Interview with Mitchell Joachim by Marianne Combs on MPR (Minnesota Public Radio) A radical architect has ideas on promoting environmentalism in cities with stackable cars and homes built into trees. He also says "sustainable" is not a good enough word to describe his goals for buildings.
Thank You: Susan Leem, Nancy Lebens.
Co-Founders Mitchell Joachim and Maria Aiolova awarded EUR 60,000
At a meeting at Roden Crater, Arizona (USA) in February, an international jury selected this year's winners of the Zumtobel Group Award for Sustainability and Humanity in the Built Environment. The award in the "Research & Initiative" category went to the non-profit design group Terreform ONE, jointly founded by Mitchell Joachim and Maria Aiolova, for the project "New York City Resource & Mobility", a visionary plan for New York City that converts waste to buildings and reinvents the city transit system. The work for this on-going urban project is fundamentally based on the activist notions of self-reliance in the profound writings of Henry David Thoreau, Bill Mollison, Buckminster Fuller, and William Mcdonough.
"This project is a rich source of interesting ideas of real substance. The research team is not afraid to think in whole new directions and presents a range of visionary potential approaches that are already acting as catalysts in the urban development debate." - jury
The winners were selected by interdisciplinary and international jury of leading architects from different parts of the world, an engineer, a representative of the UN, and the CEO of the Zumtobel Group, including:
Stefan Behnisch, (Chairman) Architect / Behnisch Architects, Stuttgart (Germany)
Yung Ho Chang, Architect, Head of Department of Architecture / Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (USA)
Brian Cody, Engineer, Chair of the Institute for Buildings and Energy, Graz University of Technology (Austria)
Colin Fournier, Architect / University College London (UK)
Andreas Ludwig, CEO Zumtobel Group, Dornbirn (Austria)
Enrique Norten, Architect / TEN Arquitectos, Mexico City and New York (Mexico, USA)
Anna Tibaijuka, General and Executive Director / UN Habitat, Nairobi (Kenya)
“I am delighted that, in their selection this year, the jury have sent out a clear signal that smaller projects which adopt innovative approaches can also prove an important source of inspiration. We need to look beyond our current needs and see the challenges of the future in their full context, as is reflected in the winning project in the "Research & Innovation" category," explained Zumtobel Group CEO and jury member Andreas Ludwig.
The winner in the category “Built Environment” was HARMONIA 57 by Triptyque. In the category "Research & Initiative", honorable mentions went to a rural student project at the University of Talca in Chile; a cross-border exchange programme and symposium "Political Equator II" (Estudio Teddy Cruz) involving the USA and Mexico; a highly poetical idea for an office and studio building in Columbia (Husos Architects); and a master plan for a wind park in the North Sea (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) that aims to meet the entire electricity needs of the Netherlands.
http://www.zumtobel-group-award.com/com/en/5388.htm
An interview with U of T Gehry Chair Mitchell Joachim aired on the March 1, 2010 episode of the Discovery Channel's Daily Planet program.
The fabulous Ziya Tong talks to the one man Rolling stone listed as one of the 100 people changing America; View the clip: http://watch.discoverychannel.ca/daily-planet/#clip271271
29 CHAINS TO THE MOON, By Melissa Kuntz, Art in America, Feb. 2010.
"The show presented three projects by artists developing 21st-century ideas (some actually in the testing stage) to tackle big problems. It might be futile to exhibit world-saving proposals in a traditional art space, where they could seem to be nothing more than conceptual exercises, but the mix of novel ideas in this show suggested that people working in diverse disciplines might collectively yield solutions to some looming predicaments."
"Architect Mitchell Joachim, working with the design collaborative Terreform ONE, of which he is a co-founder, showed panels of digital prints with the schematics for Peristaltic City, a tall building made of a cluster of transportable pods; Stackable Cars, a storage and charging system for electric urban vehicles; and Homeway: The Great Suburban Exodus, which proposes retrofitting American dwellings with wheels in order to maintain the continuity of home in changing locations. Also on view was a digital schematic of the team’s Fab Tree Hab, a proposal to “grow” homes by training trees into habitable shapes using scaffolds."
Special Thanks: Astria Suparak
"Why No One Wants to Eat the Meat House:
The complicated world of meatchitecture" Interview by Heather Smith Meatpaper, issue 10, pp. 31-33.
School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents Between Paradigms, a panel discussion exploring experimental systems and their application in art and design. Moderated by artist and BFA Fine Arts Department Chair Suzanne Anker, the panel includes: artists Frank Gillette and Michael Joaquin Grey; architect and urban designer Mitchell Joachim, PhD; and artist and interspecies communication researcher Aimee Morgana. The event is presented by the BFA Fine Arts Department at SVA.
