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02-01-12 // INTERVIEW IN OLDSCHOOL




The Prague-based magazine "Oldschool" interviewed Bernd Upmeyer for their 3. issue. Oldschool is a group project of the three designers Hana Vanátková, Adam Uchytil, and Pavel Brejcha, who are working in the field of visual communication, graphic design and fashion.

Oldschool: What does teamwork look like in your studio/publishing house?
Bernd Upmeyer: At my studio in Rotterdam every team member or collaborator is not only asked to, but also expected to, continuously express and share his own opinions and propose new directions, whether he is an intern or an experienced designer or a theorist.

O: What does "music of the future" mean to you?
BU: Contemplating on a possible future does not mean much to me, as history has shown that eventually most of these predictions fail. Just consider the predicted death of the print media, which turns out not to be disappearing any time soon.

O: How do you meditate?
BU: I don't.

O: What has shaped and continues to influence your style?
BU: My work as an editor of a special interest publication such as MONU magazine is very much influenced and inspired by daily newspapers or weekly news and international affairs publications. I actually try to avoid looking at publications that are active in the same field as MONU. I believe this keeps MONU interesting.

O: What important things have you realized recently?
BU: That today, more than ever, we are living in a post-ideological age, in which redemptive, all-encompassing ideologies have failed. That is why we are currently working on a new issue that is entirely dedicated to that topic.


08-12-11 // ARTIST NO MORE



Bernd Upmeyer has been interviewed by the Milan-based magazine "STUDIO".

STUDIO: Officially today we live in an urbanized world. More than 50% of humanity live in urban contexts. Is this the age of urbanity or the age of the crises complexity?
Bernd Upmeyer: If you ask me like that I would rather say that it is the age of urbanity, because crises always happened. It is not that we are just now having a lot of crises and we never had them before. But I also don't see exactly the relation between the age of urbanity and the crises we are facing at moment. First of all you have to define what kind of crises you're talking about. Today we are dealing for example with three main crises: the financial crisis, the climate crisis, but also the geo-political crisis.

STUDIO: So this is not an urban topic?
BU: That depends on what crisis you are talking about. The current financial crisis, for example, has of course an impact on cities, but cities did not produce the financial crisis to begin with. If you wish to talk about the relation of the climate crisis to cities, then you can of course also say that the recent enormous population growths of cities did not make the situation easier. However, we can speak of an urban age, mainly because of the vast movements of people from the countryside to the cities, which happened especially in Asia - a tendency that does not happen so much in the Western world, where cities are rather shrinking.

...continue reading the entire interview here.


25-11-11 // BOARD LAUNCHES MONU #15: POST-IDEOLOGICAL URBANISM



This new MONU issue on the topic of Post-Ideological Urbanism probably touches on one of the most fascinating and biggest issues of our time and in our culture, or what is left of it: the non-ideological - or better post-ideological - conditions of our society when it comes to cities. Today, ideology appears to have become, and to have been reduced to, something merely aesthetic, something you can buy yourself into as Wouter Vanstiphout explains in an interview with us entitled "Acrobatic Narratives". In that sense cities have become suspicious territories where hypocrisy and fakery prevail when it comes to urban ideologies and one wishes to have some kind of optical device that detects all the lies, similar to a kind of night vision infrared technology that Thomas Ruff used in his "Nacht Series" applying the same technology that was used during the Gulf War. But the usage of alibi ideologies does not seem to be just a contemporary phenomenon and the inference that, for example, the heroic Modernist architects and urban designers were able to work without succumbing to the moral ambiguities of dealing with external political or economic contingencies is probably a fallacy as Brendan M. Lee states in his contribution "Lean Urbanism". He furthermore explains that we, architects and urban designers, are sometimes envious of our Modernist forebears for their supposed ability to remain true believers in the revolutionary ideologies they proselytized, but that perhaps we have lost the self-confidence in our own ability to bluff. Fredrik Torisson even questions the necessity to follow one coherent system of ideas or an ethical set of ideals in his piece "The Khmer Rouge and the Control of Urban Space" and disqualifies urban ideology as a homogenizer that elevates one preferred ideal over the many. But according to Michael Hirschbichler and his analytical manifesto "Remix - Negotiating Post-ideological Ideologies" there cannot in fact be a post-ideological condition as there is no society imaginable that could exist beyond an ideological framework and is totally free from ideological contexts. What appears to be post-ideological today is in fact the coexistence, silent combat and mutual neglect of innumerable ideologies, neo-ideologies and pseudo-ideologies. In this pluralistic environment, no single ideology or group of ideologies is perceived to be relevant enough to become a point of reference or a single desirable truth. Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen describe this prevailing pluralism, or coexistence, in their article "Metamodern Architecture" as metamodern, a condition in which the contemporary structure of feeling evokes a continuous oscillation between seemingly modern strategies and ostensibly postmodern tactics as well as a series of practices ultimately beyond these worn out categories. Following the authors, that kind of metamodernism can be observed in the art works of for example Djurberg, the quirky cinema of Gondry the novels of Murakami or the music of Coco Rosie and movements as diverse as reconstructivism, the new romanticism and the new sincerity. And a new sincerity is obviously needed in a world consisting of a multiplicity of choices and urban outcomes without a single consistent urban ideology as Melissa Dittmer, Jamie Witherspoon, and Noah Resnick point out in their piece "Choose Your Own Urbanism Presents: The Case of the Missing Ideal". (Bernd Upmeyer, Editor-in-Chief, November 2011)


