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March 6, 2013

NCR-08 [Architecture]: Last Instructions


NCR Rotterdam’da bir türk mahallesinde, Brendan Cormier

How to make your own New City Reader by Kazys Varnelis

Instructions
1. Identify a city.
2. Identify the newspaper most crucial to that city. What is its format (such as tabloid or broadsheet) or a type of newspaper (a free weekly paper on cultural events, a free newspaper devoted to classifieds for sex workers, government newspaper, a newspaper that exists for purely legal purpos-es such as to announce marriages, name changes, and the formation of corporations?)? Examine the format of the newspaper and identify a strategy by which it could be appropriated for hanging throughout the city. How will language work? Can your paper be published in English? If not, how will you reach out beyond your local milieu? Decide how the paper will appear on the Web.
3. Secure funding. Anticipate that you will fall short. That’s what your own pocket is for. Secure sites for hanging the paper. Closely examine local laws that might impact its public display, and most importantly if organized crime controls the display of posted materials in your city. Find an editorial staff, a press, and individuals willing to post the paper in public.
4. Decide how your paper will be published. Should it be composed of a series of sections (e.g. politics, sports, weather, culture?) or should it come out weekly. Assign editors for individual sections or issues. Develop a repeatable workflow by which issue editors will propose their topic to you, solicit articles from contributors, and pass these to your editorial team for editing and layout. This is a newspaper. Deadlines matter. Everything will be last minute and endlessly in crisis.
5. Launch.


In Love We Trash by Basurama
Bienali, is an inflatable bubble monster made out of plastics discarded during the installation of the Istanbul 2012 Design Biennial. Its size and shape came out of the amount of plastics available at the venue. The same techniques and materials used to package and wrap pieces at the Biennial, were used to build Bienali. Taking care of waste is an act of love that transforms it into something desir-able instead of deplorable. Bienali allows an easy visualization of the amount of plastic waste used to transport the installations that are on display and reflects on the concept of trash, care and reuse.

Instructions (refrain from doing it at home)
1. Take all the plastic bags you find in your house.
2. Cut the handles and two of the borders and deploy the bag as a flag (or a piece of cloth).
3. Join the pieces with tape and build a new and huge plastic bag.
4. Make a tube with the leftovers.
5. Leave a hole in the huge plastic bag in order to introduce the tube.
6. Connect the fan to the tube.
7. Inflate.


Design Demographics Turkey by Superpool
Design Demographics is a data visualization project that assesses the scale and involvement of Turkey’s design community in the production and regulation of Turkey’s built environment. The broader design community is under scrutiny in this exercise, including architects, landscape architects, urban planners, industrial designers, interior designers, and graphic designers. Archi-tecture, in particular, will serve as a primary test case due to the availability of information about the profession.

Instructions
1. Think of something you would like to know more about, for example the number of architects in each city in Turkey or the locations of the street bazaars in Istanbul…
2. Think of institutions, agencies or companies that could have the answer to your question.
3. Check their websites. If you find consistent and complete information, proceed to Step 13.
4. If their websites are not helpful, write an email with your request for information. Explain why you need their support.
5. Call the next day, to check if they have received your request. Hope they share the information with you at this point. If yes proceed to 13, if not continue to 6.
6. You might have been requested to write an official petition. Prepare it; send a fax and a hardcopy.
7. Call the next day, to check if they have received your request. Hope they share the information with you at this point. If yes proceed to 13, if not continue to 8.
8. Think of someone in your network who works or knows the institution you are contacting. Call him / her and ask for their support.
9 If the institution is in your city or close-by, go there and ask for help face to face. Take your petition, the name of your ‘inside contact’ with you.
10. Say you are willing to wait all day, but would really like to have the data you need.
11. Hope they share the information with you at this point. If yes proceed to 13, if not continue to 6.
12. You can decide to give up or keep trying. It is after all, a matter of how much time you have. Hopefully you will make it to step 13 before your deadline.
13. If you have the data, you can visualize it on a map, or as a diagram. Clarity is very important.
14. Make it pretty.


Open Source Architecture by Walter Nicolino / Carlo Ratti

Instructions
1. Visit Opensource Architecture on Wikipedia: this page was created in mid-2011 and has received contributions from hundreds of users, each suggesting ideas or projects that can be shared and edited by a large community.
2. If something does not convince you or you have ideas to add, edit the page and include your contribution, to be edited and expanded on by other users. You don’t need to be an architect or engineer: each of us, every day, can make a change to the architecture around us.
3. Now that you have helped to write the Manifesto, your ideas will be explored by the installation for Adhocracy. Every day at the Galata Greek School, a vertical plotter rewrites on an empty wall the Manifesto taken from the Wikipedia page. And every evening, deletes it in order to start over and over again.
4. The design of the plotter, and the program that controls it, have all been developed with open source software. By accessing the online community of Arduino and Processing, you can quickly learn how to make something similar thanks to the vast shared knowledge. At the end of the exhibition Adhocracy, the plans will be shared by the designers of the installation, together with the script that makes it all happen.


Ad-hoc Library by Pelin Tan / Ethel Baraona Pohl
Ordinarily, we believe that knowledge is very close to us, sometimes we think knowledge is attainable and stable. Or we walk near it but don’t realize its movement and reflection. It is a kind of movement and a journey. It is personal but collective. It is boundless. It is emotional. In some cases it is a total, unstoppable experience. It exists and moves trans-locally. It is a representation. It is not presentable. Makes you feel alone as a singularity. Makes you feel near to something. Makes you feel like the Other. It is filled with space and love. You feel you are near even if it is always far away. The mobile archive presents our trans-local production of knowledge. Realities, objects, ideas, fly in the air that you can catch and reproduce. The Ad-hoc library intends to be part of the swarm intelligence of the city: it moves, expanding knowledge wherever it is taken, but never alone. Always with people.

Instructions
1. Work together with more people: the designer of the device, the content curators, the authors, the readers.
2. Select the kind of contents, books, fanzines you want to share.
3. Select a topic, share it, discuss it, listen what people want to read.
4. Think on which places, which public spaces to take it.
5. Ask citizens to participate, to take out the chairs and start reading.
6. From time to time, make a book-club, a speaker’s corner, an activity helpful to spread knowledge.
7. Simply enjoy.

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