July 31

OBJECT OF SOUND by NOCC

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Paris-based studio NOCC’s Object of Sound is a collection of objects consisting of a candle holder, a lampshade, and a vase. Each item takes its form from the graphic produced by a person’s voice pronouncing the name of the object.

An on-line video explain the process of Object of Sound:

The profile of the sound is shaped into a 3D form and becomes an object. By giving volume to the sound wave, the form becomes a piece that is used according to the word pronounced. A candle holder profile becomes a candle holder, a vase profile becomes a vase and a light profile becomes a light. Read more

July 30

The 12xMilano series
STATS, by LAN Architecture

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[Read the Italian version of this post]

(Here’s the fourth project from 12xMilano, the exhibition currently on show at Milan’s Urban Center. Today we’re presenting you LAN Architecture’s STATS project)

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Stats returns the efficiency of some of our projects in numbers, their environmental performance and capability of producing and saving energy, and the way these projects participate in the movement for the planet’s preservation.
A set of numbers and parameters allow us to think about Milan and to study its future growth, projecting the future plans of the Italian metropolis on a more interesting scale than systematic urban development: a global culture aiming to go beyond every micro-society’s interests and speaking for a global will to “re-exist”. Read more

July 29

Discovering the near unknown (part two)

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[Read the Italian version of this post]

(Interview by Angelica Di Virgilio. Read the first part here.)

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Looking at the pictures of the bar/restaurant, some details reminded me of two known architects in Campania. One is Beniamino Servino, whose influence, in my opinion, is visible in the tratment of the restaurant’s facade, on the inner courtyard. The other is Cherubino Gambardella, mostly for a certain decoration on the inner spaces. How much are these two figures connected to your background and, if these references are correct, how can two so different languages live together? What’s the third way?

I’m flattered to be associated to names such as Beniamino Servino and Cherubino Gambardella. Their work, despite taking place in Campania, belongs to the national reality. I’ve been very lucky to meet Beniamino in my careeer. The years I spent with him have been very intense. What really helped me was something I always looked for: confrontation, to overtly talk about whatever the architecture world could be. He always pushed me to go beyond my own knowledge. On the other hand, Cherubino Gambardella’s works are known and appreciated on all architecture magazines. They love to constantly experiment their solutions, putting body and soul in what they do. That’s definitely what fascinates me. Read more

July 28

The 12xMilano series
Gran Milano, by Ludens

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[Read the Italian version of this post]

(Here’s the third video from 12xMilano, the exhibition currently on show at Milan’s Urban Center. Today we’re presenting you Ludens Architetti’s Gran Milano project)

Milan has 1.300.000 inhabitants and 600.000 commuters. Half of those travel by train, the second half by car. Most likely they are the same people who lived in Milan until the Seventies, when the city consisted in about 2 million people. Because of the increasing prices, many of them fled downtown Milan in favor of the hinterland.
Considering these data, the current administration’s ponderation on the “recostruction of Big Milan” are interesting to us: trying to reduce commuting by building new houses in the Municipality of Milan, in order to catch the people who left and now travel everyday. But let’s consider an opposite hypothesis: instead of rebuilding Milan as a bigger city, taking the commuters back in, let’s serve the commuters themselves in the very places they’ve decided to live, by developing an adequate rail transportation system, like those in the major european cities. This would help reduce the use of private cars, and allow people to live in areas where the cost of living matches their income, while they can move faster.

What if Milan, instead of a more densely populated city, was a wider city within a 45-minute reach?

Read more

July 27

Discovering the near unknown (part one)

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[Read the Italian version of this post]

(Interview by Angelica Di Virgilio)

We know ours is a strongly-globalized world, where “everything” is available to “anybody”, “right now”. Nevertheless, despite this richness in – potential – information, we’re still surrounded by walls.  Cultural, religious, mind walls. Barriers we build up ourselves, for fear, ignorance or mere indolence. It’s just too comfortable to move in a known reality. It’s easier to live in a customized garden pretending there’s nothing beyond the fence protecting us. But there’s a living world past it, a moving and active world boiling with life despite the difficulties of darkness. Even if we ignore it.
The same happens in architecture. Despite the potential of internet and the blogosphere, too often the official magazines sport the same old names, places, works. Known and conforting. And even when the attention pushes further, the look sometimes remains superficial. It’s preferred to highlight the singularity of the architectural episode or character, without investigating its reality, its difficulties and problems. For once, instead, we’re proposing a deep immersion in that darkness, in order to try and unveil it and better understand it. A journey in the italian province, the one living and acting beyond the fence of the known. A path of images and words to analyze what are the actual issues designers face everyday.

