Corrupted observations

Corrupted, corrupted, corrupted - Adriel Quiroz Through a corrupted process, this building as part of the remodeling of Macedonia was intended to show the power of the government over the people. None whatsoever, the people proved their incomformity during a protest by throwing paint at it. Lastly, the government reclaimed this proof of opposition and wants to preserve it.

A temple survives in a tight corner I-Chieh Liu Shuang Lian Temple is an intriguing temple located on the border of Taipei city under an intersection of infrastructures. The temple shares the same retaining wall as the river dike under the elevated road. This seemingly illegally-built temple is just one of the common sights in Taiwanese cities. Due to social change and rapid urban development residents shifted their emphasis in life and their reliance on faith weakened. The temples seek gaps to ft themselves in the leftover space of urbanization and start to shrink to a minimal occupation. These temples are not intentionally planned by any architects; however, they seem like creatures that struggle through live in various forms in the society and naturally evolve in the concrete jungle.

Selling Champagne - Hande Öğün The ‘Belgrade Waterfront’, a master plan consisting of luxury residential buildings, offce units and a shopping mall in one of the most expensive areas of Belgrade. The photo is taken in the main hall of the developer’s offce with this giant model hanging at the wall, decorated with luxury furniture, shiny surfaces and bar with champagne to be served to possible future residents.

There is a lot of opposition against this project by Belgrade’s citizens, architects, urbanists and civic activists. We discussed this project and the frustration it created with opposing architects and members from an activist group. We were not there to buy ‘the luxury life’ offered by the investors, so weren’t served any champagne, but we were using the media and space that they designed to sell their projects.

Ref ned brutalism - Hans Venhuizen The large scale not very ref ned brutalist building in Prishtina, formerly housing the Kosovo printing industry, is now being used as an event location. The raw brutalist detailing now offers space to present use of storing garbage from the party people that currently use the space. Thus combining brutalist detailing and party garbage to ref ned decoration.

Warrior on a horse... the Great - Hans Venhuizen The former yugoslav republic of macedonia is working hard to reframe its nations identity. The main source of inspiration for this is Alexander the Great, the king of the ancient Greek Kingdom of Macedonia in the fourth century b.C. Alexander was born in a part of Macedonia that is now in Greece. Greece opposes the claim of the new republic on Alexander the Great as they also oppose the use of the name Macedonia. Because of that Greece blocks the participation of Macedonia to the NATO, where Macedonia deperately wants to be a part of as a defence against Russian threat. As a gesture of compromise Macedonia does no longer call her airport Alexander the Great and also renamed the main sculpture in the city, impersonating Alexander the Great, to ’warrior on a horse’.

CORRUPTED SPACE - Laura Frías A space is corrupted when it allows external conditions related to people’s behaviours to change the whole premeditated meaning or planned function of the original space. Here the art piece is organizing the space in a way that manipulates the presence of people bringing them to its projected shadow. Then in this case, instead of having people around admiring the monument, it involuntarily brings them together against the heat. So shelter is organizing the scene because of the weather condition. And this organization may vary depending on different weather conditions such as wind or rain.

The basis of every design lies in observing, researching and analyzing a situation. The best attitude for doing that is to travel to places and thus experience ‘a tremendous sense of liberation and, at the same time, to be very aware of all the dangers and limitations that surround you’. (Lebbeus Woods, as quoted in an interview with Jan Jongert). Only by travelling somewhere you can see and feel the real spaces, smell the real odours, and meet the real people.

And there is a lot to see and feel everywhere: newly designed spaces that you only know from renderings in magazines, and places that are on the brink of change. Famous monuments and meaningful places you didn’t know yet. Highlights and inbetween spaces. Well designed as well as poorly designed spaces. Special and ordinary ones. And spaces that make you refect on social issues, history, politics, religion and economic situations, or that are simply fascinating in their own right. With our TRAVEL programme we excercise the ability to observe, analyse and interpret the world around us and mobilize these observations to make them of use in the designing of spatial change.

The TRAVEL programme every year starts with ENDEM and ends with STOFFWECHSEL. Endem is the Albanian word for ‘feeling happily lost’ and invites you to gather all sorts of impressions without actually knowing what for. In the next phase of the TRAVEL programme HÀOQÍ is the key emotion. HÀOQÍ, the Chinese word for ‘curious’, makes you look back at what you actually saw and discover all kinds of fascinating observations that start your curiousity.

In the third phase you bring these observations back to the core idea that you frame into various PADIDEH, the Persian word for ‘phenomenon’. These Padideh will be confronted with eachother through placing them on two sides of a matrix thus creating a ‘feld of change’.

Finally you explore the possibilities that are hidden within this feld through combining seemingly uncombinable elements, exploring the observations by merging them and thus using them for your metamorphism, or STOFFWECHSEL as the German architect Gottfried Semper (1803-1879) framed this phenomenon in architecture.