Genoa-based studio Space Caviar has recently unveiled Arcipelago di Ocno, an aquatic installation on a lake in Mantova, Italy, which is the 2016 Italian Capital of Culture. Named after the local demigod Ocno, the installation recalls the form of a lotus, a plant with an extensive presence in Mantova’s lakes.
Acting as an aquatic piazza for the city, the archipelago of floating islands “[extends] Mantova’s urban fabric onto the lakes that surround its historic center,” utilizing modular units to create a venue for Mantova’s cultural activities for years to come.
The Naomi Milgrom Foundation has released plans for Studio Mumbai founder Bijoy Jain’s design for the 2016 MPavilion, the Australian counterpart to London's wildly successful Serpentine Gallery Pavilion program. Continuing the concepts driving Studio Mumbai’s work, the pavilion will utilize a process Jain describes as ‘Lore,’ an exploration of handmade architecture and simplicity of building craft that centers on the relationship between making and human connectedness.
Courtesy of Martin Bricelj Baraga and the Museum of Transitory Art
Slovenian artist Martin Bricelj Baraga has created Moonolith, a monument to the moon and stars, in collaboration with the City of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Based on the modular design of Buckminster Fuller’sgeodesic dome, Moonolith “is a modern three-dimensional squaring of the circle, projected into Euclidean space.”
As a part of the artist’s Nonument series, the installation “[carries] a strong symbolic message in a physical, mental, and virtual space,” reflecting “research of the meaning and development of monuments and the phenomenology of collective memory.”
Sou Fujimoto has been commissioned by Swedish clothing brand COS to design its installation for this year's Salone del Mobile in Milan. Taking place from April 12-17, the event will be the brand's fifth year participating.
"In this installation for COS, I envisage to make a forest of light," said Fujimoto. "A forest which consists of countless light cones made from spotlights above. These lights pulsate and constantly undergo transience of state and flow. People meander through this forest, as if lured by the charm of the light. Light and people interact with one another, its existence defining the transition of the other."
Collective–LOK's Heart of Hearts installation has officially opened in New York City's Times Square, just in time for Valentine's Day. Winner of this year's annual Times Square Valentine Heart Design, a competition curated by the Center for Architecture, the "faceted ring of 12 golden, mirrored hearts" will remain on view in Duffy Square through March 6.
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Ganga Maki Textile Studio / Studio Mumbai. Image Courtesy of Naomi Milgrom Foundation
The Naomi Milgrom Foundation has chosen Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai to design Melbourne's 2016 MPavilion. Following Amanda Levete's rendition of the unique commission, which closed its doors Sunday after hosting four months of free events, Jain will be the third architect to design the annual MPavilion.
"I’m honored to be commissioned by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation to design the next MPavilion in Melbourne. I want it to be a symbol of the elemental nature of communal structures. Like Naomi, I see MPavilion as a place of engagement: a space to discover the essentials of the world - and of oneself," commented Jain.
As a part of the 92Y Seeing Music festival in New York, architect and engineer Gabriel Calatrava has created a moving installation that “illuminates and interprets the Brentano String Quartet’s live performance of J.S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue.” Operated by a dance corps, the set design “provides audiences with a new way to experience and interpret the music they hear on stage, while allowing various art forms to complement and inform each other.”
Stuttgart experimental architect Achim Menges has been commissioned to kickstart the V&A's first ever Engineering Season with a site specific, nature-inspired installation fabricated by robots. Complemented by Ove Arup's first major retrospective, Engineering the World: Ove Arup and the Philosophy of Total Design, the Elytra Filament Pavilion will be Menges' first public commission in the UK. He will work with Moritz Dörstelmann, structural engineer Jan Knippers and climate engineer Thomas Auer to complete the project.
"Elytra Filament Pavilion will explore the impact of emerging robotic technologies on architectural design, engineering and making," says the V&A. "Inspired by a lightweight construction principle found in nature, the fibrous structures of the forewing shells of flying beetles known as elytra, the Pavilion will be an undulating canopy of tightly-woven carbon fibre cells created using a novel robotic production process."
Mexico City-based Escobedo Soliz Studio has been named the winner of MoMA and MoMA PS1's annual Young Architects Program (YAP) in New York - now in its 17th edition. Selected over four other finalists, the winning project, Weaving the Courtyard is “neither an object nor a sculpture standing in the courtyard, but a series of simple, powerful actions that generate new and different atmospheres," says the architect. It will serve as a "temporary urban landscape" for the 2016 Warm Up summer music series in MoMA PS1’s outdoor courtyard.
"Weaving the Courtyard is a site-specific architectural intervention using the courtyard’s concrete walls to generate both sky and landscape, with embankments in which platforms of soil and water suggest the appearance of a unique topography," says MoMA.
