ARCHITECTURE OF HOPE ‘Main Street is almost all right’, wrote Robert Venturi promoting the built environment of the ordinary’s messy vitality. The ambiguity of society, its causality and its improvisations meant the acknowledgement of a diversity of practices: top-down interventions + subcultures + minority expressions + subversive acts + ... Its inspiration was translated into stylistic diversity, yet it didn’t produce a collective narrative based on its multicultural outlook. Redefining the common good, ethics, aesthetics and economics starts with writing stories of architecture that encapsulate the manifold experiences of the city. Thus it is an architectural task in which space design and the design of a new collective dream, myth or scenario about who we are and what we desire to be are interrelated. Volume 19: Is identity the issue?
Content Editorial Arjen Oosterman Crossing Francesco Jodice
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Main Streets The New Disorder of Creolization René Boomkens 12 Main Street Is Almost Alright 18, 24, 25, 30, 40, 44 The Spectator’s City Regina Bittner 20 Seeing Diversity? Regula Stämpfli 26 The Case for the Big Box Alexander d’Hooghe 36
Story Telling Architecture: A Failed Discipline Mark Jarzombek The Network Structure of Obamania. Interview with Gerlinde Schuller Nader Vossoughian Barack Obama Inauguration Address Autopsy Brendan McGetrick Transmedia storytelling Henry Jenkins EasyEurope: The Young Continent Tommi Laitio Pimped Cars Corine Smith-Vermeulen
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Good Intentions
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A Challenge of Difference. Conversation with Hector Torres Casado Miguel Robles-Durán Open Identity. Interview with Herman Hertzberger Arjen Oosterman …a Foreign Correspondent Writes David Barrie Polder Mosque Debate. Interview with Ergün Erkoçu and Cihan Bug˘daci Mieke Dings
Common Goods Font of a Nation Creating Shannon Mattern A Subjective Atlas of Serbia Annelys de Vet Nations Re-nationalized Evert Ypma, Daniel van der Velden No Need for Architecture, We’ve Got Facebook Now Edwin Gardner
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Design to Context Retooling Identity Production Evert Ypma Brand Identities Through the Day Negotiated Belonging Femke Herregraven From Corporate Identity to City Branding Emanuela Bonini Lessing Tailfins and Telephones Simon Heptonstall Is There Signage Without Pictograms? Xavier Vasseur Identity City Barbara Mutzbauer, Evert Ypma Lost in Orientation Bernard Sturm
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Insert No Academy Manifesto No Academy
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Contributors; Corrections/additions
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ARCHITECTURE OF HOPE Arjen Oosterman
The inclination to see the current crisis as merely passing and the tendency to say, ‘take cover, then we can get on with it’ is great. Yet every day makes it less likely that this will be sufficient. Old perspectives and ideas no longer suffice. This is a serious challenge and while the first step must be to formulate anew, we must maintain our lines of communication. Yet how can that be done? What is the expression of hope, for example? Indeed, politics knows what to do with this. The combination of firm measures and consoling stories in contrast to somber reports should convince voters to believe that people are working hard to improve things – that there is a glimmer of hope. In the meantime we’re no longer able to hear (neither does one actually hear) it anymore said, but ‘yes we can’ was extremely effective in motivating a demoralized population. Repressed anger and frustration were effectively used to gain the acceptance of another political agenda and anger was tapped to create a positive, creative energy. That’s potential. No complaining now, no pointing out differences; refrain from putting forward potential objections, stop measuring risks and dangers, just put one’s shoulder to the load and move on. Apart from all the complex and difficult policy rules Americans must now lay down, the political task is clear. Old rags to riches tales or even more mundane ‘to each man his castle on his own land and two to four cars (and a rifle by the hat rack)’ are spent, even destructive. The classic American Dream must be overhauled. Suburbia cannot go on. What must happen is less clear. Something sustainable – but what does that mean? The Europeans advise: concentration. The American
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At the design meeting for Volume 19 we told our people, ‘this issue must express hope!’ ‘That’s a challenge,’ was the somewhat mocking response whereupon it was decided to publish the next issue entirely in black and white. No rainbows, no eye candy, no chaotic, everyday multicolors, no shock and awe with a surprise onslaught of images. Instead, get back to the story. Were we considering an implicit reference to the ecstatic and expectant black and white images from the post-War period? Perhaps. After all, are we not now reevaluating our society and future just as they did then? The construction of the ‘welfare society’ was the principal post-War program for those (Western) societies which had been left in ruins. Now the double collapse of systems (production/consumption and economy) is once again dictating how programs and perspectives are formulated. In its economic, social and political dimensions they were executing an Enlightened and Modern project within the infinity concept (which worked well with spatial infinity in architecture and urban development; space is indivisible, at most temporarily localized and particularized). The challenge now is to operate with the concepts of infinity and boundary without confusing our experience of space with our link with the earth.
