[madnomadaesthetics]

MERRY (UNWRAPPED) XMAS

by Unknown Fields Division and Toby Smith

China Christmas Village, how is known the city of Yiwu, is responsible for the 60% world's Christmas goods.

Unknown Fields Division, a nomadic design studio, with photographer Toby Smith, traveled to China to show the source of the goods...

Merry Xmas!

Mad NoMad

[madnomadaesthetics]

Hives Sculpture by Ren Ri

A childhood spend into Wuhan's lush forest, observing animals and plants, was the beginning of Ren Ri's passion and inspiration for his work. 

The artist explores the shape of the beeswax in a transparent plastic polyhedrons, which everyone is regular, and every face is equal, where the queen bee stands in the center of it, and that results in the other bees gathering around her to start building. Every week, by throwing a dice, Ren Ri turn the box around changing the gravity of the honeycomb so the bees can create more shapes.

Ren Ri explains, “Another reason behind the choice of bees is that I wanted to try to eliminate the subjectivity of the artist and the mediation of bees served this purpose.”

He sees his work as a comparison with the relation between man and nature, made by destruction, interference, harmony and moulding.

[madnomadaesthetics]

Brazil’s Architect Day

Oscar Niemeyer´s Birthday

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Topography of emotion, a microscope look of a tear by Rose-Lynn Fisher

A tear is our form of expression, it shows our feelings, our emotions and that it is passed throuhg a moment, a quick moment. 

In a difficult time in her personal life, photographer Rose-Lynn imagined if her tears of grief was the same of her tears of happiness. The Topography of Tears is a project where a 100 types of tears are photographed through a light microscope magnified 100x or 400x.

The chemestry of the tears are a composition of proteins, waters, minerals, hormones, antibodies and enzymes, the shape of the elation to onions is different to a laughing tear, as is of a tear o grief, yawing, reabirth, frustration, rejection and many more.

As the patterns of erosion etched into earth over million years looks quite simillar to theses crystalline patterns of tears, that takes a minute to occur. 

     - "I´m not making any scientific claims in my work though, nor any declarations about anything except perhaps the poetry of life" (Rose-Lynn)

All images are proprety of Rose-Lynn Fisher

[madnomadaesthetics]

Earth Patterns by Lauren Manning

Exploring the world on a retina display, finding beautiful images on our planet.

[madnomadaesthetics]

Transitional Micro Housing by AFFECT T

Caged in small cubes, most of Hong Kong's population has its ever growing housing crisis facing higher prices in the real estate market rents.

The project developed by AFFECT T Studio is a temporary home for singles, couples and families as they face the difficulty of having them own home. Creating a vernacular architecture with bamboo and rattan, homes are tailored to the needs of each resident. Created for the inside,  the micro houses are arranged inside disused industrial spaces, allowing the resident to live is close to the urban center of Hong Kong.

[madnomadaesthetics]

Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time No. 2 by William Forsythe

Phenomenology of the movement in the spatial experiments Choreographic Objects by William Forsythe

[madnomadaesthetics]

DESIGNING APOCALYPSE by MANKIND

Stunning photographies by Edward Burtynsky

The design of the space is related to the activity of that space and this rule is valid for every scale and every activity. Agriculture, as "modern" symbiosis of our species with nature, designed our habitat and cities for many years. But now?

Edward Burtynksky shows through this beautiful collection of undeniable beautiful pictures how we are designing our main activity, self-destruction.

Chilling manmade landscapes in recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries. All the images are the metaphor of the dilemma of our existence. Although distant from our daily experiences, are still part of our daily lives.

You can learn more about this project in TED conference 2005.

[madnomadaesthetics]

Amateur Architecture, WANG Shu

Architect and professor, pritzker prize winner in 2012, WANG Shu bring an amateur approach on his work in architecture, differently than professional architecture that thinks too much of a building.

"For one place, humanity is more important than architecture while simple handicraft is more important than tecnology."  - Wang Shu

Much more than an object, amateur architecture happens, all though in a sense of an experimental building process, in a more fundamental meaning. For WANG Shu, any building activity without comprehensive thoughtfulness will be insignificant.

via Chinese Architects

[madnomadaesthetics]

World's tallest slum in Caracas, Venezuela

Architecture can operate in order to transform the social integration, improvement of spaces, creating a suitable environment.

A high-rise office complex set in the finacial center Confinanzas, stopped its construction in 1994 after a banking crisis and the death of the building's main investor, David Brillembourg, was occupied in 2007 by locals due to a massive housing shortage in the city.

Nicknamed "Tower of David" (after David Brillembourg), the building housed more than 3000 people, and was jury-rigged with electricity and water up to the 22nd floor. Photographer Jorge Silva from Reuters registered earlier this year some moments of the residents of the world's tallest slum.

