May 29

Oggetti Disobbedienti by Giulio Iacchetti @ Triennale Design Museum

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PrintDesign-addicts and fans can’t miss Giulio Iacchetti’s solo show, opening today at Triennale Design Museum and on until june 28. The exhibit, Oggetti Disobbedienti (literally, Disobeying Objects) is a survey over Iacchetti’s creative production and feature the most paradigmatic objects of  his conceptual approach and skill to provoke and create sense-generating objects. Read more

May 28

Speed Limits, CCA exhibit on contemporary diktat

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(Images & text courtesy of CCA)
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Seattle, 1983 CCA Collection, Montréal © Tod E. Gangler

The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) has presented Speed Limits, an exhibition devoted to the inescapable presence of speed in modern life, in art, architecture and urbanism, and in the graphic arts, economics, and the material culture of the industrial age and our own age of information. The exhibition spotlights the hundredth anniversary of Italian Futurism, the movement to which we owe the famous statement that appeared in its founding manifesto: “The world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.”

The exhibition is co-organised with The Wolfsonian-Florida International University in Miami Beach and is curated by Jeffrey T. Schnapp of the Stanford Humanities Lab.

Speed Limits is on view at the CCA until October 12, 2009.

Exhibition Speed Limits, 2009. View of the installation at the CCA. © CCA, Montréal

Exhibition Speed Limits, 2009. View of the installation at the CCA. © CCA, Montréal

Critical rather than commemorative in spirit, Speed Limits explores a single Futurist theme from the standpoint of its contemporary legacies. The exhibition probes the powers and limits of the modern era’s cult of speed in the domains of circulation and transit, construction and the built environment, efficiency, the measurement and representation of rapid motion, and the mind/body relationship. A variety of objects spanning a 100-year cultural history reveal the long-standing polarities and closely intertwined relationship between the fast and the slow.

“In recent years, the Canadian Centre for Architecture has undertaken a number of  projects addressing the question of limits – the limits of visual perception in Sense of the City, of postwar notions of progress in 1973: Sorry, Out of Gas, and of Modern urbanism  and top-down planning in Actions: What You Can Do With the City,”stated Mirko Zardini, Director of the CCA. “All of these exhibitions identified inventive and original  ways of challenging some founding myths of contemporary life, while bringing to light practices that are shaping daily experience. Speed Limits investigates one of the greatest of these myths, and challenges us to find alternatives to the reliance on speed in contemporary society.”

Presented in the CCA’s main galleries, the exhibition features more than 240 objects from the collections of the CCA and The Wolfsonian, including books, photographs, advertising posters, architectural drawings, publications, and videos, which together illustrate the debate about speed and present a multifaceted view that is both a defence of speed and an implicit criticism of its negative effect on contemporary life. Covering the period from 1900 to the present, the exhibition analyzes the evolution of the process of production and construction, the beginnings of prefabrication, the household, traffic and transit, and the workplace, as viewed through the prism of speed, and focuses on the opposite poles of productivity and hyperactivity.

View of the installation at the CCA. © CCA, Montréal

View of the installation at the CCA. © CCA, Montréal

The exhibition is conceived and installed in a linear fashion, each of the five distinct but interrelated themes is explored in its own gallery: Pace, Traffic, Fast Construction, Efficiency, Motion Capture and Measuring, and Mind/Body. Read more

May 27

Mapping advertising, Ad-busting, and the future of interfaces

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(By Nicola Bozzi)

Thanks to the internet, we now own more knowledge than we can possibly absorb. As a consequence, the web is more and more about interfaces, about the way we’re served this cognitive over-abundance and the graphic ways we can filter it. Interfaces become the aesthetics of the latest postmodernity: when all information is common, to filter, choose, and even discard it, is an act of elegance, a semiotic gesture more significant than information itself. So, the explosion of maps, indexes, graphs and charts over the internet becomes the world wide web’s most relevant content. Read more

May 26

More with less
Cibic&Partners and Dogtrot for HHD

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After inviting you to visit Pocket Landscapes, we cannot but refresh you with the functional oases that Cibic&Partners, in co-operation with Dogtrot, have presented at the Milan Salone this year.