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answer could well point in the different direction: a further emancipation of individual households, each dwelling to become its own energy plant in combination with electrically powered mobility. The old ‘Go West’ doctrine repackaged in a modernized, middle-class, one-size-fits-all design. It is even possible that America could get away with it, but on a global scale it’s improbable. Put more strongly, the need to do so is more urgent than ever. The current crisis is generating a reservoir of government investment across the globe and a substantial part of this will be used for construction. Let’s conclude that there is a role for urban planning and architecture, that it still makes sense to develop new models and look at possibilities. Strange as it might seem, whoever is able to get their plans noticed now has a good chance to see them realized. Phantasy skyscraper production will probably experience a serious delay, but whoever is able to offer flexible, integrated urban planning in which living, working and relaxation can be responsibly combined has the wind behind them. Now we can! Four years ago Volume launched itself as a ‘project to go beyond architecture’. We didn’t know what that meant at the time, but that made it all the more necessary. After a number of probes and excursions, Volume 14 announced our call for Unsolicited Architecture, a research and design practice in which social questions and (im)possibilities are central rather than the specific question of a client. In the interim, the plausibility of this position has only increased not only because falling orders are forcing bureaus to create work for themselves, but also because weariness with architecture as a circus act has created room other kinds of practices. The issues after Volume 14 researched topical, core terms for their meaning and potential such as the anathema (if world-wide) of Social Engineering, for example. We also clarified conceptions of things in order to present architecture as a Content Management System that operates in the context of all kinds of other content management systems; we also addressed the urgent appeal to look past the technical problems of sustainability to its social and qualitative potentials and limitations. And in this issue we seriously reflect upon the relation of design with the theme Identity. In bad times discrepancies fade away, a consequence of the effect of combating a common adversary, but that old devil discord pops his head up as soon as the threat appears to be averted. As is our practice, this issue too is a collaborative project, this time with the Swiss Design2context, a department of the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (Zurich University of the Arts). D2C has been busy for years with their ‘Multiplicity & Visual Identities’ program which researches contemporary practices of communication development. The creation of (an) identity is one of their core concerns. Discussions about identity within architecture are probably older, but also of a different character. Robert Venturi’s ‘main street is almost alright’ initiated space for other identities and expressions than those sanctioned by international modernism. The practice of architecture was subsequently seduced into stylistic proliferation and excessive attention to expression, and forgot the substantially thinking through of ‘personal’, ‘collective’ and ‘common’. Venturi cannot be reproached for this, but he interventions effectively barked up the wrong tree. Helping people find focus is reduced to making a difference (recognizability!). Offering flexible urban structures deteriorates into the prescription of theme and identity urban planning.
