March 2

Racconti di qui by Davide Vargas – Book trailer

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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

November 17

Manual of Architectural Possibilities 001 – Antarctica

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(This post is published courtesy of DPR-Barcelona)

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“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

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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

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October 26

The Function of Form by Farshid Moussavi just released by Actar

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(All materials courtesy of ACTAR)

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“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

September 10

Alguien Dijo Participar?
Book launch

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According to publishing tradition, while launching a book is desirable to get a good place (trendy-gallery, institutional auditorium, cultural centre or church hall) where to bring together a number of colleagues, friends and family … uncork some wine bottles to celebrate while explaining the main topics of the book. You can send the media a “press-release” and try to fill (depending on your expected convening power) the rented-paid-occupied place.

But this time we will do it differently, because we are not presenting only a book… and we neither are traditional publishers. Read more

August 21

Smart Surfaces and their Application in Architecture and Design

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The latest book designed by onlab, published by Birkhäuser and edited by Thorsten Klooster is out now!

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The process of creating smart surfaces leads via the perception of the associated phenomena to the understanding of surface as an approach to design. Smart surfaces expand the range of design options available to architects and designers and, more importantly, their use leads to new concepts which can also meet the changing requirements of buildings and design. Read more

August 14

Artists’ Studios by MJ Long

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Artists’ Studios showcases some of the personal work of architect and interior designer MJ Long. Long’s high profile projects include The National Maritime Museum in Cornwall, the award-winning extension to Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, and the celebrated Ivy and Quo Vadis restaurants in London. Read more

July 9

Marc Augé, Il bello della bicicletta
Book review

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(Recensione di Antonello Marotta)

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E’ stato recentememente pubblicato, dalla Bollati Boringhieri editore, il libro di Marc Augé Il bello della bicicletta.
E’ innanzitutto un testo coinvolgente e innovativo, per il tema affrontato, quello di analizzare i mutamenti della città, della socialità e della stessa pianificazione ribaltando i consueti meccanismi di lettura disciplinari. Augé ha dimostrato nella sua analisi antropologica, penso al libro Rovine e macerie, il piacere di affrontare questioni nodali della contemporaneità attraverso uno sguardo antico, in cui la compresenza di tempi esistenziali e storici si fondono in un telaio relazionale. Così la memoria archeologica si dirige dall’Acropoli di Atene ai resti del muro di Berlino, per ricordare come una traccia del destino dell’uomo sia una materia su cui riflettere, che tocca da vicino la necessità di tenerla in vita. Read more

June 17

PARASITE ARCHITECTURE. Book presentation tomorrow

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[Read the Italian version of this post]

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The emanation of building-restricting and renovation-fostering norms in several European countries triggered a research for recycling strategies of given spaces in XXI century’s architectural debate.
We’re facing a re-proposition of a so-called – and actually rather ancient – parasite planning practice, seeing the immission of new architectural bodies in pre-existing buildings or urban structures.
The parasite organism appears distinct from its guest both formally and spacially, but it’s linked to it by a state of need (of soil, systems, meaning, etc). On one hand, the intrusion of new architecture in the existing setting seems like a possible urban growth model, an answer to the need of densification, while on the other it testifies the emersion of informal practices requiring spatial translations of the sudden changes of the ordinary. Read more

May 20

Love and Hope. The letters of Gian Luigi and Julia Banfi

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invito amore e speranza toto

invito amore e speranza toto

Tomorrow afternoon at 6.30 pm Giuliano Banfi, Luca Molinari and Stefano Boeri present the book “Amore e Speranza” (Love and Hope), just released by Archinto Publisher. The book collects the letters between the renowned BBPR architect Gian Luigi Banfi and his young wife Julia Bertolotti they were ingeniously able to exchange during the period of Banfi’s imprisonment in the Fossoli concentration camp (april-july 1944) before his deportation and death at Gusen camp, Mauthausen. Banfi was actively committed first in the Action Party, then in the in the Resistance Movement against Nazi-Fascist occupation during the final period of World War II. The letters give the chance to appreciate the intellectual value, the moral strenght and the emotional richness of Banfi during, maybe the most dramatic period of Italian History.

Actress Lucilla Morlacchi will read some passages from the letters.

Where: Milan Triennale Museum, Viale Alemagna, 6 – t. +39 02 724341 – email:  info@triennale.it

When: May 21st, h 6.30 pm

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