Luciano Checco
Fascinating photographs by Luciano Checco of the 'other' side of Singapore.
Creating the Jugaad Dishwasher, The X-Way
The X-Way was a 2 day workshop sponsored by Nokia and Microsoft that focused on ideas, strategies and discussion around improving Mumbai city. Ben & Andrew moderated the workshop, keeping it challenging as twenty creatives and innovators came together with many, many city ideas.
Post-Traumatic Urbanism
Cities like Mumbai and Beirut have developed in unstable uncertainty and in many ways are resilient survivors. They have adapted with 'redundant networks' and 'diversity and distribution' rather than 'centralized efficiency' which makes them flexible in the face of shocks to infrastructure (Lahoud, 2010).
Dayanita Singh
I am especially interested in her attempts to express her own visions of a place or city, opposing the singular story people usually expect about India, that of 'sensational catastrophes and human failures'
Danger of a Single Story
This brilliant TED video by novelist Chimamanda Adichie articulates what I often have to say about Mumbai while here in UK. Namely, yes there is poverty and yes we have slums - but these are proud people who are more than just the anonymous poor.
Site-Specific Art
In his book Eyes of the Skin, Pallasmaa talks at great length about the beauty of human perception and how the senses interact with each other to form experience. He emphasizes the importance of a sense experience as a whole. He says there is a bias to the eye in the architectural practice because people are focussed on how a building looks rather than how a body can move within it or how it feels. When it comes to the perception of places he discusses the importance of emotion, memory, imagination and fantasy.
The Heard and Unheard
'By constructing an "architectural music-space...made possible by the microphone," Music While We Work explores how artistic practice can intervence in the social space of labor production at the intersection of history and everyday life.'
Place-Making
Notes on urban memory, place-making and its relation to the interpretation of the city in contemporary art and architecture.
