When Attitudes become Form

Bern 1969/ Venice 2013

Edited by Germano Celant

Published by Progetto Prada Arte, Milan 2013.

The Fondazione Prada presents between 1 June and 3 November 2013 at Ca' Corner della Regina in Venice an exhibition entitled “When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013” curated by Germano Celant in dialogue with Thomas Demand and Rem Koolhaas. In a surprising and novel remaking, the project reconstructs “Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form,” a show curated by Harald Szeemann at the Bern Kunsthalle in 1969, which went down in history for the curator's radical approach to exhibition practice, conceived as a linguistic medium.

To present, today, an exhibition from 1969 just as it was, maintaining its original visual and formal relations and links between the works, has posed a series of questions on the complexity and very meaning of the project, which has developed through a profound debate from various perspectives: the artistic, the architectural and the curatorial. Underlining and highlighting the transition from the past to the present, the complex identity of which it is important to conserve, it has been decided to graft the exhibition in its totality—walls, floors, installations and art objects, including their relative positions—onto the historical architectural and environmental structure of Ca’ Corner della Regina, thereby inserting—on a full-size scale—the modern rooms of the Kunsthalle, delimited by white wall surfaces, into the ancient frescoed and decorated halls of the Venetian palazzo.

Zenithal Light

by Elias Torres

Coac Publication 2006

Very few doctoral dissertations make for great books, books that readers cherish: architect Elias Torres's Zenithal Light is one of them. This album of thousands of photographs collected over years of research and travel, carefully classified, sometimes more than ten to a page, catalogues the tremendous variety of spaces that generate zenithal light, sunlight captured filtering downward from domes, skylights, towers and the tops of alleyways. Torres begins with intimate interior spaces and concludes in open city streets; in every case the effect is beautiful. The book's final chapter continues his playful codification, offering schematic drawings to accompany photographs of 11 cardboard boxes Torres filled with a wide variety of familiar, funny and strange objects and pierced to allow viewers to observe the effects of the zenithal light filtering through their interiors. A die-cut foldout cover allows readers to demonstrate the property themselves.

Less is Enough

Pier Vittorio Aureli

Strelka Press 2013

http://www.strelka.com/press_en/less-is-enough/?lang=en

“Less is more” goes the modernist dictum. But is it? In an age when we are endlessly urged to do “more with less”, can we still romanticise the pretensions of minimalism? For Pier Vittorio Aureli, the return of “austerity chic” is a perversion of what ought to be a meaningful way of life. Charting the rise of asceticism in early Christianity and its institutionalisation with the medieval monasteries, Aureli examines how the basic unit of the reclusive life – the monk’s cell – becomes the foundation of private property. And from there, he argues, it all starts to go wrong. By late capitalism, asceticism has been utterly aestheticised. It manifests itself as monasteries inspired by Calvin Klein stores, in the monkish lifestyle of Steve Jobs and Apple’s aura of restraint. Amid all the hypocrisy, it must still be possible to reprise the idea of “less” as a radical alternative, as the first step to living the life examined.

Il palazzo enciclopedico

La Biennale di venezia 2013

Guida breve

“Il Palazzo Enciclopedico è una mostra in cui si rende manifesta una condizione che condividiamo tutti, e cioè quella di essere noi stessi media, di essere conduttori di immagini, di essere persino posseduti dalle immagini.” Massimiliano Gioni

Il Palazzo Enciclopedico indaga il desiderio di sapere e vedere tutto: è una mostra sulle ossessioni e sul potere trasformativo dell’immaginazione. La mostra si apre al Padiglione Centrale ai Giardini con una presentazione del LibroRosso di Carl Gustav Jung. “Nei vasti spazi dell’Arsenale – ridisegnati per l’occasione in collaborazione con l’architetto Annabelle Selldorf - l’esposizione è organizzata secondo una progressione dalle forme naturali a quelle artificiali, seguendo lo schema tipico delle wunderkammer cinquecentesche e seicentesche.” Dalle numerose opere ed espressioni figurative in mostra, che includono film, fotografie, video, bestiari, labirinti, tavole enciclopediche, performance e installazioni, “emerge una costruzione complessa ma fragile, un’architettura del pensiero tanto fantastica quanto delirante.”

