MAY LIST
Rachel Whiteread
Detached
2013
Gagosian Gallery present “Detached,” an exhibition of new sculpture by Rachel Whiteread. Her title calls by name the process of abstracting or distantiating from reality that is an intrinsic part of the artistic process. Whiteread’s sculpture is predicated on casting procedures, and the traces left on the sacrificial objects and spaces from which the final inverse form is derived. She casts from everyday objects as well as from the space beneath or around furniture and architecture, using single materials such as rubber, dental plaster, and resin to record every nuance. Detached 1, Detached 2, andDetached 3 (2012) render the empty interior of a garden shed in concrete and steel. Cast from generic wooden sheds, the large-scale sculptures render negative space into solid form, and the prosaic into something fantastically disquieting. The sheds recall the monolithic architectural and site-specific works for which Whiteread first became renowned, such as Ghost (1990) andHouse (1993) and, most recently, the imposing concrete sculptureBoathouse (2010), installed on the water’s edge in the remote Nordic landscape of Røykenviken.
DROMOS
Il Melangolo 2013
a cura di Cherubino Gambardella
Dromos is new in the architectural culture of today.Responds with a small and precious periodical book to the crises of architecture magazines.He rejects the monographic issue as reassuring gallery of examples.Dogs playing theoretical knots between their curves and their tangles.It houses the opinions of interesting architects of every generation and of all nationalities.Sometimes re-edited thoughts and ideas of artists and designers who are gone.Dromos does this because he loves everything about extending a present time.Use the reality as a subject invention.It 's printed in duotone.White and black are the strongest colors in the world.It is found in all Italian bookstores.It 'also distributed in libraries architecture of sixteen cities in the worldNow work begins on the fourth number, and soon we will announce the theme
The Atlantikwall as Military Archaeological Landscape
L'Atlantikwall come Paesaggio di Archeologia Militare
LetteraVentidue 2010
Contributi, tra gli altri, di: Diller & Scofidio, Guido Guidi, Luca Basso Peressut
Not unlike so many other vestiges of war that have infiltrated our cities and our landscape, remerging as uninvited guests, the WWII bunkers and fortifications — the largest one being the Atlantikwall - exhibit an incapacity and unwillingness to be absorbed or erased. They are shreds of a past that seems unable to find its own emotional functional and spatial location as result of a memory never elaborated upon and too often simply removed via functional renewal. The signs of armed conflict, in fact, are the backbones which cross and could also unify Europe, signs defining what is now called the "Conflict archaeological landscape". This book presents a rich and unique iconography and a selection of essays for the first time providing a new critical approach to the Atlantikwall, proposing its interpretation as one of the major Western military archaeological landscapes.
Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec
Drawing
JRP Ringier 2013
A flick through its pages literally draws you into Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec Published on the occasion of an upcoming survey show at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris (26 April–1 September 2013), the book traces the dynamic French design duo’s drawing practice between 2004 and 2012. Comprising over 800 drawings, these are chronologically organized in spreads or on single pages. The absence of captions allows for a more immediate experience of these lavishly reproduced works; the line – at times broken – remains their driving force. Brightly coloured elemental forms catch the eye: geometric abstraction contrasts here with lush organic shapes, bringing to the fore the drawing’s haptic quality and subdued sensuality. If these personal pieces, extract from sketchbooks and archive, are read independently, that is “out of context of the designers’ body of work” as the book’s editor puts it, they nevertheless play a vital role in the creative working process towards the designed object. Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec (b. 1971 & 1976) have been collaborating since 1998. Drawing may be read as an exhibition in its own right, in book form.
Le Dictateur
by Federico Pepe - Pierpaolo Ferrari
le dictateur press milano
Difficile da definire, una casa editrice, una galleria d'arte, una rivista. Tante cose assieme.
Un progetto editoriale composto da più pezzi e autori, che mette assieme fotografia arte e moda, libri d'artista, riviste d'autore, numeri speciali a tema, il tutto con una grafica elegante, nel momento che tutti si allontanano dalla carta stampata, le dictateur stupisce producendo libri e progetti grafici innovativi.
