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The activist community can rejoice today on the news that groundbreaking London-based collective Forensic Architecture (FA) has been given an Institutional Peabody Award for its continued public service and contributions to electronic media. The group was cited for their work documenting the use... View full entry
Two giants of activism have acquired a new target in their ongoing fight for online privacy rights in the digital age. Forensic Architecture is pairing with Edward Snowden to take on an Israeli spyware company called NSO Group that has been behind hacks of journalists, lawyers, and human... View full entry
Pratt Institute has announced the appointment of its new Assistant Dean Quilian Riano. As an architect, urban designer, researcher, and writer, his work explores architecture's relationship to design justice, anti-racist pedagogy, and urban design strategies that address socio-political issues... View full entry
UEFA has rejected a call from activists to convert the Allianz Arena in Munich into a rainbow-covered light scheme in unison with protests ahead of Germany’s final European Championship group game with Hungary that it is slated to host on Wednesday. The city council’s proposal was rejected by... View full entry
Since 2000 RIBA has presented the Annie Spink Award to individuals for their outstanding work and contributions to architectural academia. This year the prestigious biennial prize has been awarded to the multi-talented architect and academic advocate Lesley Lokko. Growing up in Ghana and Scotland... View full entry
A new initiative focused on leveraging designers' "professional connections and privileges in the name of advancing justice" offers an easy and effective way of reaching professional organizations, leading architecture firms, political entities, and academic institutions via email. Hosted on... View full entry
Criticism: Everyone in architecture experiences it regularly. The importance of this consistent facet of the profession provides ongoing possibilities for discourse and improvement. However, like other areas where criticism plays a necessary part of establishing a significant impression or... View full entry
A Berlin-based artist who put up billboards advertising fake real estate projects in protest against runaway property development received more than 200 calls from would-be investors who didn’t get the joke. [...]
At a distance, the adverts look plausible but closer inspection of the images visualising what the new properties would look like reveals odd details.
— The Guardian
Treptown Visions, billboard in public space, Treptow, Berlin, 2019 by Dorothea Nold. Image: Dorothea Nold/aussenwelt "Citizens are not being asked for their permission when investors make such drastic changes in their city, that’s why I thought it is okay to put them without permission up to... View full entry
Enter the Illuminator, a New York-based art activist collective, whose shifting membership has mastered the legal grey zone that regulates projection in public.
[...] the Illuminator takes the normally stationary technology out of the classroom and onto the streets, affixing a high-powered, 12,000-lumens projector atop a van — or, when special nimbleness is required, a trolley — to ignite urban façades with political statements that are as bold as they are temporary.
— Urban Omnibus
Image: The Illuminator Collective.For this recent Urban Omnibus feature, digital media scholar Eli Horwatt interviews art-activist collective The Illuminator. Since capturing the public attention with their Occupy-inspired 99% Bat Signal projection in 2011, the collective has been, quite... View full entry
In looking to the past at professionals in the design and architecture professions, they found that alliances, networks, groups and affiliations were the mechanisms through which architects could become the activists they yearned to be. “[...] we want to show that architects are important allies to activists,” Rafson says.
“Those alliances where architects are working as a critical part of the team is what we emphasize.”
— Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times takes a closer look at ArchiteXX's “Now What?! Advocacy, Activism and Alliances in American Architecture Since 1968” exhibition currently at the WUHO Gallery. It examines the little-known history of architects and designers who were — and still remain — at the... View full entry
Chinese authorities are razing one of the Beijing studios of dissident artist Ai Weiwei. He said that demolition crews showed up without advance warning, and have begun the process of tearing down the studio.
Ai has been a longtime critic of the government, and on Saturday, he began posting videos to his Instagram feed of the studio's destruction. "Farewell," Ai wrote. "They started to demolish my studio 'Zuoyuo' in Beijing with no precaution."
— NPR
Ai, who has been living in self-imposed exile in Berlin since Chinese authorities returned his confiscated passport in 2015, responded to NPR about the sudden demolition of his Zuoyou studio in Beijing: We didn't receive any advance warning or announcement of the demolition. We were required to... View full entry
Each year, the Curry Stone Design Prize is awarded to projects that “use design to address pressing social justice issues.” To mark the 10th anniversary of the award, the Curry Stone Foundation will award 100 projects—“the most compelling social design leaders from across the world.”... View full entry
Block a highway, and you upend the economic life of a city, as well as the spatial logic that has long allowed people to pass through them without encountering their poverty or problems. Block a highway, and you command a lot more attention than would a rally outside a church or city hall — from traffic helicopters, immobile commuters, alarmed officials. — the Washington Post
The article notes that, historically, highway construction decimated black communities, such as in St. Paul, Minneapolis, Baltimore, Oakland, and many other cities. In New York, Robert Moses explicitly used highways to clear "slums," in the process devastating parts of the Bronx and other black... View full entry
The Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei is visiting Lesbos to document the plight of thousands of refugees who arrive daily on the Greek island by boat from Turkey. For the past two days, Ai has been photographing orange rubber dinghies coming into shore, families huddled around fires, people queuing to register at the Moria refugee camp and piles of discarded lifejackets, among other scenes [...]
It is understood Ai will be creating a work in response to the refugee crisis.
— theartnewspaper.com
Here are just a few of Ai Weiwei's recent photos from the Lesbos refugee camp; giving a human face to people and entire families escaping war and persecution in their home countries of Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, as well as documenting humanitarian workers, such as the Norwegian group, Drop... View full entry
"'Are you going to do beautiful architecture or do-gooder architecture?' I want to do neither and both." [...]
"It's not like you're going to design some single product that revolutionizes the way people shape the world around them," Surface said. "You have to change fundamentally how your organization is structured, how your resources are allocated, stop thinking of yourself as a gatekeeper. It's about redistributing how power and decision making and resources are divided between people."
— thestranger.com
Prompted by her work with Design in Public in Seattle, this profile of Susan Surface dips into her professional and personal background to designing like she gives a damn, covering the diversity of ways she seeks to question the power structures that perpetuate socially irresponsible or... View full entry
