05/05/2014

Serpentine Pavilion by Smiljan Radic

After Sou Fujimoto, Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei, Peter Zumthor, Jean Nouvel, SANAA, Frank Gehry, Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen, Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond, Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura, MVRDV, Oscar Niemeyer, Toyo Ito, Daniel Libeskind and Zaha Hadid, Serpentine Galleries Pavilion programme returns to its original aim of endorsing younger and lesser known architects by commissioning this year’s project to Smiljan Radic.

Smiljan Radic (Santiago de Chile, 1965) earned his architectural degree from the School of Architecture at the Pontificie Universidad Católica de Chile in 1989 and later studied at the IUAV University in Venice (1990-1992). One of the youngest and least-known in the Serpentine’s programme, Radic is known for developing buildings which merge elements of natural and artificial, offering a sort of a metaphorical escape from urban reality and civilization. Among his most challenging, yet widely appreciated, projects are the Mestizo Restaurant in Santiago, Chile, the Copper House in Talca, Chile, and the renovation of the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art in Santiago, Chile.

Radic described the pavilion commission as a leap of faith: “They are taking a big risk by choosing me. I’m not inside the common place of the architect, and it is really hard for me to do something so fast. But risks can be exciting.” In fact, his project appears to be one of the most exciting in the programme’s 14-year history. Resembling a primitive structure (one critic even described it as a sort of an alien cow bladder), Radic’s pavilion is structured as a circular, semi-transparent shell made of fibreglass suspended on large quarry stones which give the impression of a floating volume. In line with his previous projects and fascination with temporary, fragile constructions, the pavilion is “part of the history of small romantic constructions seen in parks or large gardens, the so-called follies, which were hugely popular from the end of the 16th century to the start of the 19th”.

Smiljan Radic’s Serpentine Pavilion will open to the public on 26th of June 2014 and will remain in Kensington Gardens in London until 19th of October, hosting a series of eight site-specific events which bring together art, poetry, music, film, literature and theory and three new commissions by emerging artists – Lina Lapelyte, Hannah Perry and Heather Phillipson.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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09/04/2014

Italian Renaissance Theaters: Teatro Farnese

Teatro Farnese (Farnese Theatre) is one of the most breath-taking sites in all of Parma and Italy. Built in 1618 by order of Ranuccio I, duke of Parma and Piacenza, and designed by the ferrarese architect, Giovan Battista Aleotti, the theatre was built to celebrate the passing of Cosimo II de’ Medici through Parma on his way to Milan to visit the tomb of San Carlo Borromeo.

However, Cosimo II de’ Medici cancelled the trip to Milano due to health problems, and the theatre would be inaugurated only 10 years later in the occasion of Margherita de’ Medici’s marriage with Duke Odoardo. For the occasion, the theatre hosted the “Mercurio and Marte” (Mercury and Mars) regal tournament written by Claudio Achillini with music by Claudio Monteverdi. The peak of the spectacle was an extraordinary “naumachia” (naval battle) for which the entire parterre was flooded with pumps located underneath the stage. The theatre also featured a special balcony for the Dukes, a precursor of what would become the royal booth in greatest theatres around the world.

Teatro Farnese was built entirely out of painted wood and plaster, in order to resemble more expensive marble. During the Second World War, the theatre was subject to bombing and almost completely destroyed; a restoration underway during the 50s brought the theatre to its original splendour. The restructured sections were nevertheless left bare in order to highlight the extent of the damage. Some consider Teatro Farnese to be the first theatre with a proscenium arch, that is, a theatre in which the audience views the action through a single frame. The age of Baroque took off from Teatro Farnese with its spectacular stage effects, while its auditorium recalled that of an ancient theatre.

Due to its complicated nature and extremely high costs of show production, the theatre was only used nine times from its inauguration, mostly for ducal marriages or important state visits. The last show dates back to 1732, after which it was left to ruin until the bombardment of 1944. In the meantime, many well-known artists came to visit the theatre, expressing their complete astonishment both by its beauty and state of decay, among them Montesquieu, de Brosses and Dickens, who even mentioned it in his “Pictures from Italy”.

