Yes, until some days ago, because it happens that his first book – “Il signore dei colori” – is out now and we bet it’s as good as it looks.

“Il signore dei colori” (Lord of colors) is the story of three youngsters becoming adults during a summer. A summer bound to reveal their weaknesses: one will understand he’s not as cool as he thought, another will be humiliated by a little girl, and the third will discover that the love of the adults may hide dark zones, pulsions that one can defend from, only if armed by a genuine naïvety.

The following is the last issue of Mosso, Roberto’s and friend free online magazine, featuring a presentation of the work with comments by Igort, Vincino, Ferruccio Giromini, and Daniel Pellegrino.
Click to download:

The ambition of identifing an idealized human proportion was the alleged basis upon which building a new rational and sanitized architecture, but the mere concept of finding a norm out of an ideal body is in fact paradoxical and even discriminatory. Despite that, the Neufert’s manual easily encountered a widespread success, and the standardization today involves not only the human anatomy but also men’s behaviour.

Without futher addition to what has been already and more exhaustively written by Léopold Lambert twice in his blog (“The Modernist Ideology of a Normative Body” and “A Subversive Approach to the Ideal Normatized Body“), we leave you with the work of Thomas Carpentier.

As a parody to the normatization of the body, Thomas focuses his attention to out-of-standard but iconic character’s bodies, such as the one of a culturist, Jabba the Hutt’s, Oscar Pistorius’, Borg Queen’s or David Toole’s. Around their real or fictitious proportions he then re-imagines or create architectural spaces whose main purpose is to accomodate their other standards.

Related:

Frederick Kiesler. Architecture, “Biotechnique”, and a Peek into the Future of the Computer, 1940. Thanks to Ethel Baraona for signaling!

Curator Adrian Lahoud looked back to the recent history of architecture and asked the participants to revisit “three competitions that radically transformed architectural culture: The Peak (1982), Yokohama Port Terminal (1994) and Blur Building (1999).” All three winning entries emerged under unique conditions to take up critical positions on the predominant tendencies of their time.”







From the brief:

“The last three decades saw significant change across social, political, and environmental registers. The conjunction of capital flows, mass urbanization and increasingly interconnected cultural and financial networks have reshaped the way we understand, produce and discuss architecture resulting in a breathless cycle of formal and aesthetic transformations. This restless appearance of change conceals an increasing sense of inertia or perhaps even of confusion, in that an intellectual project has yet to accompany the overiding sense of technical virtuosity.”

More infos on Think Space 2012 site.

We’re glad to use this occasion to bring back into surface an old article from the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s architecture magazines archive of the Fabrizi family: here’s the winner of one of the three competitions: The Peak, by Zaha Hadid, a hard-edged suprematist vision for a leasure club in Hong Kong, (Domus 642/1983)

Click to enlarge:

From the descriptive text (read below)
“The term radical reconstruction draws from the idea of radical history — generally, the history of politically radical social movements. A radical reconstruction relates to this tradition but further suggests the reawakening of radical historical thought through acts of architectural or urban reconstruction.”

I’m personally doubtful about the possible outcome of such a project: in fact rather than suggesting the reawakening of radical historical thought, I guess it would end up facilitating the fetishization of radicals spontaneous manifestations.

The following texts are the description of the project and a Petition.

The Mound of Vendome
David Gissen

Following the column’s reconstruction in 1873, various groups have called for the Vendôme Column to be destroyed again. But instead of destroying this rebuilt monument once more, we ask that another reconstruction join the reconstructed column: We, the undersigned, ask that the Mound of Vendôme be rebuilt in the plaza to commemorate the historical and radical events of 1871. The mound is a symbol of revolution and the column’s destruction, but it is also a symbol of the Communard’s interest in urban care, preservation, and the future of their city. It should be built again.

Already blogged on Socks:
LANDSCAPE FUTURES. INSTRUMENTS, DEVICES AND ARCHITECTURAL INVENTIONS

The excitement procured by the merveilles at the Exposition was so high that the concomitant Olympic Games came almost unnoticed by the public.

On an opposite (small) scale, the exposition also introduced the widely famous Matryoshka doll (Russian Nesting Doll).

There’s a lot of material available online, thanks to Things Magazine

We’d like to celebrate him posting (again) the work for which Fischli/Weiss are best known: the 1987 “Der Lauf Der Dinge” (The Way Things Go), a piece centered on an almost infinite chain reaction of objects.