Barents Lessons
Teaching and Research in Architecture
2013
Barents Lessons presents the one-year investigation carried out by master students on the Barents Sea region, under the leadership of Professor Harry Gugger. The remote but geographically crucial region has been analyzed starting with the thesis that the ocean is an urbanised territory.
Ranging from the territorial to the architectural scale, the laboratory has been organized as a three-part structure, reflecting the applied methodology. Part one: an analysis of the region in five research themes (the “Territorial Constitutions”); Part two: the documentation of a field trip of ten days in February 2012; Part Three: 13 architectural projects. Created in close collaboration with graphic design studio Ludovic Balland typography Cabinet in Basel, the gorgeous book has received the Most Beautiful Swiss Books in 2012 award with 18 other participants.
SuperCrit # 1
Cedric Price
Potteries Thinkebelt
John Morgan 2010
Supercrits take major experimental projects that have ‘changed the weather’ of architectural thought - and practice and put them back into the design studio ‘crit’ format for open public and expert debate.
Presented by the panel due to Price's untimely death. Speakers included Paul Barker, Stephen Mullin, Paul Finch, Jeremy Melvin.
Dynamo
Un siècle de lumière et de mouvement dans l’art 1913-2013
Notions of space, vision and light run through the abstract art of the 20th century and interest many world renowned contemporary artists such as Ann Veronica Janssens, Anish Kapoor, John Armleder, Carsten Höller, Philippe Decrauzat, Jeppe Hein, Felice Varini and Xavier Veilhan. By putting vibration along with the spectator’s perception in the centre of their works, they set up multiple resonances with optical and kinetic art, which first emerged at the Movement exhibition in Denise René’s Paris gallery in 1955, but also, more broadly, with what was later called “perceptual art” at the exhibition The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965.
In an unprecedented move, the whole of the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, an area of about 3,700 square metres, has been made available for the exhibition, in order to present almost 150 artists, who contributed to the development of this approach over a hundred years or so. Outstanding among them are Julio Le Parc, François Morellet, Gianni Colombo, Jesús Rafael Soto, Dan Flavin, Hans Haacke, James Turrell, Yayoi Kusama, Victor Vasarely, Kenneth Noland, Jean Tinguely, Yaacov Agam, Tony Conrad, Pol Bury, Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp, Gerhard von Graevenitz, Christian Megert, Nicolas Schöffer, Bridget Riley, Dan Graham, Takis, Gregorio Vardanega, as group of artists such the GRAV — Group of visual Arts research — and the group Zero.
Andrea Branzi
Armin Linke
Alessandro Rabottini
Gli Strumenti non esistono
la dimensione antropologica del design
Jonan & Levi 2013
La Civiltà Merceologica non è soltanto consumismo, volgarità commerciale, oggetti inutili e invadenti, ma rappresenta la realtà fisica nella quale si svolge la nostra esperienza esistenziale. "Gli strumenti non esistono" è il primo di una serie di libri nati dalla collaborazione tra Johan & Levi e Miart per consolidare il nuovo ruolo della manifestazione quale realtà che produce cultura tutto l'anno, nonché luogo in cui arte moderna, contemporanea e design dialogano fra loro in una città, Milano, che è il contesto privilegiato di un continuo scambio tra i settori della creatività.
