China’s Emerging Metropolises
Amsterdam, De Balie, Thursday February 11th, 20.30

In the next ten years, more than 350 million Chinese people will move from the countryside to the city. Most Europeans have never heard of Chongqing, Kunming or Shijiazhuang. Yet these cities in Central and Western China are rapidly turning into the big brothers of metropolises like Chicago, Madrid or Rio.

China correspondent Michiel Hulshof and architect Daan Roggeveen are the founders of the Go West Project, a research project that studies the development of these emerging metropolises. On Thursday, February 11 they give a lecture at De Balie in Amsterdam. How do these cities develop? Does China build a new type of city? What does the growth of these cities mean for China and the rest of the world? The lecture will end with a panel discussion about these topics. The panel consists of several China watchers, amongst whom Annette Nijs, director Global Initiative of the China Europe International Business School and author of the book ‘China with New Eyes’ and Michelle Provoost, director of the International New Town Institute.

Also on February 11, De Balie will open a photo exhibition about the performance of the Go West Project at the Shenzhen / Hong Kong Architecture Biennale in December, where they asked 6 taxi drivers from 6 different Chinese cities to drive across the country to Shenzhen.

Time : February 11, 2010 at 20.30 pm
Location : De Balie
Address: Kleine Gartmanplantsoen 10, Amsterdam (near Leidseplein)
Admission : Free
More info on the Go West Project:

MIMOA is following Go West Project and promotes their work as part of a mediapartnership. Do you also want MIMOA as a media partner for your event? Contact us, and hear all about our reach.

casa mercedes, in A Coruña, Spain

Content management.

Choose your medium, set your content
Just like the amount of photos is set to a maximum, we also have a limit on text. It forces you to write down only the essentials. In 1000 characters, including spaces, every one can convey a message, and if not, you can link the publication to any other web page leading to more information. Providing architectural content on a medium such as ours, forced us to rethink the character and size (or length for that matter) of information. We want to see large size real-life photos we’re not writing books on-line. Also, drawings are pretty difficult to publish. How many times do you run into an architects’ website and find scaled, low resolution, blurred illustrations with indefinable details – probably texts? Apart from the visual restrictions, drawings are juridical gremlins. We’re not including these into our website, but will always link a project to the architects’ site, where you can probably find them. “The first is that the Web is not a medium of data, information, knowledge, wisdom, or content – it is a medium for linking data, information, knowledge, wisdom, and content. Just as writing a newspaper column isn’t like writing a novel”. From “Lessons Learned: We Still Don’t Get the Web” article published in Wired 04.29.1997, Author: Michael Schrage.

Take your content with you
“I envisioned myself wandering around a city with a hand-held device such as a pda or an iPhone viewing a map that tells me where I am, and what beautiful architecture exists around the corner”. Quoted from an email send to MIMOA by Ryan Taube.

One major advantage of having only digital content is its mobility. The use of wireless Internet will only continue to grow and we see a great opportunity for visitors to be able to reach MIMOA with their mobile phones, or other mobile devices (tomtom?). Travelling is becoming easier, cheaper and the number of city trips (in Europe) is growing. There will be a major change in the use of travel-guides and other city sources. Travellers don’t want to spend hours searching for information, buying heavy travel books, nor do they want to walk around conscious with their small guide book in their hands. As a global traveller you want inside niche information on the spot.

To see all posts in this series on ‘how we did it’, type ‘MIMOA: the story’ into the search bar on top, or click on this category.

Works carried out by students usually disappear into drawers after presentation to a relatively small college audience. There the work remains invisible. : output wants to change that. : output is the biggest international competition for students in design and architecture. You can now submit your work to the : output award.

Deadline: February 15, 2010
: output Grand Prix: 3.000 Euro
Publication of the best projects in the yearbook : ouptut

Publication, Grand Prix and scholarship
The works selected by an international jury will be published in the yearbook : output. The best work of all submissions will be honoured with the : output Grand Prix which includes a scholarship of 3.000 Euro (currently about 4.500 US$). With this scholarship we want to foster talented young blood designers and also present the high quality of the work which is done at design colleges and art schools to a broader public.

open-output.org
On the new platform open-output.org we will present all projects which have been submitted to the : output award*. The : output Grand Prix and the projects which have received a distinction will also be featured in the „: output hall of fame“ on the platform.

The Jury
All works to be included in the yearbook : output and the winner of the : output Grand Prix are selected by an international jury of renowned designers and educators.

> Kate Moross (graphic design | UK)
> Elio Caccavale (product design | I/UK)
> N.N. (architecture)
> Juliette Bellocq (graphic design | USA)
> Florian Pfeffer (: output | NL/GER)

The : output foundation
: output is a non-profit organisation in Amsterdam and international platform for colleges and students in design and architecture. They organize the largest competition for design and architecture students worldwide, foster young talents and initiate innovation projects in order to connect companies, cultural and political instutions with young designers.

