MEATS Workshop in Olot, Spain

In keeping to the CO-VID precautions imposed within the country, our team spent a part of the time co-living and working at Xevi Bayona’s workshop.

‘Far Away, So Close’ began with extensive research into how the pandemic is transforming the organization of our domestic and collective habitats, as well as the effects of these changes on the physical, mental and emotional health of our society. One of the main conclusions of this research is the urgent need to revise the concept of social distancing, a controversial notion that could have devastating consequences if, as can be expected, this new reality persists over time.

BTS + "Beautiful Failures," experiments at the Pavilion

Beautiful Failures is a story of construction-destruction-construction to reflect on the rich history of the German Pavilion of Barcelona 1929 International Exhibition. At the same time, it considers current events that transcend material culture and question our memo­ry and ethics. We fervently think that the pavilion’s history and its context embraces and exalts the grudges and desires we come to tell.

In 1914, while Mies van der Rohe began sketching the glass skyscraper for the Friedrich­straße competition, Paul Scheerbart published Glasarchitektur (Glass Architecture). In this essay, the author demanded a replacement of brick construction in architecture in fa­vour of glass. The possibility of transparency of this material encouraged the idea of gen­erating a new society by releasing it from the shadows.

The properties of glass have always caused a mystical fascination. Due to its appearance as an amorphous material, it resonates with bright minerals. It presents complex qualities such as fragile hardness. It also brings danger such as razor-sharp edges, or high tempera­tures when in viscous state.

While many architectural utopias are framed in glass’s hypnotic qualities, many dystopias have been devised based on its contradictions. Mies’s and Reich’s German Pavilion is a clear example of glass’s ambivalence. Its polished surfaces of stones and water sheets seek to mirror the intrinsic qualities of glass: transparency and reflectiveness. The pavilion’s architecture of reflexes and see-through followed the idea of progress and freedom in a new German republic. However, in the last decades, glass has been applied to contin­uous curtain-walls in corporate buildings and anonymous architecture. Devoid of its sug­gestive and quasi-mystical origin, plate glass has emulated the tenets of globalized mo­dernity to the point of becoming its symbol. Despite its obvious failures and explicit horrors (e.g., 9/11), this image of modernity continues to thrive in our collective memory.

NONOTAK STUDIO @ FUTURE FORWARD EVENT

FUTURE FORWARD EVENT SERIES PRESENTED BY THE ALL-NEW TOYOTA PRIUS

Location:
Industria
775 Washington Street
New York, NY 10014
Saturday, Jun 4 2016
12:00PM - 5:00PM EDT

ANOHNI | HOPELESSNESS | PARK AVENUE ARMORY

Anohni (fka Antony Hegarty)
Red Bull Music Academy Festival

Red Bull Music Academy and Park Avenue Armory are proud to present the world premiere of Anohni’s live show for her new album, Hopelessness, on two consecutive evenings in New York. Featuring original films, the celebrated singer, composer and visual artist will bring her politically charged masterpiece to the stage. With her haunting work in Antony and the Johnsons and her flooring contributions to the Hercules & Love Affair project, Anohni has established herself as one of the most fragile and fiercest vocalists around. Expect to see another breathtaking chapter to her story take shape for the first time ever on May 18th and 19th at Park Avenue Armory, as part of the Red Bull Music Academy Festival New York and the Armory’s Spring-Fall 2016 programmatic offerings. 

[More information here]

Maybe the queen (Naomi Campbell) will make a visit?! Can only hold my breath.

Micro-Exhibition hosted by Terreform ONE | BASF Creator Space™

By 2050, there will be more than nine billion people living on Earth, primarily in cities. The needs of the growing world population for good living conditions, energy and food can only be met through innovations. Terreform ONE, a non-profit design group that promotes smart design in cities will host a series of exploratory and radical proposals for development of these smart cities. These proposals address the ecologies of cities, systems and objects at a number of different scales and incorporate contemporary bio-design methods.

A reception with a panel talk about the pieces and the trends they relate to will be held in the evening on May 28.

>> More about Terreform ONE

>> REGISTER HERE

The Bunker presents Demdike Stare (Modern Love | UK)

****Thanks Natalie for the tix!

The Bunker presents

Demdike Stare (Modern Love | UK)
performing a new score commissioned by the British Film Institute to a screening of Benjamin Christensen's film "Haxan" 

For our first sit down event in a church, World-renowned UK-based electronic musicians Demdike Stare perform a new live score commissioned by the British Film Institute to a screening of Benjamin Christensen's "Haxan", a silent Swedish/Danish film from 1922. "Häxan" (English title: Witchcraft Through The Ages) is a study of how superstition and the misunderstanding of diseases and mental illness could lead to the hysteria of the witch-hunts. Originally shown at the British Film Institute's Southbank Cinema in London, this rarely performed project reaches America for one weekend with performance/screenings in NYC, Knoxville, and Detroit only. Demdike Stare has long been known for their obsession with obscure cinema, and have recently contributed music to films such as "Joe" and "Kiss of the Damned."

