public lecture// SAND_BOX:; WORK AND PLAY

This Wednesday January 4th 2012,As we start another year in FAED,arcbox lecture series will have the pleasure to present to you the work of SAND_BOX by Bruce Engel; who is a new instructor of architectural design 3.

Bruce Engel is co-founder and partner of sand_box which operates from New York and Chicago. Over the last 10 years his design firm has designed and built a range of projects including, new construction, renovations, installations, product design, and digital media. His lecture will provide a wide survey of work from the beginnings of sand_box until present day all with a focus on the importance and role of PLAY.

public lecture// THE IMPORTANCE OF LANGUAGE SHAPING URBAN DEVELOPMENT

This Wednesday 21st DECEMBER. The arcbox lecture series will have the pleasure to present the importance of language in shaping urban development by Dr. llaria Boniboruni.

to help architecture students know about their lecturers; through a series of lectures, arcbox lecture series will present to you all new lecturers of the department.

Dr.llaria is a new lecturer in the Department of architecture.This time she is going to share with us,”How words make the city”.

Words are very important not only to communicate and understand each other, but also to give meaning to things and therefore to shape reality. They are also important in architecture, urban design and urban planning because they have the power to influence the way we think about the city, how to interpret it, how to represent it and therefore how to change it.

The discourse about the city through the years has produced many ideas of what the city is, should be and how to achieve that idea. The production of these ideas is a “battle field” where different ideas struggle to emerge. The idea that manages to become dominant has the power to influence, more than other ideas, other discourses, to influence urban policies, masterplans and the way architects and planner envisage and design the city and/or parts of it.

Dr.llaria will show us how different ideas of the city have been conveyed, and how these have the power to construct different types of cities and different types of citizenship.

Nairobi will be used as a point in case to see how words have contributed to a certain type of urban development.

ARCHITECT OF THE MONTH

ANNA HERINGER

"Architecture is a tool to improve lives." Anna Heringer

“Learning with joy is the school’s philosophy – the best for me is to see the building crowded with sprightly kids, who are really happy to go to school. It is primarily not the architecture that makes something special – it’s the people: everyone who worked on it with all efforts and potentials and all who live in it and fill the space with atmosphere.” Anna Heringer

Anna Heringer designed and realized in Bangladesh a “handmade” school that highlights the use of the natural materials that the country is increasingly forsaking in favor of industrial materials. They are built by hand by local laborers, who learn new construction methods. “People are becoming interested now in finding their own solutions, not just copying the West,” said Anna Heringer

Anna Heringer, young woman architect, was born in 1977 in Rosenheim (Germany), grew up in Laufen a.d. Salzach and is currently living in Salzburg (Austria). 

Anna Heringer spent one year in Bangladesh (1997/98) as development learner. Since then she is involved in development work. She studied architecture at the University of Art Linz, where she graduated in 2004 with her diploma: "School-handmade in Bangladesh."   

      

 An important focus of her work is the training of young architects. She has conducted hands-on workshops for students with BASEhabitat in South Africa, Austria and Bangladesh. In 2008 she was teaching at the Stuttgart University and since 2008 she is heading the studio "BASEhabitat" where she is a visiting professor. In 2010 she received the nomination as Honorary Professor of the UNESCO Chair "Earthen Architecture".

Anna Heringer won several international awards; amongst them she won the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture for her ingenious design of a primary school in rural Bangladesh that combined modern construction techniques with traditional, locally available materials such as bamboo sticks, earth, and straw. She won the AR Emerging Architecture Award (2006 and 2008)

Retrieved from

www.anna-heringer.com

http://www.fondationpourlarchitecture.be

http://europaconcorsi.com

ARCBOX EXHIBITION INVITES YOU TO THE ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN, LAST YEAR BEST WORKS.COME ONE COME ALL.

REVIEW_KISSED

At first we ask ourselves about the name but few minutes after the lecture began we start to understand that it is all about images and what they really tell us, what do you see in those different images.

She came for the first time to Rwanda after being fascinated by a picture of an over-terraced hill. She wanted to understand, why? And how, a culture is organized and a society works in order to produce a change in the landscape like that.

Yutaka has been working in Rwanda with General Architecture Collaborative. This firm works not only in architecture but also related to anthropology.