Giovanni Ambrosio, a young 35 year-old designer from Casterta, will walk us through, to his first work: “La casa e la stalla”, a bar/restaurant located in Ercole, next to Reggia di Caserta’s park walls, a rural area characterized by tuff walls and pitched roofs.

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Unluckily the reality in which you still live and work doesn’t really recognize any definite role for the architect. It’s dominated by the logics of building trade. What does it mean to face this resource and request poverty everyday, with such a lack of institutional stimuli?

Actually it’s just like that. That’s reality. It’s always a challenge. Maybe the strenght comes right out of this very suffocating situation. But by attitude i’ve never liked easy things. Buyers here invest everything on companies without considering the professional figure; trying to eradicate this established thought around here is the main task. Read more

July 24

YOKO ONO ANTON’S MEMORY
FONDAZIONE BEVILACQUA LA MASA (PALAZZETTO TITO)
until September 20, 2009

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[Read the Italian version of this post]

(Text by Maria Vittoria Capitanucci)

Along with great visual artist and theorist John Baldessari, this year’s Golden Lion Career Award went to Yoko Ono, who has made japanese silence the strenght of the western struggle. A feminist and feminine conceptual performer, Yoko Ono – despite being lost in her mythical partner John Lennon’s shadow for too long – still represents one of the figures in contemporary art who best did justice to the role of the woman, the intellectual woman and the complex feminine universe. Her installations enphasize an erudite, detached and poetical thought. Read more

July 23

The 12xMilano series
Milan 2015, by Salottobuono and YellowOffice

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[Read the Italian version of this post, with an interview to YellowOffice]

(Here’s the second video from 12xMilano, the exhibition currently on show at Milan’s Urban Center. Today we’re presenting you Salottobuono+YellowOffice’s Milan 2015 project)

The Inner Edge
March 11th 2009: Ferrovie dello Stato (the Italian railway company) signs an agreement with the Milano municipality that prefigures the transfer of 1.200.000 m2 of disused railway infrastructures.
The surface, consisting of railway facilities under total or partial dismantling, is distributed in 7 urban freight depots.
The funds raised through this operation will be invested by FS to improve the general operation of the Milanese railway junction.
On these new available surfaces, the Municipality aims to build new city parts.

Program:
50% of surface = public space, mainly parks.
50% = housing (11.000 dwellings, at least one third of social housing)
25.000 new inhabitants within 2015

What architecture for this program? What landscape?

Read more

July 22

Beyond Media report
A guest post by Ethel Baraona Pohl

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(This is the first of a series of guest posts by architect and DPR-Barcelona co-founder Ethel Baraona Pohl, who is reporting us on the Beyond Media Festival that has just taken place in Florence. We here welcome Ethel on yskira.com, and you guys stay tuned for more of her posts soon.)

Visions-photo Benedetta Mori

Visions. Photo © Benedetta Mori

SPOT on Schools-photo Benedetta Mori

SPOT on Schools. Photo © Benedetta Mori

Beyond Media Festival: Visions
Florence, Stazione Leopolda, July 9 to 17, 2009.

As part of this series of Yskira contributions it was our intention to start with a post dealing with vanguard an innovative ways that architecture practice has adopted in this days. The current edition of the Beyond Media Festival held in Florence represents the perfect start due to its forward-thinking vocation.

