BySarah Andaya, Davao Today Intern

Davao City The United Architects of the Philippines (UAP) wants to dominate the ASEAN region. This was revealed during a press conferenceWednesdayby Davao Citys only ASEAN architect, Benjamin Panganiban.

The annual National Architect Week will be hosted by the UAP under District D1 and its 8 local chapters this coming December 8-13in an effort to uphold ASEAN Architecture within the region.

The six-day celebration themed: Filipino Architects at the Forefront of ASEAN Integration 2015 will also promote the upcoming ASEAN Integration where the Philippines will be opening up its borders to other ASEAN countries in terms professional services, including architecture.

Panganiban said that Filipino architects are more creative. The architects from other regions should fear us because of our creativity and ingenuity, he said.

Panganiban is one of the 40 ASEAN architects in the Philippines and the only ASEAN architect in Davao City.

Panganiban gave the new structural designs and technologies in Singapore as an example where the work force is diverse, however, the backbone of the architecture designs are all coming from the Filipino majority.

UAP Davao chapter president, Architect Michael Madrazo said that being an ASEAN architect would be an advantage for Filipinos.

We are limited to practice our profession in the Philippines only. Whereas when we became an ASEAN architect, we are eligible to practice in other countries in the ASEAN Region. For [big] practicing architects thats a very big opportunity, Madrazo said.

Aside from becoming the leading organization in the ASEAN region, the UAP wants to prepare not only the Filipino architects but also the architect major students and all those who are interested in the art of architecture for the bigger opportunities as well as the challenges that can be presented by the ASEAN Integration.

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Filipino architects plan to dominate ASEAN

Even the most prosaic oppositions of architecture can be cast in terms that indicate something is really at stake. This is Derrida for architects. There is always something at issue, and the stakes are high. One of Derridas terms for the problematic conditions is the aporia, a word in Ancient Greek relating to perplexity. The key is to keep perplexity and ambiguity alive rather than to resolve it. It is to show that any putative resolution is itself fraught with further ambiguity and complexity.

-From Chapter One, Thinking About Architecture

Routledge Press (2014)

At a time when it seems all human endeavour has become tied to technology and obsessed with compiling mountains of meaningless data, perhaps pressing refresh on our philosophical underpinnings could provide a means to remove ourselves from this digitopia. And who better than Jacques Derrida to give us an alternative perspective, ifonly for a brief moment. Such is the case with architect and professor Richard Coynes Derrida for Architects,part ofa larger series published by Routledge called Thinkers for Architects,with other volumes on Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Walter Benjamin. In its brief 98 pages, the book examines in six chapters the way that the current practice of architecture could learn a thing or two from the late, great post-structuralist.

As any architect will recall from theirarchitecture history classes atschool, there was a symbiotic moment in the 1980s when modern philosophy and architecture briefly coalesced, a movement which would later become known as Deconstructivism in architecture.Its philosophical origin, Deconstruction,wasa term coinedbyDerrida himself, as he was the first to use it in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Architects like Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi found hisquestioning of western belief systemsthose political,scientific and religious underpinningswhichhe called metaphysics as a point of departure for a new architecture more critical of its meaning and context.

Coynes writing style is clear and his narrative straightforward. This is essentialgiven the complexity of the material he discusses, with numerous citations to support his text throughout. In the introductory prologue, he introduces us to his subject not as an academic (he teaches architecture theory at the University of Edinburgh), or even a philosopher, but simply a writer whose works Coyne just happens to have read extensively.We then are the beneficiaries of this erudition, as to accomplish a similar feat would require not just reading Derridas texts of which there are over 40 but all the commentary that has been written about him, as well.

The first chapter, Thinking About Architecture, develops Derridas thinking from an architectural perspective,beginning with a quick lesson onStructuralism and introducing us to its founder, Ferdinand de Saussure. This lays the basis by which one can understand Derrida, as of all the great thinkers he deconstructed, it is Saussure who is the origin. Coyne is alsoconsiderate of the readers attention spanon the subject, breaking each chapter into smaller partswith architectural afterthoughts. In one instance, a discussion of the historical linguistspoint of view isgiven an architectural analogy, questioning what a volute means beyond its reference in an Ionic capital.

