René Boer and David Helbich

East Market, Detroit (photo: Bryan Debus). Ruins, the cliché ‘failed architecture’. When photographed in an extreme way, with dark clouds and lots of debris, the images will quickly become easily shareable clickbait. This one-dimensional aestheticization, popular on fickr, obfuscates the social cruelty in Detroit’s dramatic decline.

Hotel Jakarta, Amsterdam (SeARCH architects) Renders, offcially accepted ‘architecture’. Unrealistic visions of shiny surfaces in dramatic settings, flling the social media feeds of Archdaily and Architizer. In a similar fashion, this catchy-but-easy imagination keeps the important debates about Amsterdam’s urban future decidedly out of sight.

David Helbich - Belgian solutions or: How people deal with stuff.

If Rome is the open museum of the antique, Paris the open museum of the 19th century and New York the open museum of the 20th century, then Brussels is the open museum of the last 5 minutes. In Belgium traces of on-the-spot decision making are integral part of the urban environment and even architecture. Their seriality suggests that not every solution is an answer to a problem. Still, the individual situations are shining as signs of care-taking within a place were the feeling of the temporality of communities is stronger than the authority of traditions. I am still wondering if the underlying aesthetics of Belgian solutions are their unvarnished functionalism, or if we can read it as a new way of ornamentation. davidhelbich.be - IG: davidhelbich - belgian-solutions. be - IG & FB: Belgian solutions - book volume 1&2 at Luster, Antwerpen