Volume 64 – World Tour 2023

This issues itinerary covers a whole lot of Europe, before heading East, with multiple stopovers in China, Japan, and Indonesia. A short detour across Australia is then taking you to Mexico and The US, allowing you to take in and admire our small cave of wonders:

22 contributions by at least 18 nationalities, covering curious, fun, or engaging developments in design and architecture in 17 countries. Small but significant snippets from the enormity of our globe, our cultures, and the current moment. Fragments that reflect a world struggling, but as much an exercise on what we collectively share. It’s about losing: from the Roman column in the Chinese countryside to pop culture in Japan, the scruffy Chinese 90s, and a magnificent Swiss Ice-Beauty. Tales about cultural transformation: an Indonesian post-colonial mind-fuck in Jakarta, reflecting the ugliness of Australia due to mindless imperialism, while appreciating the complexity of documenting Indian urban and cultural development, or describing the pervasiveness of the globalized leisure-driven smooth city. Of parables: of a tale of two Mexican airports, being naked in Denmark, and developing the next generation of cars in the US. There’s criticism on the Right with a Czech house built for a right-wing politician, and criticism on the Left with an inability to effectively express itself in Venice, and a glimpse at the other building biennale we have been collectively ignoring in Munich. Most importantly, perhaps, we party together from the Adriatic coast to the Chinese Berghain in Beijing.

VOLUME 64’s World Tour 2023 is a project by Archis and the the Nieuwe Instituut, in collaboration with the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and TU Delft’s The Berlage.