The importance of being axonometric
An interview from Augsburg by Marco Ferrari, Elisa Pasqual
For years Michael Stoll has been collecting and publishing paper material online that would otherwise be lost. His Flickr account now contains more than 100 sets of images personally scanned from his archive: a panorama of information design spanning from the early 20th century to the present day, including user and instruction manuals, illustrated reports, urban representations and maps. This heritage is also an obstinate record of the power of information. When we arrived at the Augsburg University of Applied Sciences, one of the three universities at which he teaches Media Theory and Information Design, he promptly took us on an extensive tour of lecture theatres and workshops, while describing the work of his students and how the goal of his teaching is to produce designers who appreciate the autonomy of all forms of knowledge.
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A news report from Verdun
A former Standard Oil gas station by Mies van der Rohe, which ceased to be commercially operated in 2008, has been recently renovated by Canadian architecture firm FABG, who transformed the space to cater to a youth and senior activity centre. The simple program requires an open space for each group to congregate and participate in communal activities.
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States of Design 10: Social Design
A design report from New York by Paola Antonelli
What is Social Design, anyway? The term is typically used to label the work of those designers and architects who focus on tasks born out of humanitarian and socio-political issues, but the term is deeply unsatisfying. For instance, it suggests a type of design that is not conceived for the benefit of individuals, but rather for idealised and averaged groupings thereof, with the intent of improving their conditions. But isn't the generalisation dangerous? And isn't it what designers do? Isn't all design "social"? It also suggests outside intervention and, indeed, a teacher-pupil relationship.
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An op-ed from London by Crystal Bennes
The LHC is perhaps the most complex and fascinating engineering project of our time and not one architecture publication bothered to tell the story of how it was built. Instead, as Michelangelo presented the Sistine Chapel to Pope Julius II, so too were we presented with images of creation, awe and wonder, as if the LHC was fashioned out of thin air. Even the language used by journalists to describe the experiment and its aims was resonant of Godly creation: here was the machine that would discover the "God particle" if it existed to be discovered.
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iGuzzini Illuminazione Headquarters
An architecture report from Sant Cugat del Vallès by Ethel Baraona Pohl
The new headquarters of iGuzzini Illuminazione in Sant Cugat del Vallès, near Barcelona, emerges from the ground like a balloon seeking the sky. The project is a radical intervention sandwiched between the Montserrat highway and Avenida de la Generalitat. In a place where traffic surrounds everything, the building is characterized by its lightness, which is a perfect metaphor for a company that produces one of the world's most innovative lightning systems.
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