Re-living the City: UABB 2015 Catalogue

Description

This richly illustrated book presents the exhibits and curatorial visions of the 2015 Shenzhen Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (UABB), organized around the theme, Re-Living the City. It highlights the contributions of dozens of international architects, designers and artists, and offers 12 probing, original essays. The projects and essays of UABB 2015, Re-Living the City, criticize the status quo of architecture and urbanism, but they also resist the false dream of designing a perfect city from scratch. Instead, they portray the city as the incremental product of its inhabitants and designers, who provisionally make and remake its fabric through various means at their disposal. Urbanization in the world's fastest growing regions today has a dual character: officially-sanctioned, large-scale development shadowed by unregulated or 'informal' spaces built by disenfranchised migrants. UABB 2015 operates between these poles, seeking alternative paradigms to generate a more sustain- able, equitable, and imaginative urbanity.The principal exhibitions of UABB 2015 include: (1) 'Radical Urbanism', curated by Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner (Urban-Think Tank), based on the proposition that the city today is more radical than the architects and planners operating within it; (2) 'Collage City 3D', curated by Aaron Betsky, in which artists and architects are asked to create adjacent three-dimensional installations to explore the idea of habitable collage as a mode of urban design; and (3) 'PRD 2.0', curated by Doreen Heng Liu, focusing on the need for a more balanced approach to urbanism and architecture in the Pearl River Delta region in southeast China. Liu also offers an account of the renovation of the Shenzhen exhibition venue, the former Dacheng Flour Factory complex. In addition, the book presents the 'Social City' online platform and exhibition curated by Renny Ramakers, the 'Maker Maker' showcase of contemporary craft, and a series of national, regional, and thematic pavilions. Curatorial essays are complemented by guest essays from international critics, researchers, and practitioners.

Aaron Betsky is Dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture at Taliesin. He is also a curator, critic, and lecturer on art, architecture and design. In 2008, he directed the 11th Venice International Architecture Biennale. He formerly served as Director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006-2014), Director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2001-2006), and Curator of Architecture, Design, and Digital Projects at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995-2001). Betsky has authored over a dozen books including, most recently, Making it Modern (Actar, 2015), and writes a twice-weekly blog for architectmagazine.com. Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner head the interdisciplinary design firm Urban-Think Tank (U-TT), which they co-founded in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1998. They have held a joint Chair of Architecture and Urban Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich since 2010. Brillembourg and Klumpner have received the 2010 Ralph Erskine Award, the 2011 Holcim Gold Award for Latin America, and the 2012 Holcim Global Silver Award for innovative contributions to ecological and social design practices. Notable built work by U-TT include the Metro Cable and a series of 'Vertical Gyms' in Caracas. Their books include Informal City: Caracas Case and Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities