Le Corbusier planned and built five Unités d’Habitation in Marseille, Nantes, Berlin, Briey, and Firminy in the period from 1945 to 1967. Owing to the acute shortage of housing after the war, he also developed a new type of building, a multifunctional block of flats that combined a large number of apartments on a small plot: the buildings included a roof landscape and other urban structures, such as a kindergarten, cinema, pharmacy, and grocery store. (more…)

 

 

The Common Accounts project has an open pavilion located outside the Academy of Spain in Rome, which puts the ritual capacity of body images in the foreground and plays with the way in which emerging funeral practices understand muscle as archive. “Refresh, Renew”, a funerary catafalque for the digital era. (more…)

The project is used as a starting point to take a new look at both Ungers’ work and the concept of sustainability. During a summer school in July 2018 at the Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft in Cologne, the project was analyzed together with students from the KU Leuven, Faculty of Architecture and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

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“Negotiating Ungers — The Aesthetics Of Sustainability”
5 July – 22 September, 2019
CIVA Brussels
Rue de l’Ermitage Kluis 55, Brussels
Belgium

 

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Following the summer school, six students decided to continue their work on the subject and to further expand on the ideas developed in the discussions. The results are now presented in an exhibition at CIVA. Rather than delivering an overall interpretation of Ungers’ project, it represents a plurality of voices, reflections and interpretations of the design. Besides original drawings by Ungers, the exhibition includes installations and analytical presentations, which critically negotiate Ungers’ position on sustainability.

 

Students: Alessandro Cugola / Lisbeth Decloedt / Natasha Kurmashova / Tom Schoonjans / Juliane Seehawer / Fien Werckx

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News source: CIVA Brussels
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The philosopher Guillaume le Blanc invites us to address these questions, and the exhibition inservitude explores the question of freedom as an essential raw material for architecture that offers potential alternatives. (more…)

 

 

The exhibition Praise of the Method puts into perspective the specific approach of the operation of the Gare d’Auteuil. Unique urban piece, in line with the experiments that have marked the history of housing in France and fruit of an international competition launched by the City of Paris in 2008, this operation is carried out by a “collective of authors” consisting of four architects and a landscape architect: Anne Demians, Francis Soler, Rudy Ricciotti, Finn Geipel and Louis Benech. (more…)

 

Wanted by his daughter, Antonella Berardi, a poet of architecture. Pier Niccolò Berardi and Fiesole is the work of the architect Marco Romoli, his pupil and collaborator, and is carried out under the patronage of the Tuscany Region, the Municipality of Fiesole and the Giovanni Michelucci Foundation. (more…)

 

 

It will include representatives from the top Los Angeles-based SCI-Arc school; the Neri Oxman studio at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Dutch UNStudio; the British-based Zaha Hadid Architects; the Vienna-based Moh architects; architects and teachers from the University of Innsbruck; and architects and teachers from the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. (more…)

 

 

His style of painting was metaphysical, seeking to overcome the appearance of reality. It was also a style that reflected his fascination with the classics. The exhibition presents all the great themes of the Pictor Optimus: his metaphysical exteriors (Italy’s town squares and towers); his mannequins, his disturbing muses and his archaeologists. Also on display are examples of his still lifes – or silent lifes, as de Chirico liked to call them – horses, copies or free interpretations of great masters such as Raphael and Perugino, as well as the famous self-portraits in period clothes in the style of Rubens or Velázquez. This is an exhibition that is also a journey, an eternally cyclical journey in search of self and beauty. (more…)

 

 

The show explores the artistic and exhibition history of Jannis Kounellis (Piraeus 1936 – Rome 2017), establishing a dialogue between his works and the eighteenth-century spaces of Ca’ Corner della Regina. The artist’s early works, originally exhibited between 1960 and 1966, deal with urban language.

