Archinect - News

Oana Stănescu named curator for the Beta 2024 Timișoara Architecture Biennial

2024-01-11T13:00:00-05:00

Romanian architect Oana Stănescu has been named as the curator for the Beta 2024 Timișoara Architecture Biennial. In a career spanning two decades, the architect, designer, writer, and educator has offered a “profound reading of contemporary architecture and design,” according to the biennial organizers.

“I am deeply honored, excited and nervous, thrilled and moved all at the same time,” Stănescu said about the appointment. “We live our lives within the confines of architecture, which makes it the perfect excuse for urgent socio-cultural conversations, especially in Romania’s unique position, with its simultaneous proximity and distance to the West.”

Having completed her architectural studies at FAUT (The Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism from Timișoara), Stănescu ultimately established her studio in New York and Berlin, with notable projects including retail designs for Virgil Abloh’s Off White stores, large-scale installations at MoMA and Coachella, and a co-founding of the col...

MVRDV’s Winy Maas to curate biennale on threatened Van Gogh landscapes

2023-04-17T13:36:00-04:00

MVRDV founding partner Winy Maas has been selected as curator for the Van Gogh Homeland Biennale. Set to launch in 2025, the event will draw attention to the Brabant landscapes in the Netherlands which featured in many Vincent Van Gogh paintings more than a hundred years ago and are now under threat from climate change.

Image credit: MVRDV

The Biennale is part of a broader collaboration between Midpoint Brabant, MVRDV, and the Van Gogh Homeland Foundation, which aims to raise public awareness of the challenges faced by the Dutch landscape, where the number of flood events is increasing, and tensions are rising between farmers, cities, industries, and nature lovers over land use.

The team hopes that a blend of architecture, landscape design, sustainability, and leisure backgrounds will “show in an attractive and accessible way how the landscape that inspired Vincent van Gogh 150 years ago can be made more sustainable and greener in the future.”

Image credit: MVRDV

The Biennale will in...

Don't miss the must-see architecture and design events for Fall 2019!

2019-09-23T19:00:00-04:00

The fall season is a time of focus, when students head back to school and working folks gear up for the last few months of the year. The next few months will be full of opportunities that can perhaps provide refreshing perspectives on architectural practice and design, whether it's discussing the importance of design competitions at a conference, visiting a student exhibition, or touring a brand new building designed by a famous firm.

To help you out, we've put together a comprehensive list of the biennales, expos, exhibitions and must-see events of Fall 2019 to keep you up-to-date on the latest developments in architecture and design.

SEPTEMBER

©ChicagoArchitectureBiennial/Photographer’s Francis Son, 2019.

Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism | Sep 7-Nov 10 | Seoul, KR

The space and structure of cities, creative development and regeneration, new building methods and technology, sustainable urban environments, city governance, and new forms of solidarity: these are the centra...

Don't let FOMO bring you down! These are the must-visit architecture and design events for Summer 2019

2019-05-15T12:05:00-04:00

With summer just around the corner, it's the perfect time to start planning your visits to the most critical architecture and design events around the globe. To help you out, we've put together a comprehensive list of the biennales, expos, exhibitions and must-see events to keep you up-to-date on the latest developments in architecture and design.

From finding out what design trends lie ahead in the near future, to exploring periods of uncertainty through art, to networking with fellow design professionals and industry leaders, here's our event master list of upcoming events for the summer season.

MAY

Tranceflora, 2015–19; Sputniko! (Hiromi Ozaki) (Japanese, b. 1985) and Masaya Kushino (Japanese, b. 1982), Another Farm (Tokyo, Japan), in collaboration with National Agricultural and Research Organization (NARO) (Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan, founded 2006) and Hosoo (Kyoto, Japan, founded 1688); Glowing transgenic silk; Photo: So Morimoto.

Setouchi Triennale 2019 | Apr 26-Nov 4 ...

Chicago Architecture Biennial announces 'Other Such Stories' as theme for 2019 edition

2019-02-06T13:54:00-05:00

Making its return later this year, the third edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial will go beyond design to address questions of land, memory, rights and civic participation. Announced yesterday, the theme "...and other stories" has been picked by this year's artistic director, Yesomi Umolu, and her team as a way to examine how histories, landscapes, and communities undergird the built environment.

