The recently published issue n°90 of the architectural journal OASE is entitled "What is good architecture?". bOb Van Reeth and the curators of the bOb Van Reeth exhibition, Bart Verschaffel and Christophe Van Gerrewey contributed amongst others to this issue. On June 27, during the nocturne at BOZAR, the issue will be presented by OASE editor Véronique Patteeuw. Afterwards bOb Van Reeth will talk about his view on architectural quality, a view that will be challenged by other definitions of good architecture.

Date:
27th of June 2013, 7:30 pm

Place:
at the entrance of the exhibition  bOb Van Reeth: Architect

Entrance:
free — reservation via www.bozar.be

Language:
Dutch

Coproduction:
Bozar Architecture, A+Belgian Architectural Review

Many problems in today’s architecture world would vanish if every once in a while it was clearer what is meant by good architecture. The ‘crisis of criticism’, for instance, is a symptom – seldom recognised as such – of the impossibility of knowing (or daring to know) what good architecture is. The assumption, critical in itself (and certainly useful), that each architecture project has to be judged anew each time has led everyone to unquestioningly assume that there is no values model for architecture. It has also ensured that the last models for evaluating architecture (modernism and postmodernism) are been followed merely by perversions (supermodernism, retromodernism, etcetera) or by ideals made into science (sustainability, mathematical models and regionalism).

Nevertheless, it is impossible to work with architecture – in design, theory or history – without making assumptions about criteria for quality. Just because a unique values model no longer exists does not mean that different values models cannot exist side by side. This issue of OASE uncovers and makes explicit the assumptions underlying these models, by posing the simple question ‘What is good architecture?’ in different ways and have it answered by people whose ‘main occupation’ is architecture. 

Of course the question of good architecture cannot be answered unequivocally and definitively. But simply because a question is certain to have an infinite number of answers does not mean it should not be asked. This issue of OASE can be like a banquet at which each guest selects something entirely different from the menu in a well-reasoned and forthright way – and so keeps the architecture party going.

With contributions by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Patrick Bouchain, Kersten Geers, Christophe van Gerrewey, Herman Hertzberger, Steven Holl, Anne Holtrop, Lucien Kroll, Andrew Leach, Philippe Morel, Steve Parnell, Bob van Reeth, Eva le Roi, Elsbeth Ronner, Bart Verschaffel

OASE 89 wil be presented on April 25 in the Stadsmuseum Gent (STAM).

Klaske Havik will present the issue.
Lada Hrsak will reveal the project ‘Scramble City’.
Michiel Dehaene will discuss the Mid-Size City in a conversation with Bart Verschaffel and Paul Vermeulen

Informatie
wanneer: 25 April 2013 19.00
waar: Stadsmuseum Gent (STAM). Bijlokesite. Godshuislaan 2, 9000 Gent

stamgent.be

De middelgrote stad is een onderbelicht thema in het discours over stad en stedelijkheid. Urban studies hebben zich in hoofdzaak op de metropool gericht en focussen meer recent ook op relatief nieuwe fenomenen als de generieke stad of de netwerkstad. Terwijl de middelgrote stad weinig tot de verbeelding sprak van diegenen die het discours bepaalden, bleek zij in de praktijk desalniettemin populair als woon- en vestigingsgebied – misschien juist vanwege haar weinig spannende karakter. Als de metropool bij uitstek de plaats van de moderne stedelijke ervaring is, dan is de kleine en middelgrote stad de plek waar de moderniteit wordt geabsorbeerd en zich een vertrouwd en vertrouwenwekkend gezicht verwerft. De middelgrote stad als plaats, waar het verlangen naar een ‘getemperde’ stedelijke ervaring voorwerp wordt van stedenbouw en architectuur. Ooit het centrum van haar eigen ommeland is de middelgrote stad meer dan ooit deel van een stedelijk netwerk waarin de kansen en problemen van de hedendaagse stedelijke samenleving neerslaan. De grote maatschappelijke opgaven, demografie, migratie, mobiliteit, ecologie, zijn net zo goed uitdagingen voor de middelgrote stad. In die context is de middelgrote stad vandaag opnieuw de plek waar de stedelijke beeldvorming rondom de Europese stad herijkt wordt.

Le graphiste néerlandais Karel Martens occupe une place essentielle dans le paysage du graphisme, de l’art et du design d’aujourd’hui. L'un des praticiens les plus importants de sa discipline, Martens a développé depuis 1961 un travail à la fois appliqué et autonome, personnel et expérimental.

Ses contributions au graphisme incluent des timbres et des cartes téléphoniques, des revues et des livres, mais également de la signalétique et des interventions spécifiques dans des bâtiments. Sa pratique d’artiste, intimement liée à celle du graphiste, se développe autour d’une fascination pour la matérialité du papier, l’impression d’artefacts industriels et des constructions géométriques et "kinétiques".