(Images and press release courtesy of Cibic&Partners)

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Photos © Michele Nastasi

More with less. Enjoy life in a changing world.
Cibic&Partners and Dogtrot for HHD.

Research that goes beyond the aesthetics of the new, abandons the reduction of content to form, and completely rethinks everyday living. Chance forces human beings to start over, from scratch, challenging everything, freeing up new energies and new relationships. A lighter world, from everyday objects to living spaces, vegetable gardens, flower gardens, because only by designing an entire system of life is it possible to glimpse new modes of behavior based on a serene balance between man and nature. The objective of the design intervention is to conceive and construct “oasis spots” to encourage a new way of living and approaching free time, in line with changing concepts of lifestyle and beauty. A microworld that pays more attention to the poetry of natural settings, the sustainability of choices in construction, the flexibility of increasingly nomadic, dynamic domestic needs. Read more

May 25

2009 Riba Awards announced

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After the Italian Gold Medal for Architecture, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced the winners of the 2009 RIBA Awards, RIBA Awards for architectural excellence. 97 winning projects are in the UK, 6  in the rest of the EU. The RIBA Stirling Prize shortlist will be drawn from the 103 RIBA Award winners.

Curve, East Midlands, project design by Rafael Vinoly Architects, photo © Peter Cook

Curve, East Midlands, project design by Rafael Vinoly Architects, photo © Peter Cook

The RIBA Award-winning buildings range from an Observatory at Kielder in Northumberland to the Liverpool One regeneration and retail masterplan, from a private house at Dungeness to Wexford Opera House in South East Ireland. Health centres, notably for Cancer, are well represented here as are retail buildings in their many forms, including John Lewis in Leicester and the Reiss and Monsoon headquarters in London. Seaside buildings and regeneration projects also feature in various guises. The architects whose work has been honoured this year range from small practices to large, international ones. There are also some multiple winners such as Allies and Morrison (4 awards), Hawkins/Brown (3 awards), BDP (3 awards), Niall Mclaughlin Architects (4 awards) and Penoyre & Prasad (3 awards).

Castle Hill Hospital, Yorkshire, project design by HLM Architects, photo © Ian Bruce

Castle Hill Hospital, Yorkshire, project design by HLM Architects, photo © Ian Bruce

RIBA President Sunand Prasad said about the 2009 RIBA Award winners:

“The RIBA Awards are a thermometer to indicate the state of health of British architecture and for 2009 the results are good: both quality and quantity have been maintained. This year’s list accurately reflects both the diversity, and the workload of UK architecture, with more schools and health buildings than usual winning awards.  It is particularly heartening to see more schemes that are about regenerating our cities, towns and countryside.  These awards, which are judged on a regional basis, reflect and reward the good things that are going on all across the UK, and they also form the basis of what promises to be another interesting year for the RIBA Stirling Prize.”

The 97 UK buildings that have won an RIBA Award are:

Scotland    Beatson Institute New Cancer Research Facility    Reiach & Hall Architects

Scotland    Drummond House – The Shed    LJRH Architects

Scotland    Moore Street Housing    Richard Murphy, Elder & Cannon, JM, Page/Park

Scotland    North Glasgow College    RMJM

Scotland    Pollock Civic Realm    Archial Architects Ltd

Scotland    The Potterrow Development    Bennetts Associates

Scotland    The Printworks    Cameron Webster Architects

Northern Ireland    Fallahogey House    McGarry-Moon Architects Ltd

Northern Ireland    The Knockbreda Centre    Penoyre & Prasad/TODD Architects Read more

May 22

Interactive Museum of Feminine Arts by Id-lab, Ghigos and ARC Studio

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Night views

MAF (Museo delle Arti Femminili/Museum of Feminine Arts) opened in October 2008 in Vallo della Lucania, a small town in the province of Salerno.

