Two Sides of the Border. Reimagining the Mexico–United States Region Aedes © Erik Jan Ouwerkerk

Interdisciplinary architectural and urban concepts of 13 participating architecture studios from universities across Mexico and the United States are presented on the basis of drawings, pictures and models. The approaches explore numerous topics such as migration, housing or natural resources—with a focus on one common region rather than two nations. In addition to a photo essay by Iwan Baan, new maps of Thomas Paturet highlight interesting spatial relationships of the Mexico–United States border which is characterized by a variety of cultural and economic similarities and a common history. (more…)

Formafantasma, Nervi on the making, Progetto Alcantara © Formafantasma

In 2019 it is the turn of Formafantasma, a studio composed of an Italian design duo based in Amsterdam, Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin. Named among the 20 best international design studios, their work has been exhibited in leading museums around the world and features in the MoMA collections in New York. For MAXXI, Formafantasma is preparing a space inspired by Pier Luigi Nervi that visitors may enter and move around, a place in which the result of their interpretation of the museum collection can be displayed. (more…)

Stephen Bates (*1964), On Cadbury-Brown’s Royal College of Art extension, 1972, 2018. Plaster.

A new exhibition curated by Jantje Engels and Marius Grootveld, in collaboration with Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation. Acknowledging that architecture is a corpus of inherited ideas, “Alternative Histories” invited more than 80 contemporary practices in the UK and Europe to imagine an exchange with architects from the past. (more…)

Dogma – Rooms © Dogma

While the American architect Louis Kahn (1901-1974) considered the room to be the essential origin of architecture, the British author Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) emphasized the private space as being vital to female creativity in ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929). At the time of writing, her words were a direct challenge to the patriarchal organization of the domestic sphere and, by extension, society at large. (more…)

Lake Verea, »Glass House« (Phillip Johnson, 1949), New Canaan, Connecticut Paparazza Moderna series, 2011–2018 © Lake Verea

Francisca Rivero-Lake and Carla Verea approach these buildings like paparazzi – unannounced and spontaneous – with the aim of capturing them in an unembellished, private state. Lake Verea’s evocative photographic compositions of buildings by Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Richard Neutra, Rudolf M. Schindler, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson were taken between 2011 and 2018 during their journeys throughout the USA. (more…)