Here is a video and some photographs documenting the event that MAS Context and Studio Gang Architects organized on Wednesday, May 2nd 2012 to celebrate the release of the OWNERSHIP issue of MAS Context, and Studio Gang’s “The Garden in the Machine” project, currently on display at The Museum of Modern Art’s Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream exhibition in New York.

Video and photographs by Tom Harris and Matt Messner.

Iker Gil is an architect, urban designer, and director of MAS Studio. In addition, he is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture at UIC. He is the recipient of the 2010 Emerging Visions Award from the Chicago Architectural Club.
mas-studio.com | @MASContext

Jeanne Gang is an architect, and the founder and principal of Studio Gang Architects, a Chicago-based collective of architects, designers, and thinkers whose projects confront pressing contemporary issues. In 2011, Jeanne was named a MacArthur Fellow.
www.studiogang.net | @studiogang

Photographs

“There is something abominable about cameras, because they possess the power to invent many worlds” Robert Smithson, (Art through the Camera`s Eye)

I want to propose to the reader a drift through the beauty and the poignancy of some of the photographic essays that regularly appear in each issue of MAS Context. Usually they relate to the theme that is being treated. However, sometimes this relationship is not an obvious one, but rather an ambiguous, blurry or even contradictory one: it is in these last ones that I am interested in because they open the door to the unexpected and new. If the written articles give an insight and define the position of the authors in relation to a specific topic, the photographic articles are the place for multiple readings and open interpretations; they can ultimately articulate the unsaid.

Consider the work of Yosigo in the context of the “Amusement” issue and the perplexity his pictures can produce in the viewer – for there is nothing amusing on them. Andrew Bush’s Vector Portraits may seem appropriate to illustrate the theme of “Speed,” except for their stillness is so well achieved that one has to look very carefully to detect traces of movement. Suburbia gone wild, by Martin Adolfsson, deals with the global landscape of the new middle class suburban owners that paradoxically don’t seem to own an individual identity. David Schalliol’s Isolated Buildings makes us think about the relevance of “Work” as a powerful counter entropic force by showing the effects of its absence. The energy of a live performance stage seems to be very well captured in Staged Energy images, by Chris Martin and Cesar Russ. But where does their melancholy come from? Perhaps -as in every photograph- from trying to grasp a live instant in time and turn it into something frozen and eternal.

EMPTY AMUSEMENT
Photography by Yosigo
Issue: 6 | AMUSEMENT SUMMER 10

VECTOR PORTRAITS
Photography by Andrew Bush
Issue: 11 | SPEED FALL 11

SUBURBIA GONE WILD
Text and photographs by Martin Adolfsson
Issue: 13 | OWNERSHIP SPRING 12

ISOLATED BUILDINGS
Photography by David Schalliol
Issue: 3 | WORK FALL 09

STAGED ENERGY
PhotographY by Chris Martin and Cesar Russ
Issue: 5 | ENERGY SPRING 10

Diego Arraigada is an architect and Professor at the Escuela de Arquitectura y Estudios Urbanos of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires. He established his office, Diego Arraigada Arquitectos in 2005 in Rosario, Argentina.
www.diegoarraigada.com

© Mark Hallet

Mark Hallet, senior program officer at McCormick Foundation, writes an article titled “Engaged?” about our event with Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang Architects on the occasion of the release of the OWNERSHIP issue and Studio Gang’s “The Garden in the Machine” project.

To read the complete post, please visit McCormick Media Matters.

MAS Context is excited to participate in Magazine Library 10, a travelling exhibition of magazines, art books, zines and independent publications from around the globe. The event takes place from May 3rd to May 13th, 2012 in the Daikanyama area of Tokyo, at the Hillside Terrace, a complex designed by architects Fumihiko Maki and Makoto Motokura.

Below is more information from the organizers:

For Magazine Library 10 — held for the first time at Hillside Terrace in Daikanyama — the basic premise of introducing innovative and hard-to-find international titles to Japanese audiences will continue, but this time accompanied by a series of workshops, installations, markets, and various live events.

