For the March edition of School’s Out! we’ve invited Todd Reisz, who has been studying an area that is caught in a building frenzy for more than half a century, the Gulf region. He was part of the team behind Almanakh, wrote Showpiece City. How architecture made Dubai and is presently studying new cities in Saudi Arabia. Todd is an architect and writer and lives in Amsterdam. His work examines the global practice of architecture, specifically how the architect circulates technologies and cultural narratives.

For the March edition of School’s Out! we’ve invited Todd Reisz, who has been studying an area that is caught in a building frenzy for more than half a century, the Gulf region. He was part of the team behind Almanakh, wrote Showpiece City. How architecture made Dubai and is presently studying new cities in Saudi Arabia. Todd is an architect and writer and lives in Amsterdam. His work examines the global practice of architecture, specifically how the architect circulates technologies and cultural narratives.

For the 2nd edition of Back to School with…  we’ve invited architect Rick ten Doeschate to curate a series around the topic of representation and formal expression of public buildings. This first session is focused on the historic perspective of representation and the formal expression of public buildings with a lecture by Lara Schrijver. She will highlight a number of key moments in the 19th and 20th centuries that can help to address the role of architecture today as a complex fabric of the social and the formal.

On April 12, Independent School for the City’s Dean Team Members Michelle Provoost and Wouter Vanstiphout will talk to architect and writer Reinier de Graaf about the significance of terms like “world-class”, “award-winning”, “creative”, “innovative”, “sustainable”, “livable”, “beautiful”, “placemaking” and “wellbeing” in today’s architecture discourse. In his new book ‘architect, verb’, Reinier de Graaf argues that the incorporation of such terms into the glossary of architecture is part of an ongoing trend in which the language to debate architecture is less and less architects’ own, and more and more that of outside forces imposing outside expectations.

For the 2nd edition of Back to School with…  we’ve invited architect Rick ten Doeschate to curate a series around the topic of representation and formal expression of public buildings. In this second event, we will focus on the design perspective. More info about the evening will follow soon.

Maria Roszkowska, our School’s Out! Guest in April, is a founding member of the Paris collective Disnovation. This group works on the themes that we think are the most urgent: they develop post growth imaginaries and practices aiming to surpass the dominant techno-solutionist ideologies. They use research, art and hacking as their instruments, while making exhibitions and books like The Pirate Book and A Bestiary of the Anthropocene. Wildly inspiring and provocative! On Friday afternoon there is a chance to play the game Post Growth Toolkit with Maria, ‘a way to reprogram ourselves out of the economic growth orthodoxy’.

On Friday 28 April, before the School’s Out! lecture, we offer the opportunity to participate in the Post Growth Toolkit Game. The game, developed by Disnovation, is an invitation to reprogram ourselves out of the economic growth orthodoxy. Tickets available for 15 euro (including entrance to the lecture). Get them here.

For the 2nd edition of Back to School with…  we’ve invited architect Rick ten Doeschate to curate a series around the topic of representation and formal expression of public buildings. In this third event, we will focus on the political perspective. More info about the evening will follow soon.

On the 26th of May we will organise the 34rd edition of School’s Out! As always, you can expect an interesting lecture, drinks, bites and a short movie handpicked by AFFR curator Jord den Hollander.

On June 23 we will organise our third school party again, with statements, music, performances, drinks, DJ’s, cocktails and more. Stay tuned. More info soon

In a world dominated by globalisation, automation and consumption, there is real need for authenticity. Making something yourself, alone or as part of a community of makers even feels like an act of resistance. Knitting, crocheting, pottery or needlepoint becomes a willful retreat from the destructive and alienating forces of capitalist economy. Activism becomes craftivism. Betsy Green is a maker, a speaker, a teacher and an activist who is the most eloquent representative of this movement and she will take us on her journey from the world to knitting needle and back again.

Can architecture be more than parachuting shiny objects into the city? Djamel Klouche believes so. Not the object or its iconography is the object of his fascination, but the city as a living organism of forms, spaces, shapes and people, in which architecture should be precisely inserted. His office, L’AUC, finds urbanity anywhere, not just in the precious inner cities, but also in the post war banlieues and the post-industrial wastelands on the edges of the metropolis. Their mission is to understand the contemporary city, through architecture.

Do architects rearrange the city according to their own models and methods, and do we just live in it? Eva Pfannes of the architecture office  Ooze, doesn’t think so. Ooze believes that space is subjective, and that changing it is a matter of personal politics. Therefore Ooze works across all scales, from the ephemeral art project, to the large scale urbanist or architectural project. A sense of urban poetry is what binds their work together and what allows their projects to get under the skin of the urban dweller.