Ole Bouman
C001690
Germany / Architectural Design
Ole Bouman is an influential figure in the world of Architecture. As an architecture historian, editor, curator, teacher and lecturer, Ole has been heavily involved in contemporary architectural discourse, working for organizations such as Volume Magazine and the Archis Foundation. But it was his role as the director of the NAi – Netherlands Architecture Institute (2006-2012) where Ole played a critical role.
The NAi (which since 2012 has been fused with the Netherlands Institute for Fashion and Design, and the Knowledge Institute for E-Culture into The New Institute) has been a platform to put the challenges of our times into the agenda of architecture. Under Architecture of Consequences, part of the innovation agenda of the NAi directed by Bouman, the institute has (in the form of lectures and debates in the Netherlands and abroad) focused on explaining how value creation, social cohesion, energy, space, and food, among other issues that the world is facing, are part of our field’s purview.
Ole Bouman has been appointed as the Creative Director of the 2013 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture.
Portfolio
-
The Invisible in Architecture
This vast and comprehensive volume of work on and by the world's finest and most representative architects and essayists is unparalleled in its field. Faced with the increased invisibility of the architectonic discourse itself, as media attention focuses more on the visual aspects of architecture, this book restores the balance between social and artistic choices and their consequences.
The Invisible in Architecture provides a rigorous survey of the principal trends in present-day architecture and highlights the versatility of the discipline, avoiding a one-sided emphasis on technique and design at the expense of the intellectual and tactile dimensions. Architecture and its cultural context are presented as completely interwoven, without losing sight of the professional characteristics.
Within a discursive framework, ranging between the encyclopaedian and the utopian, and sustained by leading thinkers including Ernest Mandel, Gianni Vattimo, Hal Foster, David Harvey and Richard Sennett, the book examines the work of architects such as Rogers, Hasegawa, Koolhaas, Herzog & De Meuron, Holl Venturi and Scott Brown, and many others; probing the hidden facets of the architects' approach and project descriptions, coupled with incisive articles and often controversial questioning of concepts, allow Ole Bouman and Roemer van Toorn to use the powers of verbal and visual arguments to give architecture, once more, its rightful place in the public sphere. -
3D-2D: The Designers Republic's: Adventures In and Out of Architecture
Created by the people at The Designers Republic, one of todays most revered design firms, 3D-2D/Designers Republic explores new ways of communicating architecture. By recreating a three-dimensional building in the form of a printed publication, this innovative book attempts to expand and open up new approaches to presenting and experiencing architectural products, based on the firms own products and research from over the past ten years.
The book takes as its subject the CCIS Office Building (Chamber of Commerce and industry of Slovenia) which was designed by Sadar + Vuga, an up-and-coming architectural practice. Both provocative and interactive, this unique case study reinvents the architectural drawing in ways that force the reader to rethink his relationship to buildings, to drawings, and to space in general. As visionary as it is plain fun to read, 3D-2D is a user-friendly book in a post electronic, post-CD-ROM, postDVD eraone that challenges the potentials of a book as a medium in itself. -
Architecture of Consequence
Architecture of Consequence began life as the Dutch presentation at the São Paolo Architecture Biennale in 2009. "Shape our country!" was the call that the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) made to its public over a six-month period. The result was a deluge of proposals, as the people of the Netherlands rose to the challenge of naming their needs: new guidelines for food production, alternative energy sources, solutions for space shortage, social cohesion, a healthy living environment and the recalibration of economic value. Formulating responses to such fundamental questions of our time is, it seems, everyone's business. All of the above issues converge at spatial planning and design, where real opportunities for social innovation still await. For this project, the Netherlands Architecture Institute selected 22 Dutch architecture firms with genuinely innovative ideas on these seven imperatives and the will to do something about them. The result is an agenda for the future of our living environment and a proof that designers have the creative power to make it happen. Architecture of Consequence proves that any notion that architecture should be an "expression of its time," or should do no more than express the vanity of its commissioners, pales into insignificance when compared to its tremendous potential for resolving urgent societal problems.
