WHITEBOX
Whitebox is an experimental, online portal showcasing projects, conjecture and commentary on design from Australia and around the world as a component of Craft Victoria’s annual festival of craft and design, Craft Cubed. Whitebox brings to Craft Cubed a parallel forum for the critical exploration of design. Featuring links to an array of design information currently accessible on the Web, the content for Whitebox has been gleaned purely from online resources. The objective has been to consider the ways in which virtual space supports, informs and influences the dissemination of design knowledge.
The focus then for the inaugural iteration of Whitebox is design that negotiates the terrain between the ‘city’ and the ‘country’. It is by now a truism that urbanisation has become the norm in developed and developing nations. Urbanisation cannot help but dominate our experience of place. But how do social actors come to understand a sense of location? How does design fashion or respond to patterns of inhabitation and use? Is design changing the way we think about cities and regions? Whether singular iterations, ongoing ventures or organization-based research all of the projects featured here in some way concern themselves with mitigating the effects of urbanisation. The initiatives featured on Whitebox are not user-oriented products as such, rather propositional projects designed to fabricate situations or modes of intervention.
- N55
Participating Artists/Designers
Ion Sørvin (Co-founder)
Øivind Alexander SlaattoN55 is a design and architecture collective founded on the principle of ‘rebuilding the city from within’. Based in Copenhagen, N55 create objects, situations and systems that explore the psychological resonance of public space. Manuals for realized designs are then distributed freely on the group’s website for anyone to download and replicate at their leisure. Notable projects include LAND, a system for exchanging pieces of land and WALKING HOUSE, a nomadic dwelling. Here open source design is utilized as a form of social activism; a means to challenge modes of inhabitation.
N55
N55 News
Manual for LAND
Manual for WALKING HOUSE
Free Download of most recent N55 set of ManualsTags: architecture, cities, furniture, housing, urban planning
- DIY CITY
Participating Artists/Designers:
John Geraci (Creator)
Anthony Townsend (Advisor)
Sean Savage (Social Expert)
Dan Greenblatt (Project Design)An open source forum dedicated to using online applications to improve cities. DIY City is a compelling example of the use of social networking technology to debate both the place of design in our everyday lives and the increasing dissolution of urban and regional boundaries.
Tags: architecture, cities, open-source, urban planning
- THE LIVING
Participating Artists/Designers:
The Living: David Benjamin and Soo-in YangThe Living is an architecture studio based in new York and comprised of David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang. Their recent projects have explored the responsive and interactive potential of the built environment. Living Light is one such public art project. Installed in the city centre of Seoul, Living Light records information about the air quality and if SMS-ed, relays the information to interested citizens.
Living Light
The Living
The Living City
The Living at Life Without Buildings by Jimmy StampTags: cities, psychogeography, technology
- FLYING CITY
Flying City is a Seoul-based Urban Research Group whose projects investigate cultural markers.
Tags: architecture, cities, design
- THERE’S A HOLE IN MY BUCKET
Participating Artists/Designers: Pip Caroll
Launched in 2007 in Melbourne and expanding to Sydney in 2008, There’s a Hole in my Bucket was a project initiated to heighten public awareness of poor design in everyday life. Linking environmental issues like drought with urban planning, the project brought to the fore the importance behind decisions in design and how it is often taken for granted.
Tags: cities, everyday life, urban life
- URBAN INTERIOR
Participating artists:
Robyn Healy
Mick Peel
Mick Douglas
Malte Wagenfeld
Suzie Attiwil
Kate Church
Michael Fowler
Roger Kemp
Rochus Urban HinkelUrban Interior are a research group based at RMIT University and comprised of academics and researchers from across the design disciplines. Urban Interior use design to test the boundaries between interior and exterior in urban environments. Recent projects include Urban Interior Occupation (a project at Craft Victoria which saw the space and the conditions of engagement within it continuously transformed by a succession of projects) and the more recent Urban [Di]version a set of ‘guerilla’ installations in and around Sparks Lane in Melbourne. Urban Interior encourages us to imagine new possibilities for the city.