NEW ISSUE MONU #18 - COMMUNAL URBANISM
How should we live together? is the central question of this 18th issue of MONU on the topic of "Communal Urbanism", focusing on contemporary communal living in cities. According to Martin Abbott's contribution "Learning to Live Together", this is a question often discussed among the housemates of Berlin's 40 year old communal "Hausprojekt Walde". Rainer Langhans, one of the early members of the legendary "Kommune 1", founded in Berlin in 1967, is convinced that in the future we will live increasingly communally. He sees a growing demand for, and interest in, communal life and shared experiences as he explains in our interview with him entitled "Privacy and Ecstasy". But in contrast to his own experiences in Kommune 1, where he experienced an uninterrupted, 24/7, spiritual communal ecstasy of love, the communal life of the future will instead be characterized by temporary communities, where people meet and share spaces, facilities and experiences occasionally, similar to his own current communal life. That way cooperation does not come at the expense of our individualism and is focused on membership rather than ownership as Travis K. Bost and Eric Höweler clarify in their piece "Ownership to Membership: Collective Consumption as Urban Strategy". Yasmine Abbas, Lara Jaillon, Thomas Watkin, and Onnis Luque explain in their article "Two Generations Together" how communal life might be an answer to present urban challenges that appeared due to increasing social fragmentation, weak or fragile economies and the burst of the housing bubble that pushed many countries to the edge of acceptable standards of living. History has shown that communal and cooperative life can lead to numerous benefits for everybody involved. For example, America met the challenges of the Great Depression in the 1930s in the spirit of cooperation as Jason Reblando illustrates in his contribution "New Deal Utopias: Model Cities of the Great Depression". However, communal urban life today has to provide a flexible platform for collaborative possibilities and should no longer aim to provide a self-sufficient framework, but a lifestyle that is stripped of the "forced socialization" of the shared forms of life of the past as Maier Yagod describes in his piece "The Urban Kibbutz - Revolution from Within". Such a platform, that could be taken up and inhabited by people as an extension of and complement to their own houses, is what the Swiss architecture collective Atelier 5 had in mind when it designed and built its famous "Siedlung Halen" in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as Heinz Müller, one of the current partners of Atelier 5, puts it in our interview with him entitled "Promoting Communal Life". STAR strategies + architecture and BOARD, in their contribution "Co-Residence: Habiter en Grand", argue that the introduction of a new form of communal life on the domestic scale of the apartment can contribute considerably to solving the current problems on the metropolitan scale, whether of an economical, social, or environmental nature. But the success of such a communal urbanism; and communal housing in particular, relies on a high level of goodwill and participation from all people and residents involved, as Adam Holland states in his article "Unpaid (House) Work". Only then might the communal experience of cooperation become a sustainable pleasure as Richard Sennett explains in his piece "The Community - Practicing Commitment".
Paolo Ulian
L'essenza e l'eccesso
Corraini 2013
Il libro raccoglie disegni di una serie di prodotti che rappresentano gli eccessi di un consumismo superficiale e acritico, eccessi ai quali ci siamo irresponsabilmente assuefatti negli ultimi cinquant’anni e che hanno contribuito all’alterazione ambientale del nostro pianeta.
Sono tutti quei prodotti di cui potremmo fare tranquillamente a meno ma che il sistema produttivo, veicolato dalla comunicazione pubblicitaria, é riuscito a trasformare in prodotti assolutamente indispensabili per l’uomo.
Nei disegni di Paolo Ulian, questi prodotti, come per esempio una bottiglia di diserbante, si affiancano a oggetti essenziali, come per esempio una piccola zappa, che ha la stessa funzione diserbante ma é più sana sotto tutti i punti di vista, creando così delle coppie per analogia funzionale e per contrasto etico, un prodotto che esprime gli eccessi del consumismo a un’oggetto che esprime l’essenza.
Garbin Emanuele
Il bordo del mondo. La forma dello sguardo nella pittura di Gerhard Richter
Marsilio 2013
Gerhard Richter è uno dei più importanti artisti viventi eppure la sua opera è ancora poco nota in Italia. La tesi di questo libro è che la pittura di Richter sia in realtà un'ininterrotta e profonda interrogazione sull'essere delle cose e, più in generale, sull'essere stesso, cioè su quanto ci è più prossimo e al tempo stesso più estraneo. "Il bordo del mondo" a cui fa riferimento il titolo è appunto il contorno ripiegato di ogni cosa e di tutte le cose, il "recto" e il "verso" del visibile e dell'immaginabile.
Editorial Gustavo Gili
Una Historia (1902-2011)
GG 2013
La Editorial Gustavo Gili SL fue fundada en 1902 por Gustavo Gili Roig. En sus comienzos se caracterizó por la publicación de libros de temática diversificada, con especial atención a los manuales técnicos, un género que hasta entonces no existía en España. Adaptándose siempre a los nuevos tiempos, la Editorial Gustavo Gili continúa liderando la edición en sus especialidades —arquitectura y diseño— mediante la aportación de una interesante y atractiva bibliografía y, al mismo tiempo, mediante un atento y equilibrado cuidado por sus formas y contenidos. Más de cuatrocientos títulos en catálogo son el reflejo de la amplitud, variedad y profundidad de los temas abordados.