Dickens wrote: “There is the Farnese Palace, too; and in it one of the dreariest spectacles of decay that ever was seen—a grand, old, gloomy theatre, mouldering away. It is a large wooden structure, of the horse-shoe shape; the lower seats arranged upon the Roman plan, but above them, great heavy chambers; rather than boxes, where the Nobles sat, remote in their proud state. Such desolation as has fallen on this theatre, enhanced in the spectator’s fancy by its gay intention and design, none but worms can be familiar with. A hundred and ten years have passed, since any play was acted here. […] The desolation and decay impress themselves on all the senses. The air has a mouldering smell, and an earthy taste; any stray outer sounds that straggle in with some lost sunbeam, are muffled and heavy; and the worm, the maggot, and the rot have changed the surface of the wood beneath the touch, as time will seam and roughen a smooth hand. If ever Ghosts act plays, they act them on this ghostly stage.”

Giulio Ghirardi 
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04/04/2014

Italian Renaissance Theaters: Teatro all’Antica

Teatro all’antica (“Theatre in the style of the ancients”) is a theatre in Sabbioneta near Mantua. A jewel of rare beauty, it was the first free-standing building designated exclusively for theatre performances. In fact, it would anticipate subsequent abandonment of open-air plays in favour of indoor performances. It is the second-oldest surviving indoor theatre in the world (after the Palladian Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza), and is, along with Teatro Farnese in Parma, one of three remaining Renaissance theatres.

In May 1588, Duke Vespasiano Gonzaga commissioned Vincenzo Scamozzi to build a theatre in his idealized town of Sabbioneta. Even though Scamozzi’s design relies on that of his master, Palladio, it was nevertheless compromised by completely different needs in terms of space and form. While Palladio’s theatre in Vicenza is wide and shallow (almost squared), Scamozzi’s is narrow and deep (rectangular), with seating area arranged around an almost horseshoe-shaped plan. Though smaller in scale, with only five rows of seats, the theatre in Sabbioneta retains some of the original Palladian solemnity, adding, at the same time, a unique and innovative element to the structure: a back entrance reserved for the artists, with direct access to dressing rooms.

Currently, one of the remaining elements of the original theatre is the elegant and harmonious lodge consisting of a Corinthian colonnade surmounted by crown statues representing deities of the Olympus. The statues of Gods and the elegant mouldings were built by the Venetian sculptor Bernardino Quadri (school of Veronese), while the raised stage was characterized by sets designed by Scamozzi himself, destroyed in the second half of the 18th century. It represented an urban perspective, a street lined with noble and bourgeois buildings. The sense of depth was accentuated by tilting both the stage and the vaulted ceiling, made of woven river reeds, plastered and painted blue.

The buildings of the scene, as in Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, were made of wood, stucco and painted canvas with faux marble and faux stone, while frescos on the side completed the scene giving the illusion of great distance. While we cannot define the structure built by Scamozzi a proscenium arch in the modern sense of the term, it nevertheless presented a very elaborate stage design. Larger than the one in Vicenza, much of the stage space in Sabbioneta is used to create the illusion of an outdoor perspective, leaving little room for actors. In fact, it proved to be too hampering, and was substituted with movable flats in later productions.

Unlike the theatre in Vicenza, surrounded by buildings on all sides, the one in Sabbioneta is almost free-standing and Scamozzi was free to design three imposing facades, severe enough in style to be defined Palladian – a plain ground floor with rusticated quoins, doorways and windows, and a piano nobile with coupled pillars and niches – a unique and precious gem of Italian Renaissance architecture.

Giulio Ghirardi 
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25/03/2014

Shigeru Ban Wins Pritzker Prize

The purpose of Pritzker Prize, viewed as the Nobel of architecture, is to “to honor a living architect/s whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision, and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture,” and it usually involves the works keen on leaving a permanent mark on our landscape. Yet, this year’s prize was awarded to an architect whose work is anything but imposing or monumental.

Shigeru Ban, born in 1957 in Tokyo, is known for his unorthodox choice of material. While carton tubes and paper are usually used to build working models, Ban has been using those very materials his projects for disaster relief projects around the world. Rather than praising only formal qualities and stylistic coherence, this year’s prize was awarded to the Japanese architect because “His buildings provide shelter, community centers and spiritual places for those who have suffered tremendous loss and destruction. When tragedy strikes, he is often there from the beginning.”

