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 8

WOOD SUMMIT SMÅLAND 2010

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Remember the call for Architecture of Necessity we published some time ago on behalf of the Virserum Art Museum in Sweden? Here’s the program for their WOOD SUMMIT SMÅLAND 2010 (which you can also download here). The event is a seminar on architecture, sustainable development and sustainable urban planning taking place on June 29 and 30, also enriching the Wood 2010 exhibition going on from May 9 to September 19 at the konsthall.

TUESDAY 29 JUNE – THE ARCHITECTURE OF NECESSITY
Topics of the day include: Sustainable urban planning; recycling and regeneration; the Architecture of Necessity; who are the city meant for?
WOOD SUMMIT SMÅLAND 2010 coincides with Virserum Music Days and this will be reflected in series of concerts throughout the seminar. All events on this day will be conducted in English.
07:30–10:00 REGISTRATION
Breakfast. Morning concert featuring Ismahni on harp and Gunilla von Bahr on flute.
CLAES CALDENBY: THE ARCHITECTURE OF NECESSITY
Caldenby is a professor in architectural theory and history at Chalmers Technical College, Sweden. He is also the moderator for the day.
MICHELLE KAUFMANN: SUSTAINABLE ARCHITECTURE WITH MODULAR SYSTEMS
Michelle Kaufmann is an architect and designer from California, USA. She is a leading figure in the field of sustainable design and was, among other things, named “2009 Green Advocate of the Year” by the National Association of Home Builders.
LUNCH
Presentation of specially invited Swedish architecture agencies and their proposals for the Architecture of Necessity. Concert in the Paperhouse.
RICCARDO VANUCCI, FARESTUDIO: ARCHITECTURE OF NECESSITY
Riccardo Vannucci is an architect at FAREstudio in Italy. The agency won the WAF 2008 Health category with their Centre pour le Bien-être des Femmes in Burkina Faso.
KENGO KUMA, KENGO KUMA & ASSOCIATES: ANTI-OBJECT
Kengo Kuma is a Japanese architect known for his refined minimalist style. His buildings get their identity from the use of traditional materials such as bamboo, stone and metal.
17:00 TOUR OF EXHIBITIONS AND PRE-DRINKS IN THE PAPERHOUSE EVENING BANQUET
Followed by a concert in Virserum church. After that there is the possibility of enjoying a drink at the River Pub. Read more

February 24

I Hate Rendering / Looking for a Client
New Ymag competitions

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[Read the Italian version of this post]

The following announcement launches two new sections of our website, which will become active when we’ll post the first projects, starting tomorrow.

Dear architect/designer,
as an international blog focused on the continuous research of new ways to communicate and critically narrate the complexity and the changes in contemporary architecture, design and graphics, Ymag wants to constitute a platform for cultural exchange between different worlds.
With these goals in mind, we are now lauching two new categories on our website: I Hate Rendering and Looking for a Client.

The first, as you can easily guess, is a challenge and at the same time an answer to the prevailing dictatorship of rendering on most magazines and blogs, which too often propose project images that look very much alike. Consequently, I Hate Rendering will be devoted to drawings, sketches, and whatever handmade representation to promote and “re-discover” our expressive forces and abilities to convey ideas. The new category aims to start a critical debate on this theme, allowing all our readers to speak their mind and comment on every drawing, its peculiarities and techniques.

The second category, Looking for a Client, will be devoted to non-realized architectures in search of a client to become true. The purpose here is to unveil the underworld of project ideas that nourish the daily life of more or less famous studios and ateliers. The category will include competition projects, degree theses and, most of all, all those designs started after pure research and personal reflection by any author.

Our invitation is to join us and help us create an archive of vibrant ideas. Send your sketches, drawings or architectures looking for a client to:
info@ymag.it
We’ll be pleased and honoured to take it into consideration and promote it.
The invitation to send photos, drawings and whatever can illustrate your most recent works is open to everybody!
Thank you and we hope to hear from you soon.

The Yearbook Magazine editorial staff

February 19

Kafka’s Architecture

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(By Cesare Alemanni)

When it comes to architecture we are used to think about blocks and structures, but this terminology is not the first it comes to mind when we speak about literature. Nonetheless, in the case of some literary golems like Franz Kafka, it is most definitely the proper way to analyze their work. Indeed, he shows an incredibly clear vision of the role played by structures and blocks along literary gameplay. Not only on a metaphisical level, but, foremost and quite surprisingly, on a phisical one.

