Crossovers: Negotiating Past and Future” in the University of Southern California Public Diplomacy Magazine issue summer 2019.Monuments stand as a tangible testimony to what is untouchable: memory and history in their collective dimension.As vehicles of meaning, monuments are ambassadors affecting the public negotiation of narratives

Article Creative Crossovers @ Public Diplomacy Magazine, University of Southern California, USC Annenberg, USC Centre on Public Diplomacy, USC Masters of Public Diplomacy Program, USA, 7 June 2019

The documentary Fabric presents the history of the building complex that houses today the Athens School of Fine Arts, one the main venues of documenta 14 in Athens. It also narrates a family history that spans more than over 100 years and starting in Cappadocia in Central Anatolia, continues via Beirut and Istanbul (Constantinople) arriving in Athens in the 1920ies.

Documentary Video Fabric @ documenta 14, Athens School of Fine Arts, Peiraios Street 256, Athens, 8 April-17 July 2017

Rethinking design in order to address the changes of our future needs in our increasingly service and knowledge based society and economy.
TRUST2design develops a process-oriented design approach taking into account a multiplicity of cycles such as energy cycles (energy needed for production and transportation, objects as energy converters), the multiple-shift usage but also lifecycles, recycling, etc..

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

Interview with Hybrid Space Lab by the STRELKA Institute in Moscow for the Future Urbanism project  – forty one interviews with contemporary writers, architects, sociologists, economists and city planners“Future Urbanism” project.Together with our interlocutors we searched for evidence, we questioned facts, we extrapolated from past discoveries, we speculated about hidden patterns, we looked for clues at a messy and distorted “crime scene” that is contemporary city, in order to find answers to the whole range of unsettling questions.

Interview Future Urbanism @ Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, Moscow, 15 December 2013

The merging of the three separate Dutch institutes forarchitecture, design and media, into a new hybrid institute.
Taking place today is an even more radical merger: creative production in its most various forms of expressions – whether music, graphic design, architecture, object design, video, etc. – is supported by a single tool, the computer.
This universal instrument provides a bridge which connects these very different creative fields.

Publication Rebooting Design @ The Design Journal, Volume 15, Issue 4, UK, 5 December 2012

Networked participatory design systems are replacing the logics of the industrial age, where the creative ones designed for the non-creative masses.

Publication Networked Participatory Design @ World Architects, 11 May 2012

Copying is the strategy of cultural evolution.
Cross-fertilization, borrowing other’s ideas and incorporating elements of other’s culture into one’s own is crucial to cultural development.

Lecture Co-Thenticity @ Dutch Design Institute, Beijing Design Week, Beijing, 28 september 2011

Design culture is obsessed with authenticity.
Copying is often deemed reprehensible, and borrowing another’s idea or incorporating elements of his or her work into one’s own is viewed as a sign of creative impoverishment. But is this right?
Hybridization is an evolutionary strategy of cumulative, dynamic cultures that are based on intercultural connections and fostered by cross-fertilization.

Lecture Hybrid Culture @ Beijing Design Week 2011, Dutch Design Foundation, Symposium Copy Culture, 798, Beijing, 27 September 2011

Soft Urbanism stands for an interdisciplinary field that examines the “soft” aspects, the communication aspects, the city and deals with the dynamic interplay between urban development and the area of mass media and communication networks.
Soft Urbanism pursues “softer” planning approaches. Soft urbanism, as a holistic view of urbanity, is of significance to the city in both shrinking and growth regions.

Publication Soft Urbanism @ db Deutsche Bauzeitung, Germany, 1 August 2006

Idensity® is a conceptual tool for researching and developing space in the information/communication age.
To understand the fusions, the superimposition and the interactions of ‘virtual’ media and ‘real’ architectural and urban spaces, the new term ‘idensity®’ replaces the obsolete conventional terms of spatial distinction.

Concept & Research Idensity® © Hybrid Space Lab, Berlin, 5 May 2011

Media networks are influencing and interacting with ‘real’ places. These digital information-communication networks are changing our physical environment and also the social, economic, and cultural organization of our societies in general.

Publication Space of Flows and Space of Places versus Hybrid Space @ Delft University of Technology, Delft School of Design Series on Architecture and Urbanism, Delft, the Netherlands, November 2010

Today, media networks are influencing and interacting with real places. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is radically changing the way we live, interact and perceive our world.
Politics, economics, warfare, culture are increasingly taking place in the spaces of information-communication, media networks.

Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001), who was originally trained as an engineer, worked as an architect in Le Corbusier’s office.
He designed – in co-authorship with Le Corbusier – the vessel containing the Poème, the shell structure of the Philips Pavilion.
Xenakis, was to become an internationally renowned composer, and he continued his research into complex architectural forms and the equally complex ephemeral architectures of music, sound and light.