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View of the historical context

MAF holds a private collection of laceworks and traceries, handmade textiles, publications and tools belonging to the universe of the traditional feminine activities such as weaving and texture.

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View from the ground floor of the light well where laceworks are displayed + exploded view of the display

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Interactive mobile display panels and descriptive panels

Not only does the museum exhibit finished objects, but it’s as well meant to be a knowledge hub of transformation processes, from thread to product. Practical laboratories and the interaction exhibition project pursue this goal. The exhibition design is conceived to inspire the exploration of interactivity with objects and spaces. Read more

May 21

Pocket Landscapes
Drawings and installations by Aldo Cibic

Filed Under architecture, design, events | 1 Comment

(All drawings © Aldo Cibic, all materials courtesy of Cibic &Partners)

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Photo © Santi Caleca, Milan

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Photo © Cristiano Urban, Bassano del Brappa (Vi)

Pocket landscapes. Drawings and installations by Aldo Cibic @
Galleria Antonia Jannone, Milan, april 22-27, 2009

After approaching greenery on a large scale, with projects shown at the Venice Biennial, Abitare il Tempo, and Saie Spring in Bologna – but also a large inhabited rural park soon to be built in Shanghai – Aldo Cibic comes to terms with a miniature landscape aesthetic, working on poetics that take concrete form in structures/containers/objects (all in iron) to contain small gardens. Some are designed for indoor settings, others for outdoor locations, with the sole desire of representing an idea of nature in unexpected ways and contexts. The exhibition is based on a very simple conception of landscape: the tree, the flower garden and the vegetable garden, represented in 5 installations and 20 drawings.

Read more

May 20

Love and Hope. The letters of Gian Luigi and Julia Banfi

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invito amore e speranza toto

invito amore e speranza toto

Tomorrow afternoon at 6.30 pm Giuliano Banfi, Luca Molinari and Stefano Boeri present the book “Amore e Speranza” (Love and Hope), just released by Archinto Publisher. The book collects the letters between the renowned BBPR architect Gian Luigi Banfi and his young wife Julia Bertolotti they were ingeniously able to exchange during the period of Banfi’s imprisonment in the Fossoli concentration camp (april-july 1944) before his deportation and death at Gusen camp, Mauthausen. Banfi was actively committed first in the Action Party, then in the in the Resistance Movement against Nazi-Fascist occupation during the final period of World War II. The letters give the chance to appreciate the intellectual value, the moral strenght and the emotional richness of Banfi during, maybe the most dramatic period of Italian History.

Actress Lucilla Morlacchi will read some passages from the letters.

Where: Milan Triennale Museum, Viale Alemagna, 6 – t. +39 02 724341 – email:  info@triennale.it

When: May 21st, h 6.30 pm

May 19

Neapolitan minimum flat by Cherubino Gambardella

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(Images courtesy of Gambardella Architetti)

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Gambardella’s project is a Citro-han house after 1922 Le Corbusier’s research on minimum living unit. It’s located in an old warehouse with blind walls in the ancient part of Chiaia, Naples. Space is shaped in an essential manner: the front has a sole entrance which stands out in the lilac-coloured façade. The whole house is strictly ruled and built following the maximum budget of Euro 12.000,00, thus the urban front has one admission passage only, moulded by vertical bars.
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May 18

Gold Medal for Italian Architecture: Winners announced + Exhibition opening

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The Milan Triennale, in co-operation with PARC, has just announced and awarded this year’s Gold Medals and Special Mentions for Italian Architecture. Every three years the Award promotes the most interesting and recent projects built in Italy and the authors who made them possible. The Gold Medal is also an exhibition about the protagonists who, through their achievements, have helped to spread contemporary architecture as a tool for civil and environmental quality. The Medal is conceived to take into consideration a larger audience and the relationship among designer, client and enterprise. The Award has become an important measure of the state of national architecture.

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Massimiliano & Doriana Fuksas – Zenith Music Hall – Strasburgo, Francia 2008 Photo © P. Ruault

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