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Communication design wrestles principally with fragmented and intangible target groups (multicultural society) and the reduction of communication strategies to a contest of ‘whose designed the most recognizable logo’. Architecture and urban planning are thereby forced to make troublesome subgroups innocuous, to solve social tensions with construction programs and to reduce the individuality of cities, regions and nations to recognizable solutions (which can also be seen as a form of logoism). Precisely because they must now be so fundamentally renovated and reordered, a clear conception of what identity and difference mean for design is of eminent importance. No less important is that architects and designers accept responsibility for the development of a new relationship between shared and personal ideals. Indeed, it’s a matter of good, old bottom-up and top-down: what we pass on, put out, collectively determine and what we ourselves do.
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THE CASE FOR THE BIG BOX Joys of a non-expressionist architecture Alexander D’Hooghe
‘Expressionism stands on an irrational and mythological foundation: its creative method leads in the direction of the emotive yet empty declamatory manifesto, the proclamation of a sham activism. It has therefore a whole series of essential features that fascist literary theory could accept without having to force them into its mold. Naturally the conscious tendencies of expressionism are different from this...’ Georg Lukacz1
Inadequacy of the Icons The recently built or designed generation of icons reaches out – sideways, with cantilevers, upwards, with swoops and spires or multidirectional – as an almost formless architecture of undulating landscapes. They heroically attempt to construct an identity amidst a grey layer of generic urbanization. Yet a contracting society, one in which flows are stagnating and the clock is in reverse, is hardly ‘represented’ in an architecture that wants to dynamically move beyond its own limitations. An argument for exuberant architecture could still be made in the reverse: we might need exuberant architecture to provide an escape from the drab reality of postcrisis existence, just as Stalinism celebrated an aesthetic of cornucopia amidst Russia’s historical nadir of abject mass poverty. I would argue against this for several reasons. Any public sculpture seeking to figuratively express life-like dynamism ends up under the current circumstances conveying intrinsic sadness for it is a staged fossil, a statement about the sorrow of the emptiness of a square and the desire for it to be full again. As such expressive dynamic forms which call upon life’s great theatricality find that their own dead matter is inadequate to the task. Dead matter can never match the real thing. It demonstrates the architect’s intention to resurrect, with dead matter, that which society has already abandoned in reality.
The Big Box Architecture is dead matter. Architecture that wants to seem ‘alive’ presents itself as something that runs counter to its own constitution. Hence such architecture is kitsch. Kitsch, as a reminder, is a definition that
distinguishes high from low art. Kitsch is a form of low art. A design object is kitsch when it seeks to represent something that falsifies its own constitution (e.g., a cigarette lighter that looks like an elephant) or is a clearly figurative element made of dead matter. How can dead matter stage life and expression? A high art treatment of ‘big boxes’ may provide a way out. Big boxes are buildings such as contemporary warehouse sheds, IKEA showrooms, shopping malls, factory buildings or even airport hangars. Big boxes can be used for almost anything but as an architectural category they are clearly unambiguous. A big box conforms to the following characteristics: (a) A big box has a contiguous floor plate, maximizing flexibility and exchangeability within its perimeter; (b) A big box has a repetitive structural and facade system, built out of a few components that repeat themselves ad nauseam; (c) A big box is a horizontal form. There are no innate limits to its footprint because unlike conventional residential or office buildings, the big box does not get its natural light from its facades, but from its ceiling/roof patterns. It can, in other words, in principle expand in both horizontal directions almost endlessly; (d) The structural system of a big box limits the number of columns within the main space to an absolute minimum. Thirty to forty meter spans are current normative averages for commercial big boxes. This is an extremely important reduction of the internal regimentation. This de facto abolishes the very existence of an internal regime, replacing it with nothing more than a vast platform or stage.
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Now that the irrational exuberance of the past decade has collapsed, where shall architecture go? Shall we build cheaper versions of iconic buildings based on the same templates? Substantially reducing the building cost of new versions of the impressive array of dynamic icons such as those built in China and Dubai may be impossible without losing their formal essence and quality. More importantly, in the current post-economic collapse climate one wonders whether such gestures of irrational exuberance, even when slightly muted, display any content that speaks to society’s condition in its totality. May we instead consider it a form of elitist asceticism? If so, could a high art interpretation such as the ‘big box’ provide a sense of direction?
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Bigbox precedents
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Third floor
Late-modernist big boxes. These predecessors of the IKEA warehouse still tried to contain the big box type in a classical modernist language. Study: Stephen Perdue (MIT, Master’s thesis).
Source: Adam, Jürgen A. (Jürgen Axel), 1939– Industrial buildings: A design manual / Jürgen Adam, Katharina Hausmann, Frank Jüttner; contributions by Klaus Daniels … [et al.; translation, Fiona Greenwood and Jörn Frenzel]. Basel; Boston: Birkhäuser-Publishers for Architecture, © 2004.
Plan for a prison occupying one floor of a large big box. Design: Stephen Perdue (MIT, Master’s thesis, Platform for Permanent Modernity research group).
Economy In economic terms this type’s affordability gives it a great competitive advantage in times of economic hardship. Big boxes conventionally use pre-fabricated construction elements for structure and skins and costs are kept low through relentless repetition. It is less expensive to construct a box that is too big for its purpose but which has equal distances between its structural axes than it is to tailor its axial distances differently across the box to achieve a smaller size, that is to comply with the program demanded. The result is not spatial gluttony, but architectural consistency. The programmatic needs of that box will change soon after its inception anyway. However the logic behind this standardization plays into the architectural completeness and precision of the artifact. The relentlessness of the application of a few modules forces the retreat of architectural expression into the casing of the shell
and away from a larger three-dimensional, monumental, sculptural quality; therein lie this type’s savings.
Identity Politics From an identity politics point of view the big box is nothing less than an emancipatory project. Permanent semantic expression is eliminated from the domain of the durable architecture of the box and instead relegated to the more fleeting interiors which can be designed in the realm of fashion, sculpture or any product design category. This constitutes a non-Venturi-esque kind of populism. For indeed, the big box accepts low art signification and identity politics back into architectural discourse not by formalizing or abstracting it, but by merely staging it. By shedding (forgive the pun) commercial and vital expressions from the architectural shell of the box and merely becoming an enclosed stage for framed scenes of everyday life, the latter is de facto accepted back into high architecture. Ultimately the big box is a large platform protected from rain and wind. As a bounded platform it is exactly that: a stage. The point is that it can only act as such by refusing to participate as an actor. As easy as this may seem, it is not a reductive exercise. By demanding that the box fulfill its task as a stage or frame, one demands of it that what takes place is separated from the sensory continuum of everyday life and is turned into a consciously perceivable act of human (melo-)drama. Even the most realistic forms of theater are never confused with life because the stage is defined by a clean break from the city outside the theater. In this we recognize the stage for what it is: a separate space where when external everyday objects suddenly appear they are filled with new meaning. The stage does to life what Marcel Duchamp did to the urinal by moving it into a museum space. Ultimately this is the same ‘spacing apart’ Rosalind Krauss observed as the critical move of the surrealist photomontage. Cutting a piece of reality out of a picture and pasting it on white paper ends up revealing that the snapshot is filled with meanings previously only unconsciously present. The big box is about celebrating life itself – by staging it to the fullest. It refuses to do so by repre-
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encasing for everything from shopping, production centers and warehouses to business centers, company headquarters, churches and hangars. Furthermore, many of the great multitude of older, once empty big boxes scattered across America have taken a new lease on life with other programs including schools, libraries, community centers and even residential developments. In other words, the big box is a type which can exist without any programmatic justification. It simply exists and the very need for flexibility out of which it was first born now makes it a winner in the Darwinian struggle between architectural types. Ultimately the independence of the big box from its programs also makes it deserving of pure architectonic investigation. That our discipline has denied this type its due attention is, from that point of view, odd. A general shell or case which can be adapted and re-used contains a sustainability argument for the capital investment in such a building provides it with give a longevity and durability that may at first seem at odds with its light, industrial construction, but is ultimately confirmed through the completely internal flexibility of its organization and the energetic inexpensiveness of its construction.
