.data|base.
from each talk we want to extrapolate thoughts, ideas and inspirations discussed by the guests
and leave them here, in the form of images, text, videos,
so that hopefully, in the eyes and the mind of someone else,
they can generate new ones
this page is a constantly growing shared resource
browse through, explore every link and get lost
GrilloVasiu left some traces.
FANTASY
It's the engine towards what we think the future could be, it sets the ground for speculation
Walter Pichler
"Portable living room" 1967
SYNTHESIS
It's the moment when a vocabulary with a common ground is shaped. We start to create our tools for a clearer vision of the fantasy. A reduction of unnecessary elements for a sharable vision, will define a specific reality for our project.
Costantin Brancusi
The infinite column
DESIRE
It's the moment where a fantasy starts to have a shape to be defined into something more concrete. in order to desire something it needs to have a shape, a face, it needs to start to exist.
Ancient Egyptian aerial plan of the Temple of Amun
CRISIS
It's the moment of negotiation, not only with your colleagues and clients but as well with your own principles, desires and ambitions.
They are constraints that we have to be able to transform into qualities and advantages instead of compromises.
Moskva Pool
CONFRONTATION
A constant hunger for something new is necessary
Unknown Swiss Artist
The persistence of the Obvious
Declaration of independency of a finite universe, where sometimes things are not what they seem. Old and new fragments working together to find a possible way of living.
The traces of Marco Barbieri.
RE-WATCH
the talk
An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus
"Homo Urbanus is a cinematic odyssey offering a vibrant tribute to what we have been most cruelly deprived of: namely, public space.
Taking the form of a free-wheeling journey around the world (10 films, 10 cities), the project invites us to observe in detail the multiple forms and complex interactions that exist every day between people and their urban environments.
Somewhere between visual anthropology and observational cinema, these films put urban man under the microscope and encourage us to take a closer look at individual and collective behaviour, interpersonal dynamics, social tensions, and the economic and political forces that play out every day on the grand stage of the city streets.
These films explore our condition as a human animal and the way in which the city—this artificial environment that we build around us every day like an extension of our contemporary bodies—shapes and conditions us. Yaken on the fly, these visual notes look at urban man not only within his group but also in the depths of his solitude, redesigning the outlines of the city according to a kind of emotional geography. More than mapping out an area, the idea is to allow a city to speak through the ways in which it is used, in order to show the shifting nature of its human landscape and to understand what local singularities remain in the context of the wholesale globalisation of our urban lifestyles. By assembling these different films, this installation looks at cities as unique responses to the global challenge of living together.
about
repetition
Residents of Hong Kong have 2.7 square metres per person of public space, slightly larger than a coffin or a toilet cubicle.
Singapore at half of the size of Hong Kong has 7.4 square metres of urban public space per capita.
New York, also known for its high land price, has over 10 square metres.
some traces by Matt Quinn director of Squint/Opera...
RE-WATCH
the talk
allowing to deliver a content
to build a narrative
COMMUNICATION
setting up a strategic frame
How to put many pieces of information together, communicating a lot of complexities to a broad audience?
Did you know Toyota was actually a looming company at the beginning?
Read more...
Read this interesting PAPER
about how communication transform the perception of architecture, with the case study of the Seattle Library, by OMA.
OMA
BIG
"We pull the architect's ideas apart to reassemble them together for the purpose of communication.
We look at it from the audience point of view, which often means REDUCING the amount of information you try to convey down to the most critical elements."
KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
SIDEnote
Just check them out if you don't know them...
The importance of communication to
improve experience
Build the Narrative first and design the tech around it.
You need to allow people to enter a piece of information from many different levels.
This doesn't mean dumbing everything down, but it means considering HOW audience engage with information and build your communication strategy around it.
RE-WATCH
the talk
the traces of Tamsin Green
Time & Contact
Widening & Cataloguing
Developing the process
Structuring the narrative
the importance of a sketchbook
check the Sketchbook Project, the largest collection of artist sketchbooks
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Embedding the idea of a project into its process
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We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world; its spaces, textures, habits. The work explores the ordinary act of walking; to make sense of the world and myself. Reading the paper landscape of the map, and seeing it come to life through the combined activities of thinking and discovering while walking. Working with close up photos, coupled with the act of collecting, and subsequent photographing of these specimens in my studio, I create a mapping of where my eye and hand wander, a dialogue between the physical body and the path.
