Posts

Welcome to the Post Box for the Open Society. Here you find an overview of all the contributions.
You can either simply browse, or participate in the discussion and comment on a proposal.
You can also submit an idea or design yourself, or first read about the open call.

Entry: Monday, July 21, 2014
Submitted by:
CUD Chair for Urban Design and Urbanization TU Berlin
Country:
Germany
Category:
Inspiration
Comments: [0]
Entry: Thursday, July 17, 2014
Submitted by:
Oskar Hansen
Country:
Poland
Category:
Critique
In 1960 Oskar Hansen sent this piece of writing to Jaap Bakema and the Post Box for the Development of the Habitat, which today is held in the collection of Het Nieuwe Instituut. It includes his criticism of and wishes for the right kind of exchange of ideas for a new architecture, that would engage with 'concrete people' allowing them to develop their living environment according to their own needs, to organically arrive at a new balance between the individual and the collective, despite industrialisation, and despite the post-war society dominated by issues of quantity rather than quality. Open Form was his key concept for the new architecture, a processual understanding of design and construction. Because he was never a party member Hansen would be marginalised in Communist Poland, and he would develop his ideas into a practice of radical pedagogy at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. The MACBA in Barcelona has devoted a retrospective to Hansen's work, see for more information here: http://www.macba.cat/en/exhibition-oskar-hansen
Comments: [0]
Entry: Thursday, July 17, 2014
Submitted by:
Dirk van den Heuvel
Country:
The Netherlands
Category:
Critique
The essay highlights some of the inherent contradictions that architects have to face when trying to build towards an Open Society. The claims by architects, in particular the post-war Team 10 group, which disbanded the famous CIAM organization of modern architecture, are confronted with a rereading of Karl Popper's seminal book.
Comments: [0]
Entry: Thursday, July 17, 2014
Submitted by:
Dirk van den Heuvel
Country:
The Netherlands
Category:
Inspiration
'Open Structures' was the result of a Master Class held at The Berlage together with Herman Hertzberger, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel. Students had to reconfigure the Ministry of Social Affairs in The Hague, designed by Herman Hertzberger in the 1980s and now abandoned by the government due to administrative reorganization. Key questions concerned the value of the ideas of Hertzberger and so-called Dutch Structuralism, the dynamic relations between use and spatial configuration, the possible interrelationships between government, welfare state institutions and the agency of architecture. The publication was the outcome of a collaboration between The Berlage, TU Delft, Het Nieuwe Instituut and Volume. It contains interviews, statements and design proposals, both historical and contemporary ones.
Comments: [0]
Entry: Wednesday, July 16, 2014
Submitted by:
Ami Gokani, Lukas Mahlendorf, Morgane Goffin, Lex te Loo
Country:
Netherlands, India, Germany
Category:
Housing
Water and Treasure, the two reoccurring elements in India’s Informal Dwellings. This was the basis of our design on affordable housing in a 3 months studio in Ahmedabad, India. Our bottom-up approach found its roots in the treasure box, the heart of the home, most sheltering and holy combined with the water box, which is always near treasure on all the scales. The system had a base in the community treasure around which the simple boxes were stacked sheltering the courtyard growing over time. More communities would join in a fractal based evolutionary pattern, leaving all the scales in tact and therefore having a solid social network for the arrivals.
Comments: [0]
Entry: Wednesday, July 9, 2014
Submitted by:
Matteo Biella, Piyush Verma, Sophie Stoebe, Viola Liedervald
Country:
India
Category:
Housing
The first impression when you to go to India is that everything is more messy, more crowded, more polluted, faster. This is because your plane is probably landing in New Delhi or Mumbai. Fortunately India doesn't show always this face, we realized this once arrived in Ahmedabad for the Habitat design studio 2014. Although it's house to more than 6 million people, Ahmedabad has another feeling, another flow, even more in its suburbs such as Gota, our project site for affordable housing.
Comments: [0]
Entry: Friday, June 27, 2014
Submitted by:
Pablo Calderón Salazar
Country:
Belgium
Category:
Public space
The Other Market is a platform, materialized in a series of carts and stalls, to trade products and services without money, using dialogue as a currency.
Comments: [5]
Entry: Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Submitted by:
Jeanne van Heeswijk - Afrikaanderwijk Cooperative
Country:
The Netherlands
Category:
Public space
The Afrikaanderwijk Cooperative is a strong and flexible Dutch cooperative association that is set up to improve the social and economical situation of the inhabitants of the Rotterdam Afrikaanderwijk (in the south of the city). The organization was set up as a durational follow-up of the successful Freehouse art project. Economic sustainability is aimed through co-operative cultural production. An inclusive urban development is achieved through stimulating community participation and self-organization.
Comments: [5]
Entry: Monday, June 9, 2014
Submitted by:
Rohan Varma
Country:
The Netherlands
Category:
Housing
This project was produced by me while I was a student at the Delft University of Technology under the mentorship of Prof. Dick van Gameren, and it attempted to find an appropriate alternative to the current model of slum rehabilitation that is in reality further slumming the city. Mumbai as many are aware, is home to an estimated 10 million squatters – about 60 percent of its population giving it the unceremonious title of being the global capital of slumming. It's vast informal settlements have grown in pockets throughout the city with little access to adequate housing, infrastructure and urban resources. In fact, even though these informal settlements account for over half of the city’s population they reside in just a little under 10 percent of the land – resulting in incredibly high densities with little precedent found anywhere else in the world.
Comments: [1]
Entry: Monday, June 9, 2014
Submitted by:
Julian Oliver
Country:
Germany
Category:
Critique
The lack of Corporate and Governmental transparency has been a topic of much controversy in recent years, yet our only tool for encouraging greater openness is the slow, tedious process of policy reform. Presented in the form of a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, the Transparency Grenade is an iconic cure for these frustrations, making the process of leaking information from closed meetings as easy as pulling a pin.
Comments: [78]

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