• Together! The New Architecture of the Collective

    Housing is a scarce resource – that is something that has become increasingly clear in the last few years. As real estate prices in big cities continue to skyrocket, conventional ideas of housing development are proving increasingly unable to meet existing demands. In reaction to these challenges, a quiet revolution in contemporary architecture has been slowly brewing: the act of building and inhabiting homes collectively. Together! The New Architecture of the Collective is the first exhibition to treat this theme as a global phenomenon and present it in a spatial, experiential manner.

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  • NEVER DEMOLISH IN GELLERUP MUSEUM, AARHUS

    The second venue of the exhibition Never Demolish, a space inside Gellerup Museum aims to view the potential of the transformation of Cité Grand Parc in a wider context by placing the exhibition in a similar surrounding to the one in Bordeaux: Gellerup, site of the largest modernist housing development in Denmark.

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  • NEVER DEMOLISH

    In the 1960s and 1970s, large-scale housing complexes were built all over the world as a bold solution to satisfy the need for housing. Five decades later they are largely considered as ideologically outdated, urbanistically failed, and ripe for demolition. Against this backdrop Never Demolish claims that these projects can have a second life that's better than their first, through sensible renovation – enlarging the spaces and improving living standards. The exhibition features the spectacular transformation of 530 dwellings across three high-rise buildings of the Cité du Grand Parc in Bordea

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  • Flussbad Talks

    Believe it or not, it does get really hot in Berlin in the summer. And the swimming pools get more than crowded. Wouldn't it be great to have a refreshing quick dip right in the city centre, next to the Museum Island, in the Spree? But how would that be possible whatsoever? The project “Flussbad Berlin,” initially developed by realities:united in 2012, calls for a radical approach towards historical urban spaces and a re-appropriation of public space that goes well off beyond the usual notions of sustainability...

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  • Architecture in Migration

    What are the cultural effects of migration on architecture? The global movement of large masses of people who have given up or lost their home fundementally challenges the architectural notion of place – what used to be a permanent reference for the migrant turns into a momentary station on a longer journey...

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  • Treasures in Disguise

    The Montenegro Pavilion at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale presents four examples of late-modernist architecture that were built in Montenegro between 1960 and 1986. When these buildings were first constructed, they radiated their builders’ enthusiasm and confidence about the new society they were building. Only a few decades later, these buildings embody the complete opposite: poorly used (if at all) and maintained (if ever completed), they are a testament to the failure of modernism. Nobody seems to be able to recognize any value in them; hence, their fate seems sealed...

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  • Druot, Lacaton & Vassal — Tour Bois le Prêtre

    “You don’t really gain anything by demolishing an edifice and rebuilding it in the same place with a contemporary look.” Devoted to that principle, French architects Frédéric Druot, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal transformed a typical 1960's high-rise in the northern suburbs of Paris into a new residential building in 2001. An exhibition on the project curated by Ilka and Andreas Ruby with Something Fantastic was held in three different venues, and it provided its visitors insight into one the most successful renovation practices of the recent years...

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  • Domus 962: Min to Max

    In December 2011, Ilka & Andreas Ruby organised the "Min to Max" international symposium in Berlin and brought together a group of architects and scholars, who were asked to redefine the meaning of "Minimum Subsistence Dwelling". As guest editors of this issue of Domus, they developed the topic further with some contributors of "Min to Max", as well as a number of new ones...

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  • MACHEN! lecture series

    Walls cast out of adobe and lightweight concrete; ceilings crafted using bamboo and wood; a reed-based filtration system capable of transforming the River Spree into a swimming pool: the exhibition MACHEN! presented six projects that conceive of sustainability not as a mere technological embellishment, but as a key design principle. The parallel MACHEN! lecture series gave the audience the chance to gain insight of these projects firsthand, as the creators got to present and discuss on their awarded work in three sessions...

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  • MACHEN! exhibition

    Initially launched as a positive desideratum for building, the concept of sustainability has over time become increasingly problematic. Few projects today can dispense with the “s” word, or resist the temptation to obscure the dirty little secrets of construction with a halo of ecological benevolence. Thanks to greenwashing, deceptive marketing, and whitewashed statistics, the word sustainability amounts to little more than a PR line, its meaning dissolved like an effervescent tablet in a water glass...

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  • BKULT

    BKULT initiiert Debatten zur Gebauten Umwelt. Dazu stellt die Redaktion im Zweiwochenrhythmus eine Frage, die sich mit den Bedingungen unserer gebauten Umwelt auseinandersetzt, zur Diskussion und lädt Gäste ein, zu dieser Frage pro oder contra Stellung zu nehmen. Darunter sind neben Architekten auch Journalisten, Soziologen, Schriftsteller, Philosophen und Personen des öffentlichen Lebens...

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  • min to max

    As cost of living increases in Berlin, and in other cities around the world, demand for affordable housing becomes even more pressing. In search of new strategies for housing, Min to Max revisits a crucial development of early Modernism: the Minimum Subsistence Dwelling (Die Wohnung für das Existenzminimum). Formulated at the 2nd CIAM conference, held in Frankfurt in 1929, this doctrine intended to improve living conditions for the working poor by establishing a minimum standard necessary for dignified living...