Contact and further inquiries:
Friederike Lambers
: output
Keizersgracht 8  | 1015 CN Amsterdam | Netherlands

T 0031-20-4279020
F 0031-20-6274477
www.open-output.org

: output student award is promoted by MIMOA – the online architecture guide. Do you also want MIMOA as a media partner for your event? Contact us, and hear all about our reach.

Today we’ve reached another mighty milestone: 3.000 projects live on MIMOA! And the honour of achieving this amazing number of 3.000 is due to: Andrea Tognon Architecture with their publication of House O in Teolo, Italy.

Three days ago we announced getting close to this big moment and called up our community to start a competition: who would upload the 3.000st project? It apparently motivated a lot of you to share your work and favorite architecture, but only one could be the winner and that is: House O by Andrea Tognon Architecture.
But ofcourse this is just one of the many beautiful architecture projects featured on MIMOA. We’d like to thank all of our contributors, who have helped MIMOA to become the valuable worldwide architecture guide that it is right now. It can only improve and grow even more. We’re looking forward to all the projects we will receive and publish in the future.

As we’re a great fan of statistics, here are some facts & figures:

An Overview
3.000 projects: designed by 1928 architects; in cooperation with 1274 project teams; uploaded by 584 contributors and recorded by 1306 photographers.

By Project Type
Architecture (2746)
Infrastructure (104)
Interior (318)
Landscape (90)
Public space (247)
Urbanism (84)

By Completion date
Before 1950 (134)
1950-1970 (142)
1970-1980 (57)
1980-1990 (84)
1990-2000 (414)
2000-2003 (389)
Later than 2003 (1777)

By Location
All projects are situated in 72 different countries. But where is most architecture to be found on MIMOA?
This is the top 10:
1- Netherlands (581)
2- Spain (352)
3- Germany (273)
4- United States (233
5- United Kingdom (202)
6- Italy (190)
7- Switzerland (145)
8- France (141)
9- Portugal (136)
10- Denmark (73)
High time to beat the Dutch I would say….

By Designer
Which architect has most projects online on MIMOA? Either uploaded by themselves or published by fans.
This is the top 10 and also all architects with more than 20 projects:
1- Foster & Partners (37)
2- Herzog and De Meuron (32)
3- Alvaro Siza Vieira (29)
4- Gehry Partners (27)
5- Santiago Calatrava (25)
6- MVRDV (24)
7- AH Asociados (22)
8- Jean Nouvel (22)
9- RAU (21)
10- Renzo Piano (21)
Also: over 40 architects are represented with over 10 publications of their work.

By popularity
We invite everyone to share your opinion on architecture. You can do that by leaving a comment and rate a project.
Ratings are counted, averaged per project and listed here. For a very long time Therme Vals, by all-time favourite Peter Zumthor was steady placed at number one. Until last summer, when the Munich Olypmic Stadium by Behnisch Architekten climed in the charts.
Looking at best scoring architecture firms in the current top 20, we see that a lot changed since our blogpost on December 31. Just a few architects have more than 1 project in the Top Rated Top 20:
1- Peter Zumthor (3 projects)
2- Valerio Olgiati (2 projects)
2- Le Corbusier (2 projects)
2- Mansilla + Tuñón (2 projects)

Also want to share your opinion and/or rate a project?
Up until now you’ve written 869 comments on projects that are published on MIMOA. One project caps everything and may be considered questionable honour for collecting no less than 63 comments: Justice and Detention Centre in Leoben, Austria. You’re welcome to share your thoughts on any project. Just leave a message underneath a project and let everyone know how many stars a project deserves according to you.
Please mind: rating is only possible after login!
You don’t have a account yet? Register here.

Enough statistics for now. We’re off to 4.000!

In September 2007 we launched MIMOA. Now, two years after these first steps, this young community of architecture lovers is growing fast.
Thank you! For sharing thousands travel experiences, photos, stories and details of the architecture you’ ve visited, designed and built. Together.
(Hence this image).

In the spirit of the new year and the usual annual reporting we’ve made a retrospect of 2009 with a selection of happenings and a list of things we want to do this new year. 2010 Starts off with a whole set of plans to make MIMOA even better, quicker, easier and above all more fun.

We’re interested to get your response. Do you also have ideas, suggestions, criticism, a wish-list, a no-list (to vote against something), visions, ambitions to share with us? Write a comment underneath this post. 

We wish you all the best for the exiting year 2010, with new opportunities and new plans. Thank you all for contributing, your feedback and support.

Main photo by Wojtek Gurak, created with Mosaickr, out of over 500 different photos tagged with ‘architecture’ on Flickr, see credits list.
Click this thumb to see the project, and original photo.

