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25-08-09 // MONU #11 - CLEAN URBANISM

Do we simply have to stop having sex to produce Clean Urbanism - i.e. an urbanism that is dedicated to minimizing both the required inputs of energy, water, and food for a city as well as its waste output of heat, air pollution as CO2, methan, and water pollution, Samo Pedersen asks in his piece “Sci-fi greenery..or just Responsibility?”. In fact Randall Teal sees the growing world population frequently ignored in discussions on sustainability, as he points out in his article “Coming Clean: Owning Up to the Real Demands of a Sustainable Existence”. Fewer people spend less energy, and as the gas and oil supply will come to an end sooner or later, saving energy may be a cheaper and smarter solution for cities than depending on renewable energies, as Gerd Hauser, one of the leading researcers on the implementation of the EU Directive on Energy Performance of Buildings, explains in an interview with us, entitled “Domes over Manhatten”. Although sustainability has recently become a cache misère for our lack of intent, a trendy make-up hiding our incompetence, with Clean Urbanism being its apotheosis as Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia (WAI) maintain in their contribution “Rendering the Clean”, energy self-sufficient cities are technically possible as Gerd Hauser states and explains using a five-point manifesto. Greg Keeffe and Simon Swietochowski support that view by introducing their “Bio-Port” project, a vision of a “Free Energy City” set in Liverpool, where the old dockyards have been transformed into bio-productive algae farms. Furthermore, the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) illustrates in its project “Zeekracht – The North Sea Masterplan” how wind farms could be clustered along an Energy Super-Ring in the North Sea, distributing national surpluses and supplying regional energy needs efficiently and profitably. On the other hand, Clean Urbanism cannot only be understood from a purely technocratic perspective, but also needs a social one as Claudio Astudillo Barra articulates in his article “Regenerative Ecologies – A Prototypical Approach to the Territory”, introducing Felix Guattari’s ideas of ecosophy. On such social aspects Rogier van den Berg focuses in his piece on “The Cooperative City”, where a community is created that triggers individual initiative and the cooperation of its users to generate collective values. The Cooperative City requires a flexible plan with an open end that is only guided by one set of rules, described by Bryan Norwood and the Jackson Community Center as “Mania: An Emergent Sustainability of Density and Intensity”, created by the disorganized, hyperactivity of an actualized system with no specified, singular goal, a bottom-up phenomenon that emerges from the individual events of architecture within the city, combined with the ideology of urbanism conceived as anti-capitalism and anti-homogenization. It is mania, and mania is clean. (Editorial by Bernd Upmeyer)

More information can be found on www.monu-magazine.com


11-06-09 // FUTURE MAGAZINE #16/17



BOARD's price winning design for the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn has been published in the Madrid based Future Magazine #16/ 17.


27-05-09 // BUILDING FOR BOUWKUNDE - OPEN TO IDEAS



BOARD' proposal with the title 241 has been selected out of 466 entries in the Open International Ideas Competition Building for Bouwkunde to be published in the "Building for Bouwkunde - Open to Ideas" book and is being exhibited at the NAi exhibition Building for Bouwkunde from March 15, 2009 - June 7, 2009.

The jury reported: "This entry is an intelligent and simple project, featuring a formula of two buildings in one. It is an example of a dynamic high-rise, in which sufficient attention has been given to issues of sustainability. The design proposal has potential for rich spatial development."


13-02-09 // FUTURE MAGAZINE #15

The Bureau of Architecture, Research and Design (BOARD) has been published among offices such as OMA and MVRDV in the Rotterdam issue of the Madrid based Future Magazine #15.

