The Korean artists, MOON Kyungwon &#x26; 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 &#x26; 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 <a href="https://vimeo.com/137832738">(Mobile Agora (Mothership))</a>, 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 &#x26; Jeon. Entitled <a href="https://vimeo.com/137828788">La continuación del mundo</a>, 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.
Press Coverage:
<a href="https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/kunst_architektur/die-zweite-chance-1.18603774">“Die zweite Chance,” NZZ, 2015</a>
<a href="https://www.archdaily.com/776127/news-from-nowhere-zurich-laboratory">“News from Nowhere,” ArchDaily, 2015</a>
<a href="https://www.designboom.com/design/urban-think-tank-moon-kyungwon-jeon-joonho-news-from-nowhere-mobile-agora-10-30-2015/">“moon &#x26; jeon and urban-think tank broadcast ‘news from nowhere’ in zurich,” Designboom, 2015</a>
<a href="http://www.monopol-magazin.de/Moon-Kyungwon-und-Jeon-Joonho-im-migros-museum-Zuerich?photo=0">“Apocalypse Now,” Monopol Magazine, 2015</a>

Migros Museum of Contemporary Art

News From Nowhere: Zürich Laboratory

Exhibitions

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.
Press Coverage:
<a href="http://urban-think%20tank%20develops%20housing%20prototype%20for%20south%20african%20slums/">“Urban-Think Tank Develops Housing Prototype for South African Slums,” Dezeen, 2014</a>
<a href="http://www.greenpeace.org/switzerland/Global/switzerland/publications/Greenpeace/Magazin/2014/1403%20Magazin/1410_GP_MAG_3-14_Urbaner_Wildwuchs.pdf">“Die Chancen des Urbanen Wildwuchses” Greenpeace Magazine, 2014</a>
<a href="https://www.designboom.com/architecture/urban-think-tank-empowershack-slums-western-cape-382014/">“urban think tank introduces the empower shack to the slums of western cape,” DesignBoom, 2014</a>

Galerie Eva Presenhuber

Empower Shack

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 &#x26; 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

November 2015 – FEBRUARY 2016: <a href="https://www.architekturmuseum.de/ausstellungen/si-no-architecture-urban-think-tank/">Architekturmuseum der TU Munich</a>
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.
Selected Press Coverage
<a href="https://www.damnmagazine.net/2016/01/14/learning-from-caracas/">“Learning from Caracas,” DAMn Magazine, 2016</a>
<a href="https://www.designboom.com/architecture/si-no-the-architecture-of-urban-think-tank-exhibition-10-20-2015/">“Si/No Exhibition” DesignBoom, 2015</a>
<a href="https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/wissen/technik/caracas-ist-ueberall/story/13497226">“Zwei unkonventionelle ETH-Professoren,” Tages Anzeiger, 2015</a>

Location	ETH Zürich Haubtgebäude
Year	2015
Exhibition Design	Alfredo Brillembourg & Hubert Klumpner
Curator	Andres Lepik, Director of Architekturmuseum der TU Munich
Exhibition Managers	Daniel Schwartz, Danny Wills, Helle Bendixen, Ayca Beygo
Graphic Design	Claudia Wildermuth
Graphic Design Consultant	Ruedi Baur (Intégral)
Design Assistant	Silvia Balzan
Editorial	Daniel Schwartz, Alexis Kalagas
Structural Design	Danny Wills
Student Assistants	Jack Isles, Kosha Joian Ahmadi, Alexandra Meuche, Callisté Mastrandréas, Hélène Tabèze
Illustrated Typography	Lea Becker
Supported by	ETH Zürich, D-ARCH, NSL Architekturmuseum der TU München Creation Baumann + GF + Adunic Zumtobel Lighting, Schneider-Weisse

Si/No: The Architecture of Urban-Think Tank