The opening weekend (May 3-6) will focus on the exhibition part of the event, while the following week will be filled with live events, including a PechaKucha session where creators will share their work — or introduce their favorite titles — as well as a launch event for the latest issue of TOO MUCH, the magazine of romantic geography.

May 3rd to May 13th, 2012
Free Entrance
Hillside Terrace, Daikanyama
+81 3-5489-3705
www.hillsideterrace.com

Magazine Library profile
Magazine Library Launched in early 2009 by art director Yasushi Fujimoto (CAP) and
David Guarino (a Zillion ideas), the first Magazine Library was produced as part of the
festivities celebrating the 3rd anniversary of the Omotesando Hills entertainment complex.
Magazine Library continues to be run by A Zillion Ideas, and has so far welcomed
more than 50,000 magaholics and print hounds at its traveling series of exhibitions.
www.magazinelibrary.jp

By the way, we really love these illustrations by Luis Mendo!!

Iker Gil presenting during ARCHIZINES LIVE symposium
© Jacob Chartoff

In conjunction with the exhibition ARCHIZINES (curated by Elias Redstone), Storefront for Art and Architecture hosted a 2-day symposium on publishing practices as part of its Manifesto Series. Throughout its exhibition tour, ARCHIZINES has provided platforms for architectural research and debate, demonstrating the residual love of the printed word and paper page. Made by architects, artists and students, the publications included in the exhibition add an important, and often radical, addition to architectural discourse that will be further explored through the Manifesto Series.

Iker Gil, editor in chief of MAS Context, opened the symposium with a manifesto outlining 10 brief points that establish the methodology and goals of MAS Context. The 10 points of the manifesto are reproduced below:

1. DO IT FOR YOURSELF
Create the magazine that you would like to read. You are the audience of what you do so be passionate and critical. In the end, it is an extension of you as an architect and as a way of understanding the profession. Use it to define and reinvent yourself. Architecture, and design in general, demands expertise, commitment, engagement, and optimism. A magazine should aspire to no less than that.

2. DO IT WITH OTHERS
Collaborate with peers, either as part of your team or as contributors. Create a network of people from different disciplines, contexts and positions. Engage them as much as possible, learn from their disciplines, test each other’s positions to create a comprehensive, informed and forward-thinking outcome.

3. BECOME A PLATFORM
Use the magazine to provide a voice to people who have something meaningful to add to the conversation. The medium is flexible, and should allow for the inclusion of established authors as well as to give a voice to others who, without the platform, would remain mute and removed from the discussion.

4. STAY FRESH
Be alert to new, important and unexpected issues that affect you, the profession and your context. Address it quickly and produce fast but thoughtfully. Capture the energy of the moment, the medium demands it. But also be ready to revisit issues that can be recontextualized and discussed from a new perspective.

5. TELL A STORY
Think critically, enquire and research. There is an excess of information available out there without a story to ground it. A lot of it shallow, simplistic, partial and disconnected. Put forward topics and ideas in a comprehensive and focused way so it can advance the public awareness of the issue.

6. EXPLORE COMMUNICATION
The situations discussed are complex and multilayered. We are now used to either impenetrable and obscure essays that engage a limited audience or a constant bombing of void images without context and story. The combination of different communication techniques (essays, photographs, diagrams, videos just to name a few) and formats will not only allow to communicate efficiently and clearly the complexity of the topic but also engage with a wider audience.

7. REACH FAR
Formats evolve and with them our habits. New mediums and new habits mean challenges but also new opportunities. Test, combine and reinvent old and new mediums in order to evolve and push the boundaries. Think critically about the unique qualities present in each medium to improve the outcome and expand the reach of your network of collaborations and distribution.

8. INSTIGATE THE DEBATE
Each issue of the journal is a chance to address a pressing aspect of our built environment. The combination of formats not only helps to expand the network but also establishes ways in which a fruitful debate can be established. Each issue is a pro-active start of the conversation, not the end of it.

9. LEAVE SEDIMENT
Use multiple formats to create a culture of design in as many locations as possible. Ground your magazine. Establish events, formal or informal, that exploit the potential of a collective gathering and discussion. It will give a new reading to the content of the issue from the online and printed versions and hopefully it will start or continue to define and establish forums of critical thinking.