24-10-11 // BERND UPMEYER CONTRIBUTES TO CLOG MAGAZINE'S FIRST ISSUE



The newly founded New York-based architecture magazine CLOG is featuring a contribution by Bernd Upmeyer entitled "Any Press is Good Press". Their first issue focused on Bjarke Ingels. Read the entire contribution here:

"Dedicating an entire issue of a magazine to criticism of a single person-in this case the architect Bjarke Ingels - can be a tricky thing and ultimately spoil the publication's original intention. After all, any press is good press. The entire thing might almost look like one of Bjarke's publicity stunts, well-planned and designed to attract the public's attention. To avoid giving Bjarke even more attention than he already attracts through his extraordinary talents in self-promotion and self-marketing, most of the rather serious and critical architecture magazines have not paid him too much attention yet. However, the fairly uncritical and image-oriented magazines publish him excessively as they wish to ride on his coattails and profit from his popularity while using him as a cash cow to sell copies.

I believe it is a mistake for the somewhat serious and critical architecture magazines to not feature him. They actually should, but not because of his architecture - which is mostly about remixing, banalizing, and commercializing the Dutch architectural avant-garde of the nineties, which in itself is another crucial reason why the abovementioned magazines don't publish his work - but because of his exceptional publicizing skills. He is so good at managing the public's perception of his office that today most of the architecture students even think that famous and established Dutch offices such as OMA or MVRDV are actually copying him. That achievement caught our interest at MONU magazine as well and motivated us to interview him. Heroically, Bjarke does not ever seem to tire of repeating the same phrases and showing the same images, displaying the same scale models and diagrams, again and again, all over the world. That kind of energy and enthusiasm can only be admired."


10-10-11 // "EL EDITOR URBANO" APPEARS IN THE HIATUS BOOK



Bernd Upmeyer's concept of the "Urban Editor" has been published in the 2011 edition of the Hiatus Book, a publication for opinions and reflections about design. The book is produced by the Valencia-based studio Sanserif. Read the entire article below:

"In the near future, the interior architect might be best positioned to become the ultimate designer of space, replacing and eradicating professions such as architect and urban designer. But to become such an important figure, the interior architect has to move ahead and reinvent and transform himself into an advanced and superior version of his own existence and become an "Urban Editor" with an extended knowledge of the heritage and history of the cultural landscape and the urban environment. To succeed in the future he will have to face the past. But the interior architect has lived long enough as a Clark Kentian "mild-mannered reporter" in the metropolis of our planet. As urban editor he may leave his bespectacled old ego behind and display the super-abilities of the interior architect.

As urban editors, interior architects will dominate the architectural and urban design profession of the future, since these days, the need for new buildings or entire city quarters is decreasing or even ceasing to exist altogether - at least in the Western world - due to demographic changes and financially difficult times. In such times, when large-scale master plans are no longer sufficient design tools, design tasks will shift from new buildings to existing buildings and especially to the interiors of the existing buildings. Therefore, interior architects will be best prepared for the future; especially those who were trained by schools that focused their education first and foremost on the past and mainly taught urban and architectural restoration, preservation, renovation, redevelopment, or adaptive reuse of old structures, whereby cities will be edited rather than extended or even newly designed.

In such a future, which has become reality in most Western cities of this day and age, interior architects will be successful as urban editors. But it will probably become reality, too, in emerging and developing economies such as China, Brazil, or India, where historical city areas are currently being bulldozed out of existence by excessive development. Urban editors will be released from the modernistic burden to constantly replace the old world with a new one. Their daily tasks will first of all be based on re-designing, re-programming, and renovating the interiors of the existing urban fabric according to changing needs. But they will be also involved in processes of selecting, correcting, condensing, organizing, or modifying the existing urban material. The process of urban editing will originate from an idea for the existing urban structure itself and will continue in a relationship between the users and producers of the city and the urban editors. Urban editing, therefore, will be also a practice that includes creative skills, human relations, and a precise set of methods.

But the question is: what kind of methods will the urban editor use? What will be his task exactly? What will the process of urban editing look like? With what kind of challenging problems will the urban editor be confronted and how will he solve them? How will he assess how to deal with the existing structures, and with the preserved and protected elements of the city? Will it be the job of the urban editor to define the value of existing urban structures? Which structures will he keep and which will he destroy? How should he deal with urban nostalgia for history, and how with memory? What will be his criteria for action, his values, his moral compass? Or will the urban editor be merely the mediator between the old and the new in general?"


