Architecture in Migration
A lecture series on migration, architecture and urbanism by Ilka & Andreas Ruby

At first glance architecture and migration appear to be two worlds that could not be farther apart. For a growing number of people, though, life has long since ceased to take place in only one location, as they are moving from one place to another. Migration has become a component of their reality. This development also has repercussions for architecture. Architecture is more and more able to liberate itself from fixed attributions of function, becoming increasingly open for the multi-faceted arrangements of our existence.

Previously, the location of architecture was essentially identical with the location that it occupied with a building. In the culture of migration, however, every location is only a momentary stopping place along a line of movement. These manifold interactions between migration and architecture are the focal point for the lecture series by the Kölnischer Kunstverein, in which international architects, urban developers, artists, curators and philosophers have been invited to take part.

Andreas Ruby (*1966), architecture critic and theorist, and Ilka Ruby (*1969), architect, live and work in Cologne.

Projekt Migration
Kölnischer Kunstverein
Hahnenstraße 6
D - 50667 Köln

Telefon +49 (0)221-21 70 21
Telefax +49 (0)221-21 06 51
info@projektmigration.de

Lectures

LACATON & VASSAL: Migrating Lifestyles (lecture in English)
The French architects Anne Lacaton & Jean-Philippe Vassal have attracted international attention from the media and expert circles in recent years with their projects and buildings. The interplay of migration and architecture is reflected in their work. Migration results in an increasing mobilization, which requires new ideas of living. In their building practice, Lacaton & Vassal apply a contemporary architectonic language that does justice to this development. Prominent examples of their buildings include numerous single-family homes in France, a school of architecture in Nantes, and the remodeling of the Palais de Tokyo, where they created a new exhibition venue in Paris with almost invisible architectonic interventions.

Jean-Philippe Vassal (*1954) and Anne Lacaton (*1955) live and work in Paris

29 Jan. 2004, 7 pm

Eyal Weizmann: Architecture as Politics across the Israeli Frontiers (lecture in English)
Since 2000 the architect and urban developer Eyal Weizman has been investigating the political role of architecture in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. In an extensive study comprised of essays, detailed map material, photographs and film material, Weizman reflects on a public debate that has been conducted in Israel for several years on settlement politics, the use of architecture as a strategic weapon and the role of planners and architects. His exhibition “A Civilian Occupation — The Politics of Israeli Architecture“, jointly conceived with Rafi Segal, was recently shown in the group exhibition “Territories“ at the Kunstwerke Berlin.

Eyal Weizman (*1 970) lives and works in Tel Aviv and London

26 Feb. 2004, 7 pm

ATELIER BOW-WOW (lecture in English)
Tokyo is constantly destroying and renewing itself; the average lifespan of buildings is about twenty-five years. The city develops itself in this dynamic process less through planning or architectural and aesthetic guidelines, but rather through the immediate reactions to neighborhoods and programmatic needs, resulting in highly efficient hybrid buildings. For several years, the Atelier Bow-Wow, which belongs to an internationally respected new generation of Japanese architects, has been documenting these anonymous, adapting, mutating architectures of Tokyo, which cannot be attributed to any typology.

The Atelier Bow-Wow was founded in 1992 in Tokyo.

11 March 2004, 7 pm

Santiago Cirugeda: Architecture in Migration (lecture in English)
Sanitago Cirugeda is an urban activist, artist and architect. In his urban installations and performances he seeks out unrecognized leftover spaces between the lines of building laws and gives them (il-)legal asylum in the territory of public space. He ultimately works with the same survival strategies of migrants, who have conquered niches in a world that is alien to them to find a place of their own, which society generally refuses to grant them.

Sanitago Cirugeda (*1971) lives and works in Seville.

25 March 2004, 7 pm

Barbara Münch: Migration of Architecture High on Grandeur
While millions of people in China are migrating from impoverished rural areas into the cities, a new counter-trend is currently emerging: more and more rich city dwellers are buying villas at the peripheries of the overflowing metropolises. Investors in these villa enclaves, planned by foreign architects, advertise with the image of living "American or European style". Yet what appears to be a westernization of Chinese culture turns out to be a good example of China's tremendous power of assimilation: even the signature of famous architects is refined until it becomes unrecognizable. These architects and their architecture undergo what has always distinguished migration: a process of assimilating to the host country, in which one's own culture is increasingly mingled with that of the host country until if finally evolves into a new product.

The architect Barbara Münch (*1970) lives and works in Beijing.

29 April 2004, 7 pm

Francois Roche: Hyperlocality (lecture in English)
In his architectural designs, François Roche relies on the natural resources indigenous to the respective construction sites and integrates them as building material in an unconventional way.
In a draft for a school of architecture in Venice, for example, he directed the water from the lagoon outside through the floors and walls of the building. Roche is currently building an art museum in Bangkok, whose electrostatically charged metal façade attracts dust particles from the heavily polluted urban air. And for the planet Mars, he has suggested creating buildings whose walls consist of frozen water, which is supposed to be extracted from deep below the surface of the planet. In contrast to a colonist, who appropriates a foreign place by bringing along artefacts from his native culture, Roche’s method of working is like that of a migrant, who designs his surroundings from what is at hand at a particular place.