© Tamsin Green
MAPS
A two-dimensional depiction of a
three-dimensional condition.
In the '800 maps were much more "representative" , closer to paintings, as they were drawn from direct observation of nature.
In the 1950s, maps started to be drawn from aerial photos instead, becoming an extracted graphic representation in a 2D line drawing.
other
MAPS
from Princeton Architectural Press
BTW Check the amazing work of ScanLAB
This is a question of representation. Twice a day, twelve hours apart, a new image of Earth is scanned and saved by the Soumi National Polar Partnership satellite and its sensors. The 1:30 p.m. daytime image, assembled from data gathered over a number of days, shows a cloudless Blue Marble. The 1:30 a.m. nighttime image, similarly composited, forms a Black Marble, a cloudless view of lights across the planet. The sensors can observe light in extraordinary detail, all the way to the level of a traffic lamp or a fishing boat. According to NASA, “the sum of these measurements gives us a global view of the human footprint on the Earth.”
theseBOOKS
Three-dimensional elements into a
two-dimensional artifact.
RE-WATCH
the talk
the traces of Lucy Mclauchlan
Space and Body Motion
a mural
is art that is not meant to last
a canvas is a permanent record
"Street art is not an art movement, it’s a cultural phenomenon.
When perceived in such a wide context, is it better to just remove walls, sell them and keep them in museums, or should we allow for street art to remain what it essentially is -
an ephemeral mirror
of currents of the moment? "
...or so they thought...
P o w e r f u l I m p e r m a n e n c e
Black & White
as layers
Colors
as memory
Marco Oggian's traces
RE-WATCH
the talk
Bold messages
and design
Design is a Language, not just something cool
...but it's also cool
5 colors as a choice to express everything
...or just one
Use creativity
for change...
Only if we manage to see the universe as a single entity, in which every part reflects the whole and whose great beauty lies precisely in its variety, will we be able to understand exactly who and where we are.
Different from everybody and nobody
...but never take yourself too seriously
PUNK
Eike
Konig
some traces left by Fondamenta
RE-WATCH
the talk
the pursuit of balance
spaces in transition defined by tectonics
The surrealist moment
a process
The role of the architect // Governance of the process
Nowadays there is a sort of effort to relegate the function of the architect to purely aesthetic-decorative tasks (or, as we say to the "design intent" of a project), removing him from his technical universe and thus making the task of a unitary discourse difficult if not impossible on the making of architecture.
Should there be a return of the architect's role to the one envisaged by Vitruvius?
Should the architect re-gain a leading role as the administrator of the whole process, able to deal with practice and theory, and able to operate on the entire architectural body, from research to execution?
a deeply skeptical critic of TECHNOLOGY and "techno-culture"
used at the service of the architect, to re-assume his role of key agent in the building process. A technical tool and a communication tool.
Building Information Modeling
is an intelligent 3D model-based process that gives architecture, engineering, and construction a shared platform, a collaborative way for multidisciplinary information storing, sharing, exchanging, and managing throughout the entire building project lifecycle
It is a system where a 3D model holds information (data) on every single one of its components.
shells Suspended for 6 months...
© Mikael Olsson
...until the roof is poured.
deliberately putting together things that do not belong
Domestic Infrastructures
on Domestic Infrastructures...
pushing MATERIALS to their LIMITS
RE-WATCH
the talk
TOM BENSON's TRACES
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"As AI (Artificial Intelligence) becomes ubiquitous, it transforms many aspects of the environment we live in. In cities, AI is opening up a new era of an endlessly reconfigurable environment. Empowered by robust computers and elegant algorithms that can handle massive data sets, cities can make more informed decisions and create feedback loops between humans and the urban environment. It is what we call the raise of UI (urban intelligence)."
