November 18

From yskira.com to ymag.it

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One year ago we launched the first issue of The Skira Yearbook of World Architecture. It was a unique editorial and cultural initiative which, I think, suffered for the unlucky economical and historical moment it was released.
In the same days we timidly started the YSkira blog, to support the Yearbook publication and, at the same time, to create an online tool giving us new opportunities for research, international networking, and critical confrontation with the most active and experimental blogs.

In the following months – and under the pressure of the devastating effects of the economical slump – the paper project was progressively brought to a halt, while the blog gained more and more energy and connections. It was probably the future smartly pushing the past away, but maybe it’s too early to tell.

Anyway, our blog has recently become one-year-old and and it’s been growing together with us. We want it to be an open, transversal, strongly critical and receptive medium, able to short-circuit architecture, design, interior, photography, arts and contemporary critique. Along with its first birthday comes the first little graphical and conceptual restyling, along with a new autonomy.

Today yskira.com becomes ymag.it, a platform with a wider scope and a more radical and critical grasp on architecture and design.

We think these disciplines are going through a difficult period, for what concerns both contents and means, and that most of the research and experimental results we come cross are still waiting for a proper reading. Our society is expressing wishes and formulating questions that these creative fields are hardly able to answer. Maybe we’re living the dawn of a new era we can hardly even perceive. Probably a medium like the blog – with its essential freedom of content and cooperative spirit – is one of the realest and most interesting answers to our times.

Y Magazine is born to be curious, critical, and relentless, and we’d like you to help us make it even more radical and perceptive of the most compelling issues around built environments and living tools. In the future, in order to respect both Yearbook’s original selective attitude and the cosmopolitan and collaborative spirit of the blog medium, we would like to involve our readers more directly – through surveys and polls, for example – and have you share your opinions and projects even more. Let’s find out together what the most challenging projects and ideas in our future are.

In occasion of ymag.it’s launch, I’d like to thank all the people who have cooperated with us (like Ilaria Mazzoleni and Ethel Barona Pohl), contributing with their valuable content and personal research in making yskira.com a sharper tool, plus all the readers and bloggers who have been using our website daily or linked it in their homepages or bookmarks. Thanks are also due to Angelica Di Virgilio and Simona Galateo, and in particular I thank Nicola Bozzi and Milena Sacchi for managing, supervising and coordinating this project since the beginning, with passion and dedication.

Luca Molinari

September 29

Post-eartquake L’Aquila and Expo 2015: our next chances

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I’ve walked among the streets of L’Aquila’s “red zone” for hours.
Before the night of April 6, 2009 the historical center was the working heart of the city. It housed more than 40.000 people, about 4500 shops and firms employing almost 20.000 people.
I walked in a deserted city, hurt by Mother Nature. I wandered about the streets and lanes, surrounded by an inhuman silence which clashed with the richness and space quality L’Aquila was able to create over the centuries.
Broken buildings all around, crashed churches, streets crammed with ruins and laden with grief. And then, the first works of structural containment, the delicate care used by the Civic Protection and the Superintendence towards the wounded places. An unreal landscape, asking for careful and important solutions concerning the future.
I wonder about the micro-migrations compelling people, resources and stories from the centre towards other places. What kind of city will L’Aquila be? And, as soon as the city center will be re-opened, in eight or ten years, who will come back? What kind of desires?

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Chiesa Santa Maria del Suffragio, the spider supporting framework set by firemen on june 5

Chiesa Santa Maria del Suffragio, the spider supporting framework set by firemen on June 5

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September 28

Vivaio Riva
Exhibition review by Luca Molinari

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(All photos © Marta Dore)

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Pendants

Last weekend’s I.D. Vegetation, signed by YellowOffice and taking place at Vivaio Riva, has been a real experiment, a potential workshop for the Milan which should be looking out on the 2015 Expo. Read more

September 23

ANGELO MANGIAROTTI. Sculpting/Building
Review by Luca Molinari

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RITRATTO_MAN 8-2

September 12- november 8, 2009
Casa del Mantegna
Via Acerbi, 47
Mantova

When you deal with Angelo Mangiarotti’s work, now shown at Casa del Mantegna in Mantua until november 8, you’re forced to stare at a paralyzing Medusa that reminds us the most recent golden age of the Italian architectural culture. I’m usually not inclined to gloomily praise the good old days, but the so many good project possibilities along Mangiarotti’s career, his willingness to face them on different scales and his relationships with clients, apparently ready to invest and take risks, make us draw a discouraging veil over the current situation. Read more

September 7

In memory of Guido Canella by Luca Molinari

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foto-ritratto di Guido Canella

Portrait of Guido Canella

Last week architect and professor Guido Canella has unexpectedly left us. Professor at the Architecture Faculty of Milan Politecnico, Canella will always be remembered as one of the most interesting representatives of the post-war italian generation.