Tags: architecture, cities, fashion, psychogeography, urban planning
- ARCH-OS SYSTEMS
Founders:
Institute of Digital Art & Technology and produced by members of the School of Computing, Communications and Electronics, University of Plymouth.Arch-OS is an open-source platform for recording the social lives of buildings. Exploring the concept of the ‘cybrid’ - architectural and electronic hybrid – Arch-OS technology allows artists and designers to develop and stage interventions into the public realm. Hence an experiment like the Random Lift Project: in an era where we take great pains to anticipate the unpredictable, Chris Speed’s Random lift button delights in subjecting its audience to the uncertainty of chance. The lift is essentially a non-space; a transient realm designed to transport people from one point to the next. By inverting its functionality Speed’s lift button allows riders to contemplate movement, commuting as a fundamental element of our experience of place. The Arch-Os system encourages designers to explore the built environment in relation to systems of inhabitation and use.
Tags: architecture, cities, psychogeography, technology, urban planning
- LINKED HYBRID
Participating Artists/Designers:
Stephen Holls Architects (Washington)China is one of the most rapidly growing urban centres. Linked Hybrid is a significant new building development in the city of Beijing, the architects attempting to deliberately create a kind of vernacular urbanism. Complete with public roof gardens, sky bridges and an elevator that ‘jump-cuts’ to each level, Linked Hybrid fashions itself as a ‘city within a city’, an urban environment conducive to new forms of social interaction. The building was recently named the 2009 “BEST TALL BUILDING” IN the ASIA & AUSTRALIA CATEGORY BY THE COUNCIL ON TALL BUILDINGS AND URBAN HABITAT, (New York).
Tags: architecture, cities, urban planning
- DESIGN INTERACTIONS
Participating artists/designers:
Royal College of the Arts, LondonDesign Interactions is a research department of The Royal College of the Arts in London focusing on the design potentials of interactive technology. The projects listed here actively use the Internet and other social networking technologies to engage the public in the design process.
Design Interactions at the RCA
Tags: design, technology
- DUNNE AND RABY
Participating Artists:
Anthony Dunne and Fiona RabyIt is said that the purpose of design is to meet our needs – what if our needs are immoral, or benign or inconsequential? Dunne and Raby are a British based design duo whose practice explores our psychological investments in the places and things we fabricate for living. Their designs address a population conditioned to negotiate multiple spaces of interaction – here rigid geographical concepts such as the ‘city’ and the ‘country’ give way to ambiguous markers of location.
Tags: architecture, furniture, place, psychogeography, technology
- INGRID HORA
Participating Artist/Designer: Ingrid Hora
Ingrid Hora’s practice concerns itself with design for the anxious and other ‘behaviourally-challenged’ people. In her Moments of Disturbance series, Hora explores the interaction between the subject and the built environment. Her work provokes us to think about our psychological responses to geographical and material boundaries. Like the work of Dunne and Raby, Hora gives cause for us to contemplate a psychogeography of place.
Ingrid Hora
Moments of DisturbanceTags: architecture, place, psychogeography
- SLAVE CITY
Participating artists/designers:
Atelier von Lieshout (founded by Joep von Lieshout)‘Work’ is a fundamental concept underpinning the differentiation between regional and urban populations. Devised by Atelier von Lieshout, one of Rotterdam’s best known art and design collectives, Slavecity is a parodic ‘dystopia’ where all social actors work for the same amount of sleep and the city uses as much energy as it expends. Slavecity asks us to consider the role that structures of labour play in the demarcation of space.
Tags: architecture, cities, labour, sustainability
- MICHAEL MARRIOTT
Participating Artists/Designers: Michael Marriott
Michael Marriot is a designer based in London utilising objects from everyday urban life as materials for design.
Tags: furniture, urban life
- PROPWORK
Participating Artists/Designers:
Freddie Yauner
Gregory Timlin
Tony Mullin
Marc OwensPropwork are a creative studio comprising of: Freddie Yauner, Gregory Timlin, Tony Mullin and Marc Owens. These designer work both independently and collaboratively in the realm of fashion, product, industrial design and digital media.
