Features

RSS

Transit City Although Norway normally receives several thousand asylum seekers annually, this year the number of applications has increased to a projected 15,000. Currently, Code partner Henning Kaland explains, refugees are housed in rundown hotel rooms and report to one of approximately 200 asylum reception centers. Although refugees can attend language classes during their application period, “they are basically offered to do nothing for one to two years, waiting to get an answer from our well-developed bureaucracy. This can be a very frustrating period, when people feel insecure about what the future will hold.” Photo: © Benjamin Benschneider Bjarne Ringstad,

Guest editor of RECORD's October 2008 issue, David Sokol, speaks with San Diego architect Teddy Cruz about form, politics, and 'repositioning practice.' David Sokol: In this October’s “The Architect’s Hand” column, RECORD published two of your works. Border Postcard was realized in 2000. This mosaic of photographic fragments collected between Tijuana and San Diego represents how the urban infrastructure of San Diego is recycled into the fabric of Tijuana. A more recent artwork installed at this year’s Venice Biennale, Radicalizing the Local: 60 Miles of Trans-Border Urban Conflict, is a photographic cross-section of the border between these two cities highlighting

Guest editor of RECORD's October 2008 issue, David Sokol, speaks with San Diego architect Teddy Cruz about form, politics, and 'repositioning practice.' DS: How does inserting architecture at these margins manifest itself architecturally, or do you become a politician? TC: That fear of politics and social engineering has generated debate. I think ultimately that’s counter-productive. I feel that the only terrain that can be fertile for experimental architecture needs to be a terrain that is composed of the right sociopolitical and economic conditions. Image courtesy Estudio Teddy Cruz Teddy Cruz with Ana Aleman, Border Postcard: The Tijuana Workshop, 2000. I

Architects have embraced social responsibility longer than the media has acknowledged. In fact, an optimistic view of design’s ability to improve the world has defined great movements in the profession’s history. But only recently has activity in this field and attention from the press reached critical mass. This issue of record considers the flourishing of design with conscience—from isolated instances in the academy to an increasing trend in practice. Image courtesy Urban-Think Tank Urban-Think Tank is working on two vertical gyms for Venezuela’s barrios. Read a profile of the firm in our Humanitarian Design section. Why the explosion? “What may

Bruce Sterling considers the one small voice of socially responsible architecture — and the nefariousness overwhelming it. Do-good architecture is the noble aspiration to better the shelter of mankind. Today it gets a louder hearing than usual, because the housing situation is a shambles. By 2040, a third of mankind will live in slums. Not just the poor; a third of everybody. That’s the motivating fear—the growing dread that the political and economic systems we’ve built do us active harm. There was the major trauma of Katrina, of course. Historic New Orleans collapsed, becoming a sudden sister city to the

Bruce Sterling considers the one small voice of socially responsible architecture — and the nefariousness overwhelming it. Finally, we arrive at some legal, conventional, low-income housing. This is the first of these vast and growing structural complexes not directly intended to hamper or harm people, and the first that directly involves architects and architectural ethics. But do-good architecture does not merely respond to material poverty. Instead, it tangos with the colossal dysfunctionalities outside any blueprints. Today’s durable disorder is the playground of city-busting militias, gangsters, armed fanatics, and the blooming demimondes of narcotics, offshore pollution, and human trafficking. A vast,

Joe Addo looks beyond architecture for his native Ghana. Joe Addo Twenty years after leaving his native Ghana to attend the Architectural Association in London and then seek employment abroad, Joe Osae-Addo found himself contemplating a return to his homeland during a visit in 2000. The West African nation had just elected a new president, and Addo sensed a “democratic fervor” that had not existed before. “There was an atmosphere of optimism and euphoria, and I wanted to be part of it,” he says. In Los Angeles he had started a practice in the early 1990s focusing on small civic

Forty thousand people die every year in auto accidents in the United States — 400,000 every decade. Far, far more than have died from terrorism in this country. But we do not respond by withdrawing the right to drive. Images © Werner Huthmacher The new U.S. embassy in Berlin sits next to Brandenburg Gate, but is set back from the street (top); In a rendering (above), MRY shows an intention to capture the spirit of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s work. It’s an analogy that occurs to me whenever I see the latest field of bollards or other barriers in front of

One of the few to appreciate his work consistently was Banham who, in The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment got it just right, citing: “Paul Valery’s contrast between Eupalinos, the architect, and Tridon, the shipwright. The former was preoccupied with the right method of doing the allotted tasks, and deploying the accepted methods of his calling, and seemed to find a philosophical problem in every practical decision. Tridon, on the other hand, applied every technology that came conveniently to hand, whether or not it was part of the shipbuilding tradition, and treated the sayings of philosophers as further instruction on