Parmi ses nombreuses distinctions: le prix H.N. Werkman (1993) pour la conception graphique de la revue OASE, le prix Dr A.H. Heineken de l'art (1996), la médaille d'or à la Foire du livre de Leipzig (1998) et la Gerrit Noordzijprijs (2012). Martens enseigne à la Yale School of Art, et a co-fondé l’école Werkplaats Typografie en 1997.

Karel Martens s’entretient avec Véronique Patteeuw, architecte de formation, enseignante à l'ENSAP Lille et éditrice de la revue OASE.

OASE 89 is dedicated to the image of the mid-size city. Not just the way this is interpreted, but also how it is produced by urban designers and architects. The urbanism discourse has long focused on phenomena such as the generic city. OASE 89, on the other hand, also devotes attention to the typically European condition characterized by its vast number of small and mid-size cities. In contrast with the (Asian) generic city, typified by its massive scale and loss of (historical) identity and public domain, there is the European mid-size city: a city with historical and geographical identity. This makes the model of this European generic city a resilient model, one with staying power in light of today’s urban challenges.

OASE 88 examines the role of the architecture exhibition as a site of production. Bridging theory and practice, and relating historical examples to contemporary concerns, this issue considers the exhibition as a medium for experimentation, providing an alternative to the built project as a bearer of the practice of architecture.

Throughout modernity, exhibitions have played an essential part in the formation and differentiation of the culture of architecture. Apart from their historiographical role, they have been a means to identify commonalities in the present, stage discourse and instigate new forms of practice. But exhibitions are also built spatial manifestations in themselves and spaces in which unrealized proposals can be made public. As such, they offer various occasions for the elaboration of experimental design practices.

OASE 87 is dedicated to the thinking and the position of British architect Alan Colquhoun, situated within today’s debate on architecture criticism. The issue presents not only the different themes that Colquhoun has addressed in his work, but also the various positions that he has taken in his career: scholar, critic and practitioner.

Alan Colquhoun (b. 1921) has managed for decades to link his practical experiences with a particular way of thinking about architecture history and theory. Colquhoun has been making his mark since the 1950s, with constructive contributions to the discourse and the theorization of architecture. He has written important books like The Oxford History of Modern Architecture, and published essays in Architectural Criticism and Modernity and the Classical Tradition. Colquhoun’s work illustrates that architecture – even today – needs its own theory and cultural position.

Owen Hatherley is speaking within the programme of the Werkplaats Typographie End of the Year Show on Friday 6 July, in De Ateliers in Amsterdam.

Hatherley is a writer who lives in London. He writes on architecture, urbanism and popular culture and is one of the contributors to OASE’s upcoming issue OASE 87 'Alan Colquhoun'.

Public lecture:
Friday 6 July 17:00-18:00
followed by exhibition opening with drinks, 18:00-21:00

Location:
De Ateliers, Stadhouderskade 86, 1073 AT Amsterdam

OASE 87 is dedicated to the thinking and the position of British architect Alan Colquhoun (1921), situated within today’s debate on architecture criticism. Colquhoun has been making his mark since the 1950s, with constructive contributions to the discourse and the theorization of architecture.

Editors: Tom Avermaete, Christoph Grafe, Hans Teerds

Contents

Tom Avermaete, Christoph Grafe, Hans Teerds
Composition and Typology Alan Colquhoun’s Building Projects

Kenneth Frampton
‘Not Individual Property’: The Ideas of Alan Colquhoun

Stanislas von Moos
Re-Reading A.C. on L.C.

Angelika Schnell
What Is Meant by ‘History’?

Françoise Fromonot
Ristretti: Alan Colquhoun’s 90th

Owen Hatherley
Two Notes on Alan Colquhoun

Christian Kieckens
Modernical

Michiel Riedijk
The River and the Ferry / A Brief Reflection on Alan Colquhoun’s ‘Typology and Design Method’

Paul Vermeulen
After the Avant-Garde

Tom Avermaete and Christoph Grafe
A Conversation with Alan Colquhoun

In order to enhance OASE’s academic profile, the journal publishes from issue #81 onwards abstracts for all its articles. These abstracts permit an accurate insight into the contents of each contribution and allow scholars to explore OASE for research material. The contents of all abstracts is searchable through the website’s search engine.

The 86ste edition of the journal for architecture OASE is completely dedicated to baroque. On the relation between a small Czech pilgrimage church, the Berlin Philharmonic and a National parc Centre in the Swiss Zernez.