- ATELIER BOW-WOW
Participating artists/designers:
Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo KaijimaAtelier Bow-Wow are a Japanese architecture firm concerned with lived space. One of their most famous projects, Pet Architecture attempts to catalogue buildings in Tokyo sprouting up in irregular spaces between established buildings. These structures represent a kind of ‘schizophrenia’ in the urban planning of Japan. Made in Tokyo, is a similar taxonomical undertaking with Tokyo’s urban landscape as its subject.
Click here and follow the instructions.
Atelier Bow-Wow
Atelier Bow-Wow on ArchinectTags: architecture, urban planning
- ARCHIGRAM
Participating Artists/Designers:
Warren Chalk
Peter Cook
Dennis Crompton
David Greene
Ron Herron
Michael WebbArchigram were key players in the design movement loosely known as ‘Radical Architecture’: a form of practice where built outcomes gave way to propositional design projects. Based in London, and active between 1960 and 1970, Archigram’s designs among other things, regularly challenged the model of the city as a fixed structure.
Tags: architecture, cities, design
- SUPERSTUDIO
Participating artists/designers:
Adolfo Natalini
Cristiano Toraldo di Francia
Alessandro Magris
Roberto Magris
Gian Piero FassinelliSuperstudio were born in the context of utopian European architecture of the 1960s and 1970s. Fundamentally they strived to develop a new paradigm for the city through discourse and conceptual visuals, rendered drawings and photo montages.
Tags: architecture, cities, design, history
- ARCHIZOOM
Archizoom were key players in the design movement loosely known as ‘Radical Architecture’: a form of practice where built outcomes gave way to propositional design projects. Like Archigram and Superstudio, they aimed to challenge concepts of the city through ideas rather than fixed structure architectural design.
Tags: architecture, cities, design
- TERROIR
Participating Artists/Designers: Terroir
Australian practice TERROIR broadens the traditional scope of architecture by investigating the notion of cultural boundaries in a globalised society.
Tags: architecture
- THE HIGH LINE
Participating Artists/Designers:
Friends of the Highline (Joshua David and Robert Hammond) and The City of New YorkThe High Line is an above-ground section of New York’s railway system, located on Manhattan’s West Side. It runs from Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District to 34th Street, between 10th & 11th Avenues. Disused since 1980, the tracks making up the Highline were historically used to ferret freight trains through the city as smoothly as possible.The abandoned space was recently redeveloped into a public park and garden, with an attending schedule of events and public programs. The High Line perhaps represents the epitome of the current trend towards the augmentation of built structures to incorporate greenery. The project is testament to the increasingly contested boundaries between city and regional locations.
Tags: public space, urban planning
- BIO-ACCESSORIES
Participating Artists/Designers:
Brittany Veitch and Ben Laundau (Melbourne)Living in the city isolates us from the natural world. Built environments are barriers to greenery, fresh air, sea breezes and sunlight. Skyscrapers soar above us instead of trees, while laneway stench emanates from the city grid. Bio-accessories is a series of wearable couture pieces which mask the unpleasant sights, sounds and scents of the city in an attempt to bring some of the natural world back into civil living.
Each piece of Bio-accessories incorporates a living organism to accompany the wearer throughout their day, creating a symbiotic relationship. The human tends to the animal or plant, which reciprocates by bringing fresh air, light, greenery, privacy or birdsong to the wearer. The pieces are representative of mobile natural environments, framed within a fashionable alternative the couture accessory. With a trend towards boutique individuality, Bio-accessories provide an unusual take on the wearable garment.
Bio-accessories is an experimental speculation of responsive, functional, fashionable and emotional craft within a city living context.
