//Designed by Taliesin student Dave Frazee, the Miner's Shelter in Scottsdale, Arizona, is a 45-square-foot dwelling that responds to its harsh desert environment with a special metal cover that keeps it shaded at all times.//
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
//Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow, and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune's control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.//
[ Seneca, L., Annaeus, On the shortness of life, Penguin Books, 2005. ]
THE INSTITUTE OF INERTIA / DR THOMAS WEBB
Inertia being one of the demons preventing people from reaching their full potential, a network of experts and academics has been formed under the name The Institute of Inertia, to work together to try to deconstruct the process of achieving goals and understand what makes people take action, end objective being to help people make better financial decisions and stop wasting their time and money. Led by dr. Thomas Webb, a social psychologist, the team will during the next 12 months conduct research with the members of general public and explore the behavioral barriers that restrain people from taking action and prevent them to manage their finances better. The long-term goal of the Institute is to develop "tools" for breaking the psychological inertia and inspire people reframe their behavior and choose to take action instead of staying within the comfort zone.
To mark the launch of the Institute, and help understand the reasons for financial inertia, an online quiz has been developed. Whether a person has their ‘Head in the Clouds’, ‘Head in the Sand’, or lets their ‘Heart rule their Head", the quiz provides tips based on individual’s results.
WHAT IS ARCHITECTURE
//Ernst May's plan for Frankfurt, Martin Wagner's Berlin, Fritz Schumacher's Hamburg, and Cornelis van Eesteren's Amsterdam are the most important chapters in the history of modern urban planning. Yet beside the oases of order that were the Sieldungen - true constructed utopias, on the margins of an urban reality little affected by them - the old cities continued to accumulate and multiply their contradictions. And for the most part, these contradictions would soon appear more vital then the tools established by the architectural milieu to control them.//
[ Hays, K., Michael, Architecture theory since 1968, The MIT Press, 1998. / p. 23 ]
WHAT IS ARCHITECTURE
//So you see, no matter how popular and successful a public space may be, it can never be taken for granted. Public spaces always -- this is it saved -- public spaces always need vigilant champions, not only to claim them at the outset for public use, but to design them for the people that use them, then to maintain them to ensure that they are for everyone, that they are not violated, invaded, abandoned or ignored. If there is any one lesson that I have learned in my life as a city planner, it is that public spaces have power. It's not just the number of people using them, it's the even greater number of people who feel better about their city just knowing that they are there. Public space can change how you live in a city, how you feel about a city, whether you choose one city over another, and public space is one of the most important reasons why you stay in a city. I believe that a successful city is like a fabulous party. People stay because they are having a great time.//
[ Amanda Burden: How public spaces make cities work [16:55], TED Talks ]
PETITE VIE / FRANCIS FONTAINE, LUCA FORTIN AND PASCAL LABELLE
Site specific installation Petite Vie is one of 12 that have been created as part of the Les Passages Insolites 2015 (The Unusual Passages) festival of public art held in Québec City, Canada. Designed by creative trio Francis Fontaine, Luca Fortin and Pascal Labelle, the Petite Vie mirrors the surface of the adjacent stone walls, it plays with their reflections and in doing that questions spatial meanings and relationships.
This one is a part of an organized event, but more often urban installations appear without asking anyone for permission; they surprise, provoke and intrigue. Most enchanting thing about urban interventions is not so much that they are an interplay of different media (installation, performance, art, architecture, activism) but that they are a strong expression of freedom because they are a product of a mind that thinks outside the constrains of established routines and systems. They are the results of creative experiments performed by intellectuals on structures that have mostly been shaped by capitalism, institutions and population migrations. Organized or not, the goal of urban interventions is the same - let the city talk to you and talk back to it. The ones that don't ask for permission just have more balls. Tomorrow is for those who dare. //Go out and have fun, you are the city.//
"Ernst May's plan for Frankfurt, Martin Wagner's Berlin, Fritz Schumacher's Hamburg, and Cornelis van Eesteren's Amsterdam are the most important chapters in the history of modern urban planning. Yet beside the oases of order that were the Sieldungen - true constructed utopias, on the margins of an urban reality little affected by them - the old cities continued to accumulate and multiply their contradictions. And for the most part, these contradictions would soon appear more vital then the tools established by the architectural milieu to control them." [ Hays, K., Michael, Architecture theory since 1968, The MIT Press, 1998. / p. 23 ]
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