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THE NETWORK STRUCTURE OF OBAMANIA Gerlinde Schuller interviewed by Nader Vossoughian
Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency redefined American politics in a number of ways. He proved that an African-American could be a viable candidate for what is arguably the most powerful executive position in the world. He also illustrated the important role that branding and visual communication play in our contemporary social and political landscape. His message of change, hope and transparency inspired millions. It also, however, demonstrated how social networking applications such as Twitter and Facebook and user-driven media outlets such as YouTube are transforming the face of media world-wide. In this interview, I ask information designer and visual journalist Gerlinde Schuller to decode some of the chief rhetorical and visual strategies the Obama campaign used in order to transmit its message. I also ask her to place President Obama’s visual identity in historical context and speculate on what long-term effects his example may have for culture and politics generally.
Gerlinde Schuller Obama and his campaign team managed to bridge the gap between high and low culture. They achieved this through a fine-tuned interaction between the branding of Obama, contributions by individual supporters and the media response. In comparison to Clinton and McCain, Obama’s branding had a new, fresh expression. The fact that it concentrated on the strong utilization of recurring graphic forms and colors as well as consistent rhetorical elements made the difference. Although all the candidates utilized the best-known social network communities on the internet, Obama did so in more effectively because he presented himself as an individual. He maintained a profile in sixteen online communities, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, Eons, and BlackPlanet. These resources served as a cheap and effective method for receiving and offering continuous feedback, as well as gaining additional supporters. Obama’s own campaign website was developed as a community meeting point with theme-oriented blogs and ‘online homes’ for various social groups, including women, children, veterans, first-generation Americans, Arab-Americans, African-Americans, environmentalists and others. It was also possible to register on the website for email and mobile phone text messages, allowing real-time announcements from the candidate. In the end, the campaign integrated Obama’s visual branding perfectly into a series of viral marketing
strategies which ensured a wide dissemination of his message and triggered much civic involvement. NV What do you think was unique about
Obama’s campaign?
GS It was a perfect combination of branding, establishing a short and quick connection to the target audience, and personal transparency. The campaign, which was designed by the agencies Sender LLC and mo/de in Chicago, helped a great deal. Sol Sender and his team didn’t have any experience with political campaign branding and that proved to be an advantage. They used their product branding experience and designed a logo that laid claim to the letter ‘O’ in traditional red, white and blue using codes that were associated with stripes from the American flag but also with a ‘rising sun representing the dawn of a new day’. The logo as a whole was a very simple code, one that could be copied quickly and easily. Within Obama’s campaign team people were very aware that the visual and verbal branding had to rely on aesthetic cohesion and consistency. In order to supervise the branding, Obama hired a small team of designers and integrated them into his campaign. They became insiders controlling the use of every visual code published during the campaign. For example, handmade signs by Obama supporters were exchanged by campaign staff for professionally branded materials. They knew that greater consistency means greater collective impact. Another thing that made Obama unique is that he and his team established a short and direct connection with the population through social networking media and text messaging. SMS and email messages were signed ‘Barack’. The impression this gave was that you
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Nader Vossoughian Could you put Obama’s visual identity in context? What is new about how he fashioned himself in the media and in the popular imagination?