Tags: architecture, cities, fashion, technology, urban farming
- GROWING UP GREEN ROOF
Participating Artists/Designers:
Growing Up Green Roof Competition, an initiative of the Committee for Melbourne’s Future Focus Group
Bent ArchitectureAfter taking home the grand prize at the ‘Growing Up’ green roof competition, Bent Architecture is currently in the process of materialising its vision Head for the Hill on the rooftop of 131 Queen Street. The project will see Bent construct a hill in the middle of the space that will allow visitors to enjoy country greenery without leaving the hustle and bustle of the city. Head for the Hill also features a rainwater collection tank for irrigation, a micro-weather station and planting zones that will include both edible and flowering plants. This sun-smart project also takes into consideration sunlight patterns throughout the year so that visitors may take informed steps towards avoiding sun damage.
Tags: architecture, cities, roof top gardens, sustainability
- VEGITECTURE
Participating artists/designers: Jason A. King
Vegitecture is an on-line project dedicated to exploring the amalgamation of buildings and horticultural pursuits.
Tags: country, urban farming
- ROOF TOP FARMS
Participating artists/designers:
Annie Novak and Ben FlannerAn approach to urban farming in New York.
- BRISTOL FOOD FOR FREE
Participating artists/designers:
DUO Collective (Kayle Brandon and Heath Bunting)Bristol Food For Free traces pockets of urban vegetation in Bristol suitable to be cooked and eaten.
Tags: cities, urban farming
- WAYWARD PLANT REGISTRY
Participating Artists/Designers:
Heather Ring
Amy Seek
Alison Scott
Teresa Diaz
Bryan Boyer
Emilee Yawn
Jeff Ring (for the original database)
Travis Douglas (for smuggling wayward plants across state borders)
Robin Amer
Jaimes Mayhew
Maura Rockcastle (and her car, R.I.P.)
Javier Arbona
iKatun
Archinect
The Bitter Melon Council
The Institute for Infinitely Small ThingsThe Wayward Plant Registry is a public art initiative dedicated to the rehabilitation of unwanted plants. The project functions as a kind of guerilla ‘landscape architecture’, ostensibly plotting lines of flight amongst humans. The project raises questions about the symbolic role of the ‘natural’ landscape in the city/country divide.
Tags: commuting, guerilla gardening, landscape, plants, weeds
- THE VEGGIE PATCH
Melbourne designer Jo Szczepanska’s VeggiePatch is an environmentally friendly structure which can sustain a vegetable garden. The modular design allows city dwellers to grow their own food with limited outdoor space.
Tags: cities, farming, urban farming
- GUERILLA PLAYGROUND
Participating Artists:
016 (Ioanna Aggelopoulou, Elina Axioti, Constantinos Economides, Maria Evaggeliou, Nefeli Georgakopoulou, Antonis Kiourktsis, Katerina Koutsogianni, Konstantia Manthou, Antonella Nikolopoulou, Yannis Papayannakis, Dimitris Stamatakis, Yorgos Tzirtzilakis)016 are an Athens based design collective. Their most recent project is ‘Tapedscape #1’. Kerameikos-Metaxourgheio (KM for short) is a run-down area of inner Athens. The designers created a temporary playground comprised of beach sand and movable cardboard structures. Local children were encouraged to use the structures as the basis for experimentation and play. The process was recorded and made into a short film which was then screened in the space. Tapedscape #01 is one iteration of the growing trend worldwide to reclaim urban spaces as open spaces - small pockets of utopian promise within a growing and somewhat dysfunctional metropolis. Part of the ReMap2 program.
http://www.guerrillaplayground.blogspot.com/
http://www.remapkm.com/Tags: guerilla gardening, home, identity, suburbia, urbanisation
- OLAFUR ELIASSON
Participating Artists/Designers: Olafur Eliasson
Danish artist Olafur Eliasson creates site-specific installations and artworks which investigate the tensions between nature and technology, the individual and the environment.
Tags: architecture, public space, weather
- URBAN SQUARES
Participating Artist/Designer: Aleksandar Janicijevic
Urban Squares is an online project dedicated to documenting psychogeographical responses to city squares. Psychogeography was a term utilized by the Situationists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychogeography) to refer to the many ways that urban spaces affected or fashioned the pedestrian’s movement through the city. Psychogeography is increasingly becoming indispensable in the consideration of urban and regional spaces.