For the first time in history, a John Hejduk structure has been permanently installed in a public space. The American architect's Jan Palach Memorial has officially opened last week at Jan Palach Square (formerly Red Army Square) on the Alšovo Riverbank in Prague after 25 years in the making.
"The work, entitled House of the Suicide and House of the Mother of the Suicide, which was originally built in Atlanta in 1990, then Prague in 1991, honors the Czech dissident Jan Palach, whose self-immolation in protest of the Soviet invasion of 1968 served as a galvanizing force against the communist government in Czechoslovakia. A plaque at the base of the monument displays the poem The Funeral of Jan Palach, by former School of Architecture Professor David Shapiro," says The Cooper Union.
Over a four day period during the New Generations Festival, curators Edouard Cabay (Appareil, ES) and Margherita Del Grosso (MaDGStudio, IT) led an experimental workshop within a shipyard at the Historical Center of Genoa that resulted in a "Bent" installation inspired by navel construction.
"By bending wood into an (in)habitable structure reminiscent of naval craft, a dialogue was created between the medieval urban fabric of Genoa and its tradition as maritime city," says the curators. "Although is still at the heart of the city's economy, its industry has been relegated to the margins of Genoa, generating conflict and ambiguity between the shore and the urban fabric. The workshop provided an occasion to mend this detachment through an architectural installation that, rather than bringing the city towards the sea, brings the marine element back into the urban fabric."
Swarovski commissioned FR-EE / Fernando Romero EnterprisE to design an installation for Design Miami/ that "explores man's relationship with the sun." One billion times smaller than the sun, the installation - El Sol - is a spherical geodesic dome made from 2880 Swarovski crystals that "augment light emitted from its core" to "evoke the sun's gaseous, moving terrain."
"The project has allowed me to explore mathematics in relation to nature and my Mexican ancestry, which is very important and personal to my practice," said Fernando Romero.
The Flatiron Public Plaza has unveiled its centerpiece for this year’s “23 Days of Flatiron Cheer” – SOFTLab’s Nova, the winner of a closed-competition hosted by the Flatiron/23rd Street Partnership Business Improvement District (BID) and Van Alen Institute. The project will become the center of the neighbourhood’s festivities for the holiday season, as well as “a highly visible landmark” in the heart of New York.
In 2016 PUBLIC ideas go into action with FORM’s PUBLIC Platform taking creativity for the common good out into the streets and laneways. PUBLIC Platform invites you – the diverse creative minds from all parts of our community – to create installations and activation prototypes to enliven Claremont town centre during PUBLIC’s annual takeover on 2 & 3 April. Prototypes for citizens and by citizens will reimagine our public spaces and activities, and engage the public to participate, explore and play in their own city. Your big idea could bring our streets to life. Entries are due by January
Kengo Kuma & Associates has unveiled its latest project for the Galerie Philippe Gravier in Paris. Entitled Yure, a Japanese expression for a nomadic habitat moving in the wind, the project is made from identical wooden pieces, seeking to blur the lines between art and architecture with its organic structural geometry.
MARC FORNES & THEVERYMANY have completed "Pleated Inflation" a new permanent installation located in Argeles-Sur-Mer, France. Following in the footsteps of projects such as their "Vaulted Willow," the design is the latest in what they term their "structural shingle" group of projects, made up of pleated aluminum sheets which - thanks to the firm's computational design technique - simultaneously serve as the project's structure, enclosure, and its primary architectural component.
Commissioned as part of the French 1% Artistique program by the Region Languedoc Roussillon, the project serves as an informal amphitheater for the students at Lycée Christian Bourquin, "bringing together structural performance and spatial experience" with its "ornate shadows cast from porous structural pleats." Read on for more images and the full description from the architects.
SOFTlab has been chosen as the second annual winner of the Flatiron Public Plaza design competition in New York. Their winning proposal, Nova will open to the public next month on Wednesday, November 18th. Its "crystalline" structure aims to intrigue the passer-by, welcoming them inside for framed views of the Flatiron Building and surrounding landmarks, including the Met Life Tower and Empire State Building.
James Corner Field Operations has been chosen to design the National Building Museum's 2016 Summer Block Party installation. Just like its predecessors, including Snarkitecture's popular BEACH and BIG's massive Labyrinth, the installation will take over the Museum's Great Hall. With the design in its preliminary stages, little has been revealed. However, its mission is to "present innovative, interactive experiences that experiment with new ways of seeing and understanding the built environment."
“We are very excited about this opportunity to once again transform the Great Hall for summer spectacle and pleasure,” said James Corner, adding that “it will be a great challenge to surpass the genius of previous installations, but also an opportunity to explore something new and unexpected.”
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