Read more at Archined

Christophe Van Gerrewey is scientific researcher (FWO) at the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Ghent University. He is preparing a PhD on post-war architecture criticism. He is the editor of Rooted in the Real. Writings on Architecture by Geert Bekaert (2011) and publishes on architecture and the arts. In 2012 appeared his first novel Op de hoogte, De Bezige Bij Antwerpen.  

Sign up for the OASE newsletter to stay informed on new issues of OASE and other activities.

In OASE 86, the architecture of the baroque is revisited and assessed with specific regards to its relevance for modern and contemporary architecture. On the basis of several historical studies, this issue examines how the complex geometric compositions, surface treatments and semantic operations of the baroque might be connected to contemporary design practice. To that end, the authors turn their attention to relatively underexposed practices, such as the Bohemian baroque of Santini Aichel and the work of Nicholas Hawksmoor, and examine the reception of the baroque by modern architects such as Hans Scharoun and Luigi Moretti. The way in which the baroque figures as a fertile medium for recent architectural practice in Europe is investigated in interviews with Hermann Czech and Christ & Gantenbein, and assessed in studies of the work of Robbrecht & Daem and Valerio Olgiati.

Editors of this issue: David de Bruijn, Maarten Delbeke, Job Floris, Christoph Grafe, Ruben Molendijk, Tom Vandeputte

With contributions by: Andrew Leach, Dirk De Meyer, Christian Kieckens, Luigi Moretti, Hans Scharoun, Martijn van Beek, Irina Davidovici

Europe is a continent of small and medium sized cities. This could be a geographical statement, but is perhaps a more pertinent observation on the dominant collective imagination regarding the city. If the metropolis is the place of the modern urban experience, then the small and medium sized city is the context in which modernity is being absorbed and gains its familiar and honorable face. It is the natural habitat of a reformist type of urbanism and architecture that embrace modernity without choosing for the uncompromising idiom of modernism but chooses to package the new within a project that chooses for identity and legibility.

Once the center of its own territory, the mid-size-city is more than ever the part and parcel of a horizontal network within which the opportunities and problems of the contemporary urban condition manifest themselves. The big assignments, demography, migration, mobility, ecology, are just as well the challenges of the large, mid-sized or small cities. From this perspective, the mid-size city has become today again the place in which the images and imaginaries surrounding the European city are being tuned and readjusted . This is both manifest not only in the return of traditional images and urbanisms that take the small town as the reference point for a narrative on sustainable development (e.g. transition towns), but also in the rediscovery of the mediating role of the mid-size-city and its capacity to generate new imaginaries (e.g. the project ‘Mid-Size-Utopia’, Zandbelt&vandenBerg). The mid-size-city, it turns out, is well equipped to accommodate the changing roles and positions within the networked landscape of cities. We are being witness to the reinvention of a historical cities’ network, in which no longer the central position of the different cities with respect to their hinterland is leading, but rather their respective interaction and relative position within an open network.

For a new issue of the journal OASE dedicated to this theme we are in search of contributions on projects and design research specifically concerned with the Mid-Size-City as the place where the quite transformation of the European contingent takes on concrete spatial form and becomes the object of architectural and urbanistic intervention. Authors who approach the issue of the mid-size city from a perspective other than the project or design research are advised to respond to the Call For Papers of the Ghent Urban Studies Team for the colloquium ‘Mid-Size City. The dual nature of urban imagery in Europe during the long 20th century’ (Ghent, 19-21 April 2012). Authors can respond to both Call for Papers as well.

Abstracts of max. 500 words are due before 31 January 2011, e-mail to bruno.notteboom@ugent.be

OASE 89 will be released in the Fall of 2012; selected authors will be expected to deliver their full papers by the end of March 2012.

What possible relations can the exhibition assume in relation to architectural practice? How does its dual character, appearing both as a spatial situation in its own right and as a vehicle for making unrealised proposals known to a public, provide an opportunity to produce new discourses, experimentally stage architectural practice, or reconsider disciplinary limits? 

OASE 88 examines the role of the architectural exhibition as site of production, rather than a strictly representative device. Bridging theory and practice, and relating historical examples to contemporary concerns, it considers the exhibition as a medium for architectural experimentation, providing an alternative to the built project as a bearer of architectural practice.

OASE invites architects, historians and theorists to contribute to the upcoming issue. We specifically welcome case studies of historical exhibitions related to the above-mentioned questions.

Abstracts of max. 500 words are due before 15 December 2011, e-mail to vpatteeuw@gmail.com and t.g.e.vandeputte@gmail.com

OASE 88 will be released in the course of 2012; selected authors will be expected to deliver their full papers by spring 2012.

The work of Karel Martens has taken an important place in the European art and design landscape. During his 50-year-long career, Martens has designed books and magazines, facades, signs and stamps. Since 1990, he is the designer of all OASE issues.

