May 2012
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Failed Architecture #7: Fascinated By Failure
For the 7th edition of the Failed Architecture debate and talk show, on May 9 in De Verdieping/ TrouwAmsterdam, we had chosen a somewhat provocative title to evoke the discussion we wanted to have. By naming it “Ruin Porn”, we wanted to take a step back from what we have done in previous editions – which is analyzing cases of architecture and built environment regarded as failures – and address...
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FA-mobile: Rotterdam - Zalmhaven, May 20
After traveling to a.o. Belgrade, Copenhagen and Sofia the FA-mobile team will organise a one-day workshop on the case of Zalmhaven in Rotterdam on 20th May, as part of the conference ‘Prototyping futures / Occupying the present’ (find more info below).[[MORE]]
Prototyping Futures / Occupying the Present is a three-day conference with workshops initiated by the Piet Zwart Institute,...
April 2012
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FA #7 May 9 | Ruin Porn: The Beauty of Failure
Waiting Hall, Michigan Train Station. By Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre ©Galerie Fontana Fortuna, Amsterdam
Talks and Q&A | Wednesday May 9 | 20:00h | English | 5 euro
With a.o.: Hans Aarsman (photodetective), Rob Funcken (photgrapher), Kim Bouvy (artist) and Jarrik Ouburg (architect). Hosts: Michiel van Iersel, Mark Minkjan and Tim Verlaan (Failed Architecture)
In previous editions of...
March 2012
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FA-mobile: Belgrade from April 2 - 6
Savamala streetscape, Belgrade
Failed Architecture is coming to Belgrade, from April 2 - 6, for a workshop focusing on the Savamala neighbourhood, in collaboration with KC Grad. Please join us for a week of urban exploring and co-creation.
The makeup and dynamics of our cities are continuously subject to changing demographics, market forces, political volatility, aesthetic preferences,...
February 2012
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EXCAVATING THE FUTURE
St. Peter’s Seminary, Cardross.
Le Corbusier never had one of his designs built in the UK, but the closest thing to a British Corbusian building might be St. Peter’s Seminary in Cardross, Schotland. The building was designed by the Gillespie Kidd & Coia office and completed in 1966. One of head architects, Isi Metzstein, died last month, something I only found out after visiting the site last...
November 2011
2 posts
How buildings kill and get lost
In previous editions of Failed Architecture, it was often not without question whether a building or part of the built environment was failed. To whom is it failed and in what sense? Is it not possible to rejuvenate or reuse a piece of architecture? Many of the cases discussed were not failed per se but perhaps subject to certain shortcomings or unexpected outcomes – they deviously evolved from...
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Failed Architecture #6: Concrete Failures
Talks and Q&A | Wednesday November 23 | English | 3,50 Euro In the sixth edition of Failed Architecture, we will focus on the more concrete, technical and practical failures of architecture. Which seemingly clever building technologies or materials have turned out to have unforeseen negative implications for the inhabitants, users, repairmen and janitors? Which types of buildings are more...
October 2011
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Participating in Sofia Architecture Week 2011
We have been invited by Ljubo Georgiev, co-curator of the Sofia Architecture Week 2011, to contribute to this year’s edition of this annual festival. It will take place between the 1st and the 6th of November and runs under the theme Architecture Unlimited?. SAW11 will deal with the extent, in which architecture can (still) function as a transformative tool for the urban environment in...
Don't blame the architect
Ever since the riots in Great Britain broke out in the first week of August, media and experts have been discussing the relation between architecture and social behaviour. During our fifth edition on the 5th of October we discussed this theme from historical, sociological and planning perspectives.
Obviously, social unrest tends to concentrate in urban environments. Rioting and the city have...
September 2011
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Failed Architecture #5: riots and architecture
Talks and Q&A | Wednesday October 5 | starts 20.00h | English | 2,50 Euro
At De Verdieping with: Dennis Bos, Robert Grimm and Arnold Reijndorp
During the 5th edition of our series of talkshows and public discussions we will focus on the riots that recently took place in London and quickly spread to other cities in England, leaving several people killed, dozens of people injured and...
