Current Issue: Domus 973

In this issue

Domus 973 on newsstands

The October issue of Domus presents Foster’s scheme for the redesign of the old port of Marseilles, the new house of music for the Benedictine monastery of Einsielden in Switzerland by Diener & Diener and the third house at Ponte de Lima in Portugal by Souto de Moura.

News

Cover

Le Corbusier, La main ouverte. “Pleine main j’ai reçu, pleine main je donne.” Drawing taken from the sketch at right, published in Jean Petit, Le Corbusier lui-même, Collection Panorama Forces Vives, Éditions Rousseau, Genève 1970

Editorial: Action in defence of humanity

Spot Paintings

Enduring architecture

The capacity of architecture to produce lasting meaning led the author to look deeply into the topics of sustainability and responsibility in the architect’s profession

Teaching design

The Spanish architect, a professor of architecture and design since 2002 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH), describes his teaching guidelines and why he values sharing knowledge in numerous publications on the research he conducts with his students

ESAD Saint-Étienne

Yann Fabès, the director of the Saint-Étienne Higher School of Art and Design, tells of a “Copernican revolution” that turned a traditional school into an ambitious territorial project based on an idea of design that is highly sensitive to the presence of art

Fausto Melotti and The Seven Sages

The current exhibition of Melotti’s work in the “Gateway to Milan” room at Malpensa Airport focuses on the creative path that led the Rovereto-born artist to develop different versions of the same subject over the years

Corridors

A “servant space” per definition, the corridor can become “the place of lost footsteps”, as Adalberto Libera liked to call it, or a space for possibilities
in movement

Giulio Minoletti: from the archives to the project

Besides their recognised historical-critical value, the architecture archives of the Modern are an extraordinary heritage for the practice of contemporary design. The Swiss architect summarises the reasons for their interest in five points

Bellante

Enzo Cucchi has illustrated an art book that is an extraordinary homage to Italian poetry both famous and little-known, to which his highly recognisable drawings add evocative visual comments

The Montalbano landscape

The director of this successful television series describes how the landscape of Inspector Montalbano was created by the magic of cinema: getting rid of cars and thinning the crowds allows the baroque piazzas to come to life

A way of working

The artist welcomes us to his studio in Cappelle sul Tavo, Abruzzi, where he has given a new dimension to the space by just “touching” it with inner rooms and a deft use of colour and light. Here, he regains his bearings

Desk accessories

With the new Formwork™ collection designed by Industrial Facility for Herman Miller, the London studio has rethought a whole category of objects in light of the new mixed nature – both analogue and digital – assumed by today’s office interiors

Time and matter

Every architecture project is defined not only by what it is, but also by what it is not. To design a building or a city means designing the voids, too. This concept, and that of time, where architecture can be seen as the archaeology of transformation, are the cornerstones of these two Portuguese architects’ design philosophy

Coca-Cola: the red wall of Berlin

If sharing becomes a fenced enclosure and personalisation means self-referentiality, new and major challenges are emerging for those who conceive and design the spaces where humans live – from Web designers to architects

Redevelopment of the Old Port in Marseille

As part of the works promoted for Marseille Provence European Capital of Culture 2013, a large-scale operation to redesign the public spaces around the Old Port has restored urban dignity to a mythical place of modernity, much loved by László Moholy-Nagy, Le Corbusier and Fernand Pouillon

An art of living

The Benedectine Einsiedeln Monastery

The insertion of two new volumes into the historical monastery complex in Switzerland fulfils a double role of graft and completion, revealing the search for a delicate balance between the pre-existing and the contemporary

House in Ponte de Lima 3

The Portuguese architect makes a refined new version of the traditional country manors found in Portugal’s Minho region, resulting in a striking contemporary villa

Living today

Their designs are based on a quintessentially Italian idea of living, where attention to detail and fundamental aspects of daily life generate the layout. Antonio Citterio and Patricia Viel describe the character and expectations of their many recent projects

Le Corbusier is back in Marseille

With a prime exhibition on brutalism and the reopening of the Hangar J1, from where in 1933 the cruise liner Patris II set out for the CIAM in Athens, Corbu returns as a major character to one of the most important cities of his biography, revealing a story that goes well beyond his Unité d’Habitation