One of their projects in Rwanda is to work with people to build an imudugudu but also researching about the evolution of Rwanda architecture, the importance of western architecture and conceptions and their relation with Rwandan traditions

She discussed about the latest constructions built in Kigali comparing them to the Nyakatsi, she defended that the image of the country is changing according to the needs of the government and the needs of the foreign investors. The beautiful green gardens and shiny new buildings are an image addressed to the foreign investors to give them an idea of the country, related to modernity, safeness and economic growth.

Yutaka’s work studies the idea of reconciliation in Rwanda; it’s not only a matter of people but also a matter of spaces. How can we get peace through spaces, and through building processes. When the offender build a house for the victims or when they all site together in the same space.

It was interesting to see her point of view of “domestic spaces” here in Rwanda. How she understands the discretion of the Rwandese people in public spaces. She explained how private spaces in our houses are more “public” and freer, than the actual public ones. How we use the back of our “domestic home”, changing it into a public space, were we invite outsiders, enjoy and discuss.

She explained her idea of western people having a wrong image of Rwanda, they don’t see people laughing, dancing but they see people carrying guns, peoplewalking almost wearing nothing and tell us she will go back in Syracuse university and will discuss with her students about images she will bring from Rwanda and show them that the images they have of us are wrong.

During her work in Albania, on an old rail station, she designed a transformation of an abandoned rail station. It was interesting to see how her idea of transforming something and adding something can change everything rather than to destroy it and start scratch.

At the end of the lecture we start to think more about images we look at, what do they really tell us, those millions of images we see everyday?

public lecture_KISSED by Yutaka Sho

This WEDNESDAY 14TH DECEMBER. The arcbox lecture series will have the pleasure to present the work of Yutaka Sho.

Yutaka's work and teaching are built around an effort to redraw established borders between perceived geographical, cultural, economic, racial, ethical and aesthetic boundaries. She understands her work as an interface between continents, disciplines, concepts and modes of operations.

Yutaka is the founder of General Architecture Collaborative, and currently they are working on a housing project with an association of widows in Rwanda, master plan of a new university in Uganda and a design of a camera obscura in the US, among other projects. Their work has been published in Domus web and exhibited at 2010 Venice Biennale. When she is not searching for the best zingaro in Rwanda, Yutaka is an assistant professor of architecture at Syracuse University in New York.

The lecture will take place in FAED building at 4.00pm, we hope to see you all there.

REVIEW_TOUCHING THE GROUND

“I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen” said Frank Llyod Wright.

This Friday the Arcbox lectures series had the privilege of hosting one of the best lecture up to now: “TOUCHING THE GROUNG” based on the doctorate thesis of Toma Berlanda, one of our senior lecturers.

Tomà is a senior lecturer of the department of architecture at FAED, KIST and he is known for his comments emphasizing the importance on how the buildings touch the ground. In his lecture, he started by introducing to the audience his thesis project, how he started and methods he used to get to the final product. He created a lexicon (collection of words) to help him to understand and give order to architects intentions.

He took the audience through his thesis starting by the idea that architects are the ones that modify the ground the importance of how they consider the ground in their designs. He called this “Encounter the ground”.

He proceeded by showing what happened once the building touches the ground. Once the building meets the ground there is a discovery of the territory. The architect has to find the correct placement and start to consider the “growth” of the building, horizontal and the vertical, if he or she wants the building to have the vertical part at the upper part or at the intersection with the ground.

He gave importance to the fact that the architect is the one who decide to which extent the building touches or modifying the ground and not just the engineer. This was supported by examples of architects who considered the ground in their designs like Sverre Fehn, Le Corbusier, Dimitri Pikionis…..

He ended up by explaining the tectonics which is how the building parts come together and how these ones meets with the ground.

The presentation was followed by a series of questions by guests and students: Eudes Kayumba Arch.-who is one of the successful Rwandese architects-, arch. Luca Ginouliach -who works in UNICEF- and many students.

The Arcbox culture committee,representing the students, are thankful for this opportunity that were given to all students to experience a real presentation of a thesis project. We thank arch.Tomà Berlanda for his time and we encourage all students to be more participative in our lecture series.

PUBLIC LECTURE_TOUCHING THE GROUND

This week, we will restart the series of public lectures at the faculty of architecture and creative design. We will start this year with Tomà Berlanda PH.d, a senior lecturer and a researcher of the department of architecture in FAED. Tomà has also taught in Italy, switzerland and the United States.

Tomà Berlanda, is an architect and a researcher. Born in Venice he developed his studies of architecture in the Accademia della architettura di Mendrisio (USI) and then got his Ph.D in the Politecnico di torino, with the thesis: topographical Lexicon. He will present his research on the way buildings "touch" the ground. How different architects and buildings try to give answers and react to their sites.