His contribution tirelessly moved among writing, designing and teaching; he deliberately aimed at transforming university into a real active and experimental workshop able to criticize the Modern project and contextualize it, dense with a strong civil and political meaning, within the urban territory. Read more

July 17

The 12xMilano series
An introduction by Luca Molinari

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We barely mentioned it before, but there’s an interesting exhibition curated by our own Luca Molinari going on at Milan’s Urban Center right now. During the next weeks we’ll be posting videos from this show, one by one, with notes and materials on the projects and the studios who produced them.

12xMilano is a video-exhibit born after the section  “Visioni per il Futuro” within the exhibition Dreaming Milano held during Milan Salone del Mobile, at Ex Spazio Fondazione Mazzotta (april 22-27). This event was promoted by Il Sole 24 Ore, Graniti Fiandre and Martini Illuminazione.

Here’s the curator’s introduction to 12xMilano:

“12xMilano – Young architecture visions on a changing metropolis

Milan is slowly and arduously changing. A diffuse and fragmentary process is ongoing in the
city. This process is waiting for overall views and generous thoughts on Milan future and potential identity to ponder on. For this reason we believed it was important to gather some of the emerging protagonists of italian young architecture to offer visions and useful challenges to think about the city’s next steps.
In occasion of the big Dreaming Milano exhibition, which animated a debate on Milan’s future and identity during the Salone del Mobile, a several young italian designers were invited to produce ideas and scenarios for an urban territory which is changing radically. Read more

July 7

More PicNic at the Temple: a look at the installations

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(Text by Luca Molinari, PicObject photos © Luca Poncellini)

After giving my overview on the Pic Nic Building Textures workshop promoted by Marco Navarra/NOWAlab, Alessandro Rocca and Mario Lupano, I’d like to concentrate on the installations created by Alterazioni Video and 2012 Architecten, who have poetically declared two ways of colonizing and living the San Michele in Ganzaria Valley. Maybe it’s because of their archaic and at the same time contemporary style, or their easy habitability as signs of a primary landscape colonizing, but probably it’s mostly because they’ve succeeded to mark new coordinates to get one’s bearings and play within the existing natural geography among ancient traces. Read more

June 25

Pic Nic al Tempio. Creating with Nature

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(Text and photos by Luca Molinari)

installazione PicScape di Elena Vincenzi

PicScape installation by Elena Vincenzi

Pic Nic at the Temple in San Michele, Ganzaria has been a stimulating workshop organized and promoted by Marco Navarra/NOWAlab, Alessandro Rocca and Mario Lupano between may and june in the heart of Sicily. This year it’s been its fifth edition and it has had the merit to gather project designers, artists and landscape architects sharing the same attitude to free experimentation, together with students, for a week adventure of shared work. Everything started with Navarra’s pluri-awarded project of a cycle track in San Michele that, unfortunately, in a couple of years, because of the carelessness and local mismanagement, slowly disappeared. Nonetheless the sicilian architect made of this absence an occasion to bring new and different experiences and viewpoints to spur new learnings. More than eighty students coming from all Italy and many well-known authors have been summoned to interpret the “texture” theme, having the location materials and spaces at their disposal. Read more

June 8

PEEP houses by Ludens Architetti.
The good italian suburbs.

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(Text by Luca Molinari, photos © Paola De Pietri, drawings and project description © Ludens Architetti)

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Video © Roberta Bruschini, Annagiulia Gregori, Michela Ruffo

A shy but well drawn terraced little houses regain my opinion on a quite objectionable house category (maybe for the too many, bad available examples) and suggest me that in the middle of Padana plain, in Reggio Emilia, an architecture studio is blossoming and I think Ludens will save us interesting surprises in the next future. Peep houses are among these surprises. The design is severe and simple without falling into thr low-cost house cheap rhetoric. The basis of the project concept seems to lie in its clean contemporary line which could rehabilitate the discouraging imagery of our outskirts, like an antivirus able to bring back those fragments of The Netherlands, Slovenia, Switzerland and Belgium that we usually appreciate. Read more

February 16

Beniamino Servino – Obus Incertum

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(Text by Luca Molinari)

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Commenting on chinese artist Ding Yi’s work, critic Cao Weijun writes: “Since 1988, Din Yi repeats this work every day, an extreme challenge for body and mind, without interruption, without ever changing his liguistic style. He believes painting to be necessary in facing the contraddictions of the real world. Since it’s impossible to obtain the truth, the only thing you can do, and you must do, is trying with every possible mean to get close to the truth.”
When I read this short text Beniamino Servino’s work came to my mind. He focused his obstinate, obsessive, resisting research on few recurring elements throughout the years. Read more

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