March 11

WAF in Barcelona – Call for Speakers

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It’s still early to book a flight to Barcelona (you have time until next November), but in case you have what it takes you can already apply as a speaker for the next World Architecture Festival, in the most architecturally vibrant city in Spain. WAF is a festival where architects from all over the world meet, lots of awards are given and companies can also promote their products. Interactivity is one of the key factors the organizers highlight on their website. Read more

March 10

Costruire secondo natura – Exhibit postponed

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Costruire Secondo Natura

Projects by
ecoLogicStudio – deamicisarchitetti con porfiristudio – tamassociati – Iosa Ghini Associati

a cura di Luca Molinari and Simona Galateo

SpazioFMG per l’Architettura
Via Bergognone 27, Milan
march, 16- aprile, 2,  2010
tuesday – saturday h 3 – 8 pm
free entrance
Info: t. 02 89410320

March 10

Foresta nascosta, virtuous example of temporary public museum in San Giuliano Milanese

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(Text by Milena Sacchi, all images © foresta nascosta)

If you’re looking for something outside of the mainstream galleries and traditional art locations, you can visit “foresta nascosta” (“Hidden Forest”), the gorgeous public temporary museum created by Matteo Balduzzi, Daniele Cologna and Stefano Laffi in order to make the suburban neighbourhood of San Giuliano Milanese narrate its stories. I can tell you with a certain mastery – part of my family lives in San Giuliano Milanese – that this location, developed as a residential neigbourhood between the countryside and industrial areas in the Second Postwar, is not among Milan’s most charming outskirts. That’s why I’m so glad about this initiative and I think it must have been welcomed and meaningful to its audience.
The concept of Hidden Forest derives from the dormitory town trend, involves citizens to be curators of their own heritage and displays a research for collective memory. Read more

March 9

Welcome to Saint Mesmes: The new book about LAN architecture

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[Read the Italian version of this post]

(By Angelica Di Virgilio)

© Lucboegly.com – droits réservés

Image by www.lan-paris.com ©Undo-redo.com

ONE, THREE, A HUNDRED THOUSANDS

Welcome to Saint Mesmes is an architecture book. But not just that.
It’s the analysis of LAN’s design strategy, which accoring to Manuel Oranzi’s text is built on the “experience/reflection” dichotomy. But it’s not just that either.
It’s the poetic description of the new Marchesini building in France, imposing itself with strenght and arrogance in Saint Mesmes’ rural landscape. It’s the vision photographers Jean-Marie Monthiers and Luc Boegly have of this architecture. It’s the dialogue between a landscape that transforms with seasons and a black object, hard to nail down with a definition (“Is it a box or a chipped stone?”, Carine Merlino is wondering).
It’s a tale of a building process. It’s the face and name of the workers who built it.
It’s a flip book. But not just that. Because “Welcome to Saint Mesmes” is ONE. It’s THREE. It’s a HUNDRED THOUSANDS. Read more

March 8

Costruire secondo natura

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(Click images for text – Cliccate le immagini per il testo)

February 22

Gagosian Gallery – Beverly Hills Completes Expansion by Architect Richard Meier

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Gagosian Gallery has completed the expansion of their Beverly Hills gallery, a new 3,000 sqf ground-floor gallery space designed by Richard Meier & Partners and to be unveiled on March 4. Read more

February 16

A House for Lady Gaga – Alternative Announcements

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Remember the A House for Lady Gaga competition we posted last week? Being the polyhedric pop singer always changing her looks and shifting from one character to another, ICARCH Gallery coulnd’t just make one announcement for their contest. In fact they made five, and today we are posting all of the remaining ones. The first is below, the others for you to download here, here, and here.


January 2010. Lady Gaga is appointed creative director for a specialty line of Polaroid Imaging products

A HOUSE FOR LADY GAGA

What is a freak…?
If we look in a dictionary, we learn that it is “a thing or occurrence that is markedly unusual or irregular” or “an abnormally formed organism, especially a person or animal regarded as a curiosity or monstrosity.”
There are other meanings as well, but this will do.
Why is Lady Gaga insisting that her main interest is the “freak…?”
She even claims that herself was a freak, at least earlier in her life.
But was / is it so…? She seems sufficiently gifted and sufficiently successful, at all levels, to imagine otherwise. But maybe it is the perennial sympathy that the authentic artist has towards the underprivileged, the misrepresented, the disadvantaged, the irregular, the misfit, the weak… and if this is the case, cheers to Lady Gaga! Let’s only hope she remains so.
Read more