-
Testify! The Consequences of Architecture
A skateboarding school in Kabul; a children’s community center in southwest Chicago; project row houses in Houston; an open-air library in Salbke-Magdeburg, Germany; colorful murals in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro: what difference do civic architectural projects like these make to the daily lives of the people who use them? In Testify! The Consequences of Architecture, editor Lukas Feireiss gathers 30 examples of community-centered architectural projects from all five continents, to demonstrate how architecture can transform the quality of our lives. This is architecture that reveals unexpected possibilities for growing food in urban environments, for creating healthy and sustainable environments, nourishing social networks and establishing real estate value based on new revenue models. Each project is presented with full-color illustrations; texts that concisely analyze the project in terms of context, mission and realization; and an interview with a community member who makes regular use of, or occupies, the relevant building. As sustainability issues intensify the public stake in the built environment, Testify! brings good news from the frontlines of contemporary architectural practice. Among the firms contributing are 2A+P/A (Italy), Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée (France), DHK Architects (South Africa), Architektur + Netzwerk (Germany), Arup Foresight (USA/UK), Cinema Jenin (Palestine), Alejandro Echeverri Arquitectos (Colombia), Haas & Hahn (Netherlands), Li Xiaodong Atelier (China), AT103 (Mexico), DAAR (Palestine), Ecologicstudio (UK), IAN+ (Italy), Studio Gang (USA), Project Row Houses (USA) and Senseable City Laboratory (USA).
-
Wang Shu and Amateur Architecture Studio
Accompanying an exhibition of the same name at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, this publication examines the recent work of the Chinese architect Wang Shu, Pritzker Prize winner in 2012. At a time when China’s explosive urbanization is making inroads into rural areas and leaving the marks of cheap concrete construction everywhere, Wang Shu and Amateur Architecture Studio are keen to work against this tendency by reusing materials from the buildings that Chinese authorities are systematically tearing down and rebuilding after western models. Wang Shu’s architecture reveals a thoughtful attitude toward both design and implementation, as well as the ability to react flexibly to the surroundings and history of a particular site.
-
Dutch Architecture in 250 Highlights: Preserved by the Netherlands Architecture Institute
Drawing from the collection of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Dutch Architecture in 250 Highlights celebrates the collection’s centenary with this portrait of the rich and varied architectural history of the Netherlands. This broad and voluminous publication brings together the designs, buildings and ideas that have helped to build the considerable reputation of Dutch architecture around the world, from the nineteenth century to the present. Architecture historians Ole Bouman, Behrang Mousavi, Hetty Berens, Suzanne Mulder and Ellen Smit guide the reader through more than 250 outstanding buildings and designs, by architects ranging from Cuypers, Berlage, Kromhout, Van Eesteren, Stam and Wijdeveld to Weeber, Coenen and Koolhaas. The thematic and chronological chapters elaborate on their designs in plans, sketches, maquettes and photographs.
-
AMO, History of Europe and the European Union: v. 1
Volume: Independent bimonthly for architecture to go beyond itself Volume 1 features visions by Beatriz Colomina, Keller Easterling, Rem Koolhaas, Kester Rattenbury, Mark Wigley, and others. Volume is a project by Archis + AMO + C-Lab + ...
-
Volume 22: The Guide (+supplement)
Dont be confused by the title guiding is not entirely the issue here, rather creating realisable alternatives and a new reality. Volume takes the reader on a guided tour around the world to explore different cities, their possibilities and new discoveries. Respective projects visited in different cities include those found in Melbourne, Istanbul and different locations in Russia, while other highlights include; Atelier Bow-Wows guide to the 13th Arrondissement of Paris; an atlas of love and hate a visit to the Detroit unreal estate agency, and an essay on the relevance of Jane Jacobs.
Included in a separate edition is Beyroutes, an invaluable guidebook to Beirut which presents an exploded view of a city with its multiple truths, myths and historical falsifications that in turn acts as a field manual for the 21st century urban explorer.