ghost13 | ideas in things

June 14, 2011 -  June 17, 2011
Upper Kingsburg, Nova Scotia 
*Participation is limited to 200 registrants


The Conference theme,‘Ideas in Things’, addresses the unity of the discipline of architecture, offering an optimistic critique of the current separation of the academy and practice, or the mind and the hand. A book and film will document the conference.


The conference will feature a number of renowned speakers, including: Kenneth Frampton, Juhani Pallasmaa, Brian MacKay-Lyons, Patricia & John Patkau, Brigitte Shim & Howard Sutcliffe, Francis Kèré and many more.

More than meets the eye

We live in a world where we Google the closest cafe, get directions from our phone, send tweets while standing in line and blog about the whole experience over coffee.

Reality is becoming so much more than just what we see in front of us. It is being created by companies and individuals at the global scale and in the palm of our hand. Want to change the world? There's an app for that...

Check out these two examples of the potential that exists to augment our perceived reality of buildings and space:

SARA brought to you by the Netherlands Architecture Institute is "the worlds first mobile architecture application featuring augmented reality with 3D models."



And Microsoft demonstrated the astonishing capabilities for augmenting reality in Bing Maps at this year's TED conference... and you thought Google Earth was cool.

Not just another pretty face...

Bjarke Ingels, from Denmark's hottest architecture firm, talks about some BIG ideas in this inspiring and humourous lecture from TED:



Like what you see? Check out BIG's book Yes is More: An archicomic on architectural evolution in our collection!

Not just a pretty facade...

Zerofootprint has just announced the Z-prize. The "Zerofootprint Skin Renewal Award" will be launched at the Discovery '09 Conference this May in Toronto.

More than just an anti-aging cosmetic approach, this award will challenge designers from across the wold to come up with new solutions to an old problem...old buildings. The largest greenhouse gas emissions in cities come from buildings. Rebuilding cities is not an option and retrofitting can be inadequate. Re-skinning, however, has many advantages:
· It can be used to hide a cheap retrofit
· It is potentially non-invasive
· It can make a ho-hum building into a handsome green role model
· It can be used to engineer an energy reduction of as much as 70%
· Re-skinning can be smart — solar, thermal, media, vegetation etc.

More information, and tonnes of inspiration, can be found at the new Zerofootprint resource area for a limited time in the library.

You can also find more books about designing like you give a damn now on display in the library.

New Books...on natural and fashionabe technology

For more about these books, check out our New Book Spotlight!

Climate change and healthy cities

Upwind Downwind 2008: Climate change and healthy cities conference

The City of Hamilton and Clean Air Hamilton will be hosting the 5^th Biennial Conference, Upwind Downwind: Climate Change and Healthy Cities on February 25 and 26.

A free public lecture, WALK & BIKE FOR LIFE, will be held on February 25 at 7 pm at the Hamilton Convention Centre featuring Gil Penalosa.

Gil is a global thinker with various work experiences in Canada and Latin America in fields related to parks, recreation, urban planning, and active transportation. He is the Executive Director at Walk and Bike for Life, member of the Board of Directors of American Trails and the City Parks Alliance (USA), and the North American Chairman for International Sport and Culture.

In the late 1990s he was commissioner of parks, sports and recreation in Bogota Colombia where his accomplishments include shutting down 91 kilometres of city roads every Sunday to create the Ciclovia where over 1.5 million people now walk, bicycle, run and skate every week.

Visit http://www.cleanair.hamilton.ca/updown/udconf.asp for more information about the conference. Note that there is a reduced registration fee for students ($30)

Check out some videos of the transformation in transportation in Bogota under Penalosa's direction.

http://www.streetsblog.org/2008/01/28/streetfilm-brt-in-bogota/ and
http://bcgp.blogspot.com/2007/12/ciclovia.html