Publications

Films

Teaching

Buildings

Exhibitions

The Urban Groundworks contribution to the City Desired exhibition at Cape Town City Hall presents the first stage in the community-driven urban upgrade process currently taking place in the BT-Section of Khayelitsha. Rooted firmly in this bottom-up process of urban transformation, the focus lies on site analysis, mapping, and the tools and acts of negotiation in reshaping the urban environment. The aim is to reveal the significance of place making through direct stakeholder participation. In addition, the exhibition catalogue offers a report on a long-term, integrated research program run by U-TT, in collaboration with Cape Town-based NGO, Ikhayalami, and community members of BT-Section.

The activities displayed in Urban Groundworks form part of the broader Empower Shack project led by Urban-Think Tank and collaborating partners. What began as a design and build workshop that aimed at developing an affordable and sustainable shack prototype for Khayelitsha, has evolved into a more ambitious project to devise and implement design, methodological and analytical innovations for rapid and incremental shack upgrading on an urban scale, supported by community-driven spatial planning and multifaceted livelihoods programming.

Cape Town City Hall

Urban Groundworks

Urban-Think Tank’s project, the Metro Cable of San Agustín in Caracas, was selected as one of eleven projects featured in the exhibition, Small Scale, Big Change at MoMA in 2010. The featured work came from five continents, all responding to localized needs in under-served communities. These pragmatic solutions demonstrate how architecture can serve the greater needs of society.

In 2003, U-TT proposed to build a cable-car system linking San Agustín, an informal settlement with approximately 40,000 residents, to the formal city below. The plan followed the philosophy of urban acupuncture, where minimalist and sensitive interventions create a major impact. Developed after numerous site surveys, community workshops, and consultation with international experts, the plan also called for for “plug-in” buildings—structures attached to each station that would provide housing, cultural, and recreational programs. The completed cable car line, with five stations, opened in 2010. The system has proven to be extremely popular and affordable, moving up to 1,200 people per hour.

“Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement,” New York Times, 2010

“MoMA’s Small Scale, Big Change,” Dwell Magazine, 2010

“The Museum of Modern Art reveals its sensitive side,” The Architectural Review, 2010

MoMa

Small Scale, Big Change

In 2013, Urban-Think Tank was invited to exhibit in the CoalMine Gallery, located in Winterthur, Switzerland. The exhibition displayed a brand new video installation titled, “Gran Horizonte: Around the Day in 80 Worlds,” a 33-minute, three-channel piece made from an assemblage of U-TT Film’s media archive. Depicting a typical day across the urban world, the video was shown in conjunction with a photo installation made while producing the project. The film was produced by Alfredo Brillembourg & Hubert Klumpner, directed by Daniel Schwartz and Martin Andersson, and made with the support of the Georg und Bertha Schwyzer-Winiker-Stiftung.

In conjunction, U-TT displayed a new version of its Torre David research, documentary, and design project with photographs by Iwan Baan and videos by Daniel Schwartz and Markus Kneer.

COALMINE Gallery

Gran Horizonte & Torre David

Torre David, a 45-story office tower in Caracas designed by the distinguished Venezuelan architect Enrique Gómez, was almost complete when it was abandoned following the death of its developer, David Brillembourg, in 1993 and the collapse of the Venezuelan economy in 1994. Today, it is the improvised home of a community of more than 750 families, living in an extra-legal and tenuous occupation that some have called a vertical slum.

Urban-Think Tank at ETH Zürich, spent a year studying the physical and social organization of this ruin-turned-home. Where some only see a failed development project, U-TT has conceived it as a laboratory for the study of the informal. In this exhibit and in their book, Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities, the architects exhibited their vision for practical, sustainable interventions in Torre David and similar informal settlements around the world. They argue that the future of urban development lies in collaboration among architects, private enterprise, and the global population of slum-dwellers. The collective issued a call to arms to their fellow architects to see in the informal settlements of the world a potential for innovation and experimentation, with the goal of putting design in the service of a more equitable and sustainable future.

