YES IS MORE . Architecture Exhibit

For class we were required to write about the exhibit YES IS MORE. This exhibit was a obnoxiously intense architecture exhibit located in Christianshvn. (Photo, Right) I went on the closing day of the exhibit so it was quite packed. The theme for the exhibit was comic book-based with each building representing its own story in the comic. (Photo, Right) I immediately got the impression that the architect was trying too hard to sell this to the general public.

There were numerous buildings/planned developments on display in the exhibit but for the purposes of this post, I will only talk about ‘A Welfairtytale’ because it was most closely related to one of the topics I am researching in Denmark, which is transportation. ‘A Welfairytale’ was designed for an expo in the city of Shanghai, China in 2010. The idea was to bring 1,001 city bikes to China, showcase the ‘Little Mermaid’ monument that is Copenhagen’s most famous landmark, and allow the Chinese to experience a harbor bath. The comic book noted that the design’s main objective was to focus in sustainability and increase quality of life. I’m not convinced because the project has no references to how it fits in with its surroundings.

Here is ‘A Welfairytale’ (Photo, Right). The most striking feature is that the Danish pavilion has bicycle infrastructure looped around itself and is covered in the bicycles that were mentioned earlier. The harbor bath at the base of the pavilion is water brought in a tanker from Denmark and the “Little Mermaid” is situated in the bath. The project does not go into any details about how these features related to an increased quality of life or sustainability.

In Jane Jacobs book, The Death and Life of Great American cities, she focuses in a detailed way about how city life and the built urban environment is directly related to how people interact in those spaces. For instance, having porches on the front of a house situated on a residential street influences the way people interact with their neighbors and the street life and bring “eyes” to the street which help to keep it safe. For the project, ‘A Welfairytale,’ there was little consideration as to how people would find the bicycles, why they would be drawn to come inside the building, why they would have their bathing suit in the first place (to swim in the man-made harbor baths) and how people would interact in the building and on the street.

Other projects were named with such buzz-phrases as “Urban Integration” and “Post Petroleum Palace”(Photo, Right) with little or no mention of how they would achieve the integration on a specific site or which features made the palace post oil. The exhibit was very superficial because it seemed to focus on the pop-culture aspects of architecture without really developing any true meaning to the phrases that were used to describe the projects. Jane Jacobs would probably roll over.