Combining Japanese tradition with his Western education and influences, Shigeru Ban has been developing unique structural solutions starting from formal explorations with basic building materials. In fact, it was almost 20 years ago that Ban started using paper-tube structure for building temporary homes after the Kobe earthquake in 1995. Since then, his temporary structures were deployed for the Cardboard Cathedral in New Zealand or Paper Concert Hall in L’Acquila, Italy, while other notable projects include Centre Pompidou Metz, Naked House or Crutain Wall House.

Firmly convinced that architects should serve the public and not just a privileged few, Shigeru Ban stated: “Receiving this prize is a great honour, and with it, I must be careful. I must continue to listen to the people I work for.”

Rujana Rebernjak 
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21/03/2014

Trix and Robert Haussmann: Manierismo Critico

Trix and Robert Haussmann have spent their lives challenging design and architecture practices. From their early projects in the 1960s, reductively categorized as post-modern or radical design, until their “Manierismo Critico” manifesto in 1980, the Swiss couple has questioned, subverted and interpreted with irony, humour and wit the rigid forms of the country’s modernism.

With the perspective of time, there is much to be newly discovered in their approach: the so-called ‘Lehrstücke’ (‘teaching items’) series, drawings, poems, fabric collections, or buildings they designed, such as the Boutique Weinberg and Shopville in Zurich’s main railway station; Trix and Robert Haussmann’s projects can be found in a diversity of forms, each offering a critical and idiosyncratic vision of architectural, design and aesthetic conventions.

After a 2012 exhibition at Studiolo in Zürich, paired with a beautiful publication by Edition Patrick Frey, a new show aims at revealing different aspects of the couple’s work. Conceived in close collaboration with the architects over a long period of time, the exhibition will be held at Fri Art, Centre d’art de Fribourg in Switzerland, and will trace the projects developed since the founding of their joint studio Allgemeine Entwurfsanstalt in 1967.

Rather than a simple retrospective, the show will be the perfect occasion to engage in critical discussion about canons of architecture and design practice, revealing how objects can be vectors of meaning and what being an architect today actually entails.

Trix and Robert Haussmann exhibition will open on April 26th 2014 at Fri Art in Fribourg, Switzerland.

Rujana Rebernjak – Images courtesy of Edition Patrick Frey 
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18/03/2014

Sensing Spaces at London’s Royal Academy

In our everyday life, we are used to accepting spaces that surround us just as they are, rarely questioning their forms, structure, light or material, and how all these elements affect us. An exhibition, which opened at the Royal Academy of Arts in London back in January, investigates our relationship with those elements of architecture and space through a series of seven installations developed by an eclectic mix of contemporary architects.

Titled “Sensing Spaces” and curated by Kate Goodwin, the exhibition’s full-scale installations occupy the impressive first floor galleries of the Academy, inviting the visitors to touch, smell, feel and live the works displayed. In fact, the curator describes the exhibition as an immersive experience, about experiencing the power and poetics of architecture: “People will respond to each of these installations in different ways and discover different things,” says Goodwin.

From Pritzker Award-winning architects Eduardo Souto de Moura and Álvaro Siza to Berlin-based African architect Diébédo Francis Kéré, from Shelley McNamara and Yvonne Farrell of Irish practice Grafton Architects to the young Pezo von Ellrichshausen, from subtle interplay of smell and light developed by Kengo Kuma to an immersive labyrinth designed by Li Xiaodong, each architect’s work concentrated on a specific aspect of space. Grafton Architects explored the concept of light and lightness with two sculptural installations suspended from above, while Kéré invited the public to engage with his structure adding plastic straws to a structure made of honeycomb panels. Grand masters Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura explored the tradition and history of the exhibition’s building with installations that challenged our view of the architectural practice itself.

“Sensing Spaces” demonstrates an ever-growing willingness to create exhibitions, temporary projects and installations about architecture where the visitor isn’t only seen as a silent observer, but is actively invited to participate, touch, feel, add pieces and live the spaces on display. Whether this type of show, in between Serpentine Gallery’s temporary pavilion and more structured, yet sometimes equally elusive, narrations about architecture such as the Venice Biennale, actually contributes to our awareness of the spaces that surround us is still to be discussed. In the meanwhile, the beautiful installations at Burlington House wait to be explored, with “Sensing Spaces” running until the 6th of April 2014.

