Lecture and guest critic at the Lehrstuhl für Planen und Bauen im ländlichen Raum at TU Munich whithin the urban design course 'The agriculture of the City' conducted by visiting professor Stefano Boeri.

Today agriculture employs over one-third of the world's population, while its production accounts for less than five percent of the gross world product. Not only the population employed in agriculture constantly decreased in recent years, agriculture was also largely seen as a residual activity and indifferent to changes. Yet agriculture is crucial for the understanding of the territories in which we live: Cities came into being only because of the role they played in the agricultural organization of territories. This fundamental relation among city/urbanisation and agriculture needs to be re-considered regarding contemporary changes in food production. The challenge of contemporary agriculture is not only to produce food for the increasing world population, but to insert these goals inside of a wider project of civilization, in which productive landscapes and cities produce new meaningful constellations. Addressing these considerations, the lecture on the ETH Studio Basel research project 'Nile Valley - Urbanisation of Limited Resources' attempts to give an understanding of the specific form of 'rural urbanisation' whithin a condition of increasing scarcity of land and water.

From 17th to 23rd of October, Raumbureau is teaching at the OSSA-Workshop 2009 in Poznań, Poland.

Our workshop group attempts to transfer the theoretical and methodological approach of the Situationist International, which was in its origins in the sixties applied to the traditional city of Paris, to the housing district of Rataje. Rataje is with its 150’000 inhabitants the largest housing area of Poznan and with its specific panel-housing typologies a legacy of the modernist era of the sixties and seventies. Although Rataje represents an entirely different urbanity than we know it from the so-called traditional city - a condition that is generally stigmatized for its monotonous character without specific qualities – the project seeks to emphasize on the specificity of this city-part.

Psychogeographic Map Rataje - Poznan (2.6mb) | Rataje Ortho Photo | Aerial Photo

Feldstrasse 133
8004 Zürich

Map

"Preservation, it should be noted, is not memory. Preservation is selective and tends to exclude the dirt and pain."
Ackbar Abbas, 'Culture and the Politics of Disappearance'

The lecture tries to further elaborate on the specific urban character of Hong Kong that is generated by the various interdependent factors, energies and forces that arose out of its unique political, economical and (socio-) geographical conditions. Did these interdependencies - such as scarcity of buildable land, massive population growth, economic shifts, postcolonial lethargy and search for identity - continuously culminate in a highly sophisticated urbanisation model of control by the gradual usage of engineering and financing expertise? The lecture tries to argue on this point via the observation of the highly controlled, organised and 'smooth surface' of the HK-territory.
www.angelil.arch.ethz.ch

Together with seven European architecture practices Raumbureau has been selected for the City Visions Europe Exchange Program 2009-2010. The selected offices will develop speculative projects for the four cities Mechelen (BE), Plzen (CZ), Kosice (SK) and Bordeaux (FR).

The program will be launched with a two-day conference in Mechelen: "New Vocabularies for the European city".

6.30 p.m., at the Foyer SG, Faculty of Architecture.

Lectures by: Didem Danis, sociologist, University of Galatasaray, Istanbul; Yves Bonard, urbanist and geographer, University of Lausanne, and Tom Weiss, Architect, Zurich University of Applied Sciences.

After several years of investigations in various international metropolises, the ETH Studio Basel will focus in the coming semester on the linear territorial organisation along the Nile Valley as a new field of contemporary urbanisation. The objective of this research is to identify the various paradigmatic factors of urbanisation that shape the current form of urban transformations.
www.studio-basel.com

Residential estates occupied by single-family homes are widely regarded as the main driver behind excessive land use, urban sprawl, energy waste and the rising traffic volumes in conurbations. However, broad sections of the population clearly view houses, as opposed to apartments, as the ideal
way to live. Hence, a decline in demand appears highly unlikely in the short to medium term. This raises the question as to how existing and future single-family residential estates may be better reconciled with the goals of sustainable urban development.

