This summer’s top five workshops

A workshop at Boisbuchet is an experience that everyone should try at least once in their lives: a week, between the beginning of June and the middle of September in a bucolic estate set in 150 hectares of French countryside near Lessac, in the company of some of the best and most innovative designers, architects and artists on the international scene. The school, founded by Alexander Von Vegesack in 1986, has become an institution and every summer welcomes around 400 students and professionals. This year the thread running through the 24 workshops, to which are admitted around twenty students, is “Making History”, a tribute to the innovative and revolutionary spirit of the Bauhaus that at Boisbuchet is always present. The workshops last a week (from Saturday to Saturday) and involve different disciplines: art, product design, architecture, set design, interior design and craft. Some of the stars of summer 2019 are British artist and engineer Philip Beesley (4-10 August), Brazilian architect Marcelo Rosenbaum (18-24 August) Austrian designer Anna Heringer (25-31 August) and Argentine designer Francisco Gómez Paz (1-7 September).

The third edition of MADE Labs, curated by Studio Formafantasma and Moncada Rangel, offers eight workshops each lasting five days, along with five conferences. In the heart of Ortigia, occupying spaces inside the Rosario Gagliardi Academy of Fine Arts in Syracuse and other facilities in the centre, two weeks of workshops have been planned as well as a two-day symposium (27 and 29 July) open to the city with international designers and guests such as  Beatriz Colomina, Mark Wigley, Emanuele Coccia, Fiona Raby and Jan Boelen. Not to be missed this year are workshops with Maio Architects, Izaskun Chinchilla, Jorge Penadés, Piovenefabi and Thomas Thwaites. The 2019 edition of MADE Labs will address the theme of hospitality: “Welcome (borderless visions on contemporary design, architecture and visual art)”.

At the end of August, a group of students from the prestigious Architectural Association in London will land on the island of Asinara - a former penal colony (from 1885 to 1997) and now a national park - off the northern coast of Sardinia. Following in the footsteps of Costantino Nicola, they will be experimenting with the original technique of sand casting - that the Sardinian sculptor invented in the 1960s by using sand to create concrete panels decorated with bas-reliefs. The aim is to interpret, measure, represent and intervene on the artefacts scattered across the uninhabited landscape and promote a project for the island that arises directly from its territory. It is the first course in a new series curated by Sabrina Puddu and Paolo Emilio Pisano that every two years will examine a different island in search of “future scenarios on current trends of tourism, environmental conservation and heritage, interrogating those territories to understand how and if architecture can challenge and escape the very ideas of prison and colonisation”.

In the month of August, the Flanders Institute of Architecture in Antwerp together with the Indian firm Case Design and Brussels practice BC-AS (BC architects & studies) are organising two workshops, each lasting five days, that will take place in the studio of BC-AS. The goal is to master the techniques of construction of an ancient material, raw earth, used in a contemporary way. Together with BC and Case Design, participants will design and prototype bricks for using to construct a small pavilion, the Peace Pavilion. The bricks have been conceived in such a way as to function also as design objects or furniture. The results of the workshops will then be presented in the exhibition “Case Design: The Craft of Collaboration” that will open on 16 October in Antwerp and at the 2019 Oslo Architecture Triennial.

A workshop organised by In Residence Design and open to designers and students consists of a long weekend at Matera with Théophile Blandet and the Zaven (Enrica Cavarzan and Marco Zavagno). A weekend that promises interesting days filled with discussion, debate and design. The central theme will be the Anthropocene and the impact of man on the environment: how can we restore harmony between the pace of man and that of nature though the practice of design? With what devices or artefacts can we imagine proposing a new meaningful synchrony between man, the environment and their cycles.