26-07-11 // E80 PUBLISHED IN "NOMADIC SETTLERS - SETTLED NOMADS"



Bernd Upmeyer contributed with an essay entitled "E80: On the Road to Binational Urbanism" to the publication "Nomadic Settlers - Settled Nomads" of a group exhibition with the same title that takes place in the Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin from July 2nd to August 28. The exhibition is curated by Bonaventure S. B. Ndikung, Simone Kraft and Pauline Doutreluingne as a research on contemporary nomadism, dealing with the complex theme of the human sense of settlement and its manifold facets. The concept of nomadism, migration, settlement will be perceived in a physical and meta-physical level, rotating around the real and the imaginary, the existential and the non-existential, the trivial and the profound, still with both feet on the ground. Read the beginning of the essay below.

E80: On the Road to Binational Urbanism
Just as bigamists marry a second time before their existing marriages are dissolved, binational urbanists start life in a second city located in another nation, without having said good-bye to their first city. Thus, binational urbanism is a particular form of transnationalism, a phenomenon which in sociology results from social interactions across national borders. In this article, binational urbanism has to be understood as a way of life of a person, who is related to two different cities at the same time. Ideally, a binational urbanist commutes continuously as a quasi-nomad between two cities and lives in constant transit between two Heimaten. Because of the recurring local changes, binational urbanists find themselves in a certain utopian condition that is characterised by a constant longing, and/or a constant homesickness for the other absent city. "The Heimat - the place of origin - becomes a Nichtort - a non-place - at the same time as a utopia. She is experienced most intensively if one is away and she is lacking; the actual Heimat feeling is that of homesickness." Binational urbanists can probably be best described as extreme commuters. Probably the most well-known commuters are work commuters, people that commute continuously between their residential city and the city where they work. A country such as Germany, for example, counts approximately thirty million commuters , which means that almost every second German leads a life between two places. In addition, binational urbanism emerges, above all, as a global phenomenon. Never before was the mobility of individual human beings higher than it is today. These days, people travel between continents, as they travelled between cities thirty years ago. Binational urbanism has the potential of becoming the ultimate way of life of the twenty-first Century.(...)


17-06-11 // MONU MAGAZINE IS FEATURED IN ABITARE



MONU magazine appears in an article by Francisco Gonzalez de Canales in the Milan-based architecture magazine Abitare as one of the rising independent magazines. "At a time when all talk is about the internet and digital information, you might think that paper-based publications are about to disappear. This assumption is not only wrong, but the amount of small, idependent, paper-based publications has increasingly grown in recent years.(...) Another controversial magazine which looks at urbanism is the Dutch periodical MONU.(...)


27-05-11 // FREE SPACE IS PUBLISHED IN FUTURE ARQUITECTURAS' CHINA EDITION



BOARD's awarded design for the House of Arts and Culture in Beirut, Lebanon entitled "Free Space" is published in Future Arquitecturas' China Edition #2.


