Here are some pictures of the MBL.MTN from the recent Cities Methodologies exhibition run by Urban Laboratory.

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Darryl Chen will be exhibiting the MBL.MTN project at the Cities Methodologies exhibition. Organized by the Urban Lab, the interdisciplinary endeavour draws together urban research from across UCL’s faculties including the Bartlett and the Slade School of Fine Art. A series of talks and workshops will accompany the exhibition. Full programme can be found here. Stop in and say hi!

Launch party 18.30 Wednesday 5 May 2010

Exhibition open until 7 May 2010

Slade Research Centre, UCL, Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB

TTT has been selected as an Associated Partner for the upcoming Europe-wide Art Festival Exchange Radical Moments! Organized by Austrian kollectiv, Die Fabrikanten, the format will encourage interdisciplinary projects that explore the nature of contemporary Europe and will culminate on 11.11.2011 as a moment of simultaneous fruition. Featured participants include Gabriela Gerber and Lukas Bardill; Scott Bunham; Owen Mundy and Juliane Stiegele. Download the promotional magazine here. (more…)

If you’re in London this Wednesday 23rd September Liam Young will be speaking at the Launch for the first issue of the Bookazine Beyond: Short Stories on the Post Contemporary. The first volume is themed Scenarios and Speculations and includes contributions from Bruce Sterling, SuperStudio, Wes Jones, Aaron Betsky, Sam Jacob, Shumon Basar and many more. The event will begin with a presentation on Urban Fictions by Colin Fournier followed by a roundtable discussion with Liam Young, Sam Jacob and book editor Pedro Gadanho. (more…)

TTT’s Where the Grass is Greener project appears in the latest issue of MONU magazine. We’ve never seen so many urban thinktanks assembled in the one place (!) with projects from OMA, alumni from the Harvard GSD, Domus Academy and a curious outfit called What About It. MONU is the only magazine we know of that has its own youtube edition. Ahh, those clever Dutch. The issue on Clean Urbanism critically scrutinizes aspects of energy, consumption and waste and their effects on the contemporary city. Scroll down in Slow Thoughts to get a taster of our vision for a green future in all its wide-eyed potential, and grab a copy of MONU!

Everyone knows Golden Lane from the Smithsons, right? We’re talking streets in the sky and those great collages of convivial couples on elevated walkways. Well, it joins the ranks of architecture’s Most Famous Second-Place-Getters eclipsing the actual built scheme. It’s a pity that hardly anyone knows much about the architects who came first - Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, who are otherwise known for the ground- and rule-breaking Barbican development next door. Even fewer would care to realize that the Barbican’s high walkways represent a successful (!) and built (!) example of those streets in the sky. Maybe, those kinds of concepts are best remembered in the imaginary and speculative world of architectural competitions than actual physical realities. Plus, the Smithsons (three noteworthy leaking buildings and a crapload of dogma) are untouchable, aren’t they…? (more…)

The Bishop of Stepney once remarked that each parish church in his diocese was no more than five minutes walk from the last. As an organizing system of governance, accountability and dissemination of religious doctrine, the Anglican parish system was an effective means of organizing the burgeoning cities of England through the scale of the local neighbourhood. 

Tesco supermarkets are distributed with the same rigour. Each new store is planned with software allowing the right matching of store size with catchment area. Tesco’s market share is more than twice its nearest rival and so as the blue and red logo continues to sweep through England’s cities, we ask could the Tesco catchment area be the new urban parish? (more…)

Reinier de Graaf presented OMA’s Ras-Al-Khaimah project to a packed audience last thursday for the Architecture Foundation in London. After a characteristically thrilling account of global urban affairs effectively narrated by statistic and graph, the talk turned to the patronisingly-titled “city in the desert” project (as though we could describe London as a “city by the river”), bringing on what could be described as one of those “Elvis has left the building” moments.

OMA’s reading of Dubai as a study in banality has its response in the banal urban proposition for RAK, though in this case, banality is not the insistent cultural phenomenon of Dubai’s skyline, but rather the unashamed rolling out of the urbanist’s stock-in-trade - “compact city” densities, a public transport loop, and (yawn) the accommodation of a naturally occurring oasis. The mediocrity of this proposition is nowhere near recovered by its context-less square plan and generic city grid, tired emblems of what may be late-OMA mannerism. This is a scheme so mediocre it begs the question - what happened to one of the most intellectually engaging self-critical practices on the planet?  (more…)

Drifting endlessly above the earth are the suburban dwellers that occupy these visions of 70’s space utopias. In the looming shadow of the cold war fears of nuclear apocalypse led us to envision new worlds above the crust of the earth drifting endlessly as orbital suburbs with all the comforts of home. (more…)

"The 21 Steps" by Charles Cumming screenshot

It begins suggestively “I was the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.” This is the opening to “The 21 Steps” by Charles Cumming. It is the first of six stories written in answer to the Penguin challenge to reinvent fiction through the medium of the internet. This narrative unfolds across the birdseye London of Google Maps. Click after click you follow the story from the air, familiar places of the city, overwritten with the invisible trials of our intrepid protagonists. Here Google Maps is not just a tool of location and navigation but an excursion into daydream and fantasy. read it here

phantom bird nests

I am reminded of my recent trip to Beijing where I played architectural tourist, scouting out a preview of the Olympic icons guided by my Google Map print outs. Just like our ‘21 steps’ hero I was consistently the wrong man in the wrong place, this time however it was the misinformation of my Google guide that led me astray. I had to track down each building from somewhere within a point cloud of misguided user added Google markers. Like a roadtrip couple bickering over who gets to use the map, it seems the collective intellegence of the web is yet to reach a sightseeing consensus.  I was walking a fictional Beijing, filled with eight imaginary Bird Nests, a new reading of place built from the mistakes of hundreds of Google literate, lost tourists.

So here we are, iphone at the ready, Google Maps in hand, embarking on journeys of strangeness and novelty as our cities are imbued with the traces of invisible maps of fantasy, mistakes, and misdirection, all uploaded by the connected population of the world/web 2.0.