In the midst of central Amsterdam’s gentrification wave a luxury department store has been given the name of the ruthless 19th century Parisian planner. The irony of the reference demands a clo...
From the Sky Lounge of Deloitte’s new HQ - the “world’s most sustainable office building” - you can see Crystal Tower, a 13 year old, 20.000 sqm building Deloitte left behind empty. Talki...
City of symbols: Egypt’s National Democratic Party HQs were set ablaze during the 2011 revolution. The blackened carcass is now rocking an ad for Egypt’s £30bn capital to be: New Cairo. (6th...
‘Roosevelt’s erection’ (187m), built in 1961 with CIA bribe money and Soviet help, recieved a fatwa in the 1990s because its shape amidst greenery could excite Egyptian women.
Collective intelligence.
Tahrir today: new (defensive) landscaping, a flagpole erected, and the Nile Ritz-Carlton almost reopening. The square’s subway station is out of use and the former NDP HQs are still ashy. (bij ...
Hand drawn cityscape.
“Frank Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne (above) and his Panama Biomuseum (below) flagrantly disregard their settings, reducing architecture to mere superfluous sp...
Squat eviction, Vondelstraat. Amsterdam, 1980
juroster : > New York, USA. Liminal space.
Great time-lapse running up to Amsterdam’s Week of the City, which is about to take off. This year’s theme is the city’s ring road A10 and the ringzone surrounding it. From November 5-9...
“Voids speak to a transient ideal of imperfection - a principle of aesthectic appreciation in longing for authenticity.” - Hiroshi Naito in Tokyo Void
For The Guardian I wrote about FOODLOGICA, a smart solar-powered tricycle service for food delivery. You can read it by clicking the image below.
Sandwich shop, Jodenbreestraat, Amsterdam, 1965. One of the last remaining buildings in the Waterlooplein area, which was torn down in the 1960s. Image by Ed van der Elsken. Courtesy of Annet...
Ruin capitalism.
Mastery over nature? I don’t think so.
Here’s the sneak preview of the book We Own The City by CITIES and published by Hong Kong University Press and Trancity*Valiz. I contributed to several parts of the book, mostly by interviewin...
For Failed Architecture, I reviewed Bradley Garrett’s fantastic book Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City. Bradley Garrett’s Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City is a book that g...
Today I came across a piece on Guardian Cities titled ’Cities are losing their smell ’ by Oliver Wainwright. It reminded me of the fascinating book (and catalogue to the similar-titled exhi...
An interesting passage from the great book ’Brussels - A Manifesto. Towards a Capital of Europe ’, about the difference between city and urbanization, civitas and urbs, and the citizen member...