La memoria Vegetale

e altri scritti di bibliofilia

Uberto Eco

Edizioni Rovello 2006
Economica Bompiani 2007

Le riflessioni di Umberto Eco sul mondo affascinante e antico dei libri, sulla bibliofilia, sulla memoria e sulla gioia della lettura. Un volume elegante e raffinato, stampato in soli mille esemplari, nel quale Eco traccia un elogio del biblos, del liber, nati ancor prima della stampa sotto forma di rotoli, e la cui etimologia rinvia alla scorza dell'albero, a quellamemoria vegetale nata con la scrittura prima, con i papiri e la carta dei libri poi.

Un libro per bibliofili, ma non solo, capace di trasmettere a tutti il piacere della lettura come dialogo ininterrotto con gli scrittori. Un dialogo senza limiti di tempo, in grado di richiamare alla mente memorie e saperi, emozioni ed esperienze altrimenti perdute.

Dan Graham's

New Jersey

Lars Muller Publisher 2013

Dan Graham, one of North America’s most important contemporary artists, is best known today for his sculptural works and installations. His photographic works are generally not so well known, despite the fact that he first became famous for his photographic series Homes for America, pictures of typical American suburbia. To this day the theme of architecture and its surfaces in the context of postmodern everyday culture represents an extremely important facet of his work. This publication presents new photographs by Dan Graham together with original photographs from the Homes for America series. The new images exhibit stark similarities to the old pictures, as they were taken in the same locations, the same deserts of suburban streets and housing that Graham photographed in the sixties. Creating a fascinating, multilayered reference system of repetitions and differences, both spatially as well as temporally, it raises questions about architecture and public space and their function in society.

INdIZI diSEGNI

Domenico Pastore

Favia 2013

Piccolo Catalogo della mostra curata da Carlo Garzia che ha inaugurato la nuova stagione dell' associazione La Corte nella chiesetta del castello svevo a Bari. La fotografia è il primo livello delle opere del giovane architetto originario di Sammichele, che con mezzi semplici come lo smartphone fissa appunti visivi di frammenti architettonici o paesaggi. Su di essi interviene successivamente con un software con cui inserisce scomposizioni grafico - prospettiche su supporti di carta d' imballaggio: in un sottile processo di stratificazioni successive che i giochi di parole dei titoli complicano ed amplificano.

Cosmologia portatile

Scritti, disegni, mappe, visioni
Italo rota

A cura di Francesca La Rocca
Quodlibet 2013

L’utopia da sempre accarezzata da Italo Rota è quella condivisa da larga parte dell’architettura radicale italiana (Superstudio e Archizoom su tutti): quella cioè di fare architettura senza costruzione, bensì attraverso l’inserimento di oggetti, che siano di nuova concezione o objet trouvé poco importa.

Non a caso la maggior parte dei suoi lavori realizzati in oltre trent’anni di carriera sono soprattutto progetti di interni e allestimenti. Ne deriva una rivoluzione, in senso letterale, del modo in cui il design e l’architettura possono essere pensati specie in termini spaziali. O forse si tratta solo di un modo in cui l’autore c’invita a reinterpretare un’antica profezia contenuta in L’arte decorativa (1925) di Le Corbusier: «al vuoto del secolo della macchina bisogna reagire con l’effusione ineffabile di un ambiente che culli e inebri con dolcezza». Gli scritti qui raccolti per la prima volta descrivono appunto le profonde conseguenze di questo punto di vista sovversivo che prosegue nella seconda parte in parallelo attraverso i disegni al tratto, in massima parte inediti, che l’autore ha realizzato con un semplice mouse: disegni, mappe e visioni partorite o saccheggiate dalla smisurata cultura bibliografica dell’autore, atte più a smarrirsi che a orientarsi.