Publication Hybrid Architectures of Iannis Xenakis @ Conference Poetics of Space, Sonic Acts 2010, Amsterdam, 25 February 2010

Security is a deeply-felt and debated theme: How can we reduce risk and increase the sense of social interaction and identity of social places?
Part of the World Design Capital 2008 and based on Torino case studies and in collaboration with the Torino Integration Policies Department the workshop aims to develop new design thinking models to address these issues.
Safe Space focuses therefore not on singular solutions but on general working tools to tackle these phenomena.

Workshop Safe Space @ World Design Capital, Turin, Italy, 13-20 July 2008

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

The property becomes the interface, the house develops into a “smart”. Network environment. Similar to the car, the connected car, which is not just a project from Microsoft, but has long been a reality.

Interview Social Construction & Technology @ BUGA, Bundesgartenschau 2005, Munich, 1 September 2005

According to the traditional (bourgeois) concept of privacy, identity is based on private individuality. It is, however, important to be aware of the historicity of such a concept.
As John Lukacs writes “Domesticity, privacy, comfort, the concept of the home and of the family are, literally, principal achievements of the Bourgeois Age.”
The notion of the “privy chamber” emerged in 17th century English literature at the same time as new private physical spaces came into being, when the introduction of the corridor layout in English interiors of the 17th century enabled the development of “private quarters.”
But the expression “privy chamber” is also used metaphorically for the soul. The “privy chamber” is the container of (private) identity.

Publication Networked Architecture @ MIT Leonardo Electronic Almanac, ISBN 978-0-9833571-0-0, USA, 1 July 2005

Hybrid Urbanism investigates the transformations of space in the information and communication age and develops and designs hybrid urban and media networks.

Lecture & Publication Idensity: Planning Paradigms for the Information & Communication Age @ CORP 2002 Conference, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, 27 February–1 March 2002

Infodrome is a think tank for the Dutch government in the information society. The objectives of Infodrome are gaining insight into the social consequences of the information revolution , organizing and feeding the public debate about the role of government in this, and advising the government on relevant strategic choices.

Research & Publications @ Infodrome, Thinktank of the Dutch Government, Den Haag, 1 March 2000

Hybrid Space is a new interdisciplinary field of design, researching the transformations of architectural, urban/regional space of the emerging “information age”, explores the dynamic interaction of architecture/urbanism and the space of mass media and communication networks.
Hybrid Space develops scenarios for the interplay of public urban and public media space.

Publication Idensifying® Translocalities @ Kunst NRW.NL, Amsterdam, 1 October 1999

In the aesthetic production of the 20th century, there is a fascinating moment of artistic synergy. An architect, Le Corbusier, conceives an Electronic Poem, an electronic synthesis of visual and acoustic events, and a “vessel containing the poem” [a pavilion] for the Philips corporation presentation at the 1958 Brussels World Fair.

Research, Lectures  & Publications the Architectures of Iannis Xenakis, Synthesis after Le Corbusier, Elizabeth Sikiaridi, © Hybrid Space Lab, Amsterdam, 1 June 1999

Media Babies on CHANEL NO.5 derives its strength from fragmentation in order to develop a truly public “narrow/broadcasting/catching media network. A local-based public interface the “Media Baby” is instrument that seduces its public to use and abuse the television medium, maximizing its possible spontaneity by hijacking the public’s imagination.

Publication Public Media Urban Interfaces @ Lab für Kunst und Apparate, Jahrbuch, ISBN 3-88375-324-6, , Academy for Media Arts, Cologne, Germany, 1 October 1998

The development of Virtual Reality (VR) is closely linked to the exploration of unknown territories. Virtual Reality, slowly emerging since the1920s, really took off in 1966 when NASA introduced this technology for flight simulation systems in its space program. As it was too expensive and too risky to train the astronauts by practising the real thing – launching them into the cosmos – methods had to be developed that could provide the trainees with a simulated experience: a small physical stimulus of acceleration, supported by and combined with visual information, was extrapolated and amplified in a ‘knock-on’ effect by the brains of the astronauts, providing them with the mental environment required to practise for the operation in (real) space.

Publication Virtual Reality @ de Architect, ten Hagen & Stam bv, the Netherlands, June 1998

Public urban space and the “space” of communication networks are usually considered to be competing, even mutually exclusive frameworks for social interaction.  In fact, the traditional functions of public urban space are being taken over by telecommunication networks, their input/output devices implanted in (private) interiors. 

Publication Media & The City @ de Architekt, den Haag, the Netherlands, July 1997
Introduction Harm Tilman, editor in chief @ de Architect, den Haag, the Netherlands, @ de Architect, den Haag, the Netherlands, Juli 1997

Architectural space and structures and the mental spaces and structures of philosophical discourses have always been associated with each other.
The new image of Man looks roughly like this: we have to imagine a network of human interrelations, a ‘field of intersubjective relations’. The strands of this web must be conceived as channels through which information (ideas, feelings, intentions and knowledge etc.) flows. When these strands knot for a moment, they form what we call ‘human subjects’. The totality of the strands constitutes the concrete sphere of life and the knots are abstract extrapolations.

Article Vilém Flusser © Hybrid Space Lab, Berlin, July 1999