The first chapter of the booklays the foundation for Derrida by introducing us tothe notionsof juxtaposition and opposition, concepts that architecturesimilarly has to deal with on a day-to-day basis. This is as well counterpointed withDerridas rebellion against the Structuralist notion that language is not meant to represent reality, butmerely signify it. The reality that language does not reference the real world, but some other world beyond language does not bode well with him, and perhaps is a contributing factor to his sense of urgency.

In the books second chapter, Language and Architecturethe author gives usa brief history of linguistics, from its origins in philology, to the notion of historical linguistics forwhich Saussure created his ownelaborate system to overcome. He explains that while the historical model of linguistics looks at links between languages in a linear progression, the structuralist looks at the similar structures in all languages, regardless of their evolution. This was a notion very much in the same spirit as the High Modernistperiodof architecture,which sought to distill the gestalt from the program, turning simple brick and mortar into somethingsublime and imbued with a meaning greater than the sum of the parts.

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Book Review: Derrida for Architects

(PRWEB) December 03, 2014

The AIA PA chapter presented their awards at a Barnes Museum gala November 12, 2014. To be included in an evening where many well-known firms and professionals are being honored was honestly, quite amazing! noted Gray. Garmon was nominated by his professors at Penn for his design excellence and outstanding academic standing Garmon was ranked highest in his graduating class this May, receiving the Henry Adams Medal from the AIA.

At Array, Garmon works with teams of architects, planners and interior designers to create healing environments at hospitals across the country. Currently he is involved in a new hospital complex in Ohio and a Health & Wellness Center in Florida. The design acumen Gray brings to our team allows us to offer an excellently-rounded group of professionals who work together to provide a healing space to further our clients mission of keeping their communities healthy, reports Marsha Whitt, AAHID, EDAC, NCIDQ, Principal & Regional Vice President of Arrays Dallas office.

Since 1983, Array Architects has been recognized as one of the nations leaders in the design of healthcare facilities and offers a full complement of knowledge-based services including planning, architecture, interior design and advisory services from our six office locations. Our devotion to a healthcare-exclusive practice springs from our belief in the power of design to improve patient outcomes, maximize operational efficiencies, increase staff satisfaction and provide remarkable results for our clients.

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Inaugural AIA Pennsylvania Award Goes to Array Architects Designer

PSC Architects - Reception Re-Model
DIY re-model of our office #39;s reception area http://pscarchitects.com/

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PSC Architects - Reception Re-Model - Video

ROCKFORD (WREX) -

The final pieces are coming together in a new strategy aimed at fighting crime in the Rockford region.

Rockford City Council approved the architects needed to design the final district building--district one.

They had been toying with different locations and finally agreed West State and Avon was the best location.

Rockford City Administrator, Jim Ryan, say this is an important step in the geo-policing initiative, but there is still work to be done.

"We think its going to be very stabilizing institutional anchor for west state street and that neighborhood," Ryan said.

The goal was to find a location to better fight crime but also help build a relationship between west side residents and police.

City officials believe they found it.

The district one police headquarters will sit on a nine acre plot of land along West State Street and Avon.

The project is expected to cost about $8.5 million.

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Architects for district one police station approved

Officials examine Johannesburg Native Townships plan. Apartheid Museum Photograph: ApartheidMuseum

It is the mid-1950s. The precise location is not clear. Five officials aboard a van are looking intently at a hand-drawn map titled Native Townships, signed off by Johannesburgs city engineer. Presumably they are visiting the area the map depicts, southwest of Johannesburg, planned for the imminent resettlement of tens of thousands of non-white residents from the citys western areas.

The intention and effect of maps such as this was to assert control over space as part of the process of achieving racial apartheid. Such plans, and the records of their use, were instruments that helped to realise and maintain the National Partys Group Areas Act (1950) legislation, which segregated populations racialised as black, Indian and coloured into residential areas away from those allocated to the white population.

In Johannesburg, the Natives Resettlement Act, Act No 19 (1954) and central government pressure resulted in an acceleration of the city councils earlier piecemeal slum clearances, facilitating the removal of Africans from Johannesburgs western areas, such as Sophiatown, to new gridded suburbs south-west of the city, such as Soweto, shown on the map. This resulted in the forced removal of around 60,000 people over a period of five years from February 1955. From 1960 to 1983 a further 3.5 million non-white South Africans would also be displaced and forced into segregated neighbourhoods.