Rujana Rebernjak – Images courtesy of Royal Academy of Arts 
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14/03/2014

Carlo Mollino: Boundless Work of an Eclectic Genius

In looking at the richness of Carlo Mollino’s work, one cannot but wonder how should this eclectic figure be framed – architect, design, photographer, but also aviator, a passionate skier and a racing car driver – any label appears too restrictive to frame his body of work, his character and his wit. Stereotype of a wild genius, Mollino was influenced by Turin’s lively cultural scene between the two wars, soon establishing himself as a versatile artists combining rigorous technological research and formal experimentation with sophisticated historical references. Despite his wide range of work, all of his projects remain coherent and a precise line of thought can be found both in his interior design projects (such as the surrealist Casa Miller, Casa Devalle or Casa Mollino), in the architectures of the mountain and the city (Teatro Regio in Turin, Turin Horse Society), as well as in his one-off products and photography.

A dandy, shy, lonely and elusive, Mollino conveyed his subtle messages by elaborating forms of the past using contemporary technologies, such as the reinforced concrete and bold structures applied to the sledge lift station of Lago Negro, a project where one would expect the more traditional use of wood. In fact, such juxtapositions of opposite materials, forms and textures, the dialogue between tradition and innovation, appears fundamental for his design process. Even though initially driven by the building fervor of the fascist period and the hiatus of the war, he has notably rejected the Modernist lessons of Gropius and Le Corbusier accusing them of cold functionalism and advocating for a more emotional, personal approach to architecture.

Even in his furniture designs, Mollino prefers handmade production of limited edition pieces, rather than any large-scale industrial production processes, giving his projects a unique aura. Throughout his life, he will never design anything for the big industry and the majority of his furniture will be one-off projects, ranging from wonderful tables, chairs and household objects inspired by nature, to the racing car designed with Bisiluro. The forms developed in architecture and design are highly evocative of his photographic work, notably the erotic series produced with a Polaroid, which explore the sinuous forms of a female body. The use of photography is in itself symbolic of his creative process: it’s not the image itself that is important, but how it is processed and produced.

Even though Carlo Mollino’s work is currently celebrated in major exhibitions, he still hasn’t been fully recognized as an architect, but rather appreciated as a charming, eclectic figure. While his objects are on high demand among collectors and the most fashionable of photographers, like Juergen Teller, have often chosen Casa Mollino for their photo-shoots, the figure of Carlo Mollino still waits to be fully understood.

Giulio Ghirardi 
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18/09/2013

Rediscovering an Indoor Walk

The tunnels and covered walkways were born during the French Revolution and they experienced a period of flowering until the First World War. These “roads in a road” increased their splendor, and thanks to them the cities became centers of trade and were inspiring greatest architectural achievements. The presence of theaters from the early days, in more than one arcade wordwide, is no accidental detail, for the arcades themselves created a new form of spectacle. Idling, window-shopping and observing became an art form, summed up in the French verb “flâner”, meaning to stroll, which, with its derivatives “flâneur” (stroller) and “flânerie” (the activity of strolling), became inextricably bound with this special form of urban space. 
The gallery is a structure, which in many parts of Europe helped make alive the city centers. Having emerged as attractive places in which it’s hard not to come in contact with other people, even the most lonely person felt inexplicable attraction for having to go walking through these places, amid a flurry of passers-by and an endless parade of shops.


During the last century of history emerged also objections and criticism against this new urban spatial system. The German philosopher and writer Walter Benjamin wrote from 1927 to 1940 The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk), his last giant masterpiece as an effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history and as an allegory of the new modern age.
 But, in spite of Benjamin’s social investigation – where he labeled the passages in a negative way – the gallery is in general loved and located in the most crucial place of the city. And it doesn’t matter how you call it: gallery, store, pass, stoa, colonnade, corridor or arcade. 
Whether you go in a hurry or not, the tunnel should be fun, but its use has lost importance for the hundreds of malls in every city.


As a recent example one could look at “The Allen Lambert Galleria” – a 6-storey pedestrian avenue designed by Santiago Calatrava in Toronto, Canada – an attempt to build an arcade in a modern city center, to give people a new covered shopping street. The construction has a very futuristic architectural form that goes back to the Gothic cathedrals, and it becomes at the same time, in a symbolic way, the cathedral of shopping. Today, as the German architectural historian J.F. Geist wrote, “we are living in a time when the arcade is seen not only as a historical object but also as a contemporary possibility” and there are so many examples that could be restored and revitalized to ensure that the gallery will become again, a special stop-in-transit to experience the city.



