March 9

Welcome to Saint Mesmes: The new book about LAN architecture

Filed Under architecture, books | Leave a Comment


[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 2

Racconti di qui by Davide Vargas – Book trailer

Filed Under books | 1 Comment

A man wandering along the sidewalks in a lonely afternoon. The man is attracted by the street. The cracks, the cigarette butts, the corks all swallowed like fossils, the height differences on the path, a spiderweb like shattered glass opening inside the asphalt. Where is he going? Nowhere, there is no longer a real place where that man might be going, since he’s going here. That’s how the protagonist of Tales of Here moves, a man sucked in the world and convinced that by paying more attention to them things will reveal their secret to him, and narrating their lives as they were a character made of asphalt, concrete, sewers, jetties, facades, cracks, dumps, holes, squares, sands, alleys, dead ends, sea: chasing a truth that is shouted by the physionomies of hurt things, and hidden by the silent, knowing human ones.

Davide Vargas is an architect and lives in Campania. His projects are featured on the major Italian magazines. His short stories have been published by “Nazione Indiana”, “Sud”, and “Abitare la terra”. Tales of Here is his first collection. Read more

February 24

Gentlemen of Bacongo by Daniele Tamagni. Book presentation @ Forma, Milan

Filed Under arts, books, events | Leave a Comment

(All images © Daniele Tamagni)

Tomorrow, february, 25

h 6.30 pm

Forma. Centro Internazionale di Fotografia

Piazza Tito Lucrezio Caro, 1

20136 Milano

info@formafoto.it

Gentlemen of Bacongo by Daniele Terragni

Book presentation

Photographer Daniele Tamagni, designer and stylist Marina Spadafora, Francesco Benvenuti Arborio di Gattinara, Trolley publisher Gigi Giannuzzi and Contrasto director Denis Curti will attend and debate on the book.

Download the invitation

Don’t miss the chance to get introduced to the world of style and fashion of Congo Sapeurs that photographer Daniele Tamagni depicted in his, “Gentlemen of Bacongo”. The book is a colourful journey through the streests of Brazzaville and Kinshasa by young photographer Tamagni who has distinguished himself by his sociocultural research on Afro-Caribbean subculters around the world. Tamagni’s interviews to Congolese sapeurs open us the doors to the SAPE creed, the Society of Tastemakers and Elegant People who perform and live the dandy-like dressing codes of elegance and behaviour. Refined, respected and admired like real vip by their communities sapeurs inherit and revive the French colonial roots and – despite living in slums and poverty – carry on the daily mission of elegance started by Grenard André Matsoua, the first Grand Sapeur who came back from Paris dressed as a genuine French flâneur in 1922. Tamagni’s eye immortalizes the paradoxes of the sapeur life and brilliantly captures the conflicting belief in good taste performed by gentlemen you wouldn’t expect in the Republic of Congo or in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The eternal and boundless longing for beauty keeps a constant factor of human condition. Aesthetics can be comforting! Read more

February 10

Beyroutes – A Guide to Beirut

Filed Under books | Leave a Comment

An interesting-looking guide to the capital of Lebanon has just come out, so we thought you might want to check it out:

The field manual for 21st century urban explorer.

Initiated by Studio Beirut, supported by Partizan Publik, Archis and the Pearl Foundation – Beyroutes, a guidebook to Beirut, one of the grand capitals of the Middle East. Beyroutes presents an exploded view of a city which lives so many double lives and figures in so many truths, myths and historical falsifications. Visiting the city with this intimate book as your guide makes you feel disoriented, appreciative, judgmental and perhaps eventually reconciliatory.

Art Direction: Jeanno Gaussi, Nicolas Bourquin – Design: Pascale Harès, Jeanno Gaussi, Nicolas Bourquin
Chief Editor: Christian Ernsten – Editorial Team: Rani al Rajji, Joe Mounzer, Steve Eid, Christaan Fruneaux, Joost Janmaat
 Publisher: Archis – Distribution: Idea Books – ISBN: 9789077966549
Read more

December 7

Urban Screens @ Trouw, Amsterdam

Filed Under architecture, arts, books, design, events, ideas | Leave a Comment

(Text by Nicola Bozzi, photos by Marta Colpani)