Martens will be featured in television programme 'De Canvasconnectie', 13 november 2011, on CANVAS (BE) at 20.15.

Trailer

Following the publication of OASE 84 'Models', editor Anne Holtrop organises in collaboration with KAdE a symposium on models on 17 November 2011 in the Kunsthal in Amersfoort.

The evening programme:

19:00 Doors open and possibility to visit the exhibition MärklinWorld.
19:30 Start of the symposium.

Introduction by Anne Holtrop (moderator for the evening). Speakers: Christophe van Gerrewey (on the model as autonomous architectural work) and Krijn de Koning (on imagination).

The symposium will be held in Dutch and will end at 22:00.

See the website of Kunsthal KAdE for more information.

On Saturday 5 November, OASE editors Veronique Patteeuw and Tom Vandeputte will chair a discussion at the Architectural Association, London on new modes of criticism in recent publishing practices. Participants in the discussion will include Tina di Carlo (Log), Matteo Ghidoni (San Rocco), Benedikt Boucsein (Camenzind), Ian Pollard (matzine), Tiago Casanova (scopio) en Sebastian Craig (Touching on Architecture).

The event takes place between 4pm and 5pm in the New Soft Room, Architectural Association, 36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES.

More information

OASE will take part in the exhibition ARCHIZINES at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London. ARCHIZINES celebrates the recent resurgence of alternative architectural publishing with 60 new fanzines, magazines and journals from around the world. The exhibition, curated by Elias Redstone, is open to the public from 5 November to 14 December 2011. The private view takes place on Friday 4 November, followed by two chaired discussions in the Architectural Association on Saturday 5 November.

AA Website

Indeterminacy in spatial design, planning and management.

Recent times have demonstrated how swiftly the social, political, cultural and economic circumstances can change. The disciplines of landscape design, urban planning and architecture find themselves facing the consequences. OASE 85 investigates how the indeterminacy and instability of contemporary programmes, contexts and ambitions can be regarded as a potentially productive factor in spatial design and day-to-day management.

Editors of this issue: Klaske Havik, Véronique Patteeuw, Hans Teerds

With contributions by: Michiel Dehaene, Els Vervloessem, John Habraken, Thierry Lagrange, Yeoryia Manoulopoulou, Dimitri Messu (Exyzt), Erik Rietveld, Ronald Rietveld, Iris Schutten, Hannes Schwertfeger (Baubotanik), Tom Vandeputte

The International Committee of Architectural Critics (CICA) has announced that the CICA Pierre Vago Journalism Award 2011 is awarded to OASE 81 'Constructing Criticism'.

The complete list of winners was announced at the CICA Symposium held within the UIA World Congress Tokyo 2011 on September 28th in the Tokyo International Forum. The international jury consisted of: Joseph Rykwert (USA/UK), Manuel Cuadra (Germany), Sengül Gür (Turkey), Louise Noelle (Mexico) and Jennifer Taylor (Australia).

List of winners (PDF)

OASE’s editor and publisher are very interested in the opinion and appreciation of it’s readers. That’s why we invite all our readers to participate in OASE’s Readers survey.

In OASE 84 the architectural model takes centre stage. Models are such a self-evident aspect of the architectural métier that barely any thought has been given to the specific contribution that these physical models make to the discipline. In an era when computer visualizations dominate architectural (re) presentation, the demise of the model seems to be looming on the horizon. While in architecture the role of the model remains underexposed and is even being called into question, in the visual arts the spatial capability of the model is currently being discovered. The models made by artists are revealing the power and quality of architectural models anew, and these special attributes are the subject of investigation in OASE 84.

Launch of OASE issue 84 on Wednesday July 6th, 2011 at Gemeentemuseum Den Haag

Launch of issue OASE 84 on Wednesday July 6th, 2011 at Gemeentemuseum Den Haag with a lecture by Stefaan Vervoort on models in the artistic domain and by Christophe Van Gerrewey on models in the architectural realm.

This exhibition, held in Gallery The Narrows in Melbourne, focuses on Martens’ contribution to the graphic style of OASE. From 1990 (Issue 28) Martens took over the art direction of the journal, often working with students from the Werkplaats Typografie, an experimental typography school he founded in 1998 with Wigger Bierma. What began as a student magazine, evolved into an international professional journal in which a reflective and critical approach to architecture, urban design and landscape architecture is the mainstay. Recently celebrating its 75th issue, the success of OASE is, in part, due to Martens’ refined graphic statement, often absorbing his experiments in print and typography, while upholding the dialogue between graphic design and architecture. The exhibition features all 56 issues of OASE designed by Martens along with printed matter from his experimental studio practice.