In the spirit of the Biennale’s theme, Common Ground, the installation took the form of a Venezuelan arepa restaurant, creating a genuinely social space rather than a didactic exhibition space. The residents of Torre David have similarly created a variety of common grounds—for sports, leisure, worship, and meetings—that reinforce the cohesive nature of this settlement. Even before its opening, this installation inspired intense debate in the Venezuelan architectural community. Many were dismayed that the nation’s architectural accomplishments are “represented” by a never-completed and “ruined” work; others argue that the exhibit condones the Venezuelan government’s tacit and explicit support of illegal seizure and occupation of property. In fact, none of these positions reflected the true nature and purpose of the exhibit. It, and its creators, avoid taking political sides, arguing that Torre David represents not Venezuelan architecture but rather an experiment in informal/formal hybridity and a critical moment in the global phenomenon of informal living. With the aim of developing the debate over Torre David and similar sites in other cities, the installation included many of the letters and newspaper articles that have appeared in response to the announcement of the exhibition.

The exhibition was awarded the Golden Lion for best non-national pavilion, and inspired numerous other exhibitions on the project around the world. The Golden Lion itself was eventually presented and given to the residents of Torre David.

“Projects Without Architects Steal the Show,” New York Times, 2012

“Caracas’ Torre David at the Venice Biennale,” Architect Magazine, 2012

“La Torre David fue reconocida con el León de Oro en Venecia,” El Universal, 2012

“Torre David/Gran Horizonte,” Domus, 2012

“Starchitects and squatters: Venice Architecture Biennale,” The Guardian, 2012

The Venice Architecture Biennale

Torre David: Gran Horizonte

15 May 2018 – 17 May 2018 – Regards Sur La Création Contemporaine Vénézuélienne: CARACAS RESET!

CARACAS RESET! presented creative works from leading artists, architects and thinkers connected to the Venezuelan crisis, bringing together projects from the diaspora. Marked by mass exodus, the fracture of cultural institutions, economic failure and the birth of new political consciousnesses, the works represent a broad reflection of the process of cultural fragmentation and re-assemblage in a variety of modes.

Paris

Caracas Reset

A result of the Caracascase: Informal Urban Culture project, Urban-Think Tank curated and organized an exhibition in the Sala Mendoza Gallery. There, the work of 17 artists, researchers, and documentarians presented alternative views on the rapidly changing metropolis. The participants were both local and international, including work by Ignacio Arcaya, Diego Rojas, Alexander Gerdel, Pablo Souto, André Cypriano, Keisuke Fukuma, Shui Endo, Marco Poletto, Guy Lafayette, Armando Silva, Tulio Hernández, Nicolás Bancilhon and Marí­a Alejandra Padrón, Marjetica Potrc, Liyat Esakov, Sabine Muller, Andreas Quednau, Sabine Bitter, Helmut Weber, Feliz Madrazo and Elena Chetchencko.

The exhibition itself makes no attempt at final solutions, but rather attempts to understand and generate discussions on unsanctioned “informality” as a cultural force. After travelling to the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, the show was repackaged into a book, “Informal City: Caracascase,” published in 2004.

Sala Mendoza

Caracascase

Urban-Think Tank was commissioned for The Institute Effect program in "Close, Closer", the 3rd edition of the Lisbon Arquitecture Triennale 2013. The installation, “Architecture at 24 Frames per Second,” took the form of a 48-hour performance and screening, focusing on moving images and audio as uniquely powerful means to communicate and analyse space making.

The core component of the installation was a multi-media performance, bringing together live music, video remixes (VJ-ing), and spoken-word poetry. Additional photographic and archival video components explore the relationship between visual media and architecture. Godard once defined cinema as “truth 24 frames per second”. U-TT contends that modern day architects, who wish to truthfully understand and work within reality, must adopt cinema as both a product and process. The institute seeks to inspire a new generation of urban space-makers to treat video as an invaluable tool.