Nordic Countries Pavilion for the Venice Biennale, photo by seier + seier

Content management.

Editing before publishing
The basic project entries are reviewed before publishing, checked on required minimal information and checked for errors. As soon as a new project is submitted, MIMOA reviews and (sometimes) edits the data, adds information where possible, and puts it on-line. We keep the right to change the texts a bit, but will always respect the personal contributions. We also check copyrights of all data that others contribute. You might think that this is quite a lot of work, why not use a more wiki-like system? Many “wiki-like” sites have major problems on keeping the information consistent, correct and complete. That is why we need an “editing panel”, a gentle expert guidance to maintain order. And it pays off: Eventually it’s only once a year that we’re really surprised to see what people try to upload.

Copyrights on content
We respect the intellectual property of others, and we expect our users to do the same. MIMOA does not claim copyright on the photos or texts, which always remains with the author. If we believe that someone is publishing content without the rights to distribute it, we simply don’t publish it. We ask the contributor if he or she has a photo that they’ve taken themselves. Members are very understanding about this. The photos do not have to be of a professional standard, the object just needs to be recognizable. People need to register before contributing content, thus we can always get in touch with them if we, or any external party have any questions, or image requests.

To see all posts in this series on ‘how we did it’, type ‘MIMOA: the story’ into the search bar on top, or click on this category.

Photo: ‘the light from the distant future’
by Christian Beirle Gonzalez

Happy New Year to you all!
We wish you all the best for the exiting year 2010, with new opportunities and new plans. After finishing the long list of achievements and developements in 2009, we’ve summarised a list of things we want to do this year.

MIMOA Mobile. The Layar launch has showed us the user-interest and possibilities. This is only a kick-start into any mobile product. MIMOA in your pocket: take your content with you! In this range of opportunities the iPhone App is definitely next on our list. Still looking for a sponsor; someone to believe in us and wants to cooperate to conceive this wonderful mobile product. No time to waste.

Widgets to share our content easier. Almost ready to be embedded on your website. Please let us know if you’re interested to add your favourite projects, your contributed projects, your visited projects, your photographed projects, your guide or just the latest additions to your website – and we’ll start working on your personal widget.

City Pages already half way: the pages are there, now the content, editing, and styling. On these pages you will get some more architecture related- information on a certain city. Hope to show you a finished page soon.

The Mi guide is a great success, one of the best used features of MIMOA. And we hope to give it a layout-make-over and a map (yeah!), more custom-possibilities and maybe even tours. That’s what you said you want (some time ago already).

More cooperation with local architecture information centers, architecture events, city marketeers, travel organisations, magazines, student assemblies, design competitions, guides, and well, architecture lovers in general.

More trips, and that’s not just travelling more, but maybe even start organising MIMOA-trips ourselves! Yes, we know, quite a vague ‘wish’ on this list, but this ‘idea’ is all there is right now. 

To finish it up, we’re thinking of organising MIMOA Event ‘10 for all MIMOA members. Barcelona? Porto? New York? When? No definite plans yet. Any suggestions?

And well, here are two determined intentions:

• Making MIMOA self-supporting and turn this personal passion (and shared with thousands, read our story on the tiny slice or ‘niche market’) into a truly sustainable initiative.
• Travelling more, visiting old cities, new countries and meeting more lovely people. Can’t wait to get there.

With only a few uploads to go, we can soon celebrate the next milestone of 3.000 unique projects live! 

And that’s just one year after we reached the amount of 2.000 projects. Great score! In the last two years over 7.700 individuals have registered on MIMOA, and all add to the website by sharing their experience, photos and work, to help find those projects and make the lives of other architecture-lovers a bit easier.

At this very moment we’re counting 2.984 projects. Let’s see how fast we can get to the 3.000: get those images off of your cameras, and publish your recent shootings! You can keep track here  to see how many projects are live right now.

Here’s a small incentive: the contributor who has submitted project no. 3.000, will receive a free original Mi shirt. If the winner already owns one, we will think of another suitable reward. (Uncomplete entries and projects that are already live do not count). 

So start right away: login (or register first) and go here to upload a project. Good luck!

Photo: ‘In/Out’
by Christian Beirle Gonzalez

In the spirit of the new year and the usual annual reporting we’ve also made retrospect of 2009 with a selection of happenings:

Offline activities:

• To start with the most memorable (and time-consuming) self-organised off-line activity: 2009 was the year of the first MIMOA Event. We celebrated MIMOA’s second birthday in Rotterdam with you, and had great fun during the tour: city-cycling with 25 architects from all over the globe. In the evening we managed to pack the architects’-bar of Rotterdam and fill it with another 150 architecture lovers. Great day. Very rewarding.
• In March we were invited to explain the story behind the work process of MIMOA, to a group of interaction designers, product developers, digital artists and performers, at This Happened in Utrecht. We shared a lot of interesting details about the development and the necessary steps to bring the initial idea to a fully functional product.
• For the third consecutive year MIMOA was present at Picnic Conference & Festival, where the MIMOA market stall drew an interested creative crowd of business men and new media entrepreneurs.
• On a hot full afternoon in summer, we gave a presentation on our experience with ‘user generated content’, ‘nichemarketing’, and focus in communication to the collegues and relations of communication-firm De Wijde Blik .