The visions for autonomy in agriculture or domotics were pretty accurate. Transportation not so much...
making an impact here, has an impact on everything else on the planet - and due to the prominent role of cars and transportation in general, working on the future of mobility
is one of the most pressing aspects to shape a better environment.
get to know Systematica
collecting, mapping and visualizing data about our cities
Physical
social
Flows
technology is a precious tool for collecting data that are helping to inform useful researches and possibly shape the future, but what about the
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES of it?
RE-WATCH
the talk
Ghigo ditommaso left some traces
if you don't know who he is...
Recommended Reading
PUBLIC SPACE
where community comes together
where freedom and identity are expressed
where resources are shared
European
Check Christoph Gielen's work
CIPHERS
The giga-automobile infrastructure destroyed the public spaces in America.
American
Vs
The automobile’s mark on the land went well beyond core cities and their immediate surroundings. While the suburbanization process began well before cars were invented, and the outward thrust of the urban population had many causes, urban sprawl is clearly a phenomenon of the automobile era. The motor vehicle, as one critic stated, “has a voracious appetite for land.” Urban sprawl in post-World War II America did not follow a clear, consistent pattern of outward development, however, but a kind of “leapfrog nature of urban growth” that scattered people, businesses, and industry over a broad landscape with substantial patches of vacant or empty land interspersed among tracts of homes, commercial strips along roadsides, and a variety of low-density uses of various types. Ultimately, metropolitan growth morphed into megalopolitan development with urbanization stretching for 200 miles from Santa Barbara to San Diego, with Houston engulfing more than 600 square miles, and with the nation’s capital part of an urban matrix extending northward to New York City and southward to Richmond. In the late 1990s, Chicago accounted for only six percent of the land area of its metropolitan region. The automobile was the perfect mode of transportation in this terrain, and if it was not responsible for causing sprawl, it certainly fed the impulse. Sprawl became synonymous with the automobile.
Cars became both forces of diffusion and cohesion, helping to change the scale and form of suburbanization well before World War II. As David Nye suggested, “The automobile was an enabling technology that permitted greater dispersion of the population.” Motor vehicles disperse populations almost randomly, and roads and highways become the essential common links between people and their homes, their jobs, and their diversions. This process was underway well before anyone recognized urban sprawl and put a name on it. In 1922, approximately 135,000 homes in sixty cities had become dependent on automobile transportation. By 1940, 13 million homes did not have access to public transportation. In 1920, the average density of urbanized areas (cities, suburbs, and towns) in the United States was 6,160 people per square mile; in 1990 that figure was only 2,589.
the first ever
park(ing) day
A metered parking spot is an inexpensive short-term lease for a plot of precious urban real estate. What is the range of possibilities for creativity in a space usually dedicated to the storage of a private vehicle? Motivated by the desire to activate the metered parking space as a site for creative experimentation, political and cultural expression, and unscripted social interaction, Rebar offers PARK(ing) Day as a prototype for open-source urban design, accessible to all.
Your park(ing) day manual
Read about
gehl approach
The importance of MEANINGFUL and real data collection, to understand how people really use a space, not how we think they would.
the pilot project that transformed NYC
Working on PUBLIC SPACE is very complex, first of all because it belongs to everyone, therefore it is a constant mediation among many different parts...
Moreover, especially when working on sensible areas or countries, one needs to guarantee the greater good, but there is a constant risk that improving public space might be a trigger for gentrification.
Often the responsibility attributed to designers is far too big, while there should be instead a better governance of the urban politic, through which people could be defended by purely speculative mechanism.
another take to architectural photography
The traces of Fabrizio Festa
When two projects meet...
some other great collaborations...
...and perhaps the greatest of all
explained in the a simple way, to make it understandable
Simple
Topic
Complex
Topic
expanded in the craziest directions, linking it to peculiar and specific information, to make it richer
RE-WATCH
the talk
Statement 01 // One and Three Chairs
Joseph Kosuth
Is the nature of the project that determines its representation or is it the representation that makes the project as such?
Every project is seen through many lenses.
Statement 02 // Sketches of space and facades
Peter Markli
Proportions and Measurements to understand space and facades and all the single elements composing them.
There is the rule but also an element of intuition.