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30 SEP: Failed Architecture in Copenhagen
On the occasion of the national Day of Architecture on 30 September 2011 the Danish Network for Young Planners (Netværk for yngre planlæggere) invites Failed Architecture to Copenhagen. As the fourth in a series of similar events we will discuss criteria (‘benchmarks’) for quality and failure in modernist housing estates in an international East/West perspective.
To make the event...
August 2011
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Architecture experts talk about the UK riots
Rather inevitably, discussion among the architectural community this week has focused on the UK riots and the question of whether the cities we have been building have contributed to social breakdown. The opinions on the role of architecture differ widely. Here’s an overview of what some people had to say.
Owen Hatherley, journalist and writer, Verso Books Blog:
“What I...
July 2011
2 posts
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Detroit Wild City: reborn center or dying heart?
French filmmaker Florent Tillon’s 2010 documentary Detroit Wild City (Detroit ville sauvage) offers a poetic portrait of the dystopian ‘Motor City’ where ‘grass is growing in parking lots’ and building after building is crumbling apart. The film shows suffocating images of the Renaissance Center, one of the world’s largest office complexes and Ford’s...
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Architectural failure as a matter of politics
The third edition of our series of FA-discussions on Wednesday, June 15 at De Verdieping, a cultural project space located in an abandoned printing plant in Amsterdam, covered three different examples of fiercely debated architecture; buildings that were or are doomed to fail due to their location in the built environment, their time of conception and usability.
Maybe the most famous Dutch...
May 2011
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Failed Architecture #3: black architecture
Talks and Q&A | Wednesday June 15 | starts 20.00h | English | 2,50 Euro
With a.o.: Ana Souto, Paul Groenendijk & Maja...
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Failed Architecture at Skopje Architecture Week
Failed Architecture will be co-hosting a public debate during the Skopje Architecture Week on Friday June 3. We were invited by Ljubo Georgiev, architect and speaker at the last Failed Architecture event in Amsterdam. In his role as curator of the coming Sofia Architecture Week in Bulgaria in November 2011, Ljubo was invited by the organization in Skopje to contribute to this annual event. Given...
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More repentance wanted in assessing modernist...
Are we too quick in assessing post war architecture as failed? That was the question that dominated the second edition of the Failed Architecture series on the 20th of April at De Verdieping / TrouwAmsterdam.
At least a hundred people listened to how five speakers gave their views on how our contemporary taste influences the assessment of modernist architecture. The diverse backgrounds of the...
April 2011
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Failed Architecture #2: Almere to Zagreb
Detroit. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Talks and Q&A | Wednesday April 20 | Starts 20.00h | English | 2,50 Euro
Failed Architecture is a new series of talkshows with presentations by various experts and public discussions that focus on buildings and urban environments that failed to stand the test of time and are currently neglected, abandoned or even vandalized or demolished, because...
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Failed Architecture #1: Preservation as a matter...
Anthony Tung sees the preservation of our built environment as a struggle between competing interests, which has to be decided yet. In a detailed and extensive lecture the author (of Preserving the World’s Great Cities, 2001) and former New York City preservation commissioner elaborated on the importance of preservation, and the different approaches to heritage in Europe and the United...
The downfall of British Modernist architecture
On the 16th of May 1968 a gas explosion led to the collapse of an entire corner of the recently opened Ronan Point council estate in Newham, East London. The responsible council tenant, Ivy Hodge, set of a domino effect of buckling flats by trying to light her stove in her 18th floor apartment. While Miss Hodge miraculously survived, four others died and seventeen were injured.
The accident led...
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London's Worst Building
25 Ridgmount Street, LondonI was recently asked to contribute to Failed Architecture - a series of talks and public discussions that focuses on buildings and urban environments that have failed to stand the test of time. Whilst my initial thought was to be preemptive and suggest London’s Orbit Tower - an embarrassing project that serves no purpose other than to warn people away from...
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Making Amends, Priory Green Estate
When first seeing this photo (courtesy of Courtauld Institute of Art), I thought it was from somewhere former Soviet Union, or so. Finding out it was something called “Priory Green Estate”, a rather prestigiously titled housing area in Islington, UK, from the 1950’s (architect Berthold Lubetkin), made me instantly more curious about how Soviet it would look today. While this, was mainly due to...