According to French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (Kafka: Towards a minor literature) the whole opera of the Czech writer is spotted by narrative and descriptive junctions that Deleuze himself calls “blocks”. They are distributed, in particular, along The Trial and The Castle; two novels in wich architecture is not merely a background, but it reaches the status of a character. There it is where the basements seems to represent the magma of instincts and in the upper floors lies the transcendence of a law that is impossibile to transcend. 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 15

Dopo La Crescita. Idee sul futuro della dispersione

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Che cosa sta succedendo ai territori della dispersione?

Cosa alla città diffusa e ai suoi manufatti a bassa densità?

E’ attorno a queste domande che il seminario Dopo La Crescita. Idee sul futuro della dispersione chiama a riflettere alcuni tra i protagonisti della stagione di studi sulla dispersione degli anni ‘90 e li invita ad ipotizzare nuovi scenari di evoluzione. Interverranno Cristina Bianchetti (Politecnico di Torino), Stefano Boeri (Politecnico di Milano), Pippo Ciorra (Università di Camerino), Arturo Lanzani (Politecnico di Milano), Chiara Merlini (Politecnico di Milano). 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

February 3

Last Action Hero: Coast to Coast, Real to Unreal

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(By Nicola Bozzi)

After last week’s post about Demolition Man (1993) and the city of Los Angeles, today I’m writing about another action flick dealing with urban imagery, also come out the same year: Last Action Hero. Both movies are cop-tales, reterritorializing a way of dealing with crime and justice from one world to another. In Stallone’s sci-fi exploit the change happens in time, while in the more sophisticated – and also more tongue-in-cheek – film starring future governor Arnold Schwarzenegger the jump is twofold: from reality to fiction and, quite significantly, from New York to Los Angeles. Before we go further about the retorritorialization I mentioned before, a short introduction to the movie’s plot is necessary.

Read more

February 2

Urban Flux issue 2009-4 review

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(Text by Gaia Bianchini, all images of Gantenbein Vineyard Façade courtesy of Gramazio & Kohler, Zurich, photos © Ralph Feiner)

Conceived as a bimonthly issue, the Chinese magazine published by the Academy of Architectural Design & City Planning of Tianjin University and by Tianjin School of Architecture is dripping architecture from every edge of its rectangular, compact volume. Starting from the cover graphics, the “UrbanFlux” on the top left, challenging the border, to the minimal, rationally composed interior pages, the architectural structure of the magazine is above all reflected in the articles treated.

With a schematic index, thought like an underground map, the 2009/4 issue is mainly focused on Switzerland and ARCH/SCAPES, the Swiss exhibit contribution to the 7th International Architecture Biennal in São Paulo, 2007, whose theme was “Architecture – the Public and the Private”.

Urban Flux’s aim is to clearly present national urban strategies and architectural experiences to make them short-circuit in a common global debate on the thematic pair landscape/urbanization. The Swiss well-known, but compromised, relationship between architecture and landscape is here analysed with didactic approach. Besides country and canton maps, a selection of recent projects featured at ARCH/SCAPES are shown to follow and combine 5 different strategies of possible intervention: disruption, accentuation, dimensional dialogue, confirmation, injection. Which is the best approach – if there is one – I can’t tell for sure. Meanwhile, though, the several expert essays give the reader important clues and the projects shown definetely catch your eye. Read more

January 29

Blueprint, issue 286 review

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(Text by Gaia Bianchini)


Blueprint has traditionally made its readers well accustomed to sound explanations on design mechanisms and processes, what’s exactly up with design today. And, of course, by “today” we mean “now”. And, possibly, tomorrow.

Thinking of some attribute to generally define the thin, large format magazine, I can’t avoid stressing its most peculiar features: young and independent.

Under the wise guidance of Vicky Richardson (who’s recently been appointed as director Architecture, Design and Fashion at the British Council) and Tim Abrahams, Blueprint goes on giving its lucid, 360°- oriented glance on our world through specific sections dedicated to people/objects/exhibitions/installations/processes and meanings.

This month’s issue gives a challenging assessment on the 25 people among designers, architects and campaigners who will change architecture, design, graphics and communication in 2010. Of course – since the borders of the architect and designer profession are more and more blurring into somewhere else – the list includes personalities from researchers to graffiti artists; from economists to sculptors. Just keep an eye on architectural firms like  Toh Shimazaki Architecture, or sculptor Richard Wilson; or even the think tank Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, which is “exploring the consequences of fantastic, perverse and underrated urbanisms”, to see what’s in store in Innovationland for 2010. Read more

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