18-04-11 // MONU #14 - EDITING URBANISM



Despite the current urgency to deal with the enormous potential of the already existing urban material as Urban Editors, there seems still to be an enormous lack of interest in topics such as urban and architectural restoration, preservation, renovation, redevelopment, renewal or adaptive reuse of old structures among architects and urban designers. But ignorance in this matter can only be dismissed as socially irresponsible and economically and culturally unacceptable. But what might be the reason for the prevailing ignorance? Who is to blame? Why is Urban Editing considered to be so utterly unattractive? Felix Madrazo, one of the members of the UNION3 collective, blames the media and in particular architecture publications, as he points out in UNION3's discussion of urban renewal entitled "The Naked Lunch: A Stark Honest Discussion on Renewal". He states that a prestigious architectural magazine such as the Spanish El Croquis would never publish an architect who has been practicing renewal for the last twenty years. In OMA's contribution "Extreme Demolition and Extreme Preservation" Rem Koolhaas holds the arrogance of the modernists responsible for making the preservationist of today look like a futile and irrelevant figure. He furthermore claims that preservation necessitates the development of a theory of its opposite: not what to keep, but what to give up, what to erase and what to abandon - and proposes a system of phased demolition. To a certain extent this is what Lucas Dean recommends in his piece "Apoptotic Woomera 2035" for a small town in South Australia, in which he suggests a programmed urban death that ensures that the urban fabric can constantly undergo a process of rejuvenation. The concept is an analogy to the biochemical process of apoptosis, which is organized cell death that our bodies undergo on a daily basis, killing fifty to seventy million cells, enabling the body to rejuvenate and ensure longevity. Obviously terms such as death and rejuvenation are crucial notions when it comes to Editing Urbanism. In his article "Eternal Ise" Jarrik Ouburg sees destruction as a natural part of preservation. He advises to look east and learn from the way how in Japan important shrines have been rebuild every twenty years for more than ten centuries. But accepting death and decay in buildings is one thing, when it comes to our own death, things get much more complicated. For that reason Adolfo Natalini, one of the founders of the legendary 60ies architecture firm Superstudio, does not like physical changes in cities, because they remind us that we are moving closer and closer towards death, as he explains in an interview with us entitled "Deadly Serious". He likes to be surrounded by things that remain the same as they give us the impression of eternity and he sees architecture as the most powerful medium of this form of hope. To solve the paradoxical situation that cities should on the one hand remain the same, keeping and maintaining all their existing buildings, yet on the other able to change, Beatriz Ramo / STAR suggests in "In the Name of the Past: Countering the Preservation Crusades" to establish Virtual World Heritage Sites as a new category for UNESCO. Virtual preservation enables cities to survive for eternity in the virtual, yet remain living and changing organisms in the real world. Released from the fear of death, Editing Urbanism can become a vital, active and experimental practice, in which the concept of sample and the remix gain importance as a cultural technique as Jan Bovelet and Miodrag Kuc describe in their contribution "The Digital Habitat and Urban Design as Emerging Practice". Just as remixes of songs are alternative versions of recorded songs, made from original versions, remixes of cities can be alternative versions of the original cities. Especially with the help of hand-held devices, mobile and digital online applications, citizens will be able to alternate and control cities as Michiel van Iersel, Juha van't Zelfde, and Ben Cerveny explain in their article "Controlling the City". To edit cities successfully, Brian Davis, Rob Holmes, and Brett Milligan even propose to develop "Urban Field Manuals", which show how to change or maintain your city just as automotive maintenance manuals teach you how to repair or maintain your car. Such Urban Field Manuals allow you for example to learn how, as a non-profit landlord, to approach buildings that are awaiting demolition permissions for a new construction on old properties, and to format micro-contracts that make unoccupied buildings available to other non-profits at the costs of utilities alone. But one of the most successful strategies for such reuse of unoccupied spaces in cities has probably been developed by Patrizia Di Monte recently. In her contribution "This Is Not an Empty Plot", she shows how she created an employment plan, in which sixty one long-term unemployed workers cleaned initially empty plots of the historic district of Zaragoza, which led eventually to the realization of twenty-eight projects on those lots over the last two years. (Editorial by Bernd Upmeyer, Editor-in-Chief, April 2011)


03-11-10 // BOARD'S PROJECT "ATREE?" IS PUBLISHED IN D MAGAZINE



"Atree?" has been published in issue #712 of the weekly cultural supplement “D” of the Italian daily newspaper la Repubblica. La Repubblica is the second largest Italian daily general-interest newspaper with a circulation of 556.325 copies.


29-10-10 // ELLEGIRL KOREA #6 2010



MONU magazine on urbanism has been featured as "cool & strange" in the issue #6 2010 of the Korean edition of ELLEgirl.


05-10-10 // MONU #13 - MOST VALUABLE URBANISM



When John Lennon was photographed by the legendary rock 'n' roll photographer Bob Gruen, wearing a New York City T-shirt in the year 1974, he proudly expressed his love for the city of New York. For Lennon, although born in Liverpool, New York City was without doubt the most valuable city. In that sense the value of a city can become extremely personal, subjective, and only a reflection of feelings, as Mika Savela argues in his contribution "Most T-shirtable Cities". Because of this subjective experience the value of a city is - just as the beauty of a city - in the eye of the beholder and what constitutes 'most valuable', in whatever respect, shifts back into our hands, as Bobby Shen puts it in his piece "Within a Day". People attribute a value to spaces that cannot be quantified in statistical terms, but is dependent on how 'city users' identify with the place where they live, as Luciano Alfaya and Patricia Muñiz explain in their article "Urban Perception of Happiness". And this identification is usually based on rather intangible criteria; social, cultural, and psychological dimensions; or qualities such as history, identity, memories, or lifestyle, as Human Wu illustrates in his piece "Tales of Nail Houses". Nevertheless, it would be naïve to exclude certain basic physiological needs out of the value discussion regarding cities. Those basic needs include, for example, security, housing, or health as Ruraigh Purcell, who spent several years running an analytical team producing city ranking lists, points out in an interview with us entitled "The Crumbles of the Cake - The Truth Behind City Ranking Lists". In his opinion, basic, low-level needs have to be satisfied in a city, referring to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, before you are in a position to move to a higher level of needs that would take in account things such as educational and cultural stimulus. Most of the evaluation criteria used by companies such as Mercer or the Economist Intelligence Unit to produce the famous city ranking lists that define the so called "most liveable cities", are based mainly on those basic needs. But what is often less known is the fact that those ranking lists are not representative, as they use as a primary source the answers of a particular socio-economic group: expatriates. Klaas Kresse detects that fact in his text "The Systematic Thinking Livability Rankings Imply" and discloses that rankings are not made for the multiplicity of urban dwellers, but for a group of wealthy, well-educated and highly skilled professionals. He furthermore points out that the livability rankings imply an urban thinking in terms of closed systems as cities start focusing on the points already scored, which makes them static and inflexible. To continue being able to change Matthew Johnson proposes in his piece "Is Livability Overrated?" that cities should be allowed to exist in a state of perpetual upgrading and renovation - always under scaffolding, in the form of a transactional urbanism. In his eyes, Houston in Texas is such a transactional city that is evolutionary and voracious, and secure in itself, despite its imperfections. Jürgen Krusche misses such imperfections in the always top-ranked city of Zurich as he clarifies in his contribution "The Value of Ugliness", where the constant striving toward clean, safe, and beautiful public spaces has banished unwelcome individuals from marginalized social groups from public life. But ever since the Economist began some ten years ago to rate cities such as Vancouver as the number one most livable city in the world, while other livability indices by Mercer and Monocle Magazine also gave it consistently high rankings, the safe and clean downtown living model of Vancouver became the planning model for cities around the world, as Brendan Cormier and Christopher Pandolfi explain in their article "Vancouverism is Everywhere". Today, top positions in urban planning councils all over the world are filled with Vancouverities. However, there seems to be a resistance towards Vancouverism and there are possibilities to top livability ranking lists without following the trends, as Stefan Gruber explains in his text "Vienna: Slow Capital?", in which he suggests that the quality of life in a city might also be determined by its capacity to resist certain movements and instead to concentrate on its unique attributes. (Editorial by Bernd Upmeyer, Editor-in-Chief, September 2010)