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“Jannis Kounellis”
11 May – 24 November, 2019
Fondazione Prada Venice, Ca’ Corner della Regina
Calle de Ca’ Corner, Santa Croce 2215, Venezia
Italy

 

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These paintings reproduce actual writings and signs from the streets of Rome. Later on, the artist transferred black letters, arrows and numbers onto white canvases, paper or other surfaces, in a language deconstruction that expresses a fragmentation of the real. From 1964 onward, Kounellis addressed subjects taken from nature, from sunsets to roses. In 1967 Kounellis’ investigation turned more radical, embracing concrete and natural elements including birds, soil, cacti, wool, coal, cotton, and fire.

 

 

Kounellis moved from a written and pictorial language to a physical and environmental one. Thus the use of organic and inorganic entities transformed his practice into corporeal experience, conceived as a sensorial transmission. In particular, the artist explored the sound dimension through which a painting is translated into sheet music to play or dance to. Already in 1960, Kounellis began chanting his letters on canvas, and in 1970 the artist included the presence of a musician or a dancer. An investigation into the olfactory, which began in 1969 with coffee, continued through the 1980s with elements like grappa, in order to escape the illusory limits of the painting and join with the virtual chaos of reality.

 

 

 

In the installations realized toward the end of the 1960s, the artist sets up a dialectic battle between the lightness, instability and temporal nature connected with the fragility of the organic element and the heaviness, permanence, artificiality and rigidity of industrial structures, represented by modular surfaces in gray-painted metal. Kounellis participated in exhibitions that paved the way to Arte Povera, which in turn translated into an authentic form of visual expression. An approach that recalls ancient culture, interpreted according to a contemporary spirit, in contrast with the loss of historical and social identity that took place during the postwar period.

Beginning in 1967, the year of the so-called “fire daisy,” the phenomenon of combustion began to appear frequently in the artist’s work: a “fire writing” that enlights the transformative and regenerative potential of flames. At the height of the mutation, according to alchemical tradition, we find gold, employed by the artist in multiple ways. In the installation Untitled (Tragedia civile) (1975), the contrast between the gold leaf that covers a bare wall and the black clothing hanging on a coat hanger underlines the dramatic nature of a scene that alludes to a personal and historical crisis. In Kounellis’ work smoke, naturally connected with fire, functions both as a residual of a pictorial process, and as proof of the passage of time. The traces of soot on stones, canvases and walls that characterize some of his works from 1979 and 1980 indicate a personal “return to painting,” in opposition to the anti-ideological and hedonistic approach employed in a large part of the painting production in the 1980s.

 

 

Throughout his artistic research Kounellis develops a tragic and personal relationship with culture and history, avoiding a refined and reverential attitude. He would eventually represent the past with an incomplete collection of fragments of classical statues, as in the work from 1974. Meanwhile, in other works the Greco-Roman heritage is explored through the mask, as in the 1973 installation made up of a wooden frame on which plaster casts of faces are placed. The door is another symbol of the artist’s intolerance for the dynamics of his present. The passageways between rooms are closed up with stones, iron reinforcing bars and lead sheets making several spaces inaccessible in order to emphasize their unknown, metaphysical and surreal dimension.

The exhibition narrative is completed with large-scale installations realized by Kounellis from the end of the 1980s. These ensembles envelop shelves or metal constructions containing objects of various origins: from musical instruments to sacks, from plaster casts to stones, from coats to glasses, from mechanical gears to fragments of furniture. The large interventions hosted in the central rooms of the two main floors of Ca’ Corner della Regina are included in this context. Already as early as 1967 Kounellis dealt with the motifs of gravity and equilibrium in his works. However, it wasn’t until the 1980s and 1990s that he developed a deeper dialogue with architectural and urban spaces. Both of these aspects would result in the monumental 1992’s installation presented in the internal courtyard of the Venetian palazzo. Originally conceived for the external façade of a building in Barcelona, it is composed of seven metal plates that support sacks filled with coffee beans.

The retrospective is completed on the ground floor by documents – including films, exhibition catalogues, invitations, posters and archival photographs – that trace Kounellis’ exhibition history, and by a focus on his theater projects. The exhibition is accompanied by a volume that includes an essay by Germano Celant and an extensive illustrated chronology, documenting and exploring Jannis Kounellis’ artistic career and biography. Designed by 2×4 (New York), the book is published by Fondazione Prada.

