GOOD Design: Solving a City's Biggest Problems

GOOD Design: Solving a City's Biggest Problems
swissnex San Francisco - swissnex
Architects and designers everywhere are engrossed by questions of cultural sustainability, innovative design, and suitable living conditions in the ever-expanding urban centers of the world.

As part of the Architecture in the City Festival in San Francisco, swissnex hosts the exhibition Teaching Architecture: 3 Positions Made in Switzerland, which expresses three points of view on urban architecture from three leading Swiss architecture schools.

“Hong Kong in Zurich: A Typological Transfer,” from a team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, asks what Hong Kong’s iconic skyscrapers and urban apartment blocks would look like in the Swiss city -- and how the architecture would need to change to fit in.

A project titled "19 Important Buildings," from the Accademia di Architettura Mendrisio, explores what makes a building "good" using examples from around the world. And from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, "Radical Mix in Hanoi" looks at vertical urbanism and the architecture of communication.

Teaching Architecture was presented by the Istituto Svizzero di Roma at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale. A dedicated catalog designed by Ludowic Balland accompanies the exhibition.

The Teaching Architecture exhibition in San Francisco is a project of the U.S.-wide program ThinkSwiss-Brainstorm the Future. As a leading country in science, research, and technology, Switzerland is working with its American counterparts to address key global topics such as sustainability to better understand trends and arrive at solutions.

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Now in its 8th year, the Architecture and the City Festival in San Francisco is the largest architectural festival in the US, showcasing tours, films, exhibitions, lectures, and interactive workshops all over the city. Organized by AIA San Francisco and the Center for Architecture + Design, the 2011 theme, Architecture of Consequence, will demonstrate how progressive design and creative problem solving can address many of our most pressing urban issues, from decreased social cohesion to unsustainable food systems.