The following photographs, selected from his series “Quarries,” “China,” and “Ships,” provide a global perspective on the cycle of extraction, production and recycling. They provide a visual journey through the quarries of Vermont; China’s manufacturing conglomerate; the construction of the Three Gorges Dam and destruction of the nearby cities and towns that displaced over 1.2 million people; and ultimately, to the manual dismantling of oil tanks in Bangladesh.

They open a troubling window onto our modern existence and its consequences.

Edward Burtynsky is known as one of Canada’s most respected photographers. His imagery explores the intricate link between industry and nature, combining the raw elements of mining, quarrying, manufacturing, shipping, oil production and recycling into eloquent, highly expressive visions that find beauty and humanity in the most unlikely of places.

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Hong Kong is an apt example of this: according to Atlantic Cities, as one of the most densely populated places in the world (7 million souls on 423 square miles), it has rents a whopping 35 percent higher than New York City. Almost half of Hong Kong’s population lives in some kind of public housing, yet there’s a critical lack of it, and coupled with the deplorable conditions of some government-subsidized dwellings in a city where home prices are approaching $1,300 per square foot — means that affordable housing is a major flashpoint issue here.

The local human rights organization Society for Community Organization (SOCO) recently released a photographic report on the derelict conditions of sub-divided apartment units averaging 40 square feet and even metal “dog cages,” in which an estimated 100,000 of the city’s laborers live. These spaces are so small that they can only be shot from above.

SOCO’s report focuses on “inadequate housing” and points to the growing 320,000-person-long waiting list for public housing, meaning that families often must live years in these “cubicles” before being moved to appropriate housing:

The number is increasing due to the decrease of allocated units every year, decrease of newly built flats every year and increasing number of working poor and needy.

Yes, this is mind-bogglingly the same place where designer tiny apartments, expensive shark’s fin soup and McDonald’s weddings all co-exist, and where it seems that the situation will most probably worsen before it will improve.

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The Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture, 1922-32, is an eponymous book and exhibition documenting the work of modernist architects in the Soviet Union in the years following the 1917 revolution and the period of instability during the subsequent civil war. In little more than a decade, some of the most radical buildings of the twentieth century were completed by a small group of architects who developed a new architectural language in support of new social goals of communal life. Rarely published and virtually inaccessible until the collapse of the former Soviet Union, these important buildings have remained unknown and unappreciated. The buildings featured are located in a wide territory spanning the former Soviet Union that includes Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Georgia, and Russia, and are drawn from an archive of approximately 15,000 photographs taken by British photographer Richard Pare during extensive visits that began in 1992. Pare’s photographs offer the first contemporary documentation of these buildings, some still in use, others abandoned and decayed, and many under the threat of demolition.

Pare’s photos show some buildings both before and after restorations funded by contemporary Russians. Konstantin Melnikov’s personal home–a cerebral, elegant cylinder punctured with diamond-shaped windows–became a recurring subject. Other buildings, like the famed Narkomfin apartments in Moscow, are still falling apart and show plenty of scars inflicted by new highways, pollution, and time in general. In one interior shot, a table riddled with vodka bottles and flowers sits beneath the thin light cast by Moisei Ginzburg’s ribbon windows (which predate Corb’s, for the record). Above the table, a vignette of images feature famed works of Russian art, each representing a different regime. A few oligarchs have said they’ll restore the blocks–none have followed through, yet, and the building is on UNESCO’s Endangered Buildings List.

Pare’s work illustrates how passive architecture can ultimately find itself, before the whims of politicians, billionaires, and history in general. The difference between razing Penn Station and restoring Crown Hall, for example, is smaller than historians and architecture buffs would like to hope. Pare’s fate as an artist now seems linked to the country he says he was fascinated by as a 7-year-old child in Britain. Right now, he’s completing a series of photographs on Le Corbusier’s work for Moscow’s Pushkin Museum–the first exhibit on Corb in Russia.