More information can be found on www.monu-magazine.com


16-06-10 // IBA PUBLICATION VOLUME 4



BOARD's ME(U)TROZONE study has been published in the 4th volume of the Internationale Bauausstellung (International Building Exhibition) entitled Metropolis: Metrozones.

As transitional areas between different parts of a city, metrozones are without doubt closely related to the transit
routes that link entire cities with one another...

Get more information about the study in projects.


30-05-10 // ARQA #80/81



Bernd Upmeyer has been interviewed by the Portuguese Contemporary Architecture and Art Magazine arqa. The interview was entitled "The New Black".

arqa: Given your interest in radical urban research and your activity as editor of MONU magazine, how would you interpret the situation and the current relations between architecture and the global market?
Bernd Upmeyer: In an increasingly interconnected world and ever- growing interdependence of national economies across the world that led ultimately to the emergence of a global marketplace, architects - as all other corporations and industries - are challenged and threatened in their existence more than ever before. Today, an architect based in the city of Lisbon does not only compete over clients and commissions with architects from Porto, but also with architects from São Paulo, New York or Tokyo. But the pressure has not only increased among architects, but also and especially among real estate companies, something that eventually reflects back onto the architectural profession. A Rotterdam-based real estate developer explained to me only recently in an interview that has been published in our most recent issue MONU #12 under the title "Life without Architects" that real estate companies currently consider a price per square meter in building costs over 600 Euros as expensive. This is quite shocking, when you consider that a price of around 1000 Euros per square meter was regarded as cheap. But low budgets are not the biggest threat to architects. The same developer told us that nowadays real estate companies actually try more and more to avoid working with architects and rather collaborate directly with construction companies as they share in their opinion a greater understanding of their profession and are by far cheaper than architects. But this tendency is accompanied by another extreme trend. Ever since projects such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao have proved that very high investments lead to very high revenues for the developing companies - at least that is how it was presented in several articles in magazines and newspapers - more and more of such expensive, iconic and glamorous buildings, designed by famous architects, have been constructed. On one hand, if both extreme trends continue, most of the built-up hardware of our cities will be made out of cardboard in the future and designed only by untalented and uninspiring architects that are working in big construction companies. On the other hand, this vast mass of cheapness will be punctuated by some beautiful and glamorous buildings as "red hot spots of intensity surrounded by a plane of tarmac" as Rem Koolhaas called it once.

arqa: In the context of the growing affirmation of architecture in contemporary societies, how can the architect take positive action to cope with the current economic and productive forces?
Bernd Upmeyer: What appears to be going on is that to survive as an architect you either have to become extremely cheap and generic and work in the possible best way directly for a big construction company, or you have to try to become extremely expensive and famous to design some of the exquisite red hot spots of the cities. At first glance that situation might look very depressing. But it also offers a lot of opportunities as in the history of the human race it has never been easier to actually become famous as an architect within a very short period of time. The internet has made this possible. Today it seems that with the help of the internet and a successful marketing and public relations strategy you can reach great fame rapidly and grow an architecture office of a large size very fast. Evidences of such phenomena can be witnessed specifically in Scandinavia, where some Danish architecture offices managed to grow into offices of up to 80 people in only a couple of years. The internet has offered the opportunity to spread information to a vast number of people simultaneously and almost instantaneously. It has accelerated the possibilities of getting famous through blogs, internet forums and social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace or Twitter. Architecture offices that exhausted and strategically used up all the new possibilities that the internet offers reached fame almost overnight. But to be able to use the internet successfully, architects have to change their way of working profoundly and become businessmen rather than artists. And since architecture can not remain just an art form, but has to become a business in order to survive, architects are forced to improve their business skills. They have to stop dreaming of being some kind of artistic elite that focuses solely on the artistic side of architecture. Architects have to be become business people who run profit-oriented enterprises instead of architecture offices. They have to become more involved in the management of their company. The days of black turtleneck pullovers seem to be over. Architects have to change their black clothes for suits with white collar shirts and neckties.

