Urban Lab Global Cities Post

architectural-review:

Both dizzyingly vibrant and wonderfully dark, Naples has a classical beauty tempered by decaying grandeur and crime-ridden streets. As the architect Luca Molinari once said: ‘In the bowels of Naples you can find anything.’ And while some may find this half-sinister ambiguity alarming, Neopolitan architect Cherubino Gambardella has found the urban scene to be an endless source of inspiration and a recurring site of speculation.
Asking us to indulge in a ‘dose of unreality’, this Futurist-Surrealist lovechild Life with Objects: the Manifesto is taken from Gambardella’s latest book (La vita con gli oggetti / Life with Objects). With an intuitive creativity scarcely glimpsed in his more pragmatic built work, this collection of drawings offers a vision to purge the city of its pathologies and endless tedium, describing new architectures sprouting out of the old.
From the rushed yet purposeful qualities of the differing media used, to the recurring sun motif (as exemplified in the popular Neapolitan folksong O Sole Mio), and the collaged photographic references of ad-hoc construction, the city has clearly shaped the architect’s imaginings. Or, as Gambardella would have it, ‘by observing the ordinary city, the space for a new beauty will be born’.Federico Sher
Life with objects: the manifesto. Mixed technique on brown paper, 100 x 100 cm, October 2011

Both dizzyingly vibrant and wonderfully dark, Naples has a classical beauty tempered by decaying grandeur and crime-ridden streets. As the architect Luca Molinari once said: ‘In the bowels of Naples you can find anything.’ And while some may find this half-sinister ambiguity alarming, Neopolitan architect Cherubino Gambardella has found the urban scene to be an endless source of inspiration and a recurring site of speculation.

Asking us to indulge in a ‘dose of unreality’, this Futurist-Surrealist lovechild Life with
Objects: the Manifesto is taken from Gambardella’s latest book (La vita con gli oggetti / Life with Objects). With an intuitive creativity scarcely glimpsed in his more pragmatic
built work, this collection of drawings offers a vision to purge the city of its pathologies and endless tedium, describing new architectures sprouting out of the old.

From the rushed yet purposeful qualities of the differing media used, to the recurring sun motif (as exemplified in the popular Neapolitan folksong O Sole Mio), and the collaged photographic references of ad-hoc construction, the city has clearly shaped the architect’s imaginings. Or, as Gambardella would have it, ‘by observing the ordinary city, the space for a new beauty will be born’.
Federico Sher

Life with objects: the manifesto. Mixed technique on brown paper, 100 x 100 cm, October 2011

May 24

smithsonianmag:

Photo of the Day: Walking an old man through a traditional village in Iran, named Abyaneh

Photograph by Ruhollah Mahmoudi (Qom, Iran), March 2010, Abyaneh, Kashan, Iran

(via theatlantic)

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theatlantic:

Science Picture of the Day: The Mars Horizon

NASA’s Mars Rover Opportunity captured this image looking eastward over the Endeavour Crater late in the afternoon of Opportunity’s 2,888th Martian sol (day) which corresponded with March 9, 2012 here on Earth. In the foreground, Opportunity’s own shadow appears, in a sort of one-step-removed self-portrait. […] The image is a mosaic of about a dozen images and presented in false color to draw out certain features of the topography.

[Image: NASA]

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theatlantic:

In the June issue of The Atlantic: David H. Freedman on the return of B.F. Skinner’s ‘creepy’ science of behavior modification, Robert D. Kaplan on Vietnam’s place in U.S.-China relations, a profile of Olympic women’s boxer Marlen Esparza, new fiction by Molly Patterson, and more.

Check out the full Table of Contents and let us know what you think!

May 18

SEEDocs: Owe’neh Bupingeh Preservation Plan and Rehabilitation Project

May 10

Crisis of Capitalism | David Harvey

May 9

CITY BREATHS: Gordon Matta-Clark: Converting the City’s Decay into Critical Works of Art

citybreaths:

Gordon Matta-Clark: “Splitting” (1974).

Over the past years, there has been a strong current of photographers preoccupied with urban decay. Detroit is the primary example of this fascination with abandonment, ruination and former glory. Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre for example,…

May 7

“ The standard burial plot occupies 35 square feet, which means that burying every American alive today would take a piece of land large than New York City’s five boroughs — or, roughly six times the size of the District of Columbia MAP 003 ı Archive | David Garcia Studio

May 2

“ My particular bête noire has always been the suburbs. If you build suburbs, you get a suburban political consciousness; you get a suburban human being, with all goes with it. And, frankly, that’s not the kind of human being that I admire. Now, I’m not going to say that they’re not human; they are very human, in fact. As human beings, we always adapt to our environments in certain ways; adapt our mental conceptions of the world according to the kinds of experiential world in which we exist. It is not inhuman to be that way in the suburbs. But what you have to do is build something completely different so that people end up being human in a completely different way. (…) [T]herefore it’s a class conflict, it’s a cultural conflict, and so on. Interview with David Harvey | Michael Schapira & David Backer

May 1

Paco Gonzalez: May Day: The Return of the Trade-Unions?

pacogonzalez:

An excerpt from the fantastic commentary “May Day: The Return of the Trade-Unions?” by Immanuel Wallerstein:

The so-called financial crisis since 2007 changed all this. The world saw the emergence of new kinds of radical movements such as Occupy, the indignados, Oxi, and others. And…