SCI-ARC Spot on Schools-photo dpr barcelona

SCI-ARC Spot on Schools. Photo © dpr barcelona

The program was really long and complete, sometimes maybe too long for each day, but with a great effort from the curators in trying to include all these material between only eight days. That’s why we will focus on the main talks and exhibitions to review here, so you can have an overview about the event. The main topic this year is VISIONS and its objective is to question popular convictions about the use of assorted media in architectural practice. One of the things we found really interesting is that the talks included groups of speakers involved in many disciplines, not only architects but also journalist, writers, philosophers, artists and designers and these make possible to have a holistic approach about each topic. Read more

July 22

Endless Bauhaus exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin

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Check out a few preview pictures and a press release on “Endless Bauhaus”, video-installation curated by Ilka & Andreas Ruby, special section of the big retrospective on the Bauhaus at Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin.

Endless Bauhaus

Ilka & Andreas Ruby, Endless Bauhaus, Videoinstallation, 2009
In their video installation Endless Bauhaus (2009), Ilka & Andreas Ruby interviewed eleven contemporary personalities on the relevance of the Bauhaus today. Has the Bauhaus already become a historical entity of the past or does it still have a contemporary presence? Which of its original intentions and ambitions have survived and can be tied in with the present? Which of its ideas seem unrealizable today? Is there anything genuinely owed to the Bauhaus? Has its general claim and aspiration for a unity of the creative forces in the arts and crafts, science and technology become anachronistic today – or do we need such goals more than ever in view of increasingly diversified and specialized societies?
In order to find answers to these questions, Ilka & Andreas Ruby met with personalities of various design fields which have points of contact with the Bauhaus – architects, artists, curators, communication designer, automobile designer, art historian, and entrepreneur. The responses of the conversation partners are thematically correlated and mounted in a virtual conversation.

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An interview collage with contributions by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Architect; DOGMA, Rotterdam; Chris Bangle, Automobile Designer, Chris Bangle Associates, Turin; Ole Bouman, Director, Nederlands Architectuurinstitut (NAi), Rotterdam; Olafur Eliasson, Artist, UdK Berlin, Institut für räumliche Experimente; Christian Gärtner, Board of Directors of Stylepark AG, Frankfurt am Main; Bjarke Ingles, Architect, BIG, Copenhagen; Olaf Nicolai, Artist, Berlin; Michael Rock, Designer, 2×4, New York; Barbara Steiner, Director, Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig; Jean-Philippe Vassall, Architect, Lacaton & Vassall, Paris; Karin Wilhelm, Architecture Historian, University of Braunschweig.

Concept, Screenplay, Interviews: Ilka & Andreas Ruby, textbild, Berlin / Camera and Editing: Breitbild:brüder, Berlin / Title design: Leonard Streich, Berlin / English transcription and subtitle translation: Uta Hoffmann, New York / German transcription: Tim Aßmann, Lahnau / Spatial installation: chezweitz & roseapple, Berlin / Exhibition architecture: kubix, Berlin / Commissioned by Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Klassik Stiftung Weimar and Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau / Initial idea and consulting: Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau (Regina Bittner, Philipp Oswalt, Walter Prigge) / Production coordination: Nicole Minten-Jung / The spatial installation was realized with the generous support of Eternit AG, www.eternit.de

July 21

The 12xMilano series
Metropolitan protoGARDEN by ecoLogicStudio

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[Read the Italian version of this post]

(As promised, here’s the first of a long series of specific focuses on the 12 projects of 12xMilano, the exhibition currently on show at Milan’s Urban Center. Today we’re presenting you ecoLogicStudio’s Metropolitan ProtoGarden project.)

Milan 2015: Metropolitan protoGARDEN is a visionary project, it’s the projection of a dream for a new kind of cybernetic urban ecology; however, rather than with fictional scenarios, the dream is constructed through the systematic and rational deployment of techniques and technologies that have already entered our daily life: “google MAPs and Earth”, “panoramio”, “flickr”, “facebook” on one side, iPHONEs, computational tools, interactive and robotic devices on the other. In 2015_MpG this instruments are deployed to read, understand and eventually control and manipulate real material processes unfolding in Milan: the intensification of public urban life, the city’s global awareness, the concentration of air pollution, the collection of rain water, the accessibility to public transportation, the growth of algae colonies, etc. The 2015_MpG interface extends the reach of such technologies to become instruments of communication and eventually conversation with the city as a large living system. Read more

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