Blog slash personal archive by Mark Minkjan on cities
I'm an urban geographer and Editor in Chief at Failed Architecture. Also part of Non-fiction, an interdisciplinary studio with a broad focus on culture and the city. Follow @markminkjan !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs");
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- The Poetry of Decay
- A Collective Approach to Local Entrepreneurship
- Amsterdam's Morphology, A History
- Definition of a City series
- Critical Urban Interventions, Right?
- Rational Order vs. Spontaneousness in the Modern City
- Public Home - Private City
- Sartre and Camus in New York
- Gordon Matta-Clark: Converting the City’s Decay into Critical Works of Art
- How Coffee Revitalizes the City
- The Origination and Mental Effects New York’s Grid
- UK cities: From Privatized Dystopias to Fertile Soils for Community Projects
- Excavating the Future in Scotland
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Current favourite reads:
In the midst of central Amsterdam's gentrification wave a luxury department store has been given the name of the ruthless 19th century Parisian planner. The irony of the reference demands a closer look at these two periods of urban redevelopment.
”It signifies the direction in which Amsterdam is going: it’s on its way to becoming an incredibly liveable, comfortable, clean and pretty city; but of course, the cost is its soul.”
I formulated my thoughts about current urban developments in Amsterdam. You can read them on Failed Architecture.
From the Sky Lounge of Deloitte's new HQ - the "world's most sustainable office building" - you can see Crystal Tower, a 13 year old, 20.000 sqm building Deloitte left behind empty. Talking about sustainability. (bij The Edge)
City of symbols: Egypt’s National Democratic Party HQs were set ablaze during the 2011 revolution. The blackened carcass is now rocking an ad for Egypt’s £30bn capital to be: New Cairo.
‘Roosevelt’s erection’ (187m), built in 1961 with CIA bribe money and Soviet help, recieved a fatwa in the 1990s because its shape amidst greenery could excite Egyptian women.
Tahrir today: new (defensive) landscaping, a flagpole erected, and the Nile Ritz-Carlton almost reopening. The square's subway station is out of use and the former NDP HQs are still ashy. (bij Tahrir Square - ميدان التحرير)
"Frank Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne (above) and his Panama Biomuseum (below) flagrantly disregard their settings, reducing architecture to mere superfluous spectacle, over-exaggerated and detached from reality."
"More than that, the attention attracted by works like those of Gehry and Hadid impedes the rethinking of architecture that is so desperately overdue. We need to move on from the adolescent search for momentary excitement and spectacle to a more mature architecture of synthesis and subtlety that reveals its understated riches over time. But that would entail architectural academe and media developing a much more searchingly critical attitude to architecture and how it is assessed so as to help us move forward to an architecture relevant and adequate to the manifold challenges of our time. To do this it also would help if we ignored, and starved of the oxygen of publicity, the architectural nonsense too long applauded in our times."
Quotes from the highly recommended article 'Empty Gestures: Starchitecture's Swan Song' by Peter Buchanan in the Architectural Review.
Great time-lapse running up to Amsterdam's Week of the City, which is about to take off. This year's theme is the city's ring road A10 and the ringzone surrounding it.
From November 5-9, you can explore this dynamic part of Amsterdam in a vast programme. There will be ring walks, debates, lectures, films, art projects, ring safari's and more activities.
The full programme can be found at www.weekvandestad.nl
Sandwich shop, Jodenbreestraat, Amsterdam, 1965.
One of the last remaining buildings in the Waterlooplein area, which was torn down in the 1960s.
Image by Ed van der Elsken. Courtesy of Annet Gelink Gallery.
The exhibition Amsterdam! Ed van der Elsken is on display at Amsterdam's City Archives until September 14.
We Own The City - Enabling Community Practice in Architecture and Urban Planning
Here's the sneak preview of the book We Own The City by CITIES and published by Hong Kong University Press and Trancity*Valiz.
I contributed to several parts of the book, mostly by interviewing renowned Dutch architects Winy Maas (MVRDV), Caroline Bos (UNStudio), David Gianotten (OMA) and Bart Reuser (NEXT architects) about how they allowed community/democratic input in their design processes.