In July venezuelan officials considered that the building was not safe for the squatters, and they started what they like to call a "peacefull" evacuation, relocating them to Cúa in south of Caracas, to public housing. Still president Nicolás Maduro haven't decided yet what to do with the abandoned building, rumours said that chinese developers wants to transform it into a comercial space.

    - "the view was so beautiful", said a resident from the complex.

Readjust the building to the basic needs and turning into a safer place so they could live, would be a much more viable alternative, both city and to those who lived there.

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we are looking for pioneers 

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Container Project: Nomad Living by Studio ARTE

The fascination for the ancient nomad tribes lead Studio ARTE to explore this way of life through a project called Nomad Living. 

Based in Portugal and The Netherlands, the studio developed this mobile living concept with the first prototype located in Silves, Algarve, Portugal. It can serves various options such as a start up for young home owners, a holiday home, a concept for holiday resorts planners, a shed for your guests, a home office, the wished music boom box home studio, a pop up shop, a hotel room.

The modern nomadic life, adapted to new technologies such as smartphones and tablets, which we call urban nomads were re-adjusted into a sustainable, economic and ecological architecture lifestyle by the studio.

For the construction of the first prototype they selected second hand 40ft high cube shipping containers and former Sales Cabines. Those will function as structural shell that can be transformed by adding all various architectural, mechanical and engineering features, which at the end can provide all the necessary comfort. 

All information is a courtesy of Studio ARTE

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[madnomadaesthetics]

mad nomad #recruiting campaign 

we are looking for hobo pioneers - contact us

[madnomadaesthetics]

Solskin Peels by Ori Sonnenschein

Israeli designer recent graduated in Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, created with an orange, a locally-avalibale, cheap and lightweight product, households items, which besides biodegradable has a different design.

The collection is called Solskin Peels and it is made with re-used discarted orange peels, drying and molding them to the desired shapes, and uses non-toxic shellac to make it water-repellent. Best of all, these items will retain their citrusy aroma, inviting you to touch, smell and taste, giving life to ordinary objects.

With today's life changing and bigger displacements, it is important for us to readapt to a nomad behavior, using an artisanal way to create funcional objects for our everyday.

[madnomadaesthetics]

Abandoned Rail Tunnel Philadelphia

  Rail corridors in Philadelphia cross the city among abandoned warehouses and factories wich in the 19th century served as the as the life blood of the North American economy. Today the city is rich in history rusted Industrial Revolution.

Paul Vanmeter landscape gardener and an enthusiast railway history, led a tour through the rails abandoned for decades. He managed to increase local awareness of the potential of these beautiful and unique urban abandoned corridors.

For more information about the project you can visit Friends of the Rail Park

[madnomadaesthetics]

WRITING HISTORY THROUGH SPACE

Territorial consequences and colonial practices in Israeli-Palestinian conflict

I

Being confronted with the most diverse investigative and journalistic opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - from the latest attacks on the Gaza Strip to the recognition of Palestine as a UN observer state – it’s complex to understand how Palestine exists as a territory. To do this, we must go back in history and understand the territorial reality that all palestinians are subjected to daily, segregated through a complex network of spacial devices scattered throughout the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem.

II

Israel has established itself as the "State that not yet erased the 'founding violence' of their origins"[1], since the expulsion of Palestinians from its territory in 1948 – al-nakba - until the construction of the Separation Wall in the Occupied Territories, acts that incorporated the urbanism as physical and social weapon.

In the particular case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the technologies of control that allowed the continued colonization of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip represent the end of an evolutionary chain of techniques and processes of colonization, occupation and administration, developed throughout history. Despite the differences in the processes of colonization among modern empires and the Zionist State of Israel, the assumptions that targeted the domain of a population and its reduction to homo sacer[2], such as the attempt to "tame" by redesigning their space and their culture, are shared.

"A land without people for a people without land" was the phrase most often repeated by those responsible for this occupation and clearly marks the Zionist attitude of attachment, separation and violent expulsion. This belief was a reality created in order to void the islamic territory and culture of a meaning. The Arabs were, in this case, depicted by Israel as the real "foreign body" of a territory with Jewish roots. Since the occupation began, there has never been a willingness to live with this "other", to incorporate it into a cultural and spatial colonization, there was rather a constant attempt of non-recognition and expulsion. Israel saw Palestine as a land without people and as a tabula rasa where to implement the construction of a new modern nation from scratch, combining this creation of a new identity with the secular history of the Jewish people.

III

The design of the Israeli space always had a laboratory component of experimentation, combined with the reflection of the current global space thinking.