10. ACT, AND ACT FREQUENTLY
As Mimi Zeiger wrote it in her article for the INFORMATION issue of MAS Context “Forget paper or websites, publishing is a happening, an act, and event to generate content in itself.”

ARCHIZINES LIVE symposium
© Storefront for Art and Architecture

Besides MAS Context, other magazines participating in the symposium included PIDGIN, PLAT, Fresh Meat, Archphoto 2.0, Log, OASE, CLOG, One:Twelve, Architects Newspaper, Another Pamphlet, No Now, P.E.A.R, Praxis, New Geographies, Cornell Journal of Architecture, Foreign Architects Switzerland (FAS), Volume, PLOT, Scapegoat, San Rocco, Candide, Evil People in Modernist Homes in Popular Films, Megawords, Thresholds and PIN-UP.

Iker Gil is an architect, urban designer, and director of MAS Studio. In addition, he is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture at UIC. He is the recipient of the 2010 Emerging Visions Award from the Chicago Architectural Club.
www.mas-studio.com | @MASContext

Resistant Objects

In plumbing the already-extensive depths of the MAS Context archives for this edition of In Context, I found myself confronted by a menagerie of resistant objects that cropped up from issue to issue. These are physical things, whether found or invented by those who introduce them to us, whose stubborn agency and incommensurability has provoked a series of unconventional practices — not just writing but making souvenirs, filing lawsuits, drawing obsessively, or collaging histories — for the authors and audiences that encounter them.

Tom Keeley’s Boom Boom Rubble Dust gives poignant homage to a pair of industrial objects that unwittingly became heroic bastions of resistance against the generic “airbrushing and botox-ing” of Northern English cities, “tarted up beyond recognition” under the market economy: the Tinsley Cooling Towers of Sheffield. Abandoned as relics, memorialized as icons, nearly transmuted into artworks, circulated as memorabilia, finally reduced to rubble: for Keeley, the Towers offer a stubborn reminder that cities like Sheffield have a history, too, one that deserves to be folded into the transformations of the present.

“Social architect” Santiago Cirugeda clearly relishes the resistant nature of the objects he introduces aggressively into urban contexts in Spain. He gleefully notes “the interest of the police to fine him” for his Containers project in Seville, and faithfully reproduces the newspaper articles through which an ongoing debate about the legality of his work has been conducted in the Spanish press. In one instance, he even sued himself in order to be able to erect temporary scaffolding, a canny exploitation of legal codes to convert a resistant act (grafitti) into the pretext for an even more intrusive spatial intervention (extra room).

Mika Savela’s form of resistance to reactionary cultural politics in Switzerland is mediatic rather than physical. In The Great Mosques of Lake Geneva, a highly charged series of images are used to subvert the country’s recent constitutional ban on the construction of minarets by projecting the fictional history of a nation in which the Ottomans, rather than the Habsburgs, had won the decisive battle at Zenta of 1697. Savela fuses the classical landscapes of nineteenth-century Switzerland with the minaret-studded panoramas of Constantinople, forcing us to confront challenging questions about the idealized constructions of nations and histories.

The objects that generate discomfort for Kate Bingaman Burt are the everyday detritus of products, packaging, fast food, energy drinks, movie tickets, and other remains of a consumer lifestyle faithfully catalogued. Obsessive Consumption is itself an obsessive recording of these items — everything Burt has purchased since 2006 — through drawings accompanied by captions which betray both attraction to and repulsion from these products. The “gross” Chick-fil-a sandwich Burt guilted a student into buying (“I need to stop”), the admission of temptation of Powerade’s “orangy sweet goodness” instead of drinking water—the process of documenting these objects amounts, for Burt, to a measure of her resistance or submission to their seductions.

To produce an architectural object that resists classification: that was the aim, or at least the result, of Antón García-Abril’s project “The Truffle.” Fittingly aberrant for an issue on speed, the Truffle undoes the conventionalized processes of design and construction to produce a formless register of the animal and mineral traces of compression, erosion, cutting, grazing, and hollowing. Is it a grotto? A hollow rock? A bunker? The object stands there silently, both suggesting and resisting interpretation.

