In Montréal, the CCA kicks-off its Young Curators Program exhibitions with First, the Forests, an exhibition exploring the ways in which we understand and perceive forests, introducing the concept of forestry as a design (not just science) tool and a form of knowledge about creating artificial forests. In this week's Op-Ed, Joseph Grima reflects on this year's Architecture Biennale, noting how "as a shared space and a point of encounter, it is unfair to expect "Common Ground" to be a platform for a specific position (aesthetic, social, political). Its value lies in a point of disciplinary encounter that has something for everyone".
Utopia is possible
An architecture report from Barcelona by Ethel Baraona Pohl
La utopía es posible is located in two main rooms of the MACBA, the huge white cube museum: a perfect scenario to display documentation of the congress in several media: correspondence, magazines, film and sound recordings. It is an exhibition of ideas and not of objects.
Adolfo Natalini once pointed that "utopia is not an alternative model: it puts forward unresolved problems (not problem-solving but problem-finding)". Thinking on Natalini's idea, we can see that Prada Poole found a problem (the lack of accommodation space) and proposed a "problem-solving" idea (the instant city); so perhaps we can be optimist enough to believe him when he said, referring to Instant City, that the ICSID Congress in Eivissa was the proof that utopia is possible. We profoundly believe that indeed, it is.
[Read the full article]
A design report from Guimarães by Inês Revés
Inaugurated on 26 September in one of the main squares of Guimarães — a city remarked as the birthplace of Portuguese nationality —, Unidade finds a place of its own. "Our first idea was to design a machine that would produce small stools," says Pedrita's Pedro Ferreira. From that point on, the whole project was developed into an object reminiscent of a factory production line that performs in the urban space and adds a point of interest to the city.
[Read the full article]
An architecture report from Montreal by Marcelo López-Dinardi
Handel's curatorial project is ambitious. It is historic and contemporarily researched, and argues that forests are not the natural scenery that we think they are, but a highly processed, rational, productive and manicured environment. To sustain this, Handel investigated a variety of forests manifestations between a range of time that goes back to 17th century Venice to the recent Hannover Expo in the year 2000. The research collected information from the CCA archives alongside external primary sources. After spending three months developing this task, the immense amount of data and outcome possibilities needed to be filtered, and the project is thus organized under four categories that provide the interpreter with a synthetic view of the complex and larger phenomenon of forestry and nature. These are: Bureaucratic Forestry, Scientific Forestry, Tropical Forestry and Economic Forestry.
[Read the full article]
An op-ed from Milan by Joseph Grima
This, it turns out, is one of the challenges of organising an exhibition about common ground: everyone has their own idea of what it means, and because everyone has a stake in it, disappointment is almost guaranteed. Paradoxically, if you want to make an exhibition that's going to make everyone happy, common ground is the last topic you should pick. But Chipperfield must have known this, and deserves credit for having stuck to his guns. He also deserves credit for having done what he promised to do from the very beginning: an exhibition about architecture (read "buildings"), a strategy that among other things allowed him and his team to neatly sidestep the trap of doing an exhibition about architects, and the thorny issue of how to deal with the rampant personality cult among contemporary practitioners.
[Read the full article]
An architecture report from Milan by Cristina Fiordimela
In Milan, from 1 to 7 October, cultural centre MACAO and the Paris collective EXYZT converted these axioms into an experience in design and self-building with the workshop "Let's build the literary café together". Founded by five architects in 2003, EXYZT is now a multi-disciplinary group that works directly on site, with locals, designing and putting into practice often ephemeral constructions. They aim to use a participatory and self-built architectural project to generate shared action, new living and social contexts and cultural exchange in the city.
[Read the full article]