Opening the event is another well known techno artist doing something completely different. Rrose will perform James Tenney's solo gong piece "Never Having Written A Note For Percussion". This piece is a powerful study not only of minimalist composition, but also the importance of the room and environment that a performance, or just pure sound, takes place in, and a potent example of the kind of experimental tendencies that make Rrose one of techno’s more fascinating figures.

READ MORE

Emerging Voices: Gabriela Etchegaray and Jorge Ambrosi; Neri Oxman

Emerging Voices
Gabriela Etchegaray and Jorge Ambrosi, AMBROSI | ETCHEGARAY, Mexico City
Neri Oxman, Mediated Matter Group, MIT Media Lab, Cambridge
Introduced by Billie Tsien

1.5 AIA and New York State CEUs

The final evening of the annual Emerging Voices lecture series features Gabriela Etchegaray and Jorge Ambrosi of AMBROSI | ETCHEGARAY and Neri Oxman of Mediated Matter Group, MIT Media Lab. Emerging Voices spotlights individuals and firms based in the United States, Canada, or Mexico with distinct design voices and the potential to influence the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism.

Jorge Ambrosi and Gabriela Etchegaray founded Mexico City-based AMBROSI | ETCHEGARAY in 2011. The firm considers “architecture in harmony with nature, where earth, gravity and light must be present.” Current projects include Papalote Museo del Niño, an outdoor “museography-landscape,” as well as a collaboration with GMexico Mine Company to build cultural plazas and sports infrastructure in local communities. For more on AMBROSI | ETCHEGARAY, click here.

Neri Oxman founded Mediated Matter Group at the MIT Media Lab in 2010. Concerned with how “digital design and fabrication technologies mediate between matter and environment to radically transform the design and construction of objects, buildings, and systems,” Mediated Matter Group’s research merges “computational form-finding strategies with biologically inspired fabrication.” For more on Mediated Matter Group, click here.

Billie Tsien is the partner and founder of Tod Williams Billie Tsein Architects. She is the president of The Architectural League and served on this year’s Emerging Voices committee.

Time & Place

Thursday, March 26, 2015
7:00 p.m.
Scholastic Auditorium
557 Broadway
New York

This Is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good | MOMA

FEBRUARY 14, 2015–JANUARY 01, 2016

ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN GALLERIES, THIRD FLOOR

MOMA press release:

This exhibition takes its title from the Twitter message that British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) used to light up the stadium at the opening ceremonies for the 2012 Olympic games in London. His buoyant tweet highlighted the way that the Internet—perhaps the most radical design experiment of the last quarter century—has created limitless possibilities for the discovery, sharing, and expansion of knowledge and information.

As we revel in this abundant possibility, we sometimes forget that new technologies are not inherently democratic. Is design in the digital age—so often simply assumed to be for the greater good—truly for everyone? From initial exploratory experiments to complex, and often contested, hybrid digital-analog states to “universal” designs, This Is for Everyoneexplores this question with design works from MoMA’s collection that celebrate the promise—and occasional flipside—of contemporary design.

Organized by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, and Michelle Millar Fisher, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design.

Architecture and Design Collection Exhibitions are made possible by Hyundai Card and Hyundai Capital America.

TERREFORM ONE | NEW LAB

CURRENT HAPPENINGS AT TERREFORM ONE:

PROGRESS, 'POST CARBON CITY STATE NYC'

http://terreform.blogspot.com/2014/07/new-post-carbon-city-game-board.html

BLDG. 292

tears become … streams become …

more info:

PHOTO: JAMES EWING

tears become … streams become …

Douglas Gordon & Hélène Grimaud

December 9, 2014–January 4, 2015

Turner Prize-winning artist Douglas Gordon takes the elemental force of water as inspiration for a large-scale visual art installation in which acclaimed pianist Hélène Grimaud will perform a program of water-themed works by Debussy, Ravel, Liszt, and others, creating a confluence of live music and visual art that allows audiences to experience this celebrated music in a refreshingly new way. The installation will be open to the public in addition to performance times for further reflection.