Trienal de Lisboa

Architecture at 24 Frames per Second

2 December 2017 – 25 February 2018: MAXXI_Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Roma

The sixth 2017 edition of THE INDEPENDENT – MAXXI’s programme dedicated to independent realities – focusses on the group Urban-Think Tank (U-TT).

Urban-Think Tank is an interdisciplinary collective that deals with the theoretical and practical applications in architecture and urban design. U-TT was founded in 1998 in Caracas by Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner, where many of their built works inspired the theory of Città Parangolé, and since 2010 they operate within the Swiss Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. U-TT works internationally, bringing together people from various disciplines, fostering discourse between developing and developed countries, with a focus on informality and urbanity in areas with relevant situated knowledge.

At MAXXI, Urban-Think Tank presents Città Parangolé, a reflection on, and development of utopian theories with the contemporary urban environment as a setting.  ‘60s artist Hélio Oiticica inspired the concept, where U-TT takes his notion of “life is movement” from the body into the city.  This future city concept is governed by a manifesto where people and movement are central.

Città Parangolé has developed over time through case studies exploring the relationship between its theory and the application to contemporary contexts such as Sao Paulo, Brazil and Piacenza, Italy.

THE INDEPENDENT showcases the results of these case studies in the Carlo Scarpa foyer, where an architectural model translates the philosophy of this alternative city concept as a solution for the hypothetical future city of Piacenza. An informative graphic wall juxtaposes life in a generic present-day city with that of the future city. Città Parangolé is a sensual and playful city. Experience life in the city with an animated 3D flyover or see how gaming can involve citizens in planning their city. An in-depth theoretical exploration with the relative case studies are documented in an accompanying book.

THE INDEPENDENT / MAXXI_Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Roma

Città Parangolé

U-TT’s Vertical Gym prototype was featured as one of numerous global design projects in the show, Design with the Other 90%: CITIES organized by the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. The Vertical Gym was selected as an example of how architecture can address complex issues arising from the unprecedented growth of informal settlements in emerging and developing economies. By building upward in dense environments, the Vertical Gym provides provides under-served communities with additional recreation space. The exhibition was hosted in the United Nations headquarters, offering an ideal setting to examine these complex issues and connect with powerful and influential stakeholders.

Smithsonian

Design with the Other 90%

Urban-Think Tank was invited to exhibit its video installation, “Gran Horizonte: Around the Day in 80 Worlds” at the Jeju Art Biennale 2017, located in Jeju, South Korea. This  33-minute, three-channel piece made from an assemblage of U-TT Film’s media archive depicts a typical day across the urban world. The film was produced by Alfredo Brillembourg & Hubert Klumpner, directed by Daniel Schwartz and Martin Andersson, and made with the support of the Georg und Bertha Schwyzer-Winiker-Stiftung.

2017 Jeju Art Biennale

Gran Horizonte

May 26, 2016 – June 30, 2016: La Biennale di Venezia

Like no other structure in Sarajevo, The People’s Museum stands as a heroic icon of resistance and resilience. Starved of funds and abandoned by the government, citizens have been invited to activate the space themselves, questioning what the 21st century museum can be. From Sarajevo to Caracas, inequality and scarcity are built into our evolving urban geography. Confronted by this reality, architects must rethink how they can operate within the city, learning from its emerging intelligence and shaping its outcomes to radical ends.

This official collateral event of the 15th International Architecture Exhibition, presented by Urban-Think Tank at ETH Zürich and Baier Bischofberger Architects, asks a simple question: can a museum be a force for change in a city? Inspired by demonstrations of solidarity and popular ownership, the exhibitors redefine it not as an elitist institution dedicated to the display of objects, but as a catalytic urban space. A temporary strategy of adaptive reuse can compel a new reading of the site and its surroundings. Sheathing the museum in a transparent vinyl skin leaves the decay and patina of the original building intact, while juxtaposing the old and new. The overall effect is a détournement, with the design projecting an oppositional message. The historic structure itself is enclosed as an uncanny artefact, subverting conventional notions of a museum as sterile container.