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Obama supporters on Super Tuesday, 2008
‘Ohio Farmers for Obama’, 2008
Facade decoration, 2008
‘Choose Hope’ sign in Pittsburgh, 2008
‘Vote Obama’ by Rexie Planalp
Fields of Hillsdale, New York, 2008
Obama signs, 2008
Self-made Obama sign in the forest, 2008
Obama support by Thundercut, 2008
Obama graffiti by anonymous person, 2008
Obama supporter got a new haircut, 2008
Obama supporter is showing her arm tattoo, 2008
Obama Force One sneakers by Jim Lasser, 2008
Painting by TMNK, 2008
Graffiti tags, 2008
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Manhattan Skyline, photo by Justin Nobel, 2008
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NV The anthropologist Benedict Anderson once wrote that nationalism is nothing other than an ‘imagined community’, a set of values and beliefs that are cemented through language, technology and discourse. Do you think that this idea is still true today, particularly given how cell phones, the internet, etc. are really transforming the nature of communication generally? GS During recent decades, globalization dissolved national borders and everybody assumed that the world was getting smaller and that everyone was being unified into a single, great society. But now in times of economic crisis national protectionism has returned and every country is trying to make its own rules, that is, rules which suit it best. Concerning new forms of communication, the next big step will be made with the creation of automatic translation software that can translate context sensitively. Multinational companies like Yahoo, SDL plc. and Google are working on it, but it’s not there yet. At the moment, we have to depend on our own language abilities. Were this obstacle to disappear the terms ‘nationalism’ and ‘community’ would be redefined completely.
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‘Field of Hope’ drawing by Hillary Ross and Jim Lenox, 2008
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VOLUME Independent quarterly for architecture to go beyond itself editor-in-chief Arjen Oosterman contributing editors Ole Bouman, Rem Koolhaas, Mark Wigley feature editor Jeffrey Inaba editorial consultants Carlos Betancourth, Thomas Daniell, Bart Goldhoorn, Markus Miessen, Kai Vöckler VOLUME is a project by ARCHIS + AMO + C-Lab + … ARCHIS with Lilet Breddels, Joos van den Dool, Christian Ernsten, Edwin Gardner, Denis Guzzo AMO with Reinier de Graaf C-Lab with Jeffrey Inaba, Gavin Browning, Benedict Clouette, Kate Meagher VOLUME is materialized by Irma Boom and Sonja Haller
The VOLUME project interpolates ARCHIS, magazine for Architecture, City and Visual Culture and its predecessors since 1929. Archis – Publishers, Tools, Interventions – is an experimental think tank devoted to the process of real-time spatial and cultural reflexivity. www.archis.org Other protagonists in this project AMO, a research and design studio that applies architectural thinking to disciplines beyond the borders of architecture and urbanism. AMO operates in tandem with its companion company the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. www.oma.nl
C-Lab, The Columbia Laboratory for Architectural Broadcasting, is an experimental research unit devoted to the development of new forms of communication in architecture, set up as a semi-autonomous think and action tank at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University. www.arch.columbia.edu Volume is published by Stichting Archis, The Netherlands and printed by Die Keure, Belgium. English copy editing and translations David Lee, Wendy van Os-Thompson Administrative coordination Valérie Blom, Jessica Braun Editorial office PO Box 14702, 1001 LE Amsterdam, The Netherlands, T: +31 (0)20 320 3926, F: +31 (0)20 320 3927, E: info@archis.org, W: www.archis.org Subscriptions Bruil & Van de Staaij, Postbus 75, 7940 AB Meppel, The Netherlands, T: +31 (0)522 261 303, F: +31 (0)522 257 827, E: volume@bruil.info, W: www.bruil.info/volume Subscription rates 4 issues, 75 Netherlands, !91 World, Student subscriptions rates, !60 Netherlands, 73 World, Prices excl. VAT Cancellations policy Cancellation of subscription to be confirmed in writing one month before the end of the subscription period. Subscriptions not cancelled on time will be automatically extended for one year. Back issues Back issues of VOLUME and forerunner Archis (NL and E) are still available through Bruil & Van de Staaij Advertising marketing@archis.org, For rates and details see: www.volumeproject.org, click ‘info’ General distribution Idea Books, Nieuwe Herengracht 11, 1011 HR Amsterdam, The Netherlands, T: +31 (0)20 622 6154, F: +31 (0)20 620 9299, idea@ideabook.nl IPS Pressevertrieb GmbH,PO Box 1211, 53334 Meckenheim, Germany, T: +49 2225 8801 0, F: +49 2225 8801 199, E: lstulin@ips-pressevertrieb.de
This issue of VOLUME has been made possible with the support of Mondrian Foundation, Amsterdam and The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture. ISSN 1574-9401, ISBN 978-90-77966-19-8 Copyright 2009, Stichting Archis Disclaimer The editors of Volume have been careful to contact all copyright holders of the images used. If you claim ownership of any of the images presented here and have not been properly identified, please contact Volume and we will be happy to make a formal acknowledgement in a future issue.
