Last weekend the Watermans Gallery sponsored a kick-off event for the ‘Power of 8′ project. Opening up our discussion to the public, a steady stream of participants ranging from the radically activist to the playfully naive populated a main table with walking houses, snow stimulators, solar powered airships, public free boxes, new wireless connectivity and human spinning tops. More images here.

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You are either a DC fan or a Marvel fan. These two competing comic universes breed a strange kind of loyalty. Both have their own stable of celebrated heroes and reviled villains. DC writers have penned the adventures of Superman and Batman and Marvel has breathed life into the likes of Spiderman, Daredevil and the X-Men. Perhaps more intriguingly however, these two comic icons each have a very different approach to the rendering of the cityscapes in which their epic struggles of good and evil play out.

The DC atlas is made up of a universe of imaginary cities, worlds off the map, which can only be walked through the pages of their comics. Marvel heroes though, are always spotted flying through the streets of real cities, the familiar spaces that many of us mortals tread each day. DC invents extraordinary cities as stage sets for their stories, Marvel invents extraordinary stories that are staged in the everyday.  In different ways these two fictional worlds are expressions of our own dreams and fears, desires and frailties. They are reflections of the culture we aspire to, and the depths to which we see ourselves descending. (more…)

Underrated urbanism par excellence. 1971 yielded a planning treatise that seems now to transcend its postwar era and enter the cut-up remixed world of the fantastic now in a way that Collage City only ever dreamt.

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With anxiety one of the themes of the early twenty-first century, it is worth revisiting Paolo Soleri and his Arcology projects of the tumultuous late-60s.

From Hexahedron, Mesa City and Babelnoah, these late-Modern and ecologically driven projects are much more than a foretelling of a clean-energy and resource-conscious future, than paint a paranoid vision of a future we perhaps now inhabit.

Hexahedron

Babelnoah

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[originally published in Architectural Review, Feb 2003]

Shanghai presents a unique almost control-model kind of urban subject matter among world metropolises. It is a city which after experiencing incredible economic prosperity through the turn of the nineteenth century froze its free market development under thirty years of failed socialist revolution, and then started again on an accelerating trajectory towards capitalist ideals. The city currently exists in a giddy state of equilibrium between government control and market forces, the monolithic state regime acting as a valve for releasing massive forces which would otherwise send the country into a multi-directional frenzy of socio-economic instability. (more…)