Alongside architectural proposals for The People’s Museum in Sarajevo, the exhibition also incorporates screenings of the film 1395 Days without Red by renowned artist Anri Sala, a new video by Urban-Think Tank, archival broadcasts from Top Lista Nadrealista,  photographs by Charlie Koolhaas, Jim Marshall, and Daniel Schwartz, and the Si/No retrospective of Urban-Think Tank projects and research worldwide, previously shown in Zürich and Munich.

“Examining the 2016 Venice Biennale: “Sarajevo Now,” Archinect, 2016

“Urban-Think Tank Presents ‘Sarajevo Now,'” Designboom, 2016

Sarajevo Now

In 2008, the director of the Architecture Biennale of Venice, Aaron Betsky, invited Urban-Think Tank to participate in the “Experimental” section of the exhibition. U-TT’s installation aimed to insert the discourse of Caracas’s streets into the show, displaying a mix of political propoganda posters taken from city walls along with U-TT’s own satirical design advertisements.

The message was clear: cities are political spaces, especially in the hyper-polarized Venezuelan context. With themes such as oil-funded infrastructure, a housing shortage, informal densification, and the appropriation of unused space, U-TT’s installation confronted viewers with an intense reality that demanded both a critical perspective and civic activism.

Slum Lifting

Urban-Think Tank was selected as one of five architectural offices to develop a vision for the future of mobility in cities. The team focused on Säo Paulo, looking critically at existing infrastructure and transportation patterns in order to imagine future products and processes.

Since the 1930s, Brazilian government investment has focused on the growth of extensive automobile infrastructure, a trend that has diminished investment in alternative modes of mass transit, and resulted in current issues of congestion and infrastructure limitations. This is a key component of the larger, asymmetrical urbanization process. Population density in parts of the central region of the city have diminished, while the urbanization of peripheral areas, especially in the sprawling gated communities and favelas, has exploded. As a consequence, the majority of people within São Paulo face both social and territorial immobility. Innovative new modes and pathways of notion are needed to make São Paulo an accessible and inclusive city for all of its inhabitants.

The resulting proposal, titled, “Urban Parangolé” liberates spaces of the contemporary city, engaging a fully three-dimensional field of mobility. Through the strata of different elevations and temporal flux, city planners introduce new pathways and services that allow São Paulo to support a swider variety of programs and typologies. Technology and democratic planning processes increase accessibility and self-determined public space. Urban Parangolé ultimately proposes the creation of networked villages that stitch together a fragmented city at a human scale.

“Urban Parangolé the Mobile Village,” DesignBoom, 2012

“Urban-Think Tank’s Research on São Paulo,” Audi Urban Future, 2012

“The Audi Urban Future Award 2012,” Domus, 2012

“Audi Urban Future Award,” Bauwelt, 2012

Audi Urban Future Award

Urban Parangolé

The Korean artists, MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho teamed up with U-TT to launch the newest version of the ongoing project, News From Nowhere. Past versions have appeared in documenta (13) in Kassel and the Sullivan Galleries of the School of the Art Institute in Chicago in 2013. News From Nowhere: Zürich Laboratory establishes an interdisciplinary and participatory platform to discuss urgent social, political, and economic issues. Located in the Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, the exhibition brings together artists, architects, designers, scientists, and documentarians in order to discuss issues facing contemporary society. U-TT collaborated with Moon & Jeon to develop a novel adaptation of the classical agora – the place of assembly as well as festive congregation in ancient Greece – in order to ‘reclaim’ urban space. In their vision, the traditionally static agora has been mobilized; it can leave the exhibition space to roam the urban environment. It consists of a converted bicycle (Mobile Agora (Mothership)), which records images and sounds and plays them back, as well as movable stands for spectators (Mobile Agora (Tribune)) that can also be folded and deployed outside, on streets, sidewalks, and plazas. The ensemble is intended as infrastructure enabling the residents of a city to talk to each other and share ideas. Inspired by mobile street vendors’ carts, the bicycle is equipped with media appliances facilitating interaction in a range of formats, including: microphones, speakers, screens, projectors, and recording devices.

