Victory Garden Seed Library

Amy Franceschini is a pollinator who creates formats for exchange and production that question and challenge the social, cultural and environmental systems that surround her. An overarching theme in her work is a perceived conflict between humans and nature. Her projects reveal the ways that local politics are affected by globalization. In 1995, Amy founded Futurefarmers, an international collective of artists. In 2004, Amy co-founded Free Soil, an international collective of artists, activists, researchers, and gardeners who work together to propose alternatives to the social, political and environmental organization of space. Free Soil has exhibited internationally and received funding from the Danish Arts Council, and Zero One, San Jose to create temporary public art projects. Amy’s solo and collaborative work have been exhibited internationally at ZKM, Whitney Museum, the New York Museum of Modern Art and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. She received her BFA from San Francisco State University and her MFA from Stanford University. Amy is a professor of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco and a visiting artist at California College of the Arts Fine Arts Graduate program. Amy was awarded a grant from the Graham Foundation in 2008 for her project Victory Gardens 2007+.

Related Links
Free Soil
http://www.free-soil.org
Atlas Magazine
http://www.atlasmagazine.com

For more information on the exhibition, Actions: What You Can Do With the City, click here.

The Kaisersrot “Stadtigel” at the NAI in Rotterdam, 2009.

Just recently Alex Lehnerer published the book Grand Urban Rules with 010 Publishers, Rotterdam. Grand Urban Rules is a tribute to the city’s will to form, manifest in its vast number of steering regimes. The book contains a total of 115 significant ingredients for the Grand Projet of our contemporary metropolis. Not always positive but always powerful, these rules are the inverted, abstracted and extracted image of a city’s actual situation. Setting standards is first and foremost a cultural act. You can read cities by their rules! Rules link the physical with the social city, connecting quality with quantity and latent characteristics to manifest ones. Thereby and almost unnoticed, they have become design instruments. In fact, regarding rules as tools offers a valuable (urban) design attitude – departing from an approach that wants to control everything, and moving towards a non–fatalistic form of control between freedom and coercion.

Alex will discuss the content of the book and show its relevance for designers by relating it to other (urban design) projects of his. A limited amount of books will be available for sale.

Alex Lehnerer is an architect and urban designer, received his PhD from the ETH in Zurich where he was also a lecturer before moving to the US. With his studio he is currently based in Chicago where he holds a position as Asst. Professor at the University of Illinois, School of Architecture. He is partner of the urban research practice Kaisersrot in Zurich (CH) and ALSO-Architekten.

Related Links
http://www.010.nl/catalogue/book.php?id=666
http://www.alexlehnerer.com

Buildings sit at the center of the global financial crisis. By way of a post-apocalyptic settlement in Montréal, a public learning center about finance and architecture in New York City, and a plan for the riverfront of Newark, New Jersey, Damon Rich's presentation will explore how tools of architecture might shift catastrophe to revitalize relationships between people and their living environments.

Damon Rich is a designer and artist who uses video, sculpture, graphics, and photography to investigate the political economy of the built environment. His work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the 2008 Venice Biennale, Storefront for Art and Architecture and SculptureCenter (New York City), the Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montréal), and Netherlands Architecture Institute (Rotterdam). In 1997, he founded the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), a New York City nonprofit organization that uses the power of design and art to improve the quality of public participation in urban planning and community design, where he was the Creative Director for 10 years. His solo exhibition Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center, supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation, was on view at the Queens Museum of Art May 31-September 27, 2009.

Related Links
Another CUP Development
http://www.damon.anothercupdevelopment.org

For more information on the exhibition, Actions: What You Can Do With the City, click here.

Plan for Ordos 100 plot, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, NAO, 2008.

Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss is an architect, founder of Normal Architecture Office, and founding member of the School of Missing Studies, a network for experimental study of cities marked by or currently undergoing abrupt transition. Weiss has published two books: Almost Architecture, which explores architecture vis-à-vis emerging democratic processes and the Lost Highway Expedition Photobook, which documents the transitions and different speeds of recent urbanization that are challenging nine major cities in the Western Balkans. His work on the preservation of public space from the Socialist era is best known through his designs and activism for Handball Stadium in the city of Novi Sad. He was recently selected by Herzog & de Meuron architects and artist Ai Weiwei as one of 100 architects to design a villa in Ordos, Inner Mongolia. Srdjan is an Assistant Professor at Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University and has lectured at Harvard and Penn. He is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

NAO: Normal Architecture Office is a spatial practice for architecture, urbanism and curating. NAO's partners are Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Katherine Carl and Edwin Thaddeus Pawlowski. NAO employs a rigorous conceptual approach at all levels of the design process: from analysis, curating, building to articulating larger visions and is a strategic partner with School of Missing Studies.

Related Links
The Normal Architecture Office
http://www.thenao.net
School of Missing Studies
http://www.schoolofmissingstudies.net

For more information on the exhibition, Actions: What You Can Do With the City, click here.

Chamber of the House of Lords in the Houses of Parliament, London. Rolf Richardson-Spectrum Colour Library/Heritage-Images.

In his forthcoming publication, The Nightmare of Participation (Crossbench Praxis as a Mode of Criticality), Miessen challenges the ubiquitous use of the term participation and the current discourse on participatory practice. What happens when everyone is turned into a participant? What happens when participation is used as an instrument to pacify? Invoking the crossbencher, a member of the British House of Lords who is not aligned with a particular political party, Miessen encourages the role of the uninterested outsider--one not limited by existing protocols--entering the arena with nothing but creative intellect and the will to generate change. Miessen argues for conflict as an enabling rather than disabling force. He calls for a format of conflictual participation--no longer a process by which others are invited in, but as a means of acting without mandate, as uninvited irritant: a forced entry into fields of knowledge that arguably benefit from exterior thinking.
 
Related reading: "Did we mean participate or Did we mean something else?", introduction to Did Someone Say Participate? An Atlas to Spatial Practice edited by Markus Miessen & Shumon Basar (MIT Press, 2006).
 
Markus Miessen is an architect, spatial consultant, and writer migrating between Berlin, London, and the Middle East. In 2002, he set up Studio Miessen, a collaborative agency for spatial practice and cultural analysis, and in 2007 was founding partner of the Berlin-based architectural practice nOffice. In various collaborations, Miessen has published books such as East Coast Europe (Sternberg, 2008), The Violence of Participation (Sternberg, 2007), With/Without -Spatial Products, Practices and Politics in the Middle East (Bidoun, 2007), Did Someone Say Participate? An Atlas of Spatial Practice (with Shumon Basar, MIT Press, 2006), and Spaces of Uncertainty (Müller+Busmann, 2002). In 2008, The Independent listed Did Someone Say Participate as one of the ten best architecture books of all time. He frequently contributes to international magazines and journals. His work has been published and exhibited widely, including at the Lyon, Venice, and Shenzhen Biennials. Miessen has taught and lectured at institutions such as the Architectural Association (2004-2008), Columbia, and MIT. He has consulted the Slovenian Consulate (NYC) during Slovenia's presidency of the EU council, the European Kunsthalle, the Serpentine Gallery, and the Swiss think tank W.I.R.E.; in 2008, he initiated and now directs the Winter School Middle East. Most recently, Miessen works as a Harvard fellow on a research project in Iran/Iraq, teaches as Visiting Professor at the Berlage Institute (Rotterdam), and writes his forthcoming book The Nightmare of Participation (Sternberg Press & Merve Verlag, 2010).
 
nOffice is also featured in Performa 09, the third edition of the internationally acclaimed biennial of new visual art performance, held in New York City from November 1-22, 2009 and showcasing new work by more than 150 of the world's most exciting contemporary artists.

Related Links
Studio Miessen
http://www.studiomiessen.com/
nOffice
http://www.noffice.eu/
Brutally Early Club
http://www.brutallyearlyclub.org/
One Year - A Discussion
http://adiscussion.spex.de/

For more information on the exhibition, Actions: What You Can Do With the City, click here.

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