When the subject of "renewal" is brought up it is often accompanied by thoughts and attitudes towards our cultural heritage, and our architectural heritage. In Scandinavia, in particular, it is often an architectural historical condition that a project has a historical point of departure. We have a strong tradition of careful restoration. But can the historical foundations become so important that it blocks the renewal? Architectural development is also about daring the renewal - however without losing oneself to progress. We must remember to listen to our ‘experience’. This issue explores the URLAB theme "renewal" in a series of visual experiments, during the month of May 2012.  

Chelsea Market, which extends between Manhattan’s 9th and 10th avenues, was built in what was Chelsea's National Biscuit Company from the 1890s to the 1950s. In the 1990s, the building's ground floor at street level was renewed into an arcade, now providing an experience of a post-industrial park, which is decorated with "heirlooms" from a lost industrial culture – interrupted by exclusive food stores and restaurants. The old factory floors have been preserved and are decorated by an artificial waterfall in the middle of the arcade. The legacy has been preserved, but in a staged manner that is almost too nostalgic to be authentic.  

The idea about “the community” is at the same time decaying and characteristic for our organization today. All awhile we move into our ‘own’ house or apartment, drive in our ‘own’ car and dream about our ‘own’ office, we mobilize ourselves in digital communities, knowledge sharing communities, clubs and networks. Our interest in “the community” is complex – as if we are stock in an individualist architectonic ideal while we are realizing the gains of the community. We focus on the human project in the community and ask: How can the community contribute to our future well-being?  

Since Fall 2011, the combination of ‘ours’ and ‘place’ has brought with it associations about the occupied Zuccotti Park in New York City’s Financial District, which the Occupy Wall Street Movement took over in protest against the economic distortions in the United States. The occupation forever changed the meaning if Zuccotti Park as a “freedom zone” for the 99%. The events around the Occupy movement started a discussion and inspired a wave of artistic, action-oriented initiatives concerning the relationship between citizen, cultural production and public space.  

The concept of 'community' is ambiguous, and there is more than one recipe for designing an environment for creating great conditions for a community. Just like people, cultures and social structures are different, the values ​​that make communities successful are different, too. We have looked into various community qualities found in existing types of architectural spaces, to embrace a topological starting point for architecture for creating spaces, which make favorable frameworks for community-oriented environments. The topology is the architect’s methodological and philosophical tool to put the room together to function in certain way that creates special life patterns and provide fertile ground for a special kind of culture. The different values ​​that we focus on do not exclude each other. On the contrary, they describe five different qualities that go into the sustainable community.

 

A discussion that is gaining increased attention in the architecture profession is the one that regards the exploration of boundaries between architecture and digital technology. Our digital perception is gradually changing the ways in which we navigate in, experience and interact with the physical world. Digital technologies allow us to operate at several "levels" simultaneously; we interact with the visible, physical built environment, and simultaneously - via our smartphone or computer – with an invisible, digital environment. Architecture needs to relate to the communication society and pay attention to changes in people’s social patterns. We need to consider how the technological dimension makes an addition to the physicality of architecture and critically evaluate how these may influence the social experience of architecture in desirable ways.  

Many workplaces, modern financial houses and knowledge institutions have realized the potential of moving from 'me and mine' to 'we and ours'. They are currently rebuilding office buildings to become more community-oriented and knowledge sharing environments. While the personal office was previously equipped with its own copier, coffee machine and smoking permit, the modern office environment is based on a combination of physical possibilities that support sustainability and knowledge sharing and organize work culture around attractive communal areas.  

Participatory planning is about building a local active ownership in architecture and urban development initiatives. Beyond preventing collisions between citizens, politicians, and developers’ opinions, participatory planning should have one basic aim: Adapting the building or development initiative to the urban imaginations and opportunities of expression of contemporary human beings. In contemporary urban spaces, digital and mobile communications technologies are ubiquitous and increasingly pervading "meetings" between people, spaces (physical or virtual) and urban imaginations. In this situation, we need to raise the question of how processes of public involvement can involve both the social structure and the physical digital structure, and maybe even find new models of civic engagement in the new technological opportunities. How do the city’s information structures create new opportunities for participatory planning?  

A community is not necessarily defined by a point, but also involves 'that having something in common', or to share a number of expectations for how people should behave, how a system should function, or what the environment should look look like.  

Sometimes what makes a great community goes beyond the architectural recipe. This URLAB video proposes concepts of a great community in a scene of contradictory community features. 

Local areas and neighborhoods are constantly changing. They witness about a transition in a local population, and in “us” who constitute society. The significance of urban symbols is found in the narrative they tell about a community’s orientation and development.  

On the 15^th of November 2011, the protest movement Occupy Wall Street was forced to terminate its occupation of Zuccotti Park in Manhattan’s Financial District. Since the 17^th of September, this had been the physical manifestation of a community’s dissatisfaction with social and economic inequality, high unemployment, greed, corruption and corporate influence on politics. An ideological society was seemingly dissolving, but what does it tell about a collective instinct, which might be characteristic for our zeitgeist?  

Behind the sail boat harbor in the city of Horsens in Jutland, DK, is a special town. Urlab went to the streets of this town made by sailors, whose street names and simplistic personal architecture witness about a strong community, and a space for differences within the community.

A miniature society like this appears - with it's reflective architectonic structures -, just like the communities of Christiania and the fishing port in the Copenhagen Nordhavn, as an autonomous impulse in contrast to the regulated urban organization of Danish cities.

What would our cities look like, if we were to shape them in communities of common interests; if there were no restrictive building standards to live up to; and if we could name the streets as we liked?  

We were curious about what Human Architecture means to those who define the future of architecture: Architecture students. We went to ask some Pratt students about the concept and its relevance. 

When Coffee Commons was the monthly guest at A Startup Company, the room on 144 10^th Avenue and 19^th Street was filled with aroma and coffee shop atmosphere. Strangers and friends met for a five-Dollar all day tasting of different coffees brewed by skilled baristas. At the same time, they could shop a rare selection of coffee pots, cups and beans from all over the world.

A Startup Company is a flexible and transformative space for pop-up cultures; an architectural interior system that can be changed and developed for housing specific, temporary common rooms, arranged around stories about innovation. The space is a business model, but it has a viewpoint like the magazine, and it can be transformed like the gallery. The model opens up for a consideration of architecture as something other than to-be-consumed by citizens, which is also about content, culture and community.  

If we anticipate that the architectural practice is influenced by the thoughts, theories and tendencies in popular architectural publications, we find ourselves in a modernist orientation towards minimalism, nature and the humanitarian project.

We visited Phaidon Bookstore on 83 Wooster Street in Soho to ask which architecture books are the most popular at the moment, and got five titles.