BOOM BOOM RUBBLE DUST
Essay by Tom Keeley
Issue: 12 | ABERRATION WINTER 11

NEGOTIATING LEGALITY
Projects by Santiago Cirugeda
Issue: 13 | OWNERSHIP SPRING 12

THE GREAT MOSQUES OF LAKE GENEVA
Essay by Mika Savela
Issue: 10 | CONFLICT SUMMER 11

OBSESSIVE CONSUMPTION
Text and Illustrations by Kate Bingaman Burt
Issue: 13 | OWNERSHIP SPRING 12

THE TRUFFLE
Project by Antón García-Abril
Issue: 11 | SPEED FALL 11

Michael Kubo is a writer and editor currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture at MIT. His research focuses on topics such as history of publishing as a strategic form of architectural practice and the Cold War architecture of the RAND Corporation. He is also the director (along with Chris Grimley and Mark Pasnik) of pinkcomma gallery in Boston.
www.architizer.com/en_us/people/profile/michael_kubo/ | @microkubo

© MAS Context

–––––––––––––––––THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT–––––––––––––––––

On Wednesday, May 2nd 2012, MAS Context and Studio Gang Architects are hosting an event to celebrate the release of OWNERSHIP, the latest issue of MAS Context, and Studio Gang’s “The Garden in the Machine” project, currently on display at The Museum of Modern Art’s Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream exhibition in New York.

Led by Iker Gil and Jeanne Gang, the event is a unique opportunity to discuss the ideas behind the project and this issue of the journal, as well as to discover the innovative work of this internationally renowned practice.

When
Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012
6:30 pm – 8 pm

Where
Studio Gang Architects
1212 N Ashland Ave., Suite 212
Chicago

EVENT IS FREE BUT LIMITED TO 25 PEOPLE

To RSVP, please email info@mascontext.com

© Storefront for Art and Architecture

After London, Milan and Barcelona, ARCHIZINES opens tonight at Storefront for Art and Architecture in NYC. MAS Context will be be exhibited among the selection of architectural magazines, and editor in chief Iker Gil will take part in the “ARCHIZINES LIVE: Symposium on Publishing Practices” event taking place this Friday and Saturday.

This show is designed by \ / | < | \ | (Giancarlo Valle, Isaiah King, Ryan Neiheiser) and draws inspiration from the quintessential New York model of publication display - the newstand - and turns it on its side. Instead of a vertical, 2-dimensional billboard, the show offers a horizontal, 3-dimensional field of objects: 80 architecture publications displayed on delicate metal rods, which sprout from the floor. The exhibition evacuates all other content from the space, creating an information vacuum that focuses the visitor's attention on the objects themselves: 80 architecture magazines, fanzines and journals from over 20 countries that provide new platforms for commentary, criticism and research into the spaces we inhabit and the practice of architecture.

To more information about the exhibition, please visit their website.

© Naho Kubota

Icons in Real-Time

If, as Alexandra Lange writes in Writing About Architecture, “The idea of a landmark becomes fuzzier as we move closer to the present,” then how are landmarks defined as the present keeps speeding up? That question was stuck in my head as I dove into the MAS Context archives to curate this In Context. Richard Prouty contrasts Wordsworth’s London–a city that could be seen in its entirety from a bridge–with the contemporary techno-augmented cityscape to great effect. Today, we’re as likely to navigate a city by looking down at our smartphones as we are are by looking up at our buildings, meaning that a landmark can be created simply through the manipulation of data. That has huge implications for what–and who–defines the city.

Troy Conrad Therrien explains the difference between the speed of information (fast) and the speed of knowledge (slow), highlighting how widespread public access to data is eroding the very idea of “official,” for better or worse. Tom Keeley’s account of the re-framing of un-loved structures (in this case, a pair of cooling towers) as an emotional touchstone for the city of Sheffield serves as a case study for how a meaningful civic landmark can be established by a couple of determined individuals. Ethel Baraona Pohl, in her piece on Jürgen Mayer’s Metropol Parasol in Seville, shows how even a formally pure, officially-sanctioned landmark can be claimed and re-defined by the motliest of crews.