François Roche (*1961) lives and works in Paris and, along with Stephanie Lavaux, directs the architectural firm R&Sie... (www.new-territories.com)

13 May 2004, 7 pm

Shigeru Ban (lecture in English)
With his presentation of the Japanese Pavilion during the Expo 2000, Shigeru Ban aroused considerable attention in Europe and especially in Germany. In 2002 he was finalist in the competition for the new World Trade Center.
Ban combines light, traditional Japanese building material such as paper and cardboard with alternative building techniques. As consultant for the UN High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) he developed temporary accommodations, which he set up with his students in the earthquake region around Kobe in 1995 for those affected by the earthquake. In the same year he founded the aid organization for refugees and disaster victims, the Volunteer Architects' Network (VAN). Ban's emergency shelters have been put to use in 1999 and 2000 in Rwanda and Turkey, among other places. In addition to these altruistic projects, Ban also uses cardboard in the conception of permanent structures such as single-family homes, furniture and major supporting structures.

The architect Shigeru Ban lives and works in Tokyo.

3 June 2004, 7 pm

AMO, Rotterdam: Reinier de Graaf (lecture in English)
Reinier de Graaf co-directs AMO in Rotterdam, along with Rem Koolhaas.
AMO is the research department of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (“OMA”), which was founded in 1975 by Rem Koolhaas. While OMA focuses primarily on realizing architectural projects, AMO works together with specialists from the areas of media, economics, technology, and art to analyze the relationship between constructed environments, human behavior, commerce, and culture. The group then develops new concepts and strategies based on these analyses.
AMO recently completed a study about the future of the “Ruhrgebiet” (once Germany’s main industrial region) with regard to its steadily decreasing population. As a way of thwarting deurbanization, AMO suggests declaring the Ruhrgebiet a “migration magnet” region. The AMO group also recommends “redirecting” funds which until now have been used to combat illegal immigration, for legal expenses and repatriation, in a constructive manner to integrate immigrants based on a structured immigration policy. Fifty years after Ludwig Erhard’s campaign to attract migrant workers to counteract the manpower shortage in Germany following the war, Koolhaas himself uses migration as an economic and structural-political instrument for reviving a society that is more uncertain of its future than ever before.

17 June 2004, 7 pm

Ilka & Andreas Ruby
The curators include the different positions of the architects into the concept of the lecture series.

1 July 2004, 7 pm

Ferda Kolatan und Valérie Portefaix: China – USA:
Antipodes of living (lecture in English)
Two architects from the USA and China have been invited by the curators Ilka and Andreas Ruby as representatives of two significant, yet completely contrary developmental perspectives of living in the 21st century. Ferda Kolatan from su11 in New York and Valérie Portefaix from Map Office in Hong Kong present their research projects reflecting the trends in patterns of urbanism in both countries.
In the USA the enduring dream of a house of one's own increasingly turns the landscape into a uniform carpet of low density residences. At the same time, most of these houses were not built by architects, but as pre-fabricated houses. su11 is therefore investigating a type of pre-fabricated house that is industrially manufactured, yet tailored completely to the needs of the inhabitants, so that living in a community becomes meaningful again.
Contrary to this, the city in China, where there will be a hundred cities with a population of a million within ten years, is organized in a way that is more vertical and tremendously dense. Apartment skyscrapers for two thousand residents arise at breathtaking speed. Valérie Portefaix and Laurent Gutierrez from Map Office examine these tendencies taking Hong Kong as an example, because they regard it as a laboratory for the further urban development of China.
The question of where the European city moves within this charged field is the subject of the concluding discussion with the audience.

26 Sept. 2004, 7 pm

Wes Jones (1958) is the head of the firm “Jones, Partners: Architecture” and lives and works in Los Angeles.

7 Oct. 2004, 7 pm

Joep van Lieshout, born 1963, is the head of the Atelier van Lieshout and lives and works in Rotterdam.

4 Nov. 2004, 7 pm

Klaus Overmeyer (born 1968) is landscape architect; together with the architects Susanne Schnorbusch and Nancy Couling he runs the firm cet-0 in Berlin.

25 Nov. 2004, 7 pm

Stefano Boeri
With the network "Multiplicity", consisting of architects, geographers, artists, urban planners, photographers, sociologists, economists, filmmakers, etc., Boeri investigates how the city is changing under the conditions of globalization and migration. One area of emphasis in the research work is the project "USE – Uncertain States of Europe", which describes self-organized processes and under-determined planning concepts in case studies. Examples include a gigantic skyscraper segment in the 13th Arrondissement in Paris, the use of which has radically changed since it was completely taken over by refugees from Southeast Asia, or the underground canal system of Bucharest, to which children and adolescents with traumatic experiences have fled, appropriating this as their place of existence.
Stefano Boeri (*1956 in Milan) is architect, curator and writer.

19 Jan. 2005, 7 pm

Projekt Migration, a project initiated by the

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