The Urban Tendency-Netherlands Embassy & Flemish Representation Project

The Urban Tendency takes Hans Ibeling's ‘Horror Vaccuii’ project that examined the renewal of architectural interest in the ‘compact city’, the intrinsically urban, as its starting point and builds on and extends its discussions to other locales. As in the Netherlands, elsewhere there is similar evidence of a zeitgeist –arguably appearing in the 1990s'- for an interest in the city as a place to both live and work. The Urban Tendency is collaboration between the Dutch Architecture Institute, the University of Westminster Architecture School, The Embassy of the Kingdom of The Netherlands in the UK, The Flemish Representation in the UK and The British Council.The exhibition takes Ibeling's project as its starting point and develops it into a 'dialogue' project in which the themes raised by 'Horror Vaccuii' are traced through architecture, urban planning, design and art projects from within the Netherlands, Flanders, the UK and elsewhere. The exhibition will present a broad range of phenomena that highlight these issues, focusing on architectural manifestations, but also tracing how these themes and ideas have been picked up in contemporaneous art, design and 'lifestyle' objects speaking of 'the Urban Tendency'. It is envisaged that this approach will facilitate that the 'non-specialist' public might make the connections between architectural and urban planning thought and practice and the daily processes of life within these evolving urban environments. Whereas architecture and planning have often demonstrated the Utopian and positive drives for engaging with this renewed interest in the compact urban environment, contemporary art, by contrast, has often offered a critique or remained somewhat ambivalent towards the contemporary city. Some artists, however, prefer to turn their attention to the formal issues of the city in their manifestation of art works.

P3University of Westminster35 Marylebone RoadLondon, NW1 5LS

For more information see: http://www.netherlands-embassy.org.uk