Statement 03 // Three Plans
Kazuo Shinohara
The column and its relationship with everything else.
Statement 04 // Wireframe Render
Kazuo Shinohara
A representation that summarizes the conception of the space.
A drawing that looks at all the aspects of the project together.
Statement 05 // Layers Render
Takefumi Aida
Layers to disassemble the buildings and represent each element.
Statement 06 // NS House
Atsushi Kitagawara
The envelope of the building is reduced to nothing, it's just a thin line, while the single elements are highlighted.
same same but different
The repetition of elements in space,
but morphed to fit the differences...
or as they say
celebrating
A bizarre sense of displacement and fragmentation, creating a less obvious kind of order.
We explore architecture focusing on the scale of the fragment, starting with a very limited vocabulary. We have crushes on buildings, noticing the systematic seduction of some elements. We struggle to avoid obvious repetitions and remove things that are essentially uninteresting, arriving at a collection of ambiguous figures and impossible objects. These elements are what we study, multiply, magnify, and then perform actions through overlapping and juxtaposition of a variety of pieces.
So maybe columns, walls, windows, doors and slabs are our most precious tools, our language, the vocabulary we operate. These are very basic elements that we have at our disposal, the instruments we choose to use. Elements that we put in order or slight disorder. Elements that we invent or steal from other buildings. It’s about appropriating them, distorting, multiplying and putting them together. Utilizing them using different kinds of logic. Then the building can almost be seen as an accumulation of fragments, as a collage of these elements that are gathered from the history of architecture. But it’s never an awkward assemblage of pieces, in the end it’s a whole, a unity.
Read More...
Lera Samovich | Fala Atelier
Some other Glorious Columns
"delicate moments, sometimes not child safe"
the most valuable moments
careful mistakes
FAçADES
intention and celebration
banality
economy of means
sense of humour
when all the fragments come together...
COMPREHENSIVE DRAWINGS
The representation of the project
is a project on itself
At the beginning there were the collages...
“We began to make these digital collages without really understanding the true media impact. They’re immediate, easy to understand, and easy to make. We didn’t expect it to become so popular among students and young architects (and at the same time, opposed by architectural ‘intellectuals’).”
...then came the wireframe renderings
"Photography is the real project"
It's the essence of the project, more than the building itself, it's another tool of communication, like a drawing, it needs to be curated to show the idea. Photography also outlives the building, it makes them exist to people who never actually visited them.
RE-WATCH
the talk
Jewelry as Wearable Architecture
“The recent vogue for electric lamps in the style of the old standing lanterns comes, I think, from a new awareness of the softness and warmth of paper, qualities that, for a time, we had forgotten”
Tanizaki compared the traditional Japanese attitude toward light and shade with modern Westernized ideas in the essay—the differences he noted remain to this day.
IN-EI, a Japanese term that means shadow or nuance in English, is a collection of lighting developed by Miyake in collaboration with Italian manufacturer Artemide. IN-EI’s collapsible forms came out of the explorations for the 132 5 collection, in which Miyake exploited the fact that creased paper has a tendency to spiral when it is folded or unfolded. The material eventually used in the lamps is a nonwoven polyester surface made entirely from recycled PET bottles. However, it still has the warmth and softness that Tanizaki praised in his essay—it is made at a paper mill via the exact same process used to make paper.
As a young boy, Miyake used to pass by the Peace Bridges, which Isamu Noguchi had designed as a memorial to the atom-bomb victims of Hiroshima. The balustrades made him realize, “This is design. His expression is so simple and amazing”
Miyake explained in an interview. “He was my hero.”
Light Sculptures
Akari means light as illumination, but also implies the idea of weightlessness. The fabrication of Akari in Japan at Ozeki & Co. since 1951 follows the traditional methods for Japanese Gifu lanterns. Each Akari is handcrafted beginning with the making of washi paper from the inner bark of the mulberry tree. Bamboo ribbing is stretched across sculptural molded wood forms. The washi paper is cut into strips and glued onto both sides of the framework. Once the glue has dried and the shape is set, the internal wooden form is disassembled and removed.
The outcome is a resilient paper form, which can be collapsed and packed flat for shipping.