Future Smart Reads, 28 October 2012

From beautiful, sustainable schools in South Africa to a cloud-like waterfront for Serbia to street art, here are the articles and ideas which grabbed our attention in the past week.

CAPE TOWN: Take your office to the people. This Cape Town based firm plan on moving their offices regularly to various public and semi-public spaces, challenging the notion of public, and questioning the role of public space. Check out their website for more information and where they’ll be next.

SOUTH AFRICA: We cannot control our excitement about these beautiful school buildings in the North West and Limpopo provinces. Both schools Lebone II-Kollege and Vele Secondary School won architectural awards at this year’s AfriSam-SAIA Award for Sustainable Architecture. Read more at Visi. Those lucky children 🙂

MADRID: Cities and their street art (or some of you might call it vandalism) are very important. While some cities pro-actively promote street art, others fine, legislate and prohibit the art. This is a nice project in Madrid that tries to encourage support for the city’s residents to the street art throughout Madrid. Something that could come to Cape Town (and definitely Johannesburg).

ACCRA: We really enjoyed this article by Victoria on how to we measure liveability in African cities. The article tackles obvious issues with current ‘liveability measures’ in the sense that they cater for the traveller/relocating individuals and not actually people living in the cities which they measure. The blog is also really good and you might stay on it longer that you planned.

HARARE: Our neighbouring country has had to make innovative design solutions thanks to their financial and exchange woes. The Eastgate Centre in Harare has been internationally recognised for its ‘passive-cooling‘ design. This design makes it energy-efficient and only uses 10% of the energy needs of a building the same size and built differently.

DELHI: In a great outcome for the people of Delhi, the Delhi High Court rejected an application by a group of residents the scrap the Bus Rapid Transit lanes and allow private vehicles to use them. The court ruled that “We see no escape from the fact that the citizens of Delhi have to, one day or the other, use public transport,”.

BELGRADE: Sou Fujimoto Architects “floating could” concept for the Beton Hala Waterfront Centre was lauded by a jury to be a “brave proposal” that holds the “highest emblematic potential among all of Beton Hala entries”. This also reminds us of the benefits of Architectural Design Competitions – opening up the field and getting innovative designs.

CHINA: This man has already built a 30-story building in 15 days and now plans to build a 220-story skyscraper. His technique involves moving the building inside a factory and simply assembling the pieces to create these skyscrapers on site. Think you’ll go up in one of these? We think it’s a great idea that might help improve the building of other types of buildings.