March 2011
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March 30: Kick-off FA-talks with Anthony Tung
Failed Architecture is starting a new series of talks and public discussions that kicks off on March 30 at De Verdieping in Amsterdam with writer and urbanist Anthony M. Tung. De Verdieping is the cultural basement and fringe programme in the building Trouw-building, an abandoned printing plant on Amsterdam’s most Berlin-like street that is now home to restaurant and club TrouwAmsterdam.
...
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“Failed urban structures threaten our culture’s great achievements:...”
– Errik Buursink, urban planner and publicist
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“Failed architecture means listening to ego or current fancies and lose sight of...”
– Bob Knoester, graduate student in Human Geography / Urban Geographies at University of Amsterdam
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“I’m not sure architecture can be said to “fail”; it simply...”
– Simon Gunn, Professor of Urban History and Director of the Centre for Urban History at the University of Leicester.
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“Failed architecture is architecture that tries to be ‘iconic’, while...”
– Jan Loerakker, graduate student in architecture at Delft University of Technology
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The Rebuilding of a 'Hornet's Nest'
House of the Soviets, before its paint job
Architecture is the perfect means to an end for those in power to express their authority. A new architecture can symbolize the dawning of a new era. The symbolism of space and its relation to power plays a decisive role here, as may be exemplified by the 1969 deliberate destruction of the Königsberger Schloss in present day Kaliningrad, Russia.
Who...
February 2011
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"destroying and sabotaging architecture"
In the Wall Street Journal, architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable called attention to the problems facing the preservation of many mid-20th century modernist structures:
It’s time to stop worrying about whether New York has enough “starchitecture” and consider the ways in which we are destroying and sabotaging the architecture we already have through neglect, ignorance,...
December 2010
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The Nazis and US are gone, but the devil stays
All that is left from the former listening station (photo by the author)
Berlin is dotted with historically significant structures. Many of them, however, come with gift shops and hordes of tourists. Some do not, like the Teufelsberg.
The artificial hill, rising 80m above the green surroundings in the west of the city, was created by the Allies of World War II using the rubble of the ruined...
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NYTimes writes about new Spanish ghost towns
“The boom and bust of Spain’s property sector is astonishing. Over a decade, land prices rose about 500 percent and developers built hundreds of thousands of units — about 800,000 in 2007 alone. Developments sprang up on the outskirts of cities ready to welcome many of the four million immigrants who had settled in Spain, many employed in construction… But almost overnight, the...
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Reading tip: Untimely Ruins
“American ruins have become increasingly prominent, whether in discussions of “urban blight” and home foreclosures, in commemorations of 9/11, or in postapocalyptic movies. In this highly original book, Nick Yablon argues that the association between American cities and ruins dates back to a much earlier period in the nation’s history. Recovering numerous scenes of urban desolation—from...
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Sink Estate or Slum of the Future?
Robin Hood Gardens in east London, designed by Peter and Alison Smithson (Photo: Sublime Photography)
Robin Hood Garden is a council housing complex in east London designed by architects Alison and Peter Smithson and completed in 1972. The plans to demolish the complex and replace it with a new one are surrounded by controversy and many fear for history to repeat itself once more when the...
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Failed architecture ≠ failed life
Taken from flickr
What exactly is the link between poor housing and social problems?
Here is a very interesting extract from a comment on the Building Design website:
“As for the general assumption that housing stock causes disadvantage and social problems, that isn’t borne out by much actual evidence. According to a recent study in the UK, moving to an area with less crime and poverty...
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November 2010
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Tirana: historic traumas and growing pains
Tirana is the capital and the largest city of Albania. Modern Tirana was founded as an Ottoman town in 1614. After World War II the communists seized power, under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, developing socialist-styled apartment complexes and factories and destroying some of the oldest and culturally and historically most significant buildings and urban fabric.
Statues of Stalin and Lenin...
September 2010
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“In a global groundswell of revulsion, one particular genre has escaped the...”
– Architect Rem Koolhaas’s on preservation - its expanding territories, increasing demands, and unforeseen side effects - on the occasion of the 12th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.
Read Rem Koolhaas’s full text here
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