A post apocaliptic industrial environment is the set for physical and chemical interactions between bare objects. The dadaist piece is able to elicit laughter (echoing the Rube Goldberg machinery so frequently used as absurdly complex contraptions in the Road Runner cartoons), while offering a sober representation of the world, of its technological intricacies and its precarious condition.

The book was published by the Megacities foundation in the occasion of the lecture given by Mr.Harvey on Nov 16th, 2000 as the fourth of a session of nine on the future of Megacities.

The work addresses the need for an utopianism which is “different from the traditional, static utopianism where space dominates time”. Our revitalized, dialectical utopianism should consist of space and time simultaneously. It should be space oriented as well as process oriented. So to Mr. Harvey it is not an utopianism where everything is fixed; history has shown that Utopia can also be dynamic.”
(Full text from the keynote’s review here)

Further read:
The right to the city

Through anthropologists Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff’s concepts of “social life” of things or “cultural biography” of objects, Tropicomania shows the implications of the expansions of tropical products from the local to the global scale.

Artworks, scientific illustrations, maps, films are showed to address “the interrelation between science, exoticism and commerce, and the power relations engendered by this very alliance.”

Read more.
Commodity Pathway Diversion

Colonial garden, 1910s – expedition of plantation in “Wardian cases”, intended for the gardens of experimentation of Bingerville (Ivory Coast), Sor (Senegal), Papetee (Tahiti). © Historical library of the Cirad

Mark Dion, “Iceberg and Palm Trees”, 2007, teddy bear, tar, plastic plant, straps, aluminium box, wooden crate, 330 x 170 x 100 cm, unique piece. Courtesy : In Situ Fabienne Leclerc gallery, Paris, photograph : Rebecca Fanuele

Otobong Nkanga, “Contained Measures of land”, 2008, volcanic sand, cactus, grass, wood and metal plaques, 500cm x 230 x 50 cm, Courtesy : Otobong Nkanga

Lois Weinberger, “Prayer Book”, 1976, folded tobacco leaves from my grandfather, Courtesy : Lois Weinberger

Lois Weinberger, “Untitled”, 2003, Ventilator, wire, wood, metal, bean husk 123 x 45 x 32 cm, Courtesy : Lois Weinberger

Marie Preston, “Table servie” , 2009-2010, Enamelled terra-cotta, brioche, fruits, vegetables and wood, Courtesy : Marie Preston

Claire Pentecost, “Intensive farming with plastic greenhouse effect near the sea”, Almeria, Spain, 2005, photograph. Courtesy : Claire Pentecost

Yo-Yo Gonthier, “extract of carnet leporello”, 2012, Courtesy : Yo-Yo Gonthier

From trendhunter:
“Dreams have a tendency to use imagery and emotions that are kept buried within the subconscious, and these illustrations are a great example of that blur between the alert and reverie.”

vakavalo.com

We remember, from our time as students at the architecture school, a typical lecture in “Descriptive Geometry”, on the perspective restitution of Velazquez’s “Las Meniñas“.  From the supposed, (historically established), height of a single stair’s step we were able to derive a whole plan and section with the proper positions of the characters and the real point of view of the scene. The science of representation was in a mutual dialogue with artistic historiography.

Lately a lot of collective effort has been focused on the reconstruction of the scenario of Hitchcock’s classic Rear Window, bringing to light the architecture behind the hidden secrets of a demanding plot.

Marialuisa Pacini was able to build a set model for a an adaptation of the drama in modern London.

Jeff Desom used modern video editing tools for dissecting the film and stitching back together. What he obtained was a single panoramic view of the entire backyard.

Here’s the video and some scene of his READ WINDOW Loop 2011 installation:

The “Wrong House, The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock” provides a plan and section of the Jeffries apartment complex:

Things Magazine, from which this post is inspired, informs us that this movie features “diegetic cinematography”. This is the case of movies whose denotative narrative material does not include only the narration itself , but also the fictional space and time dimension implied by the narrative. See Wikipedia.

Rhizome.org voice on “diegetic cinematography” features an analisys of the recent movie Chronicle and opens the speculation to uncharted territories, questioning the relationship between truth and representation, violence and entertainment : “Unlike Carrie, which was made for a generation that grew up watching the Vietnam War unfold in one hour nightly episodes,  Chronicle was made by, and for, the generation who was sitting in home room when the World Trade Center was attacked. And more than the content, the way Chronicle was filmed reflects psycho-social terror of that experience.”