FAIRS & EVENTS System optimization: Team Mexico4/21/2014Mexico City is renowned for its gridlocks. Each day, commuters spend more than two hours in traffic jams. José Castillo, Carlos Gershenson and Gabriella Gomez-Mont are hunting for solutions to this problem.
FAIRS & EVENTS Swarming behavior: Team Berlin4/20/2014If you need to get from A to B in Berlin you need above all two things: patience and time. Architect Max Schwitalla, neuroscientist Arndt Pechstein and transit-manager Paul Friedli want to change this, and in their efforts have investigated the swarming behavior of animals.
FAIRS & EVENTS Digital Locomotion4/15/2014Stylepark is curating the Audi Urban Future Award for the third time. This year, the focus is firmly on connectivity: How can we utilize data to improve infrastructure and thus make more efficient use of urban space?
ARCHITECTURE Mextropoli3/18/2014Mexican architecture journal Arquine is hosting a conference for the 15th time. This year it centers on the Mexico City metropolis and is accompanied by a highly diverse festival program.
ARCHITECTURE Mexico City’s Gordian knot3/18/2014Almost everything is a challenge in this megalopolis with over 20 million inhabitants and a metropolitan area that includes 40 municipalities of the State of Mexico. Alejandro Hernández Gálvez, chief editor at the mexican architecture magazine Arquine, explains why.
FAIRS & EVENTS Urban beacons2/19/2014Frankfurt gleams in a new light – in 2014, parallel to the Light + Building trade fair, one of the world’s largest and most renowned light festivals will take place again, the Luminale. Take a look at our preview of the top ten light-installations.
ARCHITECTURE Bad weather pool2/12/2014In the Netherlands the number of days with strong precipitation increased to 85 percent. What to do with all the water in a sealed city like Rotterdam? With their concept for Rotterdam’s Benthemplein square, the architects and planners at De Urbanisten demonstrate how water management can be incorporated into urban square design.
DESIGN Uncle Tom’s Jacket12/22/2013For some time designers and architects have been making inroads into the world of fashion. Now Tom Dixon’s collection for Adidas is hitting the stores. High on garments, low on trend, and with bags that can be transformed into textile furniture.
ARCHITECTURE Revitalization at the touch of a switch12/13/2013It was not so much aesthetic architectural approaches that were called for as temporary solutions with a socio-cultural touch: For the second time Berlin has challenged Europe’s architects to submit entries for the “Urban Intervention Award”. A prize somewhere between “cute” and “best practice”.
ARCHITECTURE Incompleted: Frankfurt at a glance12/11/2013On behalf of Stylepark, the Director of Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) takes a close look at DOM Publishers’ new “Architectural Guide to Frankfurt/Main”.
MAGAZINE A shop window on Frankfurt’s Römer8/28/2013For the sixth time Vitra is hosting an “Ampelphase” exhibition in its Frankfurt Showroom – this year the exhibition is designed by six architects from the RhineMain region, who have developed a temporary creative platform with many a look inwards and many a view outwards.
MAGAZINE Going with the data flow and sharing means of transport7/28/2013What will the cities of tomorrow look like? How will we move in them? And what role will digital media play in the process? A discussion with Jürgen Mayer H. and Eric Höweler at the “Schaustelle” in Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne tried to find some answers.
MAGAZINE Bridging a gap or a bridge to urban disaster?6/13/2013Hamburg thrives on its port and on occasion subordinates quality of life to the port’s needs. A new city highway is expected primarily to ease commercial traffic. First up, a design for a new bridge was highlighted. It is stunningly beautiful, but the overall project remains dubious.
MAGAZINE What can the city do for me? What can I do for the city?5/29/2013Our cities are already bursting at the seams. We need new forms of mobility to shape life in the megacities of tomorrow. In New York experts from Audi teamed up with architects, urban planners and academics to seek answers to one of the most pressing questions of the future.
MAGAZINE Welcome to Utopia!10/31/2012The “Shareway” concept developed by Höweler + Yoon Architecture, winners of the Audi Urban Future Award 2012, spotlights the collaborative use of transportation structures. The other studios participating in the architecture award curated by Stylepark also focused on questions of mobility and transportation in 2030 – against the backdrop of individual needs and trends in society.
MAGAZINE Mobility shapes our metropolises5/25/2012About 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.
MAGAZINE Exploring urban structures3/1/2012Demographics, 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.
