News & Stories
by Nora Sobich
Can you even “design” parking lots? In the USA, where there is more paved space for parking cars than anywhere else in the world, the calls to take these “lost spaces” more seriously in their role as public spaces are growing louder and louder.
News & Stories
by Jörg Zimmermann
About 70 percent of the world’s population will in future live in megacities. For the Audi Urban Future Award 2012 six architectural offices are casting an eye over the metropolitan regions of Boston/Washington, São Paulo, Istanbul, Mumbai, the Pearl River Delta and Tokyo – and coming up with new ideas for developing mobility in urban space.
News & Stories
by Thomas Edelmann
Chief designer, founder of the Porsche Design Studio as well as Chairman of the Supervisory Board – these are just some of the outstanding stages in the life of Ferdinand Alexander Porsche, who died in Salzburg on April 5.
News & Stories
Demographics, infrastructure and resources are key factors driving urban development. Audi is for the second time holding the Audi Urban Future Award, an architecture prize designed to foster research into the mechanisms of urbanity.
News & Stories | International Motor Show 2011
by Thomas Wagner
Crisis, what crisis. At the 64th IAA international motor show, the industry is looking to the future with confidence. So how exactly do the designers think the auto of tomorrow will look? You can get an idea by casting a glance at the trade-fair orchestrations and the latest concept cars.
News & Stories
by Andreas Rossmann
Greetings from Legoland: The NRW-Forum in Düsseldorf is showcasing an exhibition about containers, which reveals just how much enthusiasm there currently is in the architecture scene for transportation vessels such as these, but also how thoroughly the beautiful new world of standardized architecture ignores individuality and local circumstances.
News & Stories
by Nina Reetzke
One area on which Jean Prouvé focused in his work was prefabricated houses, construction elements and façades. The now legendary Maison Tropicale was one product of this. The prototypes stood in West Africa for almost 50 years and are now on show in a series of exhibitions in Europe and the USA.
News & Stories
by Thomas Wagner
Anyone who expects to find a book about cars between the covers of "The Porsche Book" will be wrong. The focus here is instead on the stagings by photo designer Frank M. Orel. The cars tend to play only a secondary role.
News & Stories
by Deane Simpson
As part of the Audi Urban Future Award, New York architects Diller Scofido + Renfro devoted some thought to the issue of mobile dwellings, responding to changes in residential patterns. Many older people above all in the United States have cut their ties with conventional notions of domesticity.
News & Stories
by Thomas Wagner
The "AUFA Audi Urban Future Award 2010", which is curated by Stylepark, has set itself the task of thinking about the city of tomorrow as regards the issue of mobility. We are running a series of articles in coming weeks on some aspects of automobility and urban planning as relating to the AUFA - the latter will culminate on August 25 with a presentation of the findings in Venice in the form of an exhibition and the selection of the first prize winner.
News & Stories
by Sandra Hofmeister
Our economy is based on growth, but growth has its limits. And thus our current urban planning stands on wobbly foundations. Architect Peter Haimerl and his team are working on a new city for the future. "Zoom Town" is an urban concept that coordinates various forms of mobility with each other in an overarching urban fabric.
News & Stories
by Sandra Hofmeister
Industrial designer Christian Förg has developed a concept for electric cars called "Speedway". An electromagnetic field drives the car and charges the battery at the same time!
News & Stories
by Nora Sobich
Detroit, the very name stands for cutting-edge industrial architecture. America's very first car factory was built her, a concrete frame structure, and it was here that Albert Kahn, the "builder of Detroit", created the Highland Park factory for the Ford "Model T", which first rolled off the production line in 1908. In a city whose future seems to be behind it, what is happening to the built monuments of the industrial revolution fuelled by automobile construction?
News & Stories
by Thomas Wagner
There's no escaping the impression that designers, engineers and ad men like to be seen as artists. Yet experience shows that art does not sit easy with the advertising world, which rarely produces anything other than bland me-too's.