Tags: cities, commuting, psychogeography, regional
- THE COMMON BIKE
Participating Artists/Designers:
RMIT Industrial Design Students, led by Professor Ronald HavermanPublic bike sharing in Europe is commonplace. The Common Bike was a pilot project initiated by a group of RMIT Industrial Design Students to raise awarness and spark ideas about transport systems in Melbourne. Data, feedback and information from this trial will inform a submission for tender of a “Bike Share System” funded by the Victorian Government.
The Common Bike is part of the Share Bike RMIT Design Studio and has been led by visiting Professor Ronald Haverman who has devised a share bike system for The Netherlands.
- SWITCH COMMUTER BIKE
Participating Artists/Designers: Robert Dumaresq
The Switch Commuter Bike is a high performance bike that can be folded and easily manoeuvred in crowded environments. Robert Dumaresq is a recent Industrial Design graduate of Monash University.
Tags: bikes, cities, commuting, public transport, urban life
- SYDNEY ARCHITECTURE WALKS
Participating Artists/Designers: Eoghan Lewis
Sydney Architecture Walks (SAW) by Eoghan Lewis seeks to educate and encourage the public to think about urban planning. By deconstructing the city through the act of walking, SAW is a modern interpretation of Charles Baudelaire’s concept of the flaneur.
Tags: architecture, cities, commuting
- SWIMMING CITIES OF SERENISSIMA
Participating Artists/Designers: SWOON
In June 2009, American visual artist SWOON gathered together 3 rafts and a crew of 30 artists and set sail to Venice with a view to crash the Venice Biennale. Described as a “love poem to cities built in the middle of the ocean”, SWOON’s project explores the idea of transient populations and the way in which we make our way through the world – both literally and metaphorically.
Tags: cities, commuting, transient populations
- BUS SHELTER HOUSE
Participating Artists/Designers: Sean Godsell
The Bus Shelter House by architect Sean Godsell is a prototype for a functional bus shelter which can be converted into emergency overnight accommodation. The structure raises issues about homelessness and its relationship to concepts of place in an urban context.
Tags: architecture, cities, transient populations, urban life
- INSTITUTE FOR SURVIVAL THROUGH DESIGN
Participating Artists/Designers:
Richard NeutraThe house in many ways persists as the primary architectural structure, the means by which we make sense of our geography. In the 1960s Richard Neutra was one of the first architects to deliberately design housing for therapeutic purposes; to regard the house as an integrated structure of the natural environment. Neutra’s legacy lives on in The Institute for Survival through Design. Despite its somewhat Darwinian connotations, the Institute’s approach to housing raises interesting questions about the relationship between private space and environmental debates.
Tags: architecture, home, identity, psychogeography
- DARREN MCGINN
Darren McGinn is a Melbourne-based artist exploring the notion of transient identity. He employs a variety of techniques including the traditional crafts ceramics and carpentry.
- CENTER FOR RURAL DESIGN
Participating Artists/Designers:
Centre for Rural design, University of MinnesotaUrban design is a term familiar to most, yet the idea of rural design is alien to many. In response to this, the University of Minnesota’s College of Design have joined forces with the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences to introduce ‘The Centre for Rural Design’ as a means of balancing the immense attention spent on urban planning. Focusing on bringing design into rural areas, the program seeks to examine how design can better the rural environment – in particular issues of land use.
Tags: architecture, rural design, urban planning
- RURAL STUDIO
Participating Artists/Designers: Rural Studio (Studio based at Auburn University dedicated to exploring design solutions for rural Alabama)
The Rural Studio was set up by Auburn University to introduce students to the concept of totally immersing themselves within the design process, a goal achieved by requiring the students to move into a community where they will design and build a project that will form part of the town. In this way, the design process comes from within rather than outside.
Tags: architecture, cities, rural design
- DIMBOOLA URBAN DESIGN PROJECT
Participating Artists/Designers:
The Urban Architecture Laboratory (RMIT Architecture)A project run by the Urban Architecture Laboratory, run by RMIT’s Architecture department, designed to rejuvenate the landscape of Dimboola by employing rural design methods.