Lead designers of the tribunes and mothership were Diego Ceresuela, Alfredo Brillembourg, and Hubert Klumpner. The mobile agora transforms the museum into a site of interaction and communication by serving as a platform for lectures, discussions, and workshops, while also preserving traces of the urban environment of Zürich and other cities around the world. During a performance event held in the run-up to the exhibition, the sound artists and engineers Nadine Schütz, Zlatko Baracskai, and Marcel Aubert recorded Zürich’s urban noises and combined them with music and sounds from all over the world to create a distinctive global urban composition. The city is brought into the museum – the walls of the exhibition space become permeable. In addition, U-TT and its spin-off film company, Gran Horizonte Media, produced a new short film inspired by the work of Moon & Jeon. Entitled La continuación del mundo, the movie portrays a young resident of Medellín, Colombia as she explores the ways in which cities form memories about the future and predict the past. The film was directed and filmed by Daniel Schwartz.

“moon & jeon and urban-think tank broadcast ‘news from nowhere’ in zurich,” Designboom, 2015

“Apocalypse Now,” Monopol Magazine, 2015

Migros Museum of Contemporary Art

News From Nowhere: Zürich Laboratory

Can art and architecture lend a voice to segments of the population that go unheard? The Empower Shack exhibition at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zürich, supported by Swisspearl, presented the ongoing collaboration between U-TT, South African NGO Ikhayalami (‘My Home’), Transsolar, Brillembourg Ochoa Foundation, Meyer Burger, the BLOCK ETH ITA Research Group, and video company. The Empower Shack team was established as a response to conventional approaches in dealing with urban informality, which are unsustainable and painstakingly slow in meeting the immediate needs of the vast majority of South Africa’s urban poor. With its roots in a research, design, and build workshop aimed at developing an innovative, replicable, affordable and sustainable shack prototype for Cape Town’s Khayelitsha (the third largest township in South Africa), the exhibition used film, photography, drawings, painting, and large-scale architectural installations to explore the complexity of living conditions in informal settlements, and the social role of architects in helping to address the economic, ecological and security challenges faced by residents.

“Urban-Think Tank Develops Housing Prototype for South African Slums,” Dezeen, 2014

“Die Chancen des Urbanen Wildwuchses” Greenpeace Magazine, 2014

“urban think tank introduces the empower shack to the slums of western cape,” DesignBoom, 2014

Galerie Eva Presenhuber

Empower Shack

November 2015 – FEBRUARY 2016: Architekturmuseum der TU Munich
October 2015: ETH Zürich, Hauptgebäude Säulenhalle

Urban-Think Tank‘s first retrospective exhibition aims to provoke questions about how design can create better cities. The exhibition is comprised of a modular, off-the-shelf, pipe structure, layered fabric panels, videos, and models.  It shows an overview of U-TT’s research methods, proposals, and built projects from the past two decades. The presented work is premised on an urgent curiosity. Faced with crises of inequality, resource scarcity, and ecological volatility, U-TT argues that designers cannot remain passive. They must ask difficult questions. They must ask themselves and the world at large whether their work can make a meaningful difference. Yes or no?

A companion catalogue in the format of U-TT’s semi-regular publication, SLUM Lab Magazine, was released at the exhibition’s premiere in Zürich. As the tenth issue of SLUM Lab, it is a curated anthology of Urban‑Think Tank’s published work dating back to 2002, including essays, articles, book extracts, excerpts from out-of-print back issues, archival and documentary photo essays, as well as new contributions from Andres Lepik and Justin McGuirk.

“Learning from Caracas,” DAMn Magazine, 2016

“Zwei unkonventionelle ETH-Professoren,” Tages Anzeiger, 2015

Si/No: The Architecture of Urban-Think Tank

21 January 2018 – 24 February 2018 – CIVIC CITIES NETWORK #horspistes13 / Centre Pompidou

In a world where a large majority of the population lives and works in cities, their role and responsibilities are bigger every day. Perhaps more aware of global interdependencies, often more open and progressive than nations, they start to connect and talk in synergy about the great challenges of our planet. With such prospects to contend with, Civic City focuses on ‘public space’ as a new type of proximity common area.