“Our approach to this edition of the biennial has evolved through conversations with architects, spatial practitioners, and everyday people in Chicago and other global locations, including through partnerships fostered in our research initiatives in the cities of Sao Paulo, Johannesburg, and Vancouver,” said Umolu. “Through these engagements, we have drawn out a myriad of stories about how lived experiences across global communities, cities, territories, and ecologies resonate with architectural and space-making practices.”

The biennial will take Chicago's urban history, and the so...

New Museum appoints V. Mitch McEwen as curator of IdeasCity initiative

2018-07-24T18:04:00-04:00

The New Museum announced today the appointment of V. Mitch McEwen as Curator of IdeasCity, the museum's initiative exploring the future of cities. McEwen is the principal and cofounder of A(n) Office, a collaborative of design studios in Detroit and New York exploring the intersection of architecture and exhibition.

IdeasCity is a creative and collaborative enterprise operating through conferences, workshops, commissions, projects, and exhibitions in order to investigate key issues and proposes solutions. The Curator is a two-year appointment linked to the biennial presentation of IdeasCity in New York and is responsible for the two-year cycle leading up to this presentation.

As Curator of IdeasCity, McEwen will head up the 2018–19 cities and launch an open call for cities around the world to apply for the 2020–21 cycle. The next IdeasCity will take place in Toronto on September 15, 2018, in partnership with the Bentway.

Since 2017, McEwen has been Assistant Professor at Princeto...

Chicago magazine interviews Yesomi Umolu, 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial artistic director

2018-03-21T15:57:00-04:00

Her own history is as global at the biennial itself: born in Lagos, Nigeria, raised in London, with a deep resume that incorporates curatorial and educational experiences at museums and galleries all over the United States and Great Britain. She’s hit the ground running on the CAB, planning for the third CAB that promises an international influence with love for the city and citizens who host this three-month event.

Anjulie Rao interviews the new CAB artistic director, Yesomi Umolu, for Chicago magazine: "A biennial can’t help but be contemporary and respond to the contemporary conditions. I know that as a biennial that’s what it is set up to do: to have a hold of the historical and yet have strong ground to be propositional, to posit into the future."

Yesomi Umolu appointed as 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial artistic director

2018-03-06T14:40:00-05:00

Chicago-based curator and writer Yesomi Umolu has been appointed as the artistic director of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial, which will make its return on September 19, 2019 through January 5, 2020. After evaluating candidates from around the world and from various disciplines, the CAB board members and previous Artistic Directors selected Umolu.

Having strong roots in Chicago, Umolu has a background in architectural design and curatorial studies, and she focuses her work on global contemporary art and spatial practices. She is currently the Exhibitions Curator at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. She is also a visiting lecturer, critic, and has spoken at various international institutions.

Some of her recent exhibitions explore the politics of the built environment, like the “Kapwani Kiwanga: The sum and its parts”, “The Land Grant: Forest Law”, and “The Museum of Non Participation: The New Deal”.

Chicago Cultural Center. Photo cour...

Participating artist arrested at Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture for tribute to Chinese dissident

2017-12-21T13:45:00-05:00

The artist Hu Jiamin and his wife, who said they were French nationals, were seen being taken away by plain clothes police on Friday night from the event, Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao reported. It was not known if the couple were still under detention.

The Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture opened over the weekend. Organized in two parts, half the biennale takes place on the Hong Kong side and is organized by the Hong Kong Institute of Architects while the other, taking place in Shenzhen, is put on by the city government. While the local government's involvement has helped turn this portion of the biennale into a big-budget affair with imaginative proposals and large venues much to the embarrassment of the considerably smaller Hong Kong side, it is now being seen to also undermine the possibility of open debate at the biennale.

HU JIAMIN‘s mural Timed Discrepancy (2017). Courtesy Cao Yuxue.

The French-Chinese artist Jiamin Hu and his wife, Marine Brossard, were asked to present a mural on the outside wall of a historic temple as part of the biennale's 'Art Making City' program, in which artists from around the world were invited to explore the notions of the street, home, public space, social production and more. As part o...

The International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam releases their Curator Statement, Research Agenda and Call for Practices for IABR—2018+2020

2017-10-23T18:55:00-04:00

The next International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) will be split in two parts, the first held in 2018 and the second in 2020. Appropriately dubbed IABR—2018+2020, it will be based in both the Netherlands and Belgium and will use the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change (COP21) as its impetus.