An investigation into the typology of single-family home residential districts in the Swiss Midland.

A design studio lecture within the EMU - Program: Strategies and design for cities and territories.

Flyer Lecture

Lecturers: Bernardo Secchi, Thierry Paquot, Jaques Levy, Michel Lussault, Lee Ann Nicol, Tom Weiss

Every research, as well as every planning and urban design practice proceeds, explicitly or implicitly, with spatial objects and with geographical categories. However, the status of these objects and categories varies between authors and planners, and changes meaning over time. The seminar gathers searchers, planners and urban designers to confront the use of spatial objects and geographical categories within different disciplines.

Tom Weiss presents the ongoing research at the ZHAW Departement of Architecture, which is part of the National Research Program 54. 
Organised by the University of Geneva, Department of Geography, and Infraconsult

In 1977 Oswald Mathias Ungers and a group of architects worked on a project for Berlin called “Berlin as Green Archipelago”.
 The main hypothesis of this project was that the process of depopulation, and urban crisis could turn into a possible “ideal” for the city. Ungers proposed the form of the city as an archipelago of dense urban artefacts surrounded by a forest that would gradually replace existing (empty) portions of the city. Thought “Berlin as Green Archipelago” was a specific project for Berlin it can be regarded as a paradigmatic example of a political and formal interpretation of the city. The lecture will address Ungers’ Archipelago not so much within its own historical context, but more as a heuristic device that can help to trace back important categories of the city such as the irreducible difference between city and urbanization, the concept of the formal, the concept of the political, and the role of organization of work in the formation of contemporary urbanity. These categories will be discussed by situating “Berlin as Green Archipelago” in relationship with other paradigmatic examples of the modern city such as Ildefonso Cerdà’s “Theory of Urbanization”, Archizoom’s “No-stop City”, and Rem Koolhaas’ “City of Captive Globe”.
www.studio-basel.com

Pier Paolo Tamburelli presents the beautiful little book of Baukuh, Genova, Italy.

Hochparterre Bücher, Gasometerstrasse 28, Zurich, 7 p.m.

By applying the phenomenological research approach of the ETH Studio Basel, the general framework of the lecture tries to examine the very specific urbanity of HK as a result of its complex political and economic background and motives. Despite the general consideration that globalisation and its rampant energies are producing a homogenisation of the urban conditions today (or what Koolhaas calls the Generic city) - a concept that could easily be applied with HK as one of its protagonists - the city of Hong Kong developed a highly sophisticated evolutionary urban model that created a very unique mode of urbanisation. The lecture tries to sketch an understanding of the complex character of that governing economic model that strives for maximisation of efficiency and perfection and tries to explore its complex mechanisms and the roles of its various actors. This will be portrayed by means of an investigation in the public transport and infrastructure system of HK, that functions as a concordance between the HKSAR Government and private (transportation) companies to generate profit through real-estate developments. The question of whether this highly specific all-encompassing governance model with its main goal to gain economical profit in turn creates ‚niches of state-tolerated grey zones’ as its side product shall be formulated with the examination on the case study of the Chungking Mansions as a possible model of such an alternative.
Chu Hai Archi-cultural Symposium 2008

Poster symposium

Learning from the appropriation desires and strategies of the working class urban inhabitants, that at least for a brief moment, accomplished to resist and claim their ‘right to the city,’ the Social In-habitat program seeks latent possibilities of closely collaborating with governments and the general public towards speculative design proposals for the large and small scale re-introduction of ‘in-city social housing’ based urban developments that utilize city voids and aim to regenerate gentrified fabric, provoking the clash, sharing and cooperation necessary to inject a notion of a coexisting social difference in the fabric of this metropolises and stimulating a possible dialogue with the citizens on the social benefits of avoiding geographical expansion in favor of core urban constructions and precise architectonic solutions.
www.cohabitationstrategies.org