arqa: A subject of recent international debate, which programmes and strategies could make cities more creative? Could you give and justify a real example of a "Creative City"?
Bernd Upmeyer: Although it might sound paradoxical, but to prevent cities from becoming planes of grey tarmac filled with cheap and low quality architecture with only some red hot spots of intensity, represented by a few glamorous, spectacular and expensive products of famous architects, it is necessary for the municipalities of the cities to regain some of the power they lost in the privatisation processes of the last two decades that took place in most of the European cities. The Dutch city of Rotterdam, for example, sold most of its land to private parties in the beginning of the 1990s. When the land was divested, the city lost a lot of its power and influence. But as in most cases, the city lacks the financial possibilities to buy back parts of the city and the private parties would never sell back their land anyway. The municipalities can only regain power by creating stricter rules when it comes to real estate investments and urban development. That would be the only way to assure for the future the involvement of talented and creative architects in the production of relevant parts of the cities. It finally has to be admitted that the neo-liberal market-driven approach has failed in recent years when it comes to city planning. Nevertheless, developers should maintain a strong position, because without their money nothing will be possible. But their position has to be balanced by strong municipalities that care for quality in the cities and support the production of high quality architecture, architecture that is usually too expensive and too risky for developers. Only this will prevent cities from turning into areas that are reduced to machines for making and spending money. The only reason, for example, why OMA's "De Rotterdam" , despite the financial crisis, is currently under construction, is that the municipality of Rotterdam guaranteed that it will rent approximately 40.000m2 of the total floorspace of around 160.000m2, which lowered the investment costs. Although the city of Rotterdam is a rather weak municipality, when it comes to architecture and urban planning, I would still call it a "Creative City", because it recently started supporting extraordinary architecture such as "De Rotterdam" and began to support projects financially as well, such as the "Schieblock" that was initiated by a joint-venture between an architecture office, a developer, an investor and the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam. The "Schieblock" is a building in the very centre of Rotterdam that has stood empty for twenty years and is now going to be redeveloped as a laboratory for urban development. The "Schieblock" is going to be a hotspot of creativity and will be used by people from the creative professions such as art, film, literature, music, architecture, or design.


11-03-10 // MONU #12 - REAL URBANISM



Just like the "Ideal Woman" on the cover of this issue on Real Urbanism - a sculpture by the Brooklyn based artist Tony Matelli - most of our cities are shaped by a particular set of values that does not necessarily lead to high quality urban spaces, but instead to scary, ethically unacceptable and distorted forms. As the "Ideal Woman", so "Ideal Cities" can easily end up only fulfilling the wishes and dreams of a powerful minority, but neglect the needs of most of the other people. Jason Lee, one of the contributors to this issue, that deals more with "Real Estate" Urbanism rather than with Actual or Factual Urbanism, uses this sculpture in his article "Luxury Space" to display the consequences that can occur when a financially powerful elite develops real estate projects in the city of Shanghai merely to accommodate their consumerist desires. Cities have been reduced to machines for making and spending money as Stephen Becker and Rob Holmes put it in their piece "The Shelter Category". Especially in Central European countries, where two decades ago the state-controlled economy changed into a market-economy, developers are driven by pure profit rather than by a genuine desire or even awareness of sustainable neighbourhoods and city development as Maximilian Mendel describes in his text "Residential Developers and Investors in Central Europe: Boom and Bust". But blaming only the financial elites and the real estate industry for the prevailing urbanism of mediocrity would be too easy. For successful urban planning, cities depend on private financing as Carol Moukheiber points out in her contribution "Solidere, Inc., or Downtown Beirut", where a productive collaboration between a corporate and a cooperative party led - although heavily criticised and carried out in a kind of pseudo democratic Berlusconian way - to prosperous results. In the case of Rotterdam, where the municipality actually cares very little about the city, real estate developers seem to be even more concerned about the quality of urban spaces than the city itself, as stated by Andre Kempe in an interview with us entitled "Rotterdam is a Whore". To halt the process by which the built-up form of our cities continues to be mainly driven by practical concerns such as efficiency, profit, and self-promotion, Randall Teal proposes in his piece "Real Creativity: A Case for Ethical Freedom in Architecture" that architects should become developers themselves. But how many architects would be able and interested in doing that? Magriet Smit, a Rotterdam based real estate developer, explains in the interview "Life without Architects" that she actually tries more and more to avoid working with planners and rather collaborates directly with construction companies as they share a greater understanding of their profession. But to prevent our cities from turning into monstrous "Ideal Cities", as perverted as the "Ideal Woman", all the parties involved that are shaping the cities - the developers, the municipalities and the planners - have to accept their interdependencies, and have to try to understand the different interests of each party and have to dare to navigate into unknown territory as Bjarke Ingels concludes in an interview with us entitled "Real Big". (Editorial by Bernd Upmeyer, Editor-in-Chief, February 2010, www.monu-magazine.com )