Site Specific

Photographs by Olivo Barbieri

Introduction by Christopher Phillips

Site Specific is a summary of Olivo Barbieri’s ten-year project to record the world’s cities in aerial photographs. The book offers a thrilling survey of thirty-six cities throughout the world. At the same time, it presents a narrative of Barbieri’s evolving approach to photography and his ideas about the nature of the medium. Presented chronologically, the photographs begin with the distinct “tilt-shift” photographs of Italian cities with which Barbieri first established his reputation—and launched a popular stylistic movement for selective-focus photographs. During the series, he later introduced other devices and approaches to distort perceived reality to dramatic effect, such as playing with color, registration, and the deletion or discoloring of particular details. The result is a remarkable photo essay about twenty-first-century urban space and about photography itself. Christopher Phillips presents a thorough background to the work of Barbieri in his introductory essay.

The book's captivating dynamism is down to Barbieri's unique take on the tilt-shift technique. From his aerial vantage point, he takes recognisable city landmarks and reorients them in a magical light. The infrastructure and architecture are accentuated to such a degree, they take on an intense hyperreality, inducing newfound awe. The anthropological value in Barbieri's work is undeniable, but Site Specific, published by Aperture, also charts his technical development over a decade. Five years into the project, in 2008, Barbieri began using postproduction techniques to boost colour saturation and pixel structure. The influences of Giorgio de Chirico and Man Ray - to which he credits his graphic, abstract style - are most visible in the later images. As a result, those photographs toward the end of the book, dating as recently as 2012, are particularly memorable.

Architecture of Life

Aga Khan Awar for Architecture 2013

Edited by Mohsen Mostafavi

Lars Muller Publisher 2013

The Aga Khan Award for Architecture was established by His Highness the Aga Khan in 1977 to identify and encourage excellence in architecture and other forms of intervention in the built environment of societies with a Muslim presence. The award is given every three years and recognizes all types of building projects that affect today’s built environment. Smaller projects are given equal consideration as large-scale buildings. Richly illustrated and with explanatory texts, the book presents this year’s shortlist and the award recipients. This year’s topic is centered around the relationship between life and architecture. Numerous essays examine how architecture interacts with the life of people who inhabit it.

Architettura in movimento - Architecture in motion

Susanna Caccia

Edizioni ETS 2009

Gas stations are icons of a new era, based on the myths of the automobile, of mobility, of infrastructures and of company branding. These architectures constitute landmarks articulating both the urban and the rural landscape; transit and fringe sites that have been seducing the arts of the 20th century, cinema above all. Their architecture is characterized by experimentation, seeking aerodynamic morphologies, building daring overhangs and adopting such a material, exceptionally plastic, like concrete. In comparison to the extraordinary wealth of documentation emerging from hitherto unpublished archive records and to the high quality of many of the permanencies, investigations focusing on this issue have neglected for a long time the Italian manifestations. This led to obvious consequences concerning the conservation, because many gas stations have been demolished and many others considerably altered; but there still exist many others, which have to be preserved. This is exactly the main objective of the present volume: after locating and registering the buildings pertaining to this architectonic heritage, it will trace an interpretative path against the background of modern architecture (from the Thirties to the Sixties of the last century), both Italian and international, in order firstly to establish criteria for the identification of the permanencies and of their quality and secondly to set the procedures for their preservation and valorization.

From the Metropolis to the desert

Emanuele Piccardo

plug_in.mono 2012

From the Metropolis to the desert is a journey through the Californian landscape, from Los Angeles, the metropolis without an end, stopping in Palm Springs, to the Death Valley. My wife Kiara and I made this trip in July 2012 as the initiatory one of our wedding. We discovered together a genuine America, which is reported in this book. The idea of the cinematic metropolis and the desert, like in the movie Zabriskie Point, the masterpiece of Michelangelo Antonioni, has accompanied us during our trip, while the cinema itself has joined our love. The journeys of the British historian Reyner Banham influenced my approach and my gaze, as well did some American photographers, such as Lee Friedlander, whose ironic view has always been my own shadow. This book is the report of both the discovery and the verification of the wilderness of the American landscape, which is totally a new one to the Europeans. This is also a journey through the spaces of a metropolis which progressively dissolves to become a desert, where all the experimentations finally make sense to us, from Bucky Fuller to Paolo Soleri, from James Turrell to Walter De Maria, and the ones between art and architecture which could finally express themselves at the frontiers.