News & Stories
Will the good old gas station soon become extinct?
News & Stories
by Thomas Wagner
Design is more than just providing styling, and the look of a car is more than just pretty wraps for it. But do the ad agencies know this, too?
News & Stories
The auto's future is inextricably connected to batteries. And to power sockets. What sounds so plausible and developed in the media and at press conferences, is far from ready, and instead the major challenge we face is to develop electromobility: in the form of powerful batteries.
News & Stories
by Thomas Wagner
If we are to believe the grandiose announcements by the auto industry we will soon be driving highly efficiently in futuristically designed automobiles into a brave clean world. And the energy will come from a power socket. But a lot of what glitters as promises at IAA is simply not gold. But pie in the sky. And design is tailoring the new clothes and making do with the role of being the sub-servant of technology.
News & Stories
by Thomas Wagner
For some time now, the future has been the present as far as automobile advertising is concerned: everything must be green, efficient, economical. Such harmony between Man, Nature and Machine is, however, just a sun-drenched fairy tale, and then, just sometimes, the dim, dark night.
News & Stories
by Paolo Tumminelli
It's a bit like Christmas, only every other year: Once again this year hordes of amazed and enthusiastic car lovers will make their way to the major car show in Frankfurt, in the hope of finding the wondrous, even revolutionary automobile of the future. But what is it we are actually dreaming of?
News & Stories
by Thomas Wagner
Crisis or no crisis, you will soon be able to oggle them at the IAA International Motor Show in Frankfurt - namely all the new, beautiful, better, faster, even safer and even more fuel-efficient cars. So how does the auto industry present itself in its commercials? What instincts do they appeal to and what values do they propagate?
News & Stories
by Thomas Edelmann
Hamburg has splashed out on a new subway line with two new, well-designed train stations. One is for the most part still closed since there are no finished buildings close by. But one day there will be thousands using the new route to travel through the city. That’s a promise!
News & Stories
by Sandra Gottwald
Parking is by definition the temporary placing of vehicles on a space foreseen for this. In reality, however, the automobile does not get placed somewhere temporarily: they get driven temporarily. So where to put the rising number of vehicles not running? In car parks!
News & Stories | Salone del Mobile 2012
by Markus Frenzl
In “Colour One for Mini” Scholten & Baijings have created an installation, that conceptually challenges common conventions in surrounding the car. The Dutch designer duo dissected a “Mini One”, revamping the individual parts with new colors and textures. The outcome created a space where our associations with the past and future of the automobile were free to run wild.
News & Stories
by Thomas Edelmann
Currently hardly a car-maker has prioritized special topics. Instead, cars are on show that can potentially do everything. Give you a sporting drive, be safe off-road, and look like a limousine.
News & Stories
by Thomas Wagner
They have been fueling automotive advancement for around 100 years now: gas stations. In Christof Vieweg's informative and richly illustrated book "Volltanken bitte!" we discover that the first gas station was a pharmacy, which brands were once sold, when certain architectural models emerged and what particularly attractive stations look like.
News & Stories
by Sandra Hofmeister
We have always known that Germans love cars. We can only conjecture what kind of fantasies surround the cult object. The exhibition “Fetisch Auto. Ich fahre, also bin ich” (Car fetish – I drive, therefore I am) in Basle provides an insight into the visual images surrounding what is actually a pretty functional object.
News & Stories
by Knuth Hornbogen
Spring is back and the bicycle season starts. Should you want to buy a new vehicle, why not a custom-built one? Then a glance in the book "Bespoke: The Handbuilt Bicycle" is certainly worthwhile.
News & Stories
In the framework of the Audi Urban Future Award 2010 curated by Stylepark, six internationally active architecture offices participated in a process in the course of which they developed their own particular visions of how mobility, architecture and the city will in future interact. Five of them are currently presenting their ideas in an exhibition at Venice. The competition was won by Berlin-based Jürgen Mayer H.