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  • Not More Not Less

    With regard to its immanent powers, architecture today seems to be both under-challenged and over-charged at the same time. This biomorphic paradigm has reduced architecture’s potential to just dealing with issues concerning geometry, form-making, and manufacturing, whilst depriving it of any political impact. On the other hand, there is a programmatic notion of practice which reduces architecture to a predominantly political project, ignoring the fact that a building must eventually embody its contents through its tectonic and formal definition...

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  • Of People and Houses | Architecture from Styria

    The 2008/2009 edition of the Haus of Architecture Graz yearbook is a departure from the traditional architectural yearbook. Editors and curators Ilka and Andreas Ruby created Of People and Houses in the spirit of a time capsule rather than an archival document. A distinctive three-part strategy of interviews, drawings and photographs was used to communicate the eleven architectural projects chosen for inclusion in the yearbook...

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  • EM2N. Both And

    A book about everything you ever wanted to know about EM2N, but were afraid to ask: why this office wins so many competitions, why they make this kind of architecture even though they come from Switzerland, what buildings by other architects they enthuse about, where they fail, how their floor plans actually function in detail, why, all the same they continue to build models, and how one can construct cities with buildings…

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  • Endless Bauhaus

    Has the Bauhaus already become a historical entity of the past or does it still have a contemporary presence? Which of its original intentions and ambitions have survived and can be tied in with the present? Which of its ideas seem unrealizable today? Is there anything genuinely owed to the Bauhaus? Has its general claim and aspiration for a unity of the creative forces in the arts and crafts, science and technology become anachronistic today – or do we need such goals more than ever in view of increasingly diversified and specialized societies? ...

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  • Contemporary Architecture

    The installation “Contemporary Architecture,” by realities:united at archcouture in Halle, Germany is a piece of subtle transfiguration. Tim and Jan Edler of realities:united, through the manipulation of standard light fixtures, made legible a quality usually invisible in architecture: time...

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  • Pavillion To Go

    The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2007 was designed by Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen. Ilka & Andreas Ruby contributed to the public experiment “models are real,” held at the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion on 28.09.2007, with a flip-book that enclosed the routes of motion in the Pavilion structure and allowed people to carry it away in their pockets...

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  • Urban Prototyping

    As there is no normative concept of city anymore, there is no normative concept of city-planning either. On the one hand, we see a landslide victory of the masterplan particularly in Asia with its seemingly unstoppable demand for instant cities to be planned and built from scratch in periods of 5-10 years. On the other hand, the masterplan easily finds its limits in situations where the city is essentially built already, yet still needs to be able to change and adapt to contemporary developments - such as in most saturated urban environments in Europe, but part of Asia too...

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  • Appropriate Design!

    Taking up the topic “identity” from The Design Annual 2007, the exhibition “Appropriate Design!” asks about the identity of design. How does design become what it is? And how does it produce its identity? If you understand identity as that aspect that makes a thing or person special and distinguishes it from others identity is not a static property but a process. After all we do not only derive identity from ourselves but produce it in exchange with our changing environment...

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  • Dominique Perrault. Meta-Buildings

    “A meta-building is a structure that exceeds the customary dimensions of a building to encompass a landscape or a city, both physically and conceptually.” This catalogue for the exhibition on Perrault’s work held at the Architecture Center in Vienna shows four current projects at four different locations: the two high-rise towers for Vienna in the Donau-City; the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg; the Ewha Campus Center in Seoul; and the Olympic Tennis Stadium in Madrid...

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  • Groundscapes

    Groundscapes explores the "come-back" of the idea of the ground onto the scene of contemporary architecture. When Le Corbusier in 1925 declared buildings should be put on pilotis he de facto turned the ground into the scorched earth of modernism's quest for progress. The ground was seen as an unwanted linkage with the history, place and gravity which modernism wanted to overcome. With the decline of heroic modernism in the late 1960s a new generation of architects eager to discover this forbidden land initiated a reterritorialisation of architecture which continues until today...

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  • Urban Moods

    The notion of "urban" is arguably one of the hot keys of contemporary culture. It’s become the synonym of cool and serves as Zeitgeist indicator of lifestyle, music, food, fashion and design. Yet precisely what urban means with regard to urbanism and the city has become increasingly vague. Depending on specific geographic, climatic, economic and cultural conditions, there are many, and often radically conflicting, implications of "urban" developments...

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  • R&Sie…architects. Spoiled Climate

    Designed by French graphic artists M/M and edited by Andreas Ruby and Benoît Durandin, this book offers an unusal introduction to the work of French Architects François Roche and Stéphanie Lavaux and their office R&Sie...Unlike normal architectural monographs it foregrounds the conceptual resources of the architects. It stands out by a disciplined use of mostly small-size images and almost completely renounces on descriptive project texts. The reader of the book cannot readily consume the work in a merely visual way, but has to work his or her way through its manifold layers to understand it..

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