The plan is a careful scale drawing, draughted at a size that could easily be rolled up and rolled out on location. In situ interactions with maps and technical drawings are common practice in urbanisation. In the staged publicity photograph, these middle-aged white men performed their expertise through their visual and physical interaction with the plan they loom over, as they point at, hold and master it. Posing as if unaware of the photographer, their engagement with the plan is gestural, rather than technical, during a conversation. The fact that the men are in a van reinforces their separation from and liberty to move around the territory they are discussing; and emphasises the mobility of the image, a tool within the drastic reconfiguration of the social character of the city.

The professional identities, image-making practices, forms of image and visual languages used within this process were not new or specific to South Africa, even if they were operating in new institutional contexts. Rather they emerged through the exports and impositions of planning expertise through European colonialism and post-second world war modernist reconstruction. We can trace in this map, for example, echoes of garden cities and the postwar British planning system.

The documentary photograph illuminates how maps operated both as practical and rhetorical tools in imagining and imposing the scientific spatial segregation of peoples according to racial constructs. It effectively captured the power of government officials, professionals and the apartheid system. Unintentionally, as an historical artefact, it now serves to communicate this troubled past and the violence city plans can enact.

Ben Campkin is the author of Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture (IB Tauris, 2013), director of UCLs Urban Laboratory, senior lecturer in the Bartlett School of Architecture and co-editor of Urban Pamphleteer.

Mariana Mogilevich is a historian of architecture and urbanism and Mellon Fellow in architecture, urbanism and the humanities at Princeton University.

Rebecca Ross is a graphic and interaction designer and urban historian, senior lecturer at Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design and co-editor of Urban Pamphleteer.

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The architects of apartheid

Sure, we can all take some slabs of gingerbread, stick icing in between them, and create a makeshift (and delicious) house. But some B.C. architects are taking things to the next level and for a good cause, to boot.

Architects with Iredale Group Architecture built creative gingerbread houses for children staying at two B.C. transition homes. North Vancouver's Sage Transition House and Victoria's The Cridge Transition House for Women offer safe places for women and their children fleeing domestic violence.

The gingerbread project started off as a design challenge to do something non-traditional with the cookie kits, Irendale marketing director Katheleen Dixon told The Huffington Post B.C. in a phone interview. From there, the architects ran with it.

Basically we just wanted to do something that was related to architecture but that would help the kids make their Christmas a little bit better [since] theyre going through a lot of change," she said. "And having worked with the two homes this past year [on other projects] we felt like we wanted to do something that was very nice.

One of the gingerbread houses was made to look like the Sith Temple from "Star Wars," which was inspired by all of the current hype for "Episode VII." The team used marshmallows to make storm troopers and topped them off with Santa hats made out of icing. Red guards were made out of fondant, fountains were made out of blue candy canes, and the reflecting pool was filled with Jujubes. A second scene depicts "The Simpsons," while a third shows the streets and canals of Amsterdam.

This is the first time the firm, which has offices in both Vancouver and Victoria, has made the gingerbread houses for the children. But Dixon says the team plans on making this an annual event.

It feels so good," she says. "I think it really built up our internal morale.

See some of their creations:

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B.C. Architects Build Unreal Gingerbread Houses For Kids In Transition Homes (PHOTOS)

Architects | Live at the SM Skydome
PULP Live World and 28 Black proudly invites you to welcome Sam Carter, Tom and Dan Searle, and Alex Dean as they make their Philippine debut on February 7, ...

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Architects | Live at the SM Skydome - Video

Why Hairdressers Should Be Like Architects
Subscribe! It #39;s Free! Ben tells us about his frustration with getting his hair cut. Also check out my main channel Etcha! http://www.youtube.com/humanetcha Snapchat: thewordassassin Facebook: https://ww...

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Why Hairdressers Should Be Like Architects - Video

The Power of UNESCO World Heritage (3rd International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam)
The POWER of the UNESCO World Heritage Macchiavelling the power of world heritage Contribution to the 3rd International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam 2007 by bad architects group it!-heritage...

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The Power of UNESCO World Heritage (3rd International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam) - Video