Archinect - News

Challenging the Standard / Conversation with Zhang Ke

2012-08-30T13:53:00-04:00

More than ten years at the center of the Chinese architectural avant-garde, the role of standardarchitecture as an architectural paradigm solidifies more and more on international ground. Not interested in defining the new Chinese, nor to perpetuate the role of the status quo of the architecture of the spectacle, its focus consistently remains to present a challenge to the establishment. Everything from a growing extensive oeuvre that goes from building contemporary masterpieces in Tibet, to the design of exquisite trays made in Milan, to the way that the office operates seem to be following no other direction than its own.

WAI Architecture Think Tank sat down with standardarchitecture’s founding partner Zhang Ke to converse about the origins of standardarchitecture, its critical role in contemporary China, and how to challenge the standard.

WAI: We would like to ask you to draw us a picture of the conditions in which you had your education.

Zhang Ke: Now looking retrospect...

What About It? Part 2 goes Online!

2012-08-26T12:24:00-04:00

What About It? Part 2 is now available online on the digital publishing platform ISSUU.

The second issue of the graphic narrative in magazine format created, designed, edited, and written by WAI Architecture Think Tank includes essays, Manifestoes, Projects, Collages and a series of Conversations with: Simona Rota (Madrid); Zhang Ke / standardarchitecture (Beijing); Bernd Upmeyer / MONU (Rotterdam); and Perry Kulper (Michigan).

Manifesto of the WAIzine:

The WAIzine switches rhythm and pace, focus and aim, strategy and method. It goes from pure research, to retroactive manifesto, to speculative provocation. It is ambitious like architecture should be, especially these days of philosophical uncertainty, intellectual laissez faire, economic restraints, and social deterioration.

Rejecting the role of mere spectators of the global spectacle that has been set up by previous generations, the new generation of thinkers should be eager to embrace and confront the world with a pa...

The Ideology of Publication / Conversation with Bernd Upmeyer

2012-08-14T13:09:00-04:00

Urbanism is one of those malleable concepts that defy definition. A flexible subject where, by trying to lock it within a specific scope, its validity sometimes gets undermined and its potential spoiled.

But when a magazine develops and maintains its own way to portray the multiple faces, forms, shapes, relationships, arguments, contradictions, images, consequences, and messages of the discipline that is supposed to carry the unbearable load of thinking the city, then the exercise of defining urbanism becomes an enriching intellectual journey.

MONU (Magazine on Urbanism) was born in 2004 in Rotterdam. What was originally an almost underground magazine made available through a pdf dossier and a stapled black and white print has evolved into one of the main independent publications, a reference for the collective intelligence of urbanism, and an icon of exquisite aesthetics.

Set to satisfy a growing urbanophilic hunger, MONU has thrown into the mix an intoxicating mixture o...