Online activities:

• In 2009 the media-partnerships took off and MIMOA supported several organisations to promote their activities and events. Some of them invited us to join in person, and we travelled to the World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, the Annual Architectural Congress and a one-day lecture-marathon by famous Dutch architects, both in Rotterdam.
• One special mention is the cooperation with the Croatian architecture magazine Oris. MIMOA offered an on-line preview of several Croatian projects covered in the off-line exhibition, on show at the Amsterdam Architecture Centre, Arcam.
• In April the Mi shirt was born, and already has a lot of fans, wearing MIMOA all around the world. Get yours here.

We love numbers, so here’s some lists:

• This year we’ve grown from 4470 registered members to 7747. An increase of 173%!
• The average daily visitors grew from 1438 (2008) to 2402 (2009).
• The total unique visitors this year was 555.964 persons, an increase of 159% compared to the 350.353 people of 2008. October is by far the most popular month with 48.628 (in 2008) and 89.638 unique visitors(2009). March is runner up, with 59.525 unique visitors this year.
• In the YAMoPo (Yet Another Most Popular Architecture Sites Ranking) 2009 we ended up on the 17th place! 
• We’ve published 88 blogposts on this blog, that’s an average of 7,3 per month – we easily surpassed the 4,5 frequency of 2008.
• Using Twitter for the first year, we’ve tweeted 338 times, and have 527 followers.

Projects on MIMOA:

• The amount of projects has grown with over 1000 added in 2009. We ended the year with 2980 projects online (and 1179 unfinished staging projects – submit them before someone else does!).  
• The Top Rated Project of 2009 started off with the all-time favourite Therme Valls, by all-time favourite Peter Zumthor. This project was number one untill summer, but in the course of the autumn, the Munich Olypmic Stadium climed in the charts, and has reached number one at December 31.
• Best scoring architecture firms in the top 20 on December 31 are: Peter Zumthor (no surprise really) with 5 projects, Valerio Olgiati (4 projects), Herzog & de Meuron (3 projects), Alvaro Siza Vieira (3 projects), Le Corbusier (2 projects), Mansilla + Tuñón (2 projects) and MVRDV (2 projects).

On the development side of the website:
We must admit: we’ve been less productive on this field than the first years of MIMOA-existence in 2007 & 2008. After 2 years of non-stop programming we slowed down the pace, to re-evaluate and set priorities. And also, to be able to give the mentioned activities the time & energy needed. Here’s the mayor stuff of 2009:

• We’ve redesigned the project detail page, one of the most important pages on MIMOA. The make-over enhanced the interactive features, such as the comments-box, the rating functionality and created more links to and from the projects. To share more.
• In November we announced the availability of a MIMOA content layer for the fascinating augmented reality application Layar. Take MIMOA with you on your iPhone or Android phone. We’ve got some great response. A good warming up for the MIMOA iPhone app. 
• Also in November we started a new feature: City Pages with extra travel information added to each popular city. Still under construction, but surely a new and exiting development for 2010.
• And some less-visible but not less important improvements: the top rated list is sorted; we’ve optimised some browser related styling issues; and reoganised the project-loading-process on the map.

We’d like to thank you all for contributing, your feedback and support.
Next post: read all about our plans for 2010.

Content management.

Consistent entries
All the design strategy, user research and interaction design in the world isn’t going to get our users to the information they need without a sound architecture to guide them. When we started, other interactive (user generated) databases had major difficulties showing their information in a clear, comparable and comprehensive way, and at the same time maintaining a high quality of content. We designed our pages in such a way that all the information is structured in exactly the same manner. Input by third parties creates an extra variable and requires a clear structured content management system. Consistent data entry is crucial.

Adding or improving?
Furthermore, subsequently added information (data that is added to the database after publication) is either separated from the original entry in new fields (for example the comments), or it is an update of the original data. We have a hard limit on text input. To a hardcore data-collector this may sound senseless, but MIMOA is not for enlarging the collection and offering more data, we would prefer to improve the quality of the information, boiling it down to its essentials. This is a fundamental element of our content management system: focussed on condensing data and spending less time on managing additions, supplements and appendixes. Lean and easier to edit the data, change or improve the structure, but above all: the right records are easier to find. Oh, and yes; it keeps our storage costs down. Less is more.

To see all posts in this series on ‘how we did it’, type ‘MIMOA: the story’ into the search bar on top, or click on this category.