There is no love at first sight when it comes to urbanism. With cities you fall in love at second sight. The city of Rotterdam is a great example for this. Second sight is probably the only way to fall in love with it anyhow, as its beauty is hidden, but its ugliness famous and a fixed fact in people's heads. For a long time it has suffered under the beauty of its urban competitor - the picturesque Amsterdam. If Amsterdam is the Beauty, Rotterdam is the Beast. But there is one group of people, who has always seen the handsome prince in the beast: architects. Since the early 1990's, Rotterdam has become the worldwide hotbed for architects and urban planners. When you are a fashion designer, you want to be in Antwerp or Paris, but if you are an architect, there is only one place: Rotterdam. (Bernd Upmeyer's statement on Rotterdam published on page 13)


06-02-09 // MONU #10 - HOLY URBANISM

Can the view on cities get any bigger than through religion? Probably not. But we believe that a magazine on urbanism such as MONU, that appears only twice a year, can never have a too open perspective. Although the picture in this issue is big, and the contributions are diverse and have different focuses, one thing can be found that runs through almost this entire issue on Holy Urbanism. It is the convinction that Holy Urbanism in the contemporary city does not appear, and is not created any longer, merely by religion itself, but rather by a crossbreed of religion and economy. How such Holy Urbanism can be produced is explained by Daniel Hadley, for example, through the City Creek Center in Salt Lake City that quite clearly defies the dichotomy between market and temple cities, in his article “A Mormon Megaproject”. Thus, the City Creek Center is designed to be a centre of consumerism and economic production, whose purpose, nevertheless, is to ensure vitality in front of the nearby Temple Square. Sacred and commercial spaces seem increasingly to coalesce and create a kind of Foucaultian Heterotopia, an environment that is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces and several sites that are in themselves incompatible, as Colin Davies points out in his contribution “The Sacred and the Holy: Transient Urban Spaces”. Peter Dorsey in his piece “Strata and Sound: The Adhan as an Urban Operating Procedure” argues that contemporary Holy Urbanism is flourishing especially at places where religion is creating a hybrid together with capitalism. As an example he mentions the Lakewood Church Central Campus in Houston, Texas that can seat more than 16.000 worshipers, adapting efficiently into a spectacle-based environment by satisfying multiple consumer appetites simultaneously. In the Nigerian city of Lagos the hybridisation processes of religion and the market have even transformed the urban space itself into a battlefield, in a free market where religion is a commodity to sell and an urban survival strategy, as Emeka Udemba concludes in his “God is a Nigerian”. Within such a capitalistic realm, religious buildings follow an increasingly territorial logic that is similar to capitalistic corporations or franchises such as McDonald’s or Starbucks. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, for example, standardized the design of their temples and thus created a generic network of identical buildings that are spread out - Starbucks-like - all over the planet, as Jesse LeCavalier illustrates in his article “The Mormon Church’s Infrastructure of Salvation”. Carolyn Sponza, in her contribution “Drive-Through-Religion”, even states that in the United States, planning a church and a shopping mall always begins with the same capitalistic question – how much parking the site can accommodate. Such an attitude leads in a lot of cases to the design of big box, Ikea-like, building types that are perfectly located along a suburban highway. But religious big boxes nevertheless - though convenient and visible - force visitors to seek them out, park their cars, and walk toward their front doors. And if you don’t think it’s for you, you can keep driving along the highway until the next big box containing another religion grabs your attention. Such Holy Urbanism promotes religious choice and makes multi-religious spaces possible that are flexible as pieces of fashion, as empty spaces for inter-religious dialogue that incarnate the belief in a multi-faith society and allow for openness, and heterogeneity as Karen Crequer reveals in her piece “Sacred Beauties”. (Editorial by Bernd Upmeyer)

More information can be found on www.monu-magazine.com


19-10-06 // WORK, NOT LOVE Contribution for 'The Metropolis Issue' of Amsterdam's streetfashion magazine CODE #4. Buy "Work, not Love" T-shirt at Tokyo's BeamsT Shop.



What draws people into cities? Is it love or is it work? Some say that there is more hunger for love and appreciation in this world than there is for bread. But cities are growing and shrinking simply depending on whether there is work, or not. A city is never beautiful by default, but perceived as beautiful to the extent to which you like the job you have in the city. Once you have found work, all other romantic ideas about cities fall in a simple order: work, love, house... Everybody has experienced at least once in his or her lifetime, that when you move to a city only for love, your stay is most likely limited. But once you have found your professional path, anything is possible. There is no love at first sight when it comes to urbanism. With cities you fall in love at second sight.