The full Title: Reasoning in Architecture; About the Diagrammatic Nature of Thinking with Objects Real and Imagined.

I don’t have a proper abstract finished yet (still in my last two weeks of graduation deadline stress), but it goes something like this:

How the activity of architectural design can be explained as a form of reasoning. We’ll go from Aristotle to Artificial Intelligence, from ‘reflection-in-action’ to ‘diagrammatic reasoning’, from philosophy to brain science to architecture theory and back again.

UPDATE: I’m continuing to develop my ideas on the Action! blog over at Archis. Posts of particular interest in relation to my graduation projects: Reasoning with Waves and Diagrams, Architecture Left to Its Own Devices

accompanying text:
All across Beirut you can find walls covered with bullets holes. Reminders of past violence, conflict and war. Moving through the city they are an all too familiar backdrop for any urban scene. This proposal that I called ‘bullet lights’ is reversing the meaning and experience of the ‘bullet hole wallpaper’ at diverse locations in the city. Introducing unexpected poetic moments of beauty. Beauty, ambivalently mixed with the physical testimonies of violence. The project doesn’t want to make a point it just invites people to look at things differently. Seeing things from more than one perspective is the starting point for empathy.

Beirut, November 28, 2006

a matter of LIFE OR DEATH curated by Anna Cosentino & Steve Butcher
speaks of urgency, survival, decisions and choices - some dark, some light and those that offer solutions for better living

October & November 2008

Spring
126a Front Street
Brooklyn NY 11201

(watch the video in full-screen, its in HD)

A Brave New Europe from Edwin Gardner on Vimeo.

We are the brave new Europeans
We don’t inhabit houses but dwell a continent
We are not members of nation states, rather we are citizens of  a state of mind

We roam our continent like a vast metropolis
Where the periphery is pregnant of the future and the centers condensate the past
We are the easy jetset, the inter-railers, the couch-surfers, the children of Erasmus
We know our town like the inside of our pockets
Daily we cross its streets, take its short-cuts and meet up on the other side of town

Our city surprises us by its unusual flavours of beauty
Our city is hard to grasp, its limits uncertain and its centre unstable
Our city is harsh for newcomers, an arrogant fortress for those outside its walls
Citizenship to this Polis is privileged, and comes at a price

Our Europe is a brave one, one that hasn’t made up its own mind yet
One that embraces the merits of uncertainty and welcomes the potential of change

We are the citizens of a city the size of a continent
We are the citizens of the Brave New European State of Mind

see as slideshow
view at flickr
check the al manakh website

Look what I picked up at the airport news stand recently: L’Uomo, Italian Men’s Vogue and the new lifestyle magazine by the Economist titled Intelligent Life. I was slightly amazed, cause the cover boy and girl were respectively Koolhaas and Hadid. And no, not their buildings, they themselves, dressed-up and photographed glamoursly on the covers of these, well … mainstream magazines. At least compared to our own professional media. Of course these magazines are still targeted at the airport-hoping-style-conscious-elite, but nevertheless.

But that’s not all. L’Uomo Vogue had the whole issue committed to designers and architects, in “a world wide gallery of most influential creative people’. Although this results in not so impressive articles (which are mostly Italian anyway), it does result in some great head-shots.

Close-up wrinkled faces with brushy eyebrows (Meier).

Posing with models (Libeskind)

A mysteriously dark genius (Nouvel)

See a full-sized slide show of some snapshots of the spreads of both magazine’s

Intelligent Life has a round-up of starchitects which is even nicer. Beautiful sketched portrait drawings with short, snappy and the most concise bio’s I have ever read about them.

The portraits are done by Kathry Rathke (bottom, click portrait>celebrities)

Check out some samples from the array of bio’s describing the archilebrities (starchitect gets boring, right…)

Niemeyer: Despite his great age the architect of Brasilia is still active, not least in restoring-some would say tarting up-his own oeuvre of buildings that are (or were) sensuous and curvaceous yet geometrically elemental and slightly austere.

Gehry: The one-trick pony’s one-trick pony. Canadian-born, California-based auto-plagiarist whose “iconic” deconstructions, three-dimensional logos, and boorish gesticulations look all very much the same and all out of place, whether they have been plonked down in Bilbao, Los Angeles or Seattle.

Libeskind: Polish-born, America-naturalised. Like Gehry but without the curves. Libeskind’s signature is instantly recognisable because it hardly varies. Possesses a conventional horror of rectilinear structures. His supposedly iconic Imperial War Museum of the Nort has sloping floors which are intended to simulate the experience of battle. They don’t.

Koolhaas: Rotterdam Based writer, architect and urbanist who was one of Zaha Hadid’s tutors, and her first employer. Made his name in the late 1970s with an eccentric and energetic book called “Delirious New York”. His buildings -Seattle Central Library and a new TV Headquarters in Beijing-are no less eccentric, or energetic: frantic exercises in counter-intuitive geometries whose components seem bent on misbehaviour.

The sharp pen is Jonathan Meades‘ who also wrote the article and interviewed Hadid. The article is about a female architect the male dominated world of architecture. But not just that, “For the first time, the world’s most interesting architect is a woman.” Quite a statement, but the article is thorough and sharp, unlike Vogue’s page sized photo captions.

So far the report from airport-news-stand-magazine-wonderland. Ciao!

Its unbelievable, but it is happening. My school, Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft, my own little (big actually) temple for architecture is burning down.

This morning around 9:00 a water pipe sprung on the 6th or 7th floor, causing a short circuit in the coffee machine a floor below, which set the fire. Al people are out the building, everybody is save. But the firefighters have left the building cause the construction is in danger, and there is a serious hazard the building might collapse.

If the building totally burns down, including an amazing architecture library, the model collection, a historic collection of architect designed chairs and of course all the computers with their data (cause not everybody will have an off-site back up). And all the student work, especially the grad-students with massive amount of time invested in model-making. And lets not forget the beautiful building itself designed by Van den Broek en Bakema (you learn to love it throughout you study, its part of the education itself).

It’s crazy, luckily nobody got hurt, but that the place will be gone where so much history happened, and where I spent 8 fundamental years of my life is at the moment un-graspable.

recently we (Marten Dashorst and me) started the paper version of rss, prss.

Weekly we collect the best of the blogs of that week. The selection is extremely biased to what we like. So you can expect architecture and design stuff plus the additional sidetracks into ubiquitous augmented trans-mutant immersive media , theoretical ramblings and just plain cool stuff we had to share. You can subscribe to it by mail, rss or facebook

Or first see if you like what you bargain for: www.prss-release.org

Just to draw your attention to the following (Shamiyeh wrote a great article in the Unsolicited Architecture issue of Volume) :

Masters of Intervention #3

Tuesday April 1st 2008; 20.00; Shaffyzaal, Felix Meritis

Michael Shamiyeh v. Andrew Bullen

Designing new futures: engineering creative thinking.

Michael Shamiyeh teaches at Harvard and is co-founder of the Austrian Büro für Architektur, Urbanismus und Kultur (BAU/KULTUR). His first book What People Want: Populism in Architecture and Design (2005) was an instant bestseller. In 2007 he published the groundbreaking Organizing for Change. Since then he is working on a radical scheme to introduce his design of thinking within McKinsey, the world’s largest consultancy firm, to manufacture creative solutions when the solution is the problem.

Andrew Bullen is the director of the Media Guild, a cross-disciplinary incubator and centre for innovation for the Creative Media industries, based in the renovated Amsterdam East Docklands.

Reservations necessary: maakbaarheid [at] partizanpublik [dot] nl

via: partizanpublik.nl