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News source: Fondazione Prada Venice
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On Thursday 27 June 2019 the Plečnik and the Sacred exhibition was inaugurated at the Vatican Museums. Jože Plečnik, Slovenian architect and designer, in which from 28 June to 7 September 2019 a selection of thirty-three precious liturgical furnishings made by the Slovenian architect Jože Plečnik (1872-1957) is presented for the first time in the Vatican.

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“Plečnik and the Sacred”
28 June – 7 September, 2019
Musei Vaticani
Viale Vaticano, 00165 Roma
Italy

 

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Barbara Jatta, Director of the Vatican Museums, welcomed the idea of ​​presenting Plečnik’s sacred work in the Vatican with great enthusiasm: “The Vatican Museums are pleased to host in the heart of the Pinacoteca Vaticana a significant exhibition of sacred furnishings by Jože Plečnik, a great architect and designer of the twentieth century, who created an original and innovative style both in religious and civil architecture and in the field of liturgical furniture, creating works of remarkable value that we wanted to share with our audience. ”

 

 

Jože Plečnik is the first Slovenian artist to whom it is dedicated an exhibition in the Vatican Museums. The theme of the creation of sacred furnishings in the work of contemporary architects and designers is quite exceptional and in this field Plečnik has created something unique in the world, both in quantitative and qualitative terms. On the occasion of the exhibition, a very careful selection of goblets, monstrances, ciboriums and liturgical cases is set up in Room XVII of the Pinacoteca Vaticana, where works by famous authors from all over the world are exhibited, from Giotto to Raphael, from Leonardo to Tiziano and others . This initiative represents one of the most important projects for the promotion of culture Slovenian in the year 2019.

 

The Plečnik and the Sacred exhibition, which emphasizes that the Slovenian architect Jože Plečnik was not only a master of monumental architecture, but also an exceptional creator of sacred furnishings, was created by the Vatican Museums and the Museum and Galleries of the City of Ljubljana (MGML) in close collaboration with the Embassy of the Republic of Slovenia to the Holy See and with the support of the Ministry of the Republic of Slovenia for Culture and the Archdiocese of Ljubljana.

 

 

The creator of the exhibition is Blaž Peršin, Director of the Museum and Galleries of the City of Ljubljana, who highlighted: “We are convinced that the exhibition will contribute to making Plečnik’s work better known worldwide and that, during this summer period , its openness to the thousands of visitors to the Vatican Museums will substantially contribute to the promotion of Slovenia. Precisely the liturgical vessels represent the pinnacle of Plečnik’s artistic creation, masterpieces of art of his creative spirit. ”

 

 

With the Plečnik and the Sacred exhibition, the long-standing desire of the Ambassador of the Republic of Slovenia to the Holy See, His Excellency Tomaž Kunstelj, was finally fulfilled, who made a considerable effort to present the Slovenian cultural heritage in the Vatican museums. “Among the Slovenian minds, who with their work in the field of Central European architecture and design have been able to fully implement the richness of their talent, enriching it with hard work and a great deal of personal spirituality, Joze Plečnik surely excels. If someone has the right to access the Vatican Museums, this is definitely Plečnik, who has designed numerous churches, their interiors and sacred furnishings. The Embassy of the Republic of Slovenia is honored to have collaborated with the Vatican Museums and the dynamic creative team of the Museum and Galleries of the City of Ljubljana and to have received the financial contribution from the Ministry of Culture in order to contribute to affixing an important card in the mosaic of the Plečnik exhibition in the Vatican. ”

 

 

The main and certainly most attractive part of the exhibition are the thirty-three original sacred furnishings, which represent the most beautiful examples of Plečnik’s rich work. Thanks also to the intervention of the Archdiocese of Ljubljana, these furnishings were loaned by the curators of the sacred heritage of various churches, monasteries and private individuals.

The exhibition also includes a video on Plečnik’s sacred architecture created by Tone Stojko, with which he highlights the importance of the entire religious work of the Slovenian master. In the video visitors will be able to admire the sacred architecture of Plečnik: the Church of St. Michael, the Church of St. Francis of Assisi and the Žale monumental complex in Ljubljana, as well as the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Prague.