Returning for its eighth year, Singapore's annual premiere festival Archifest explores the concept of CROWD, and how it interacts with and becomes an integral aspect of architecture and urbanism. Hailed as a Festival of Ideas for the City, Archifest is a two week long gala focusing this year on the context of Collective Intelligence and Community Capital, and the intricate complexities and interconnectivity between both. The theme is based on the belief that it is "the human aspect of architecture that encourages, facilitates, and enhances the human quality to hold influence and create energy to the makeup of our city."
Architects have always questioned what the cities of the future will look like. In the 1960s and 70s, one of the most prominent advocates of this field of "futurology" within architecture was historian and critic Michel Ragon. In an upcoming exhibition entitled City As A Vision, the FRAC Centre pays tribute to Ragon by presenting both historical and prospective urban concepts by architects throughout the last fifty years.
How has the advancement of the Modern Movement design ethos, through geo-political expansion from the Western world, challenged the cultural foundation and aesthetic heritage of Asia?
The 13th International Docomomo Conference, hosted in Asia for the first time, seeks to explore the powerful complexities of expansion and conflict. Examining the effects of the expansion of a Eurocentric design philosophy into distinctly individual, pre-existing yet violently colonized cultures, the organization declares that "conflict is not necessarily a pejorative but…a challenge for the future."