Tags: architecture, rural design
- MILLENNIUM HOME
Participating artist/designer: Mark Bendit
Designed by American Mark Bendit, the Millennium Home is a dome-shaped home that is virtually disaster-proof. Built to last against storms, tornadoes and inclement weather, the Millennium Home was created as a solution for emergency housing during disaster remediation.
Tags: housing, shelter, technology
- TREE SPHERES
Participating Artists/Designers: Tom Chudleigh
Canandian designer Tom Chudleigh’s tree spheres are suspended ball-shaped houses that use the forest as its foundation, creating an architectural feat that puts its resident at one with nature. The physics of the project borrows heavily from sailboat construction and rigging and the spheres are supported through a series of ropes tied to the surrounding trees.
Tags: housing, landscape, shelter, technology
- WATERCUBE
Participating Artists and Designers: PTW Architects
The Water Cube, also known as the Beijing National Aquatics Centre, was designed by Sydney architectural firm PTW Architects in conjunction with the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The organic exterior of the building is made of ETFE bubbles and resembles the formation of soap bubbles, hence its name.
Tags: architecture, design
- HAUS RUCKER CO
Participating Artist/Designers:
Laurids Ortner
Günther Zamp Kelp
Klaus PinterDesign studio active between 1967 and 1992, exploring avant-garde concepts of design for living.
Tags: architecture, shelter
- STUDIO ORTA
Participating Artists/Designers:
Studio Orta (Lucy and Jorge Orta)Collaborative duo Lucy and Jorge Orta (from the UK and Argentina respectively) are contemporary artists concerned with fashion, architecture and the environment and how the relationship between these themes may be tested and teased.
Tags: fashion, mobile housing, shelter
- MARTIN AZUA
Participating Artists/Designers: Martin Azua
SleepingBagDress and Basic House (Casa Basica) are just two projects by this Chilean based designer taking mobile housing, clothing and architecture as points of departure.
Tags: architecture, fashion, home
- PARTY DRESS
Participating Artists/Designers:
Dana Kalwas and Karla KalwasCombining architecture and fashion, form with function and aesthetics with pragmatism, Dana and Karla Kalwas’ Party Dress is an exploration of not just the relationship between clothes and the body, but between clothes and the environment. Party Dress is a single dress worn by five individuals that expands to create a makeshift covered space that, for a moment, brings people together to celebrate architecture, fashion and performance.
Party Dress
Party Dress at Treehugger
Party Dress at Design BoomTags: architecture, fashion, shelter
- THE ENVELOPE
Participating Artists/Designers: Anthea van Kopplen
Wear it as a jacket, a skirt, or even use it as a shelter, envelope is a multi-functional, highly-adaptable garment that changes to fit the purpose of the wearer. Developed during a project that required designing a snowboarding jacket from a single pattern piece, creator Anthea van Kopplen’s envelope represents a serendipitous moment plucked, captured and frozen during the design process.
Tags: architecture, fashion, shelter
- ANA REWAKOWICZ
Participating Artists/Designers: Ana Rewakowicz
Ukrainian artist Ana Rewakowicz creates inflatable garments which function as mobile architecture, such as the SleepingBagDress, which transforms into a shelter for up to two people, interrogating the boundaries of the body and the environment.
Tags: architecture, fashion, shelter
- MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES
Participating Artists/Designers:
Mierle Laderman UkelesMierle Laderman Ukeles is a feminist artist based in New York. In 1969 she wrote ‘A Manifesto for Maintenance Art’ and based her practice around the labour structures of the New York Sanitation Department. Ukeles explores urban life through garbage disposal and collection.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles at Ronald Feldman Gallery
Tags: cities, public space, urban life
- CLIMATE CHANGE TUBE MAP
Participating artists/designers: Oliver Bishop Young
Designer Oliver Bishop plays with the function of the ubiquitous skip, converting the receptacle for urban refuse into a space for activity and contemplation.
Tags: public transport, sustainability, waste