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Torre David is an abandoned 45-story skyscraper located in Caracas, Venezuela. After the death of the developer in 1993 and the collapse of the Venezuelan economy a year later, the office tower was almost complete, but the construction was suddenly and inexorably interrupted. Today Torre David is a real vertical slum occupied by a community of more than 750 families. The residents of the tower have spontaneously created a sort of city within a city with areas for sports, leisure, worship and meetings—an extra-legal community whose organization has been studied by Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner, along with research and design teams at Urban-Think Tank and ETH Zürich.

The exhibit Torre David / Gran Horizonte was awarded with the Golden Lion for the Best Project of the Common Ground Exhibition, the true core of the Biennale curated by David Chipperfield.

In the Venetian exhibit and in their upcoming book Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities, Brillembourg and Klumpner analyze this reality and other similar informal settlements, coming up with concrete ideas for sustainable interventions aimed to transform and take these places back to the urban landscape.

The center of the exhibition is far from a didactic space. The fully functioning arepa restaurant, Gran Horizonte, acts as a traditional place to eat and create community, like those created by the inhabitants of Torre David. The exhibit also displays some breathtaking pictures by Iwan Baan that describe the thin line between everyday life and this one-of-a-kind situation, where despair and beauty coexist in every shot.

The Common Ground Exhibition runs through 25 November 2012 at La Biennale.

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The TodaysArt Festival is looking for unwanted household items for a special project on the Spuiplein. The German architect and artist collective Raumlaborberlin will build a huge pavilion out of all the collected stuff. The pavilion, called ‘The Vortex’ will be created from old household items discarded by the people of The Hague. The ‘Vortex’ will also incorporate furniture from cultural institutions that will cease to exist after 2012 due to the budget cuts by the Dutch government. The building resembles a black hole, a vortex that draws everything in, serving as a symbol for the transient nature of our society. The construction will be realized in collaboration with Refunc from The Hague, which already proved that you can build all sorts of fantastic things from trash during previous editions of TodaysArt.

The Vortex will host the Pip Bar and a podium where you can dance until midnight to the music of various live acts and DJs. From Wednesday 12 September until Sunday 16 September, you can bring your unwanted household items to the TodaysArt containers on the Turfmarkt, opposite the Albert Heijn. Do you want your old table or closet to become part of a phenomenal work of art? Then drop your stuff off this week!

Date and time collection
Location: Lagezand/Turfmarkt The Hague opposite the Albert Heijn

Saturday 15 September: 12:00 – 15:00
Sunday 16 September: 12:00 – 15:00

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While New York is making strides in promoting the installation of green roofs throughout NYC, the city of Zhuzhou in Hunan, China is taking the idea of green roofs to new heights with a shopping mall topped with a lush living roof and a four-villa development!

The houses atop Jiutian International Square Mall are intended to function as offices for employees of the mall’s real estate developer, and they present an intriguing possibility for urban areas seeking to offer residents more green space.

The four two-story houses occupying the roof of the five-story shopping mall are positioned at opposite corners of the roof and are approximately 500 square meters in size. This rooftop housing development demonstrates the ability to leverage existing real estate in places where new property is scarce and expensive.

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With the Venice Architecture Biennale opening this week, its director David Chipperfield, speaks about Common Ground, his theme for the biennale, and gives his views on the contemporary architecture scene, comparing architects to “perfume brands at Duty Free, on a pedestal, singular and isolated” and says: “Architects don’t have common ground between ourselves and the public”.

He stresses the need for the profession to address “the 99.99% of the rest of the world which architects are not dealing with.” Otherwise he says, architects risk being relegated to being “urban decorators.”

Chipperfield emphasizes the need for shared, public space to be higher on the architectural agenda, with less attention paid to impressive one-off projects like opera houses, theatres and museums. “What about social housing? What about office buildings and just normal architecture? That’s more difficult.”

He also calls for architects to more openly acknowledge the inspiration they draw from each other’s work rather than placing themselves apart on pedestals, admitting “we are inspired by our colleagues, I mean maybe only out of the corner of our eye, and maybe we don’t want to admit it all the time.”