Iker Gil’s interview with Everything is a Remix creator Kirby Ferguson provides an interesting jumping-off point for considering how the experience of a city’s “sense of place” could be remixed by agents of its myriad subcultures. This consideration is vital, as technology democratizes ownership of urban identity. But as Ferguson’s series points out, gatekeepers don’t cede authority without a fight. So how will this democratization play out when a city’s global brand is at stake? Something to think about.

THE DATA CITY
Essay by Richard Prouty
Issue: 7 | INFORMATION FALL 10

LOOKING FOR A THEORY OF REAL-TIME KNOWLEDGE
Essay by Troy Conrad Therrien
Issue: 11 | SPEED FALL 11

BOOM BUST RUBBLE DUST
Essay by Tom Keeley
Issue: 12 | ABERRATION

METROPOL PARASOL
Essay by Ethel Baraona Pohl of dpr-barcelona
Issue: 12 | ABERRATION

EVERYTHING IS A REMIX
Iker Gil interviews Kirby Ferguson
Issue: 13 | OWNERSHIP SPRING 12

Brendan Crain is a writer and urbanist who spends an inordinate amount of time pondering the effects of social technology on the urban environment (and vice versa). He is the founder of the Where blog and the Communications Manager at Project for Public Spaces.
http://thewhereblog.blogspot.com | @thewhereblog

© Andrew Clark

Essay by Iker Gil and Andrew Clark, editors of MAS Context University Works

Beginning at the desk of the 1st year studio, architectural education drives students to think, create, produce, react, critique, absorb, challenge and reinterpret. Architecture studios hum with this energy of work. UNIVERSITY WORKS began with a dual interest in discovering what students and universities are working on, working with, working for, within a Dymaxion projection of our world.

We undertook the project as the continuation of two lines of exploration. The first, MAS Context, is a journal in which we address contexts that shape design and the world and create a platform for sharing knowledge and discussing topics. The second is the tradition of architectural publications recording and broadcasting the condition of the academic work. UNIVERSITY WORKS was approached both as a project in method, how to collect, curate, and understand a pixelated view of architectural work, and a project in broadcast, how to instigate discussion and draw new connections between students, schools of architecture, and universities. We strove for multiple means of representation and readings: an objectified print publication, a circulating document at the student-affordable price of free, and a location on the world wide web (where else).

It is a collection totaling 50 student projects, selected by 10 curators, instructing in 10 schools of architecture at 10 universities. It is a book raising the visibility of the students’ promising design work through distinguished curators’ selections from the schools of architecture.

Bookshelves of architect’s offices, architecture schools, and student studios include the publications of architectural student work. These are usually one of three forms: a school’s annual design catalogue; a jet-setting, visiting professor’s studio compilation; or, an encyclopedia of a multi-faceted project taken on by many students over several semesters. These works have charted new terrains and trajectories for the discipline by continuing to push the method, visualization and position of architectural design.

The architectural discipline awoke to the burgeoning force and project of globalization in the 90s, and UNIVERSITY WORKS is a response to this condition. It is a publication that seeks to go beyond the borders of one studio or project, beyond the margins of one school or country. As we begin the second decade of the 21st Century, UNIVERSITY WORKS sets out to explore cultures, contexts, and creations that span lines of longitude and latitude. Breaking physical boundaries is also a goal, and in some cases, we could say a need for most of the selected schools. European schools have the ERASMUS programme (the European Union’s flagship mobility program in the field of education and training), and U.S. universities have their programs abroad. A few of the schools selected have travel programs: UIC’s semesters in Barcelona, Virginia Tech’s Chicago Studio and Parson’s work with the International Design and Architecture Program at the Faculty of Architecture at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. Architecture schools are going beyond their building walls to stay relevant.

