Darryl Chen of Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today was selected as a finalist for “Project Vienna - A Design Strategy. How To React to a City?” and is featured in an exhibition at the MAK in Vienna. The ideas competition called for future-oriented projects that expand the concept of design, and centred on the significance of design as a means to influence and shape society. Selected entries were selected on the basis of their subversive and speculative natures…. values we hold close to our hearts at TTT. The accompanying catalogue features essays from Archizoom’s Andrea Branzi and FAT’s Sam Jacob, among other Viennese notables.

The exhibition runs at the MAK in Vienna from 29 June to 12 Sep. Details can be found here. (more…)

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 is proud to be representing the cause of “Maximum Urbanism” at an upcoming conference in Cambridge University. Minimum… or Maximum Cities? will be exploring the past, present and future of urbanism and invoke the questions: Does the ‘minimum’ city provide a means to retrench, rethink and rebuild? Or is a ‘maximum’ urbanism the answer, based on expansive cities for a dynamic and globalised planet? Our session discussing the Future City (surprise surprise) will end the day and be chaired by Blueprint Editor Vicky Richardson. The conference is being run in conjunction with the Royal Academy’s Paper Cities exhibition and there will be a Paper Cities roadshow in Cambridge specially for the event.

The conference is being chaired by Alastair Donald, author of The Future of Community: Reports of a Death Greatly Exaggerated.

Thursday 26th November, Departmnet of Architecture, Cambridge University.

Darryl Chen and Liam Young will be moderating a panel session at this year’s upcoming Festival of Urbanism, organized by the crew at This Is Not A Gateway. TTT will be joined by a cast of emerging and seasoned urbanists to discuss Productive Dystopia, or An Architecture of Unintended Consequences. Also on the panel will be Austin Williams (Future Cities Project); Karl Sharro (ManTowNHuman); Tomas Klassnik (Klassnik Corporation); Elena Pascolo and Alex Warnock-Smith (Urban Projects Bureau, Architectural Association); Finn Williams (Common Office); and Amin Taha (Amin Taha Architects). The night promises to be a lively one as we consider alternate ways of conceiving of the urban project beyond the blindly optimistic and optimistically futile. Spaces are free but with limited places on the night. 19.30 Friday Oct 23 Hanbury Hall, Spitalfields E1 6QR.

TINAG creates platforms for emerging academics, activists, human rights canvassers, artists, youth workers, filmmakers, architects, students and more, whose point of departure is the city.

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…)

"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.

One might think it impoverished at first glance, though scratching and enquiring deeper, we find not so much an economic fringe, but a slowly evolving urban model. Born in the glow of a new era which suddenly died out, it finds itself detached from its divorced parents, caught in the throes of puberty setting on quickly with all its attendant growing pains - a crisis of identity, new foreign growth where before there was innocently nothing, and the desire of becoming an adult being held in check by an energy to live for the moment. we traverse highways through the neighbourhoods at great speed. here, a windmill, an abandoned factory - evidence of a productive countryside, perhaps still active? but the dominant typology - a super-typology - the bare housing block sometimes 400 metres long, maybe 800…. Unlike in China where rigid planning laws align all developments east west to face the sun (for one side, at least), here in Mahzahl, communes take on a variety of different patterns. They are distributed in this vast open plain their configurations knowable like crop circles only to those who see them from above. The scale of this landscape makes ideal viewing from a fast moving car. It is a seductive cinematic experience.