UrbanLab Bowling

Thirst
2017

Although it took us three years to create Bowling*—our 300-page “manifesto” about water, architecture and urbanism—the process was made so much better by the steady, patient guidance and design direction of Rick Valicenti, and the impeccable craft and typography of Taek Kim. For something that took time to forge, working with Rick and Taek made the entirety of the collaborative process a real pleasure.

"Bowling: Water, Architecture, Urbanism asks: Why, as a discipline, do contemporary architects counter huge crises with small ideas? Architects once thought and theorized the huge (both huge problems and huge solutions). In addition to unprecedented opportunities to design large-scale public works projects in the postwar period, architects in the 1950s and '60s eagerly took on the large-scale cultural and environmental problems of the day. Bowling seeks to reposition the contemporary debate of what a city should be by exploring how city-scaled mega-forms can become an updated architecture-based urbanism—a conjecture of what a comprehensible city could be to combat (predicted) crises—through analysis and experimentation. Through the filter of productive contemporary crises, the urban-scaled architecture project can engage and exploit existing infrastructural conditions as a catalyst for urban invention.”

— SARAH DUNN AND MARTIN FELSEN, URBANLAB

Designer
Rick Valicenti
Designer
Taek Hyun Kim