Curated by Floris Alkemade of Floris Alkemade Architectm (the Chief Government Architect of the Netherlands), Flemish Government Architect Leo Van Broeck of Bogdan & Van Broeck, and Joachim Declerck of the Belgian practice Architecture Workroom Brussels, the trio calls on innovative practices from around the globe to participate in The Missing Link: a three-year (from early 2018 to summer 2020) program of knowledge sharing, peer supervision, and joint research by design including presentations and debates at the biennales of 2018 and 2020.

This experimental program aims to see practices from various domains and continents and with different bac...

The next International Architecture Biennale of Rotterdam will be split across two years and two countries

2017-04-20T12:14:00-04:00

The next International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) will be split in two parts, the first held in 2018 and the second in 2020. Appropriately dubbed IABR—2018+2020, it will be based in both the Netherlands and Belgium and use “the world as its source of inspiration”. This follows in line with a couple other major cultural events that have recently spread out from their original base, notably this year’s documenta, which is held in both Kassel and Athens.

The curators of IABR—2018+2020 will be Floris Alkemade of Floris Alkemade Architectm, the Chief Government Architect of the Netherlands; Flemish Government Architect Leo Van Broeck of Bogdan & Van Broeck; and Joachim Declerck of the Belgian practice Architecture Workroom Brussels.

The Biennale will use the Paris Agreement as its impetus, which they consider “an actual change of direction, a fundamental transition”. To that end, the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt Delta and the Low Countries serve as appropriate workspaces. The regions b...

Architect Gustav Dusing selected for inagural Antarctic Biennial

2016-12-13T15:19:00-05:00

As part of the newly launched interdisciplinary Antarctic Biennial, architect Gustav Dusing and artist Sho Hasegawa will be sent to Antarctica in March 2017 for what could be described as an inspiring, if chilly, imaginative tabula rasa. The winners for the Biennial were chosen during this year's Art Basel Miami. As the website for the organization explains, "We are building a unique community of people who are interested in reimagining the future of shared spaces, beginning with Antarctic culture as a model for global development. With the artistic core, we are creating the platform for the interdisciplinary dialogue."

For more on ice-related architecture:

The Chicago Architecture Biennial prepares for round two in 2017

2016-01-07T19:33:00-05:00

Met with "unequivocal success", as described by Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago Architecture Biennial will be back in fall 2017. The Chicago Cultural Center had a bustling three months serving as the venue of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial, "The State of the Art of Architecture", which ran from October 3-January 3.

While the content of the Biennial itself is up for debate, the event attracted over 500,000 attendees. Students, educators, architects, and the general public got to check out exhibitions, full-scale installations like those from the Lakefront Kiosk Competition, and a slew of public programs.

There isn't much about the 2017 event just yet, but official dates, leadership, and the Biennial's theme will be revealed in the coming months. Stay tuned.

In case you missed it, here's plenty of CAB coverage from Archinect:

Cutting across the Chicago Architecture Biennial

Archinect's "Next Up" Mini-Sessions podcast interviews

"Second Season, Second City" – A discussi...

Undisciplining the discipline: Beatrice Galilee @ SCI-Arc

2015-12-09T19:49:00-05:00

Exhibiting architecture is a notoriously difficult and contentious task. After all, how do you represent a spatial practice without neglecting the very qualities that made it worth representing in the first place? Nonetheless, it has a long history – extending at least as far back as the Enlightenment, according to the historian Barry Bergdoll.

Still, there’s likely never been a period with more exhibits, biennials, triennials than the last few decades. Just about every major city in the world, from Venice to Chicago, Oslo to Jakarta, now hosts some big architecture event. Beatrice Galilee, a trained architect and the newly-appointed curator of architecture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, has played a significant role in shaping and pushing the boundaries of this practice. In a talk delivered last night at SCI-Arc, she relayed some of the major – and often controversial – moves made over the course of her trajectory to becoming the first-ever architecture curator at th...

"Are we human?" Curators Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley announce concept for 2016 Istanbul Design Biennial

2015-12-01T15:05:00-05:00

We live in a time when everything is designed, from our carefully crafted individual looks and online identities, to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes... Even the planet itself has been completely encrusted by design as a geological layer. There is no longer an outside to the world of design. Design has become the world.

Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, the curators of the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, announced the conceptual framework for next year's biennial in a press release held today in a library of the Istanbul Archaeological Museums.

