Culture: The Latest Architecture and News

Growing like an outcrop amongst the hills of Gothenburg, the Kulturkorgen by Swedish firm Sweco Architects offers the public an opportunity to watch, engage, and perform. The scheme is a result of an architectural competition for a new Culture House in the city, run in collaboration with Architects Sweden. The winning proposal, who’s name translates to ‘Basket of Culture’, acts as both a building and a square – a social arena where flexible interior spaces act in tandem with a generous public green landscape for recreation and gathering.

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In most architecture projects, the input of the end user of the space is an important consideration; but what if those users are no longer living? Memorial architecture for the dead is a uniquely emotional type of design and often reveals much about a certain culture or group of people. Especially in the case of ancient tombs, archaeologists can learn about past societies’ customs and beliefs by examining their burial spaces. The personal nature of funerary spaces and monuments conveys a sense of importance and gravity to viewers and visitors, even centuries after the memorials were created.

The list of 3D models that follow, supplied by our friends at Sketchfab, explores memorial spaces and artifacts that span both space and time, representing a variety of cultures and civilizations.

The artist residency SPOT 13 offers the opportunity to artists from all the world to access the artistic and cultural scene in Cartagena, known by its human heritage (UNESCO) and main cultural and touristic district of Colombia. Cartagena has been the center of Colombian tourism and represents one of the main Colombian cultural heritage from colonial Spanish times.

As part of their commitment to enriching the Arab society through identifying and resolving cultural and creative development issues in the region, Nuqat will be launching their 7th annual conference in Kuwait – themed ‘The Seventh Sense – Powering the Creative Economy’. ‘The Seventh Sense’ is the largest cultural event taking place in the region, as it invites theorists, academics, artists, writers, designers and innovative thinkers from all practices and from all across the Middle East to discuss the ‘mechanism’ of producing new ideas in humans - the EUREKA! Moment -and how this potential can be developed to fuel more innovation in the Arab industries, thus powering the creative economy.

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Videos

How To Architecture! is a design competition which invites students to reflect on contemporary culture and to do it with architecture. Leafing through headlines, lists, captions, zooming in and out of feeds, bold fonts, and articles made of images: we participate in the age of the listicle. Culture flashes before us—an extension of ourselves: the superabundant reel. As the cycle of consumption whirs on, architecture still stands. What does architecture say; how does it feed you? Tell us what you think! Tell us How To Architecture!

ABOUT ::
[TRANS-] is a critically-reviewed academic journal published in print and online, inviting expressions of interest for submitting works of design, writing, or multi-media on the topic of design process and design communication for Vol. No. 2 to be published in May 2016.

"For the most part, the way urbanists view black neighborhoods (and other low-income neighborhoods and communities of color) are as problems that need to be fixed. At the heart of what I want to say is what can we as urbanists learn from these neighborhoods?" So asks Sara Zewde, a landscape architecture student at Harvard's Graduate School of Design and this year's Landscape Architecture Foundation’s Olmsted Scholar, in a fascinating profile on Metropolis Magazine. Read more about Zewde and her work here.

A looping mixture of culture and commerce has won Joel Sanders Architect and FreelandBuck first prize in the international competition hosted by the largest media and publishing company in China, Phoenix Publishing and Media Group (PPMG).

Their 80,000 square meter winning proposal for the new Kunshan Phoenix Cultural Mall divides a large urban block into four 'cultural cores,' each five stories high and respectively housing a theater, fitness club, education center, and exhibition halls. The podium, which sits upon the glass-clad cores, spirals the length of the perimeter (comprised of stores, restaurants and cafes) and ultimately plateaus at an open park where the public and Phoenix employees would share a common space.