12/19/2011

Militaria - Castello di Rivoli



Castello di Rivoli

Arte Povera International
Curated by Germano Celant and Beatrice Merz
October 9, 2011- February 19, 2012

Militaria - Park Avenue Armory - Herzog De Meuron



see the all story here
New York Times
Archdaily
Herzog de Meuron

and the
movie

Militaria - Castelgrande di Bellinzona

Domus-magazine-75-june-1993Domus 750 June 1993













Aurelio Galfetti- restoration of Castelgrande, Bellinzona. Francesco di Giorgio Martini.




Aurelio Galfetti: Castelgrande, Bellinzona
(in German)
Frank WernerAurelio GalfettiStefania Beretta
Ernst & Sohn, 1992 - 59 pages
The notion of "building in historical surroundings" gained a whole new meaning from Alexander Mitscherlich's 1965 book Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Stadte, and the subject has lost none of its topicality today. The Ticino architectural scene is particularly interesting in this respect: it has attracted international attention since the sixties because of its programmatic tendency towards design rebellion.
Although Ticino architecture's considerable impact since then has come principally from new buildings, revitalization and conversion of historical architecture was always on a par with new building. Aurelio Galfetti is one of the leading lights of the Ticino scene, and his transformation of the ruined remains of the Castelgrande in Bellinzona into a contemporary museum and culture centre provides us with something like a provisional resume of decades of architectural reform effort. After a continuous series of typological corrections to Bellinzona's diffuse townscape, Galfetti was concerned mainly to sharpen public awareness of the genius loci and its history, but above all its future, when rebuilding the Castelgrande. These efforts produced what is without a doubt one of the most important conversion projects in recent building history since Carlo Scarpa's legendary work on the Castelvecchio in Verona.
Galfetti had neither restored nor conserved Bellinzona's "Acropolis". At the most -- as the Neapolitan architect Francesco Venezia would say -- he had joined pieces together to spaces in which light, objects and landscape hold silent communication. He was concerned in the first place to transform an extraordinarily damaged historical situation into an analogue reality that would make it able to speak again.



Alessandro Massarente
Castelgrande a Bellizona. Aurelio Galfetti
36 pp., ill. b.n. e colore

Questo progetto già oggetto di un ampio dibattito sulle più importanti riviste
di architettura, mette in luce il ruolo dei restauro come trasformazione, la necessità
di dare un esito formale al cambiamento dei modi d'uso per conservare l'edificio. In questo
delicato processo di trasformazione, il progetto conserva, gli elementi essenziali del
luogo (la roccia, le mura, l'acqua, il prato) donando loro un nuovo senso. Al punto che
questo lavoro appare come l'ultima delle trasformazioni subite dal complesso in ordine di tempo:
tale però da non precludere la possibilità di altre trasformazioni successive. 

ISBN9788881251988
AutoreAlessandro Massarente
EditoreAlinea Editrice (Ed. 1997)

Militaria - the Waterhouse

Chinese architects NHDRO have transformed this disused Japanese army headquarters in Shanghai into a hotel, maintaining the building’s stripped concrete and brick walls while adding a new Corten steel extension on the roof.

See the movie
See the complete story here
(from Dezeen)
see also on INTERNI

The WaterHouse at South Bund by NHDRO 1

12/18/2011

Nearly Human - Elfoid

Japanese researchers, in collaboration with Osaka University professor Hiroshi Ishiguro have invented ELFOID, a mobile phone in shape of a human being.
The phone incorporates a speaker in the head of the device and a light-emitting diode in its chest which turns blue when the phone is in use and red when it is in standby mode.
The creepy elfoid handset is designed to add an element of realism to long-distance communication by recreating the physical presence of a remote user.
(from Designboom)


12/14/2011

Animals: Chameleon

Wanderings through rural South Africa

Living the Bush

The men, of course, are free to take more than one wife, she explained. Though the women don’t like it, they must accept the practice. Mbali described a lot of pain, crying, and heartache, but if the man wants more than one wife, it is so. In traditional times, all the wives and children would live in the same compound with the man, but today it is acknowledged that there would be too much fighting between the women. The families live separately, and the man must divide his time between them. While the women must accept sharing their husbands, the men must ensure equality between their wives. “If she gets a watch, I get a watch,” Mbali said, “If you spend two nights with her, you spend two night with me.”

Alighiero Boetti, Autoritratto, 1994


12/09/2011

L'année dernière à Marienbad




L’année dernière à Marienbad
réalisé par Alain Resnais
Scénario: Alain Robbe-Grillet Photo: Sacha Vierney Musique: Francis Seyrig. Avec : Delphine Seyrig (A), Giorgio Albertazzi (X), Sascha Pitoëff (M), Françoise Bertin, Luce Garcia-Ville. 1h35. NB _ (1961)


Le film décrit le rêve d'un homme qui aime une femme inaccessible. Il vient la chercher. Mais le rêve est aussi cauchemar : la femme ne se souvient plus de lui. Il essaie de l'atteindre. Lorsqu'il croit l'avoir fait, elle s'est déplacée sur une autre pointe du temps, un autre souvenir : il faut la convaincre à nouveau. De nouveaux cauchemars se dressent devant lui : est il sur que c'est elle qu'il aime ? Est-il sûr de l'avoir rencontré ? Mais oui, c'est elle qu'il aime. Il l'emporte dans sa nuit. Fin du rêve, avant celui de demain.




     




Gradiva

  

IV Century BC.

Sigmund Freud's Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva


Sigmund Freud, "Delusion and Dream"
"Freud's long essay, an analysis of the German novelist Wilhelm Jensen's story Gradiva, is his first work to deal explicitly and systematically with literature and aesthetics, although he had commented at some length on Oedipus Rex and Hamlet in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). In asserting that dreams have meaning, psychoanalysts are aligned with the ancients, a 'superstitious' public and creative writers. Through the close analysis of a story that Jensen termed a 'Pompeiian phantasy', Freud considers 'the class of dreams that have never been dreamt at all--dreams created by imaginative writers and ascribed to invented characters in the course of a story.'"--Scott Brewster, The University of Salford

12/05/2011

Corbellini Rocca Back Up


Wouter Vanstiphout

Tomorrow episode 4 in the Blame the Architect lecture series; LA riots '92: Rodney King, Crips vs. Bloods, Mike Davis' Ecology of Fear vs. Charles Jencks' Heteropolis. But look out!! instead of Room B, we are in Room C; and instead of starting at 12.45, we start at 10.45AM, BK City, tuesday dec 6


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