The Venice Architecture Biennale is open to the public from 29 August to 25 November.

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“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” – Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Inspired by Italian writer Italo Calvino’s novel “Invisible Cities”, on the 40th anniversary of its publication, this BBC 3 Between the Ears explores the hidden, fantastical and surreal stories caught between the cracks of the modern city.

With contributions from writers, urban explorers and mapmakers they explore the imaginative possibilities held within cities, their secret folds. How does the layout of a city’s streets, underground passages and the glittering spires of its skyscrapers capture our desires, our fears and our memories?

From the ghosts contained in a cavernous lost property office deep underground to the view from the top of an abandoned warehouse – what impression does the structure of a city leave on its inhabitants?

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map of moscow 1818

“A metropolitan area can take care of a great many more people by only a very slight expansion of its radius. … if there is to be any hope of having open space in the future, there is going to have to be a more efficient pattern of building. The mathematics is inexorable. The only way to house more people is either to expand the present pattern of sprawl and cover vastly more land, or, alternatively, to use less land and increase the carrying capacity of it. The latter is by far the best approach …” 

William H. Whyte, “The Last Landscape“ (pp. 6 and 200), 1968

The second stage of the Moscow City Agglomeration competition took place on 22 June, in which nine competitors presented the first editions of their concepts for the existing, and the new south-western sector of the agglomeration. The winning international consortium in this second stage was led by Russian urbanist Andrey Chernikhov and included architecture studios McAdam Architects, Tower 151, Georgi Stanishev and Ginsburg Architects, who were awarded the highest score by a panel of international experts with OMA placing second.

The consortium suggested that instead of looking at new development in the south western sector only, that the existent fields and sites be involved in planning and development as well. As well as these areas, they listed extensive areas occupied by railways, and disused industrial sites from the Soviet era as prime areas for regeneration and expansion. They also want to re-think the current transport networks to ease the pressure on existing systems, addressing the current issues Moscow faces with congestion due to the dense population of the city.

The plan to increase the area of Moscow by 50% by expanding development into the south-western sector will make a huge impact on the public housing and problems that the city faced with the population boom in the early 20th century, and is a radical solution. James McAdam, who attended the presentations said: “The process is evolving into a fascinating discourse on how a major capital can tackle the problems of expansion and regeneration on a vast scale. As a consultation procedure the range of ideas being suggested are incredibly diverse and could be pooled as a powerful medium for Moscow’s future.”

The final concept presentations are scheduled to take place at the end of August.

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Location: Taipei, Taiwan

Year: 1978-unfinished

Status: Demolished

Program: Resort with approximately 138 residential units plus other amenities.

Client: Yu-chou Co.

Located in the Sanjhih Township in Taipei, construction of the UFO houses began in 1978. Developed by plastics manufacturer Yu-chou Co., the idea for the design came from architect Matti Suuronen.

Construction stopped in 1980 when Yu-chou went bankrupt and in 1989, Tsai Chin-hsien, the president of a local beer house proposed Hung Kuo Group continuing with the construction to create a large beer house and resort. By the end of that year, construction was halted due to differences among the partners and since then, financial problems left the complex vacant and unfinished.

In early 2009, the complex was demolished with plans to turn the site into a tourist attraction by constructing hotels, beach facilities and other amenities.

The buildings resembled Futuro houses, some examples of which can be found elsewhere in Taiwan. Futuro, or Futuro House, is a round, prefabricated house designed by Matti Suuronen, of which fewer than 100 were built during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The Futuro house was a product of post-war Finland, reflecting the period’s faith in technology, the conquering of space, unprecedented economic growth, and an increase in leisure time. It was designed by Suuronen as a ski cabin that would be “quick to heat and easy to construct in rough terrain.” The end result was a universally transportable home that had the ability to be mass replicated and situated in almost any environment.

The prototype (serial number 000) is in the collection of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

copyright images: Cypherone is a Taiwan-based photographer.

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