25-08-09 // MONU #11 - CLEAN URBANISM

Do we simply have to stop having sex to produce Clean Urbanism - i.e. an urbanism that is dedicated to minimizing both the required inputs of energy, water, and food for a city as well as its waste output of heat, air pollution as CO2, methan, and water pollution, Samo Pedersen asks in his piece “Sci-fi greenery..or just Responsibility?”. In fact Randall Teal sees the growing world population frequently ignored in discussions on sustainability, as he points out in his article “Coming Clean: Owning Up to the Real Demands of a Sustainable Existence”. Fewer people spend less energy, and as the gas and oil supply will come to an end sooner or later, saving energy may be a cheaper and smarter solution for cities than depending on renewable energies, as Gerd Hauser, one of the leading researcers on the implementation of the EU Directive on Energy Performance of Buildings, explains in an interview with us, entitled “Domes over Manhatten”. Although sustainability has recently become a cache misère for our lack of intent, a trendy make-up hiding our incompetence, with Clean Urbanism being its apotheosis as Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia (WAI) maintain in their contribution “Rendering the Clean”, energy self-sufficient cities are technically possible as Gerd Hauser states and explains using a five-point manifesto. Greg Keeffe and Simon Swietochowski support that view by introducing their “Bio-Port” project, a vision of a “Free Energy City” set in Liverpool, where the old dockyards have been transformed into bio-productive algae farms. Furthermore, the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) illustrates in its project “Zeekracht – The North Sea Masterplan” how wind farms could be clustered along an Energy Super-Ring in the North Sea, distributing national surpluses and supplying regional energy needs efficiently and profitably. On the other hand, Clean Urbanism cannot only be understood from a purely technocratic perspective, but also needs a social one as Claudio Astudillo Barra articulates in his article “Regenerative Ecologies – A Prototypical Approach to the Territory”, introducing Felix Guattari’s ideas of ecosophy. On such social aspects Rogier van den Berg focuses in his piece on “The Cooperative City”, where a community is created that triggers individual initiative and the cooperation of its users to generate collective values. The Cooperative City requires a flexible plan with an open end that is only guided by one set of rules, described by Bryan Norwood and the Jackson Community Center as “Mania: An Emergent Sustainability of Density and Intensity”, created by the disorganized, hyperactivity of an actualized system with no specified, singular goal, a bottom-up phenomenon that emerges from the individual events of architecture within the city, combined with the ideology of urbanism conceived as anti-capitalism and anti-homogenization. It is mania, and mania is clean. (Editorial by Bernd Upmeyer)

More information can be found on www.monu-magazine.com


11-06-09 // FUTURE MAGAZINE #16/17



BOARD's price winning design for the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn has been published in the Madrid based Future Magazine #16/ 17.


27-05-09 // BUILDING FOR BOUWKUNDE - OPEN TO IDEAS



BOARD' proposal with the title 241 has been selected out of 466 entries in the Open International Ideas Competition Building for Bouwkunde to be published in the "Building for Bouwkunde - Open to Ideas" book and is being exhibited at the NAi exhibition Building for Bouwkunde from March 15, 2009 - June 7, 2009.

The jury reported: "This entry is an intelligent and simple project, featuring a formula of two buildings in one. It is an example of a dynamic high-rise, in which sufficient attention has been given to issues of sustainability. The design proposal has potential for rich spatial development."


13-02-09 // FUTURE MAGAZINE #15

The Bureau of Architecture, Research and Design (BOARD) has been published among offices such as OMA and MVRDV in the Rotterdam issue of the Madrid based Future Magazine #15.

There is no love at first sight when it comes to urbanism. With cities you fall in love at second sight. The city of Rotterdam is a great example for this. Second sight is probably the only way to fall in love with it anyhow, as its beauty is hidden, but its ugliness famous and a fixed fact in people's heads. For a long time it has suffered under the beauty of its urban competitor - the picturesque Amsterdam. If Amsterdam is the Beauty, Rotterdam is the Beast. But there is one group of people, who has always seen the handsome prince in the beast: architects. Since the early 1990's, Rotterdam has become the worldwide hotbed for architects and urban planners. When you are a fashion designer, you want to be in Antwerp or Paris, but if you are an architect, there is only one place: Rotterdam. (Bernd Upmeyer's statement on Rotterdam published on page 13)