The selected universities are located on five continents. Out of this breadth, UNIVERSITY WORKS discovers distance or connection, difference or sameness, small divergence or escape velocity for these schools of architecture. They are schools with which we had strong connections, brief collaborations, close friends, or first conversations. The choice of university was largely driven by the choice of the curator.

UNIVERSITY WORKS is not a strict cross-section sampling that leads to an image of the director’s vision or press-ready position of any school. This is acknowledged in some of the of the curator’s introductions, citing for example the scale of the school as a factor of the heterogeneous production and vision of the school. Rather, the publication is more a lens from an insider’s view on the condition of the school. Curator’s subjective selection strategies include: a comprehensive view of the school, blue-ribbon winners, and traveling studios or distance projects. Their involvement in the development of certain works ranges from direct to nonexistent.

The selected projects in UNIVERSITY WORKS are comprised of programs and design challenges across the spectrums of scale, use, context, technique and representation. Included in the works are memorials and museums, mined Manhattans, methods of modeling, and multiple critiques of modernist design. In most cases, they are a set of hyper-contemporary resolutions to 21st Century challenges, while a few explore challenges and discussions the discipline has been experimenting with for half a century.

UNIVERSITY WORKS is a publication where the City is king — evident even in the selection of the universities. Many projects are situated in the urban context, deliver on challenges of restricted sites and existing histories, dialogue with conditions of higher densities and speculate on new metropolitan landscapes. However, they are projects, more than other student work publications in previous years, that respond with buildings and volumes, not only plans and diagrams.

Whether in visualization or approach, UNIVERSITY WORKS represents the shrinkage of time and space resulting in various levels of consistency in the selected projects. Among the schools, methods and approaches extracted from the student work, more are similar than different. The choice of representation and the style of visualization by the students’ highlight this growing sameness. This pseudo-monotony is also present in the absence of sustainability (embedded or the “Green Giant” variety), blobs or sinuous formal resolutions, and urban design as diagram.

Digital terrains are the driving force of the speed and frequency of intellectual and creative disbursement, keeping students attentive to the goings-on online. Software and Intel chips have made imitating and creating images easier. Daily doses are now hourly check-ins, while watching the RSS feed on the web has replaced afternoons in the stacks.

UNIVERSITY WORKS and the panel discussion we organized with architects and educators from around the world (currently based in Chicago) bring into question several issues of direction, presence, persona and influence; whether it’s the school’s position and its trickle-down effect or a mid-tier influence permeating upwards and downwards. Each level of the educational system has a position and an agenda: the university’s mission, the school of architecture’s direction, the professor’s refined, evolving project, and the developing pupil. Students work, professors work with the students, the school of architecture works the system, and the university keeps everyone working to pay the bills. UNIVERSITY WORKS is a point of departure, a first experiment in generating conversation and discussion around the conditions of schools of architecture. Refinements to this project’s method are certainly our aim. A discussion that arises from the publication is the role of the studio instructor and his/her acknowledgment in the establishment of the identity of the student work submitted. In addition, selecting schools with established connections, selecting a larger amount of schools and projects, considering cross-reference programmatic similarities instead of geographic differences are aspects to be studied for future efforts in presenting student work. They will produce different confrontations and parallelisms between the projects.

UNIVERSITY WORKS is intended to start this conversation among those in architectural education. Students should be able to produce their own tools in order to understand what other students are doing; professors should establish studios with strong identities at the forefront of the architecture discipline; and Directors and Chairs of schools of architecture should establish clear positions for their schools.

UNIVERSITY WORKS is our first contribution to this discussion.

Andrew Clark is a designer at MINIMAL and a collaborator in MAS Studio. He has designed solutions for communications, brand, vision, experience and visualization projects. His work is featured in “Shanghai Transforming” (Actar, 2008), “Building Globalization” (UChicago Press, 2011), and “Work Review” (GOOD Transparency).
www.mnml.com | @AndrewClarkMNML

Iker Gil is an architect, urban designer, and director of MAS Studio. In addition, he is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture at UIC. He is the recipient of the 2010 Emerging Visions Award from the Chicago Architectural Club.
www.mas-studio.com | @MASContext