Best of #March

In March Domusweb celebrated the spring dedicating space to the relationship between architecture and nature, in residential projects and photography. We went to Africa and New York, returning to Italy for the Design Week’s previews.

Many of the best projects published on Domusweb in March address the issue of the relationship between architecture and nature.

Ettore Moni adopts an anthropological gaze and analog equipment to describe the "suspended" dwellings along the banks of Italy’s largest river – the Po in the series Suspended Homes; Marco Casagrande designed Ultra-Ruin, a wooden architectural organism that is growing from the ruins of an abandoned red brick farmhouse, inspired by the presence of jungle, ruin and local knowledge; The Garden House, completed by De Matos Ryan, is a new house at the far end of the rear garden of a Victorian house in Battersea, London; Japanese Cubo Design Architect designed his own house Cnest inspired by an imaginary floating birdhouse with a pointy delta-shaped roof, hanging from a big tree; for the July 22 Memorial sites to remember victims of the 2011 Utøya massacre, Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg proposed a wound within the landscape itself.

March is the is the month of the Pritzker Prize and, while we were waiting for the name of the winner, we proposed in Social-genic architect the results of a popularity test conducted last year on a sample of 200,000 posts. The aim was to find out who is the most discussed, commented and appreciated architect on the social networks today (and why) and we went to New York to visit the exhibition MoMA devoted to another great master of architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright.

Among the design's project Take-off light, a paper lampshade with a very fine pattern of laser stitches which can be enlarged at will, designed by German label Fifti-fifti; the exhibition “Africa is now”, curated by Design Indaba, that let us discover an intelligent design not just “Made in Africa” but “Made for Africa”, triggered by local needs and that turns them into answers with a global reach; Islands, the collection by London-based design studio Raw Edges that Caesarstone will unveil during Fuori Salone 2014 with an interactive installation focused on food and dining.

Best of #March:
– Suspended Homes
– Ultra-Ruin
– The Garden House
– Cubo: Cnest
– July 22 Memorial
– Social-genic architect
– Wright in New York
– Take-off light
– An ambiguous lesson from African design
– Raw Edges: Islands