News & Stories
by Thomas Wagner
The future of mobility lies in a combination of various transport systems that dove-tail with one another. Train, streetcar and underground play an important role. Transport policy in this country, however, has not yet recognized the advantages of a customer-friendly train.
News & Stories
by Annette Tietenberg
During the reconstruction period in West Germany. a new control instrument entered the political landscape: urban planning. Its objective was to make a strict division between labor and living . People should work in the city, and live in the country. The fact that commuters were obliged to buy a car to cover the distance between the city center and the periphery merely boosted the economy. And produced slip roads, city highways and traffic jams lasting for kilometers. The car-friendly city - an unsuccessful historical concept or bitter-sweet reality?
News & Stories
by Thomas Wagner
In the media age racing cars not only have to be fast, they also have to look fast and stand out on the racing track thanks to colors, lines, numbers and logos. In "Go Faster" Sven Voelker illustrates that this was not always so and shows what characterizes those models with particularly successful styling.
The Audi Urban Future Award aims to analyze the future of our cities in the context of questions of mobility, and to offer concrete suggestions for their reconfiguration. During a Conference in London initial results are presented in a workshop. The process is documented and discussed in a publication.
News & Stories
by Nina Reetzke
What will cities of the future look like? How will we move around in them? Archigram's utopia provide answers which are still exciting. Thanks to the Archigram Archival Project the designs and activities of the British architect group can now be viewed in detail on the Internet.
News & Stories
by Nancy Jehmlich
At the beginning of the 1950s, Italian oil company Agip came up with the idea of linking gas station architecture to the company's corporate identity. An exhibition at Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt presents Italy's gas station architecture during the economic recovery of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
News & Stories
by Nora Sobich
Now that both Chrysler and General Motors have hit the wall America's auto industry seeks to reinvent itself. In Detroit, which is still a great if increasingly pale showroom of what was once world-famous auto-architecture, no one has stopped believing in the future of the US automobile.
News & Stories
by Peter Sägesser
Taken by surprise in the current crisis, the automobile industry now seems to be rushing towards an ecological future wearing seven league boots. But where is this future to be found? Does part of it perhaps not lie in the simplicity of its European past?
News & Stories
by Thomas Edelmann
Are electric drives more a PR campaign than a serious alternative? What is currently being treated as the future face of automobility has already been around for some time. Electric cars have as yet, however, been able to establish themselves. For several reasons.
News & Stories
Dare to look into the future? Each of us will drive an electric car, will charge it overnight, while at the same time the washing machine runs because electricity will be cheaper at night. How to secure power supplies during such peak periods? Claudia Beckmann spoke to David Dallinger. They discussed how the electric car of tomorrow can be integrated into renewable decentral energy systems.
News & Stories
The automobile industry is the focal point of the debate about climate goals and CO2 reduction. The answer to the question about the car of the future is quite clearly electromobility. Claudia Beckmann and Nancy Jehmlich spoke to three experts about which mobility concepts are currently being discussed and the technical and economic challenges that accompany them.
News & Stories
by Paolo Tumminelli
What role is design actually playing at the 63rd IAA car show? Are the new models keeping their promises in this respect? Or for various reasons, is design losing the requisite balance between yesterday and today?
News & Stories
by Georg-Christof Bertsch
Boxy cars are taking the design world by storm.
News & Stories
by Silke Gehrmann-Becker
What does it actually mean for one's own way of driving, mood, - and not least of all design awareness - to drive along behind a rear, to analyze its motion, get one's own front as close as possible to it, while at the same time, on th other hand, keeping one's one rear as far away as possible from an approaching front?
News & Stories
by Georg-Christof Bertsch
In that time people have continually been talking about the future of individual transport. There are definitely some alternatives which would help to reduce traffic congestion in big cities and use energy in an efficient way. Intelligently organized group transport is one of them.
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