_urb_ Updates :: 21 November

Some of my photos of Wang Shu’s Central Academy of Art project in Hangzhou are featured in archidose’s A Weekly Dose of Architecture.

 

I also want to point out that the excellent post Iteration City was written by Mark Collins of Proxy, who is working with Urban Think Tank and the Columbia GSAPP Slum Lab.  If you are interested in the issues brought up in the discussion you should check out more of their work and the publication Informal Toolbox about the work they are doing in Sao Paolo.  Let’s hope Mark contributes more in the future!!

 

I wrote a piece recently discussing similar issues but from a different viewpoint called Architecture of Mediation for an upcoming issue of Urban China which I will post here once the magazine is published.  For me mediatory architecture is a form of practice that seeks to negotiate the transitional space between diametrically opposed issues of globalization and regionalism, progress and resistance, first and third worlds, and avant-garde and arriere-garde positions.  I hope to expand upon this line of thought in the future.  What I find interesting about Proxy’s work in ‘critical urban areas’ is their use of advanced computational design and information management to innovate in this unchartered territory of practice and helping bridge the gap between spiked and flat descriptions of the global economy.