Its overlong title, ARE WE HUMAN?: The Design of the Species: 2 seconds, 2 years, 200 years, 200,000 years, indicates primary conceptual concerns: the omnipresence of design, or the world as a designed object; the category of the human, alongside and contra that of the animal; and an expanded temporal focus that "spans from the last 2 seconds to the last 200,000 years."

"Design always presents itself as serving the human but its real ambition is to redesign the human," the curators state in the press release. "The history of design is therefore a history of evolving conceptions of the human. To talk about design is to talk about the state of our species."

Rather than celebrate particular designers or imagine speculative futures, the biennial will be an "archaeolo...

Cutting across the Chicago Architecture Biennial: Tatiana Bilbao's solution to Mexico's housing shortage

2015-10-20T19:56:00-04:00

Housing – its affordability, accessibility, and form – is a key preoccupation of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. While not necessarily the core concern for most of the Biennial's participants, housing gets a significant share of the exhibition's floorspace.

Several participants' considerations of contemporary housing issues are exhibited in full-scale, benefitting the visitor with an easily relatable (and, at least by size, literally inhabitable) form. As one of these life-sized installations, Tatiana Bilbao Estudio's sustainable housing project stands out for already being realized outside of the Biennial's walls.

Designed in response to Mexico's housing shortage, referencing the country's overall deficit of 9 million homes, Bilbao's Sustainable Housing project aims to provide a prototype for affordable, adaptable, single-family social housing. After researching with potential users and observing concurrent trends in local social housing design, the firm produced a modified vision...

Chicago Architecture Biennial finalizes list of participants

2015-08-13T18:59:00-04:00

With a little under two months left until the big opening weekend in October, the Chicago Architecture Biennial rounded up a final list of over 100 established and up-and-coming architects, designers, and artists in the contemporary scene. Since the initial roster was announced back in April, approximately 40 firms were added by Biennale Co-Artistic Directors Sarah Herda and Joseph Grima alongside a notable advisory committee comprising David Adjaye, Elizabeth Diller, Jeanne Gang, Frank Gehry, Sylvia Lavin, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Lord Peter Palumbo, and Stanley Tigerman.

The participants, who represent more than 30 countries, were chosen following intensive research into contemporary architectural practices and issues around the world. The selection committee made visits to multiple cities including Beijing, Cape Town, Mexico City, and more.

And now, the final CAB line-up:

Al Borde (Quito, Ecuador)

all(zone) (Bangkok, Thailand)

Andreas Angelidakis (Athens, Greece)

Andrés Jaque / Office for P...

Team Ultramoderne's "Chicago Horizon" wins Chicago Lakefront Kiosk competition

2015-08-05T14:38:00-04:00

From mathematical sponges to nature-inspired havens, a sleek spacious canopy by Team Ultramoderne was selected as the overall winning Chicago Lakefront Kiosk design, as revealed by the Chicago Architecture Biennial today. Launched in late 2014, the global competition invited architects to propose kiosk designs inspired by the Windy City and its Lake Michigan waterfront.

The winning proposal — in addition to three commissioned kiosks designed by architects in collaboration with students from local Chicago architecture schools — will be installed at the Biennial starting this October. So far, the plan is that the winning kiosk will stand as a permanent lakefront installation even after the exhibition gates close in January 2016.

Team Ultramoderne, a three-person team comprising of architects Yasmin Vobis and Aaron Forrest of Ultramoderne in collaboration with structural engineer Brett Schneide, scored the top BP Prize (sponsored by oil/gas company BP) with their proposal "Chicago Horizo...

Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley will curate 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial

2015-05-27T13:23:00-04:00

In a press release issued today, the Istanbul Design Biennial announced that powerhouse architectural historians, theorists and educators Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley will curate the 3rd Biennial, taking place in 2016. Both are based in New York City (and happen to be married) – Colomina teaches and is a curator at Princeton University, and Wigley recently stepped down from his deanship at Columbia University's GSAPP.

The Biennial's agenda is to bring together a diversity of ideas and people within the design community to an international forum, and consider global issues from a design-minded perspective. Colomina and Wigley will announce the Biennial's "conceptual framework" in December 2015.

Their selection also continues the Biennial's trend of selecting international architecture figures for its curators – 2012's Biennial was headed by architects and researchers Emre Arolat (Istanbul) and Joseph Grima (Genoa), and 2014's was led by curator and writer Zoë Ryan (Chicago-based). ...