DSC_0029

As more and more cities in the world install huge digital billboards to get their share of the Times Square appeal, scholars and practitioners from both the new media and architecture fields are trying to make sense of these new elements of our public spaces. That’s the case of the Urban Screens Event, which just took place in Amsterdam at Trouw, under the INC (Institute of Network Cultures) banner. Along with a series of talks and presentations with speakers ranging from architects, designers and artists to scholars, the event included a couple of interactive installations by the students of MediaLab Amsterdam and the presentation of the Urban Screens Reader. The book features themed essays by international theorists, among which Saskia Sassen and Andreas Broeckmann. Read more

December 1

PLATFORM 3.17 – L’Aquila: la casa ritrovata

Filed Under books, events | Leave a Comment

November 30

Welcome to Espaiñ. New book by photographer Jordi Bernadó

Filed Under books | Leave a Comment

(All materials courtesy of ACTAR)

jbernado_w_espain_0125_luckylooks_0013

Jordi Bernadó’s new photography book, Welcome to Espaiñ, recently released by Actar is an irresistible bad trip among the streets of Spain. Humourous and audacious his images get the viewer inside an unreal, or too real, spanish landscape. Fiction becomes true and reality blurs into phantasmagorical. Bernadó’s eye and acumen reveal the anecdotical in each photograph and a non-recognizable gaze of Spain comes out. It’s a different Spain. It’s Calderón de la Barca (La vida es sueño), Goya, Cervantes, Gondry…it’s an architect’s vision and pun, a great traveller’s look on his country. After portraying the most important urban settlements worldwide and being internationally featured, Bernadó hit the mark with his homeland. Read more

November 17

Manual of Architectural Possibilities 001 – Antarctica

Filed Under books, design | Leave a Comment

(This post is published courtesy of DPR-Barcelona)

IMG_4404

IMG_4408

“In a new publication it may be hard -but it should be fundamental- that the objective is to provoke the well behaved, the lazy, the arrogant, the meek, the uncertain… all of them into stepping outside the bars, coffe-houses, duvets, libraries… and get stuck into the business of creativity”
Peter Cook MAP 01 Intro

David Garcia Studio has just shared with us his fantastic publication Manual of Architectural Possibilities (MAP 01) that is neither a book nor a magazine. It is a compendium of ideas printed on both sides of a single A1 sheet on 80g COLORIT 72 paper, and folded to 297mm x 105mm.

This first issue deals with one of the few unexploited areas left in the world (or maybe the only one): The Antarctica. An hostile but fascinating place “owned by no state but claimed by many, desolate in winter, inhabited by thousands in summer and with no resident architects” …yet.
Read more

October 27

Tadao Ando – Museums
Book presentation

Filed Under books, events | Leave a Comment

Skira is pleased to invite you to the presentation of the book Tadao Ando – Museums, edited by Luca Molinari, on Thursday October 29 at 6.30 pm, at Triennale di Milano (via Alemagna 6).

Along with the editor, Gae Aulenti and Giancarlo Calza will also participate in the presentation.

invito

ando_en

October 26

The Function of Form by Farshid Moussavi just released by Actar

Filed Under books, design, ideas | Leave a Comment

(All materials courtesy of ACTAR)

cover function of formFunction of Form

“Form follows function.” There has never been a more seductive dictum in the history of architecture. In The Function of Form, internationally acclaimed architect, Farshid Moussavi, provides a provocative critique of the historically opposing relationship between function and form to reveal the contradiction at the heart of modernism. We need to move away from the definition of function as utility, she argues, to align it with how function is defined in mathematics, biology or music. Form, on the other hand, should be considered not only in the way buildings are produced, but also how they perform sensorially. Function and form, considered together in architecture, stand in opposition to the dualism which defined our approach to the built environment throughout the twentieth century.
For Mies van der Rohe, buildings were a refuge from ‘the acute anxiety of the metropolitan experience,’ while Rem Koolhaas describes the building as a “machine to fabricate fantasy”. Deftly guiding readers through the historical and theoretical arguments around the production and performance of form in architecture, Moussavi, a Harvard professor and co-founder of the award-winning Foreign Office Architects, cites works by Palladio, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and OMA, as well as references to Islamic and Gothic architecture, and writings by theorists including Gottfried Semper and Gilles Deleuze, to illustrate the shortcomings of considering form and function independently in today’s increasingly molecular/hybrid reality. Read more

Next Page →

 

You need to log in to vote

The blog owner requires users to be logged in to be able to vote for this post.

Alternatively, if you do not have an account yet you can create one here.

Powered by Vote It Up