Open House Worldwide (OHWW) is pleased to announce the full programme of the  network’s first collaborative event on its relaunched and redesigned website and visual identity. 

www.openhouseworldwide.org

The festival will run as a non-stop 48 hour livestream, broadcast from the Open  House Worldwide website, and features contributions from six continents and  more than forty cities from the network and beyond. 

The festival will begin at midnight Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) on Saturday  November 14th, with an introduction by George Kafka, OHWW coordinator, and a digital gathering of representatives from different cities in the network. The rest of the festival is divided into one hour slots and organised into thematic clusters  which seek to address the most important issues facing architecture and urbanism  today.

Thematic Clusters 

Housing 

Highlights of the housing cluster include a presentation of Sonnwendviertel Ost, a  cooperatively designed neighbourhood in Vienna, a focus on the urbanisation of  informal neighbourhoods in southern Buenos Aires and a discussion on low-income  housing in Lagos. In addition, a new documentary by the Canadian Centre for  Architecture (CCA), titled What it Takes to Make a Home, will be screened. 

Infrastructure and Mobility 

Green transport and 21st century masterplanning are central to the Infrastructure  and Mobility clusters, with events looking into the adaptation of the Cerda  expansion to the contemporary needs of Barcelona, a progressive take on the car  park as typology and a walk through centuries of history at Palma’s harbour. A  special event curated by Mexico City-based gallery, Proyector, features ten young  architecture practices making visible the otherwise hidden infrastructural systems  in our cities. 

Climate in Crisis 

In the age of Fridays for Future, Open House Worldwide is proud to centre the  voices of young people in discussions on the climate crisis and architecture. Youth Manifesto!, a panel of 15-18-year-olds coordinated by Open House Dublin and  filled via an open call, will hold the discipline of architecture to account. Other  highlights of the Climate in Crisis clusters include an exploration of three European  houses exhibiting novel approaches to designing with the climate in mind and an  exploration of the Santa Catarina river in Monterrey. 

The Social Life of Cities 

The newest members of the Open House Worldwide network, Open House Taipei,  open the social life clusters with an investigation into everyday life in the city  during the Covid-19 pandemic, and Open House Seoul lead us in thinking about  how our relationships to domestic spaces have changed under lockdown.  Elsewhere, movements for urban social justice are highlighted in a discussion led  by Open House New York and the meaning of an “Open City” is dissected through  the lenses of gender and disability. 

Public Spaces 

Travel beyond your lockdowns with the Public Spaces clusters, exploring  everything from Athenian street art to the Chicago riverside, via the City of London  and the Sao Paulo work of Lina Bo Bardi. A special event curated by Julia King and  Akil Scafe-Smith looks at the role of young people in shaping public spaces in  London. 

Heritage! and Worldwide Design

As with Open House events all over the world, the OHWW festival also celebrates  wonderfully designed spaces and places. Gorgeous sets of films commissioned by  Open House cities guide us through some of the architectural highlights of Dublin,  Vilnius, Prague and more. In addition, a discussion hosted by Open House Brisbane  focuses on the emerging vernacular architecture of Minjerribah island and the team  at Open House Tallinn takes us to the hulking modernist ruin of the Linnahall,  recently used as a major location in Chritopher Nolan’s Tenet.