February 12

Jean Prouvé. The Technical Object Poetics @ Mendrisio Academy Gallery

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(All materials courtesy of Mendrisio Academy of Architecture)

Next week Mendrisio Academy Gallery opens its doors for “Jean Prouvé. La Poetica dell’Oggetto Tecnico” (“Jean Prouvé. The Technical Object Poetics“) curated by Bruno Reichlin and Franz Graf. The solo exhibition will feature a notable selection of design pieces (chairs, armchairs, tables, desks, beds and lamps), architecture elements and models – among others: Paris Aluminium Centenary Pavilion, Niamey Tropical house (Niger), Prouvé House in Nancy – dating back 1924 up to the 70’s. The exhibit is evidence of the versatile and innovative talent of Jean Prouvé (1901-1984) who designed pieces which are 20th century classics and succesfully combined entrepreneurship and professional ethics. The first steps as blacksmith apprentice, a true passion for handicraft and details, the knowledge of industrial application and mechanism allowed the french designer to become a furniture builder, an architect and a highly esteemed professor at Paris Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. His works were mass-produced even if economical reward see-sawed. Read more

February 11

BETWEEN TRADITION AND INNOVATION: A SUCCESSFUL BALANCE

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[Read the Italian version of this post]

(By Angelica Di Virgilio)

New Technical Services Center building for the Perugia Municipality
HOF

In the very historically-documented Italian reality the relationship between new interventions and what is preexisting has always been particularily problematic. These theme has animated post-war debates, especially in the 50s, when the urgency to rebuild was replaced by the need to limit the damage and ugliness brought by building speculation in the name of that emergency. Despite the appeals of the conscious architectural class in favor of a rational balance between the need for “new” and preservation, this last current eventually prevailed and relegated the first to areas of new urban expansion, while leaving downtowns more and more exclusively bound to superintendences. The result of such “abandonement” is still an open debate far from reaching a solution.

The city of Perugia has nonetheless represented an exception in this national context. Right in its very artistically and historically connoted reality, between the end of the 40s and the 50s, we witness an opening to instances of “modernity” in full respect of historical continuity. This was mostly due to the municipality’s technical office and engineer Giuseppe Grossi’s work. Such opening is still visible today in the city’s fabric and is also exemplified by recent interventions like the Palazzo Grossi expansion project by the HOF studio.

Read more

February 8

A HOUSE FOR LADY GAGA. ICARCH
Gallery Competition

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(Special thanks to ICARCH Gallery)


Image from “Bad Romance” set, © Lady Gaga official site

Sometimes speaking half in jest produces the best results ever. Down from its ivory tower, architecture speculation stll creates for the sake of creating despite times to remain aloof from economic systems, bureaucracy and democracy are almost reduced to none. Unprofitable ideas and designs spread among every studio. We all need to disconnect and, who knows? The weirdest trick could change into a profitable project and find a client…And if not, who cares? We invite you to visit the Chicago-based ICARCH Gallery – deliberately inspired by Ephimeteus (literally “afterthought,”), Titan brother of the most reknown Prometheus, openly “confused, imperfect, hungry, anti-business, passionate” and, most of all, provocative. Since 2003 ICARCH has launched competitions like: “The House of War”, “A New Facade for Florence San Lorenzo”, “The House of Pi”, “The House of Oxymorons” and others themed on a series of personalities like Eric Rohmer, Federico Fellini, Albert Camus or Friedrich Nietzsche. Now ICARCH goes pop and it’s time for Lady Gaga, the flamboyant singer brought to the fore for her spectacular mise-en-scène and outfits.

Lady Gaga, Bad Romance video

Here follows ICARCH’s announcement for A HOUSE FOR LADY GAGA COMPETITION:

The more she hides, the more she exposes. And vice versa. We reflected on the strange dialectics between hiding / exposing, as illustrated by Lady Gaga. Quite often she seems to want to hide away… her hair, her masks, her veilings betray a very high interest in hiding, in concealing… Even her use of umbrellas, when outside it is sunny…!? And the fact that quite often she hides her face behind her hand, when photographed (as if she is guilty of something, almost like Adam in the famous painting by Masaccio “Adam and Eve banished from Paradise”), does show the same thing… and the meaning of her video Paparazzi seems to be the same: an intense almost neurotic questioning of the violation of privacy that contemporary life seems to be unable to avoid. She probably does not want to end like Princess Diana or like the main character of Das Parfum. But the price of fame is high, quite often! Sometimes tragically high!
Read more

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