Future Practice launches: Helsinki, Amsterdam, New York

A quick post, following this far more extensive piece on the book, to announce a couple of upcoming launches. I’m really excited.

The ‘Paviljonki’, temporary pavilion designed by students of Aalto University, as part of the 2012 World Design Capital programme in Helsinki.

Helsinki

First up, this coming Tuesday the 11th, I’ll be launching the book in Helsinki with the help of Dan Hill, who contributed the terrific foreword, Bryan Boyer, who is interviewed in the book on his work with Sitra’s Helsinki Design Lab, and Jenna Sutela of the excellent OK Do, who will moderate.

When: Tuesday the 11th of September, 12.00 midday
Where: At the Paviljonki, Ullanlinnankatu 2-4, map
Who: Dan Hill, Bryan Boyer, Jenna Sutela & myself.
More: Facebook event page

I’m also on a panel that evening at Artek to discuss the Archizines exhibit (in which Volume is featured), with curator Elias Redstone, architect Anni Vartola and Bryan and Jenna again.

Amsterdam

Next up, this Friday the 14th of Sept, I’m a part of a combined book launch presented by Volume and Mediamatic. ‘New Futures Adrift’ — a hybrid title, drawing one word from each of the books — will launch Volume’s latest issue ‘Centers Adrift’, the catalogue of Mediamatic’s New Order exhibition which I curated with Katja Novitskova, and Future Practice: Conversations from the Edge of Architecture.

I’m thrilled to announce a killer panel to help us kick things off, featuring: Reinier de Graaf (Director of AMO), Arjen Oosterman (Editor in chief of Volume), Sandra Kaji-O’Grady (Professor of Architecture, University of Sydney) and Wouter Vanstiphout (Professor of Design and Politics, TU Delft)

Here’s the concept text:

To get a handle on what’s next, we need to look beyond. Beyond our neighbourhood, beyond our friends, beyond our jobs, beyond our comfort zones. This is where the future lies, amongst the drifting flotsam of unconfirmed hunches, unpopular territories and unfashionable trends.

When: Friday, 14th of September, 5pm for 6
Where: Mediamatic, Vijzelstraat 72, Amsterdam, map
Who: Arjen Oosterman, Reinier de Graaf, Wouter Vanstiphout, Sandra Kaji-O’Grady and myself.
More: Facebook event, Mediamatic page, Volume page.

New York

Finally, I’m planning a launch in New York on Tuesday the 25th of September, at Columbia’s Studio X, Varick Street. Hosted by Geoff Manaugh (BLDG BLOG) and Nicola Twilley (Edible Geography), who recently hosted a discussion with Bryan Boyer, Martti Kalliala, Jenna Sutela and myself on a similar topic – here’s the video.

More details to follow, save the date!

Also, Melbourne and Sydney launches are in the pipelines for mid-October…

‘Potential Futures’ update: Lecture, big thanks, and a book

In April this year I was a visiting scholar at the University of Sydney Faculty of Architecture where I ran a workshop on Unsolicited Architecture and also gave a guest lecture titled ‘Potential Futures for Design Practice’ (video link), a version of this earlier post of the same name, expanded to include a number of new ‘types’ and a handful of my own projects for context. The lecture formed part of a series on alternative methods of practicing architecture put together by David Neustein, who also gave a very generous introduction, here is a snippet:

“At the Young Architects Forum which took place during the Australian Institute of Architects conference three weeks ago, a select bunch of emerging architects from Australia were invited to present to an international jury of quite critical architects. Under that glaring spotlight it was interesting to see how many of our emerging architects retreated into discussing ‘bush poetry’ as a theme, perhaps as a way of explaining their mundane situation of working. Rory did not do that. And I find that a great relief. It’s nearly a decade since Glen Murcutt won his Pritzker, and I think it’s about time that we had another way of talking about architecture and design. So please welcome Rory Hyde.“

Lecture: Potential Futures for Design Practice from Rory Hyde on Vimeo.

The rest of this post is basically one big ‘thank you’ to all those who propelled the original ‘Potential Futures…’ piece to another level. The response has been incredibly gratifying and overwhelming for me as a researcher. It all started very innocuously: after an interesting round of emails with Gerard Reinmuth of Terroir, who has recently taken up the role as Professor of Practice at UTS, I decided to chuck it up online to open up the conversation, not really expecting anything.

What followed took me completely by surprise. Largely thanks to some extensive and thoughtful comments by Dan Hill, Bryan Boyer, Marcus Westbury (whose projects were each cited) Anita Morandini, MM Jones, Noah Raford, and many others, the conversation really got going — now totalling some 20,000(!) words — and was picked up or mentioned all over the place: BLDG BLOG, An-Architecture, Architizer, Liquid Architecture, Archinect, Architect Magazine, Mammoth, Creative Commonwealth, ETC. Of this we are sure, and more.

On top of that list, I’d like thank Greg J. Smith in particular for really propelling the conversation forward with a piece for Current Intelligence where he invited Mason White, Imran Morandi, Marius Watz and David Bausola to respond and expand upon the original piece. Just terrific.

In all, it’s confirmed my faith in the potential of the blog as a platform for intelligent discussion, introduced me to the work of dozens of incredibly smart people, and perhaps most excitingly for me, has attracted the interest of a publisher with the offer to develop it into a fully-fledged book. There’s not much I can say about it at this stage, as we’re still in the negotiation phase, but only that it’s spurred me to pick up and extend the topic further.

As it now stands, the book will be largely made up of a series of interviews with those people or practices who I believe are carving out a path for innovative means of shaping the city in the future. As with the original piece, not all are architects, but all offer unique strategies for engaging urban or architectural space.

Importantly, these people have not been selected for their innovative modes of practice alone, but for their capacity to create contributions to the city of the highest quality. The underlying message of this book is therefore not that architects and designers should expand into new territories because they are needed elsewhere, but because an understanding of these expanded territories is needed to succeed in their core aim: creating great spaces.

I hope to be able to share more on that here soon.