Contributors David Barrie is a producer and director of urban renewal and media projects based in London. Regina Bittner is a cultural theorist and Teaching Coordinator of the Bauhaus Kolleg/Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. René Boomkens is Professor of social and cultural Philosophy at the University of Groningen. His research concerns the consequences of globalization, the development of urban culture and the effects of new media on information and communication. Alexander D’Hooghe is Associate Professor in Architectural Urbanism at MIT where he is building the ‘Platform for a Permanent Modernity’ research group. He is also founder of the design office ORG - Office for Permanent Modernity. Mieke Dings is an architecture historian whose agency Bureau Dinges works on projects at the interface of architecture (including landscape architecture), urban planning and communication. Simon Heptonstall studied at the University of East Anglia and the London College of Communication. He is currently working as a freelance graphic designer and teacher in Geneva. Femke Herregraven uses graphic design and visual identity to research and speculate on new (technological) dynamics in society and power structures that lie within. Mark Jarzombek is Associate Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Henry Jenkins is currently Co-Director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program and will soon be the Provost’s Professor of Communications, Journalism and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Francesco Jodice, who graduated as architect, is co-founder of the research collectives Multiplicity and Zapruder and is best known as photographer. He teaches at the University of Bolzano and NABA in Milan. Tommi Laitio is a political scientist, researcher, writer, project manager and consultant who focuses on the politics of diversity, media and culture. Shannon Mattern is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at The New School in New York. Brendan McGetrick is an independent writer, editor, and designer. His work has appeared in publications in over twenty countries, including Wired, Art Review, Domus, and Casa BRUTUS. Barbara Mutzbauer studied interior architecture in Rosenheim and Copenhagen. She is a Zurich-based restaurant designer, after having been project leader in a corporate (interior) design agency in Munich. Miguel Robles-Durán, architect/urbanist, is co-founder of ‘CohabitationStrategies.org’ a Rotterdam-based cooperative for socio-spatial development, and is currently assisting Venezuela in the design and material conception of the ‘Socialist City of the XXI Century.’ Regula Stämpfli is a political scientist and teaches politics and political philosophy at various European institutions. She is also a commentator on television, radio and in the print media. www.regulastaempfli.ch Bernhard Sturm lives and works in Berne, Switzerland. He has a master’s degree in Geography and Anthropology, and is the founder and owner of the web design bureau das.zeichen in Berne. Xavier Vasseur studied fine arts at ECAL.ch and political sociology at UNIL.ch. He has worked as a sociologist, packaging development supervisor, designer, and most recently art director for an e-communication company. xvasseur@sunrise.ch Daniel van der Velden is a founding partner of Metahaven, an agency for design and research in Amsterdam and Brussels. He teaches graphic design at Yale University and the Sandberg Institute. Corine Vermeulen-Smith lives and works in Detroit, Michigan, where she is currently researching and photographing issues revolving around mobility and car culture. Annelys de Vet is a designer and head of the Design Department at the Sandberg Institute Amsterdam, Masters Rietveld Academy. www.annelysdevet.nl Nader Vossoughian is a curator, critic and Assistant Professor of Architecture at the New York Institute of Technology. Evert Ypma is a visual designer, researcher on identity questions, and creative strategist for commissioners. He initiated the postgraduate research and study program Multiplicity & Visual Identities at Design2context, Zurich University of the Arts.
Corrections/Additions In Volume 18 we mixed up illustrations in Ronald Wall’s contribution ‘Get the Balance Right!’. The correct(ed) version is on our website www.volumeproject.org.
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