Since the foundation of Israel, in the era of David Ben-Gurion[3], the Zionist ideology made ​​use of European modernist movement, which saw in architecture and urbanism a way to create a new kind of city and society to a new kind of man, fused with the machine and with the technology, to initiate a process of spatial creation of a modern and new State. But this benefit was reciprocal, since the big names of the modernist movement used Tel Aviv and Haifa to experiment a new kind of city, taking advantage of such a remarkable beginning to implement their ideas. The same happened in the process of critical review of modernism and its aesthetic transition to postmodernism. This period of architectural re-creation, which saw a gain in historicist reborn, took the will of the Jews in creating a new visual identity which combines its biblical past with a flourishing present downward so as to almost nullify the Palestinian culture as a culture of Jewish tradition and contradictorily, as non-genuine culture of that place. Much of the postmodern debate was made around Jerusalem, a city which concentrated the historical past of the three major monotheistic religions and which served as a laboratory for aesthetic experiences that unearthed a past blended with new methods and knowledge acquired. This experimental character always ran the risk and effectively changed the landscape irreversibly, expelling and destroying, physically and symbolically, Palestinian villages already consolidated to make them unrecognizable scenarios for those who lived there, wanting to delete them from the collective memory of a people in an attempt to shake his will to return.

IV

The heyday of colonization, triggered in the 80s, in the West Bank. Israeli settlements born from the initiative of the government, which wanted to create a certain atmosphere for the Palestinian population. The image of these settlements and suburbs, with barbed wire fences and patrols with constantly vigilant soldiers, come in contrast with the styles of the native architecture and its life forms, a policy that remembers the sectorization and ghettoization, conveying a message about the impossibility of sharing the same space for two classes of people and two different cultures. The shared spaces became battlefields whose increasing violence follows the growth of hatred between Jews and Arabs, feelings that prompted the birth of fundamentalism ethnic and religious order.

V

The Israeli strategy of annexing territory without human presence was imposed on the Palestinians through a complex compartmentalized system of spatial exclusion. But if initially this political separation were masked as a formula for a "peaceful" settlement, after the agreements signed in Oslo the unilateral decision making accelerated the fragmentation of the territory, allowing the Israeli army to control an "archipelago" formed by more 200 separate areas and with limited autonomy. The military power today manages these areas through a filtering and flow control, turning frontiers into control mechanisms. The military checkpoints and the Separation Wall were introduced in a complex geography per se, as segregation weapons and sensors in a territorial scale surveillance network. If initially Israel prepared a domain basen in expulsion and territorial presence, in the form of direct rule of the occupied populations, currently control is thought behind these walled spaces, through the selective opening and closing of different urban valves.

This encouragement of fear policies, separation and visual control are the ultimate gesture in the consolidation of "enclaves" and the spread of physical and virtual borders in the recent context of the war against terrorism, driven by the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York on 9/11. The architecture of occupation can be seen here as an accelerator of other global politics processes, as an extreme case of capitalist globalization and therefore its spacial policy.

VI

Then we got to a point where violence imposed on the landscape completely changed the country that Palestinians knew before 1948. Today Palestine is no more than a set of separate spaces, or a fragmented territory, effectively administered by Israel. This spatial discontinuity, and the absence of a singe boundary (we have is a set of imposed borders that create "enclaves" and too complex division in order to be respected) precluds the construction of a sovereign state. Israel that despite the illegality of the process, is not willing to negotiate a return or a withdrawal from the Occupied Territories in the West Bank, insisting on prolong the occupation mechanisms until eradicate any physical and human trace of Palestine (the latest attitude of Benjamin Netanyahu who refused the status granted by the UN to Palestine and declared support for the construction of new settlements in the West Bank represents the one-sidedness of negotiation), an attitude that has brought us to the last stage, where the Palestinians, sealed in their pieces of territory resist and create ethnic antibodies against Jewish population.

BRUNO COSTA

Born in Braga (Portugal) on September 1st 1988, concludes a Masters in Architecture from FAUP (University of Porto) in 2012 and studied one year at the FADU/UBA (University of Buenos Aires) as an exchange student, guiding his path by an underlying interest in the intersection between architecture, society and politics.

THESIS LINK: http://issuu.com/060201027/docs/colonialismo_como_laborat_rio_urbano_._bruno_costa

PUNKTO MAGAZINE ARTICLE LINK: http://www.revistapunkto.com/2013/01/colonialismo-como-laboratorio-urbano_9.html

[1] Slavoj Zizek in Violence

[2] Latin word - obscure figure of Roman law: a person who is excluded from all civil rights.

[3] First head of state of Israel. Ben-Gurion was a leader of the socialist Zionism and one of the founders of the Labour Party, which was in power in Israel over the first three decades of the existence of the state.