MAGAZINE Shenzhen’s Strada Novissima12/21/2011Chinese cities are known to grow very rapidly. So it is all the more important that those involved talk about architecture and urban planning. One suitable platform for discussion is the Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale. For the show in Shenzhen, curator Terence Riley chose the topic "Street" and asked twelve architects for façade designs.
MAGAZINE Wheels before feet9/10/2011Traffic in China is steadily on the increase. Naturally, you find cars, mopeds and buses there, too but everything works just a little differently. Car hooters sound like house buzzers, for example and taxi drivers cannot read maps.
MAGAZINE Hope from Heidelberg Street9/3/2011The international zeitgeist has uncovered Detroit as America's maltreated "motor city": a growing creative scene is bearing witness to the emergence of new visions and an alternative "do-it-yourself movement" for this post-industrial wasteland.
MAGAZINE Beyond all industrial romanticism8/30/2011In Year One after Capital of Culture 2010: A photo exhibition in Dortmund looks at the Ruhr region in a way it is otherwise never looked at, portraying a region in upheaval, with scars, non-locations, inhospitable zones. Its present day attests to a past that is gone forever and points to a future that still needs to be identified.
MAGAZINE What will happen to the new Parisian market halls?8/20/2011Living cities are constantly reinventing themselves. In Paris, this is especially apparent if one looks at the “Les Halles” district. The next wave of conversion and modernization is expected in the not-too-distant future. And this does not alter the dilemma of urban planning decreed from above.
MAGAZINE Trade fairs as the drivers of urban development8/7/2011During the Cold War, the trade fair in Zagreb was one of the few locations where NATO member countries and Warsaw Pact nations presented their wares. Today, the trade-fair complex on the banks of the Sava River is hopelessly out of date and the city is considering a new solution.
MAGAZINE Self-providers of the world, unite!8/5/2011“Urban farming” takes many shapes – in America’s shrinking cities the new trend toward self-providers shows just how obvious visionary town planning can be.
MAGAZINE The opening of a once forbidden city5/15/2011Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani’s master plan foresees having the Novartis Campus building realized by various architects. The book series “Novartis Campus” documents the buildings in the large-scale Basle project that are now already standing.
MAGAZINE The end of something12/14/2010In his two-volume "Die Stadt im 20. Jahrhundert" (The City in the 20th Century), Vittorio Magnano Lampugnani summarizes topographical, historiographic and organizational aspects of urban planning with an impressive wealth of material, a monographic approach to key figures, and great earnestness.
MAGAZINE Kaleidoscopic urban planning10/29/2010The exhibition "Realstadt. Wishes knocking on reality's doors" is showing in Berlin more than 300 architecture and urban planning projects from all over Germany. The exhibition stretches across around 8,000 square meters, yet as far as content goes, the presentation leaves many questions unanswered and the exhibits are more like showy objects.
MAGAZINE Back when Chandigarh was being built10/7/2010Ernst Scheidegger's photos of the Indian city of Chandigarh document the reality of a utopia being built. More than 50 years later and previously unpublished, the photos are now appearing for the first time in an illustrated book.
MAGAZINE The digitally cleansed city9/11/2010In 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.
MAGAZINE Protest in the City9/8/2010Museum Folkwang's "Hacking the City" exhibition features interventions in urban and communicative spaces. Artists, Web designers, street artists and musicians address types of public action and practiced forms of resistance. A courageous approach by the museum in Essen that definitely bears continuing - let's hope the exhibition and events series takes things to an even more intensive point.
MAGAZINE “Save the traffic, so our cities can survive”8/17/2010During 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?
MAGAZINE The Senior Leisure Nomad and the temporary city8/14/2010As 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.
ARCHITECTURE Raumlaborberlin and the revival of the urban style8/7/2010The projects by the artists' and architects' collective "Raumlaborberlin" are far from being conventional. The group of eight, which is at present developing the exhibition architecture for the "Audi Urban Future Award" that is curated by Stylepark, is currently presenting a very special kind of installation at Kunsthaus Bregenz.
MAGAZINE The City as a Labo for Future Mobility8/5/2010The "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.
INTERVIEWS The car versus the ant5/1/2001The cause of numerous traffic-jams is often the driver himself. Franziska Queling talked to Congestion researcher Micheal Schreckenberg about cooperatively acting ants and what lessons we can learn from them.