The Lecture will take place at FAED Building TODAY 9th december 2011, 4.00pm

The research project stems from a reflection on the relationship between architecture and place.

Amidst many, two question, which have already and at length been debated, deserve further investigation and experimentation. The first is the hiatus between recurrent statements on the necessity of the marking of the ground, the importance of placing the building, of the topographical situation, and the absence of scientific criteria to put into practice these indications. “Great” architects, more or less consciously, build up their personal toolbox. Aalto’s drawings show “one single and integral moment of stratigraphy, of every stratigraphy including lakes, water and seas, and contour lines”, in Utzon’s buildings the constructive logic of the tectonic form and the syntactic logic of geometry are continuously interacting, in Siza the work of the architect is thoroughly linked to that of the topographer. But the attention to the geographic patterns of places, to the form of the landscape and the singularities of topographies is not immediately translated into architecture, and to establish which are the moments of mediation is no easy task.

The second question is the diffused habit, almost a stereotype in the critical language, of praising a building as an “architecture creating a place where once stood a site”, without addressing the question “which are the reasons that make it possible for a work of architecture to create a place”. This omission is often the reason for an indiscriminate recourse to paradigms belonging to other disciplines. Thus, the architect who manipulates the landscape not only builds above the earth but modifies it through excavations, the architect in charge of great infrastructures seeks the relationship with the ground in a different dimension, the architect-geographer mediates between different morphological situations. What is missing, instead, is an explicit and fruitful work of disciplinary crossbreeding with land art and its interest to the quality of materials and transformations due to the climatic and seasonal changes.

Somewhere in between the two questions hereby posed, the hypothesis guiding the research project is that it is possible, other the necessary, to set up a sort of repertoire of elementary topographical conditions and that this operation would serve in a better understanding of how each of them is transformed in a grammar of transmissible design actions and not only related to individual sensibility. The lexicon is the intellectual tools that tries to do this.

CULTURAL COMMITTEE_NEW POSITIONS

After last year’s success with the start of the lecture series and exhibitions, the Department of Architecture opens new positions within its CULTURE COMITTEE.

We think that the life of the school and the learning process, has a crucial role beyond the teaching ours and the walls of the faculty building. There are lots of things to discover and to learn from, many to show to the Kigali’s architectural landscape and its cultural scene.

As protagonists of your own learning you are asked to participate and promote the cultural activities of your Department. Organize lectures and exhibitions, promoting the culture to your colleagues and friends and building up a student’s task force is expected from you. To reach the excellence of the Department and to create a network of knowledge that will benefit you and the future promotions of Rwandan architects. Managing and organizing lectures, exhibitions, and social networks, being exposed to guests and professional lecturers would benefit you and your careers.

For this purpose the students composing the culture committee will restart the LECTURE SERIES every Friday at 15.00pm, and the ARCBOX EXHIBITIONS. The ARCBLOG will serve as a window to our faculty work and growth and also as a tool to learn from the architectural world in general: publish articles and the work that is being done within our faculty and in the architectural world in general. This year we will start as well with a CINEMA FORUM every Tuesday at 5.30pm.

NUMBER OF POSITIONS:

16 (4 for each year

Revision of existing positions: 9 existing for 2^nd to 4^th year students.

New positions: 4 students from first year.

ESTIMATED HOURS PER WEEK: 2-3

POSITION OPEN TO: all grades students.

SCHEDULE : Meetings: every Tuesday from 12.00-to 14.00 at ARC staff office

C1_Lecture series: Every Friday

C2_Arcbox exhibitions: Every one or two weeks

C3_Arcblog

C4_Cinema

DESCRIPTION OF DUTIES: Students will make themselves available outside of normal class hours to assist in lectures, exhibitions, arrangement and update of the architectural blog and cinema series. A minimal amount of clerical duties (scanning, making photocopies, collecting drawings from students or guests, etc.) may be required. Additional duties may arise, but anything added will not exceed a workload of 3 hours per week. All students are expected to meet once weekly to organize themselves and additional work will be distributed in order to prepare lectures and exhibitions on time.

The existing positions will be revised in order to promote the good work and improve the CULTURAL COMITTEE with those committed and excited with the work.

APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS: Submit a BRIEF STATEMENT OF INTEREST to arcbox.LS@gmail.com.

DEADLINE POSTPONED: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 9, 5pm. APPLY NOW!