Giulio Ghirardi 
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29/08/2013

Build My Ranch, Tadao Ando

If thinking about architectural projects that have left their sign to our minds, designer/director Tom Ford‘s personal ranch designed by the rigorous and self-taught Japanese architect Tadao Ando surely positions high on that list.

The complex is located in the arid lands of Santa Fe, New Mexico, setting place for several western movies, and continuing the tradition of architecture connected to the fashion world and its characters. Polyhedric Tom Ford is Texan by adoption and to him New Mexico has always been a very spiritual place, a mind-set that has formed part of his aesthetic, and always meant freedom to him. For his project, Ando took inspiration from the context of enveloping portions of barren land and turning them into monumental riding facilities, integrating them with the surrounding nature.


The ranch Las Cuadras plays different roles with the architecture, landscape, Mexican customs (the figure of the Gaucho), local climatic conditions and light, a very violent light, playing with the thick, strong walls that Ando designed. Also the use of rustic color palette fills the space with tones of the earth and the blues of the sky and water.


Other additional solution is Ando’s skillful control of circulation, the contrast between curved volumes and square-shaped parts, and between camouflaged materials and solid concrete, which are a part of a method that the award-winning Japanese master has been experimenting for some time. In addition, his poetical project – certainly influenced by the works of the Mexican architect Luis Barragán – has been generated creating sweeping landscapes, juxtaposing light and shadows as strong contrasts, but could be reassumed on the themes of the wall as a monumental scenography and magnificent calibration of sunlight. The clean aesthetic, volumes of pure geometry, the modern lines and the unobtrusive relation to the surrounding views make this building absolutely stunning. Las Cuadras expresses the personality and the meticulousness of Tadao Ando’s handprint, that as Ford’s, is always directed to the pursuit of perfection and pure beauty.


Giulio Ghirardi 
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09/04/2013

Public Works: Architecture by Civil Servants

Public Works: Architecture by Civil Servants

The architect, or so the popular narrative goes, is a singleminded auteur, a créateur hellbent on erecting his or her (mostly his) vision of the built environment. He’s a mix of van Bruggen and Serra, decking out the city with pretty showpiece sculpture. He is Hadid and Gehry and Calatrava and the like, dreaming up improbable, untouchable icons akin to garish Rolls-Royce hood ornaments.

But, in case you haven’t noticed, you likely don’t inhabit an ornament. Rather, it’s probably a series of boxes penned by someone with a far less impressive name. Do you know who designed London’s magnificent, sweeping Barbican? Chicago’s utopian, yet tremendously functional Marina City? Your own home, for that matter? Doubtful. Yet it is precisely those functional, perhaps benignly anonymous buildings that our human lives actually inhabit. These works by architects no less diligent than their better-known colleagues are the real fabric of the built environment.

So, while the names of the architects who design these buildings have already been forgotten by posterity, OMA has curated Public Works: Architecture by Civil Servants, a fresh exhibition that seeks to at least pay tribute to their excellent work. Ironically enough, OMA itself is headed by the irascible Rem Koolhaas (the contemporary architect who perhaps best defines the aforementioned starchitect archetype – starchetype?), but his practice is nothing if not a visionary and considerate of human society. It seems strangely appropriate that this starchitect would be behind such an inclusive tribute to the extensive work of “anonymous bureaucrats” (the words of co-curator Reinier de Graaf): his forbears, his successors, his minions. The servants which make the boxes against which his starkly original designs look all the more impressive.

The show, which first opened at last year’s Venice Biennale d’Architettura, focuses specifically on large-scale, oft maligned brutalist/modernist 1960s-1970s public architecture of London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Italy and France. De Graaf calls the period “a short-lived, fragile period of naïve optimism, before the market economy’s brutal command took the lead.” It was the last gasp of an era when designers and planners actually seemed to believe they could neatly, cleanly solve world problems of urbanism once-and-for-all through building.

Open through April 14th at St. Agnes at Alexandrinenstraße 118 in Berlin.

Tag Christof

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