Centre Pompidou, Paris

Places en Relation

Holy contract explores alternative forms of collaboration through the research, conception, design and production of genre-defying performance. By challenging the relationship between art and architecture through the creation of a theatrical project-event.

Urban-Think Tank has been working for the past three years within Cape Town’s informal settlements, and this production is a result of real stories that have emerged through interactions with residents. We approach theater as an alternative means of making and activating city spaces. The script was written during a series of workshops run with the actors in Khayelitsha. Scott-Heron’s work, which often built upon parallels between racial oppression in the United States and South Africa’s Apartheid regime, played a key role during the project’s inception, with existing lyrical content informing and inspiring the creation of new material.

A collaboration with Theatre4Change, a non-profit group based in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, Holy Contract is an independent and experimental theater production. Founded by actor, presenter, writer, and director, Mandisi Sindo (aka Dr Disi), the organization aims to make theater accessible to a diverse audience, while prioritizing the empowerment of actors living in Khayelitsha by bridging the gap between mainstream theater and talent in the townships. Inspired by the late poet and musician, Gil Scott-Heron, Holy Contract is set against the backdrop of South Africa’s contemporary urban challenges, tackling themes around social justice and identity politics. Dialogue switches between Xhosa and English.

The production debuted at Makukhanye (meaning ‘let there be light’) Art Room, a ‘shack theater’ in Khayelitsha. Performances are also scheduled at two additional venues as part of the 2016 Cape Town Fringe Festival — Guga S’Thebe in Langa, and City Hall. The play is conceived in part as a form of artistic activism, intended as the first step towards building a new theater for the community. Learning from the Empower Shack project, research into the existing urban arrangement and planned redevelopment of the neighboring Site B Market Stalls will be conducted. Thando Mpengezi, founder of Makukhanye Art Room and recently elected council member, is in full support of the proposal. Andrew Todd, who worked on the Young Vic theater in London, will join the design team and a link to Theatrum Mundi is planned.

Holy Contract at the Cape Town Fringe Festival

A collaboration with Theatre4Change, a non-profit group based in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, Holy Contract is an independent and experimental theater production. Founded by actor, presenter, writer, and director, Mandisi Sindo (aka Dr Disi), the organization aims to make theater accessible to a diverse audience, while prioritizing the empowerment of actors living in Khayelitsha by bridging the gap between mainstream theater and talent in the townships. Inspired by the late poet and musician, Gil Scott-Heron, Holy Contract is set against the backdrop of South Africa’s contemporary urban challenges, tackling themes around social justice and identity politics. Dialogue switches between Xhosa and English.

Urban-Think Tank has been working for the past three years within Cape Town’s informal settlements, and this production is a result of real stories that have emerged through interactions with residents. We approach theater as an alternative means of making and activating city spaces. The script was written during a series of workshops run with the actors in Khayelitsha. Scott-Heron’s work, which often built upon parallels between racial oppression in the United States and South Africa’s Apartheid regime, played a key role during the project’s inception, with existing lyrical content informing and inspiring the creation of new material.

The production will debut at Makukhanye (meaning ‘let there be light’) Art Room, a ‘shack theater’ in Khayelitsha. Performances are also scheduled at two additional venues as part of the 2016 Cape Town Fringe Festival — Guga S’Thebe in Langa, and City Hall. The play is conceived in part as a form of artistic activism, intended as the first step towards building a new theater for the community. Learning from the Empower Shack project, research into the existing urban arrangement and planned redevelopment of the neighboring Site B Market Stalls will be conducted. Thando Mpengezi, founder of Makukhanye Art Room and recently elected council member, is in full support of the proposal. Andrew Todd, who worked on the Young Vic theater in London, will join the design team and a link to Theatrum Mundi is planned.