06-02-09 // MONU #10 - HOLY URBANISM

Can the view on cities get any bigger than through religion? Probably not. But we believe that a magazine on urbanism such as MONU, that appears only twice a year, can never have a too open perspective. Although the picture in this issue is big, and the contributions are diverse and have different focuses, one thing can be found that runs through almost this entire issue on Holy Urbanism. It is the convinction that Holy Urbanism in the contemporary city does not appear, and is not created any longer, merely by religion itself, but rather by a crossbreed of religion and economy. How such Holy Urbanism can be produced is explained by Daniel Hadley, for example, through the City Creek Center in Salt Lake City that quite clearly defies the dichotomy between market and temple cities, in his article “A Mormon Megaproject”. Thus, the City Creek Center is designed to be a centre of consumerism and economic production, whose purpose, nevertheless, is to ensure vitality in front of the nearby Temple Square. Sacred and commercial spaces seem increasingly to coalesce and create a kind of Foucaultian Heterotopia, an environment that is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces and several sites that are in themselves incompatible, as Colin Davies points out in his contribution “The Sacred and the Holy: Transient Urban Spaces”. Peter Dorsey in his piece “Strata and Sound: The Adhan as an Urban Operating Procedure” argues that contemporary Holy Urbanism is flourishing especially at places where religion is creating a hybrid together with capitalism. As an example he mentions the Lakewood Church Central Campus in Houston, Texas that can seat more than 16.000 worshipers, adapting efficiently into a spectacle-based environment by satisfying multiple consumer appetites simultaneously. In the Nigerian city of Lagos the hybridisation processes of religion and the market have even transformed the urban space itself into a battlefield, in a free market where religion is a commodity to sell and an urban survival strategy, as Emeka Udemba concludes in his “God is a Nigerian”. Within such a capitalistic realm, religious buildings follow an increasingly territorial logic that is similar to capitalistic corporations or franchises such as McDonald’s or Starbucks. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, for example, standardized the design of their temples and thus created a generic network of identical buildings that are spread out - Starbucks-like - all over the planet, as Jesse LeCavalier illustrates in his article “The Mormon Church’s Infrastructure of Salvation”. Carolyn Sponza, in her contribution “Drive-Through-Religion”, even states that in the United States, planning a church and a shopping mall always begins with the same capitalistic question – how much parking the site can accommodate. Such an attitude leads in a lot of cases to the design of big box, Ikea-like, building types that are perfectly located along a suburban highway. But religious big boxes nevertheless - though convenient and visible - force visitors to seek them out, park their cars, and walk toward their front doors. And if you don’t think it’s for you, you can keep driving along the highway until the next big box containing another religion grabs your attention. Such Holy Urbanism promotes religious choice and makes multi-religious spaces possible that are flexible as pieces of fashion, as empty spaces for inter-religious dialogue that incarnate the belief in a multi-faith society and allow for openness, and heterogeneity as Karen Crequer reveals in her piece “Sacred Beauties”. (Editorial by Bernd Upmeyer)

More information can be found on www.monu-magazine.com


21-06-08 // WETTBEWERBE AKTUELL #2008/ 6



BOARD's price winning design for the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn has been published in the German magazine Wettbewerbe Aktuell.


09-04-08 // POSTIMEES #82 (5262)



BOARD's price winning design for the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn has also been published in Tallinn's newspaper Postimees. Postimees is Estonia's largest circulated newspaper, with over 242,000 readers and a daily circulation of 61,000 to 72000.


09-04-08 // EESTI PÄEVALEHT #83



One day after the prize ceremony, BOARD's price winning design for the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn has been published in Eesti Päevaleht, one of the major daily Estonian newspaper.


17-08-07 // BETONART #15



MONU's 5th issue on Brutal Urbanism has been featured in the Istanbul based magazine Betonart.

Monu is designed as a truly interdisciplinary journal. We combine traditional social science with essays by architects and designers and photographic explorations. It is the combination of critical social analysis with the spatial and artistic view of the city that opens up new ways of thinking about the contemporary urban and regional situation.


19-10-06 // WORK, NOT LOVE Contribution for 'The Metropolis Issue' of Amsterdam's streetfashion magazine CODE #4. Buy "Work, not Love" T-shirt at Tokyo's BeamsT Shop.



What draws people into cities? Is it love or is it work? Some say that there is more hunger for love and appreciation in this world than there is for bread. But cities are growing and shrinking simply depending on whether there is work, or not. A city is never beautiful by default, but perceived as beautiful to the extent to which you like the job you have in the city. Once you have found work, all other romantic ideas about cities fall in a simple order: work, love, house... Everybody has experienced at least once in his or her lifetime, that when you move to a city only for love, your stay is most likely limited. But once you have found your professional path, anything is possible. There is no love at first sight when it comes to urbanism. With cities you fall in love at second sight.

06-04-06 // PASAJES #75



MONU's first four issues have been featured in the Spanish magazine Pasajes.