Sabtu, 31 Maret 2012

What About WAI(zine) in the Big Apple?


WAI in New York


The first issue of the Waizine (What About It? Part 1) will be exhibited in the world famous Storefront for Art and Architecture in Kenmare street in New York. The Archizines exhibition of contemporary architecture publications will be held from the 17th of April until the 9th of June. The Opening will be Tuesday April 17, and a series of talks and events will be celebrated Friday 20 and Saturday 21 of April.


For more information on the exhibition and events stay logged in to WAI.


Storefront for Art and Architecture is a cutting edge design gallery founded in 1982 and located in 97 Kenmare Street, New York.


“The place is shaped like a slice of pizza, and it’s not much bigger. But there’s nothing small about the visions on view at Storefront for Art and Architecture. Art exhibitions at Storefront, which operates on a shoestring, have been putting museums to shame for years.”

— The New Yorker

“One of the 14 most influential art spaces in the United States.”

— Vanity Fair

Kamis, 29 Maret 2012

What About the WAIzine in Barcelona?

WAI in Barcelona

The Archizines exhibition world tour featuring What About It? Part 1 will be displayed in Otras cosas de Villar-Rosas in Barcelona from the April 12 to May 4. The opening will be celebrated Thursday April 12 at 7:30pm. More info coming soon on this and other locations coming soon in a city near you!

Senin, 26 Maret 2012

What About the Voice of the Center?



WAI in La Voz del Centro Radio show

Intellectual polymath Dr. Angel Collado Schwarz interviewed WAI’s co-director Cruz Garcia for the radio show “La Voz del Centro”(The Voice of the Center).

The program that airs every Sunday offers panoramic perspectives from historians, politicians, experts, writers, philosophers, artists and cultural players, on the history, culture and society in Puerto Rico, the Caribbean and all the adjacent geographies of influence.

The interview that was held in Spanish will be broadcasted Sunday, April 1 at 7:00pm at WKAQ-San Juan 580 AM, WUKQ-Ponce 1420AM, WYEL-Mayaguez 600AM, WADO-New York 1280AM and WRTO-Chicago 1200AM (9:00pm).

The interview can also be accessed here.

What About ideal cities, and counter revolutionary master plans?



Megastructures are the Shopping Malls of the Avant-Garde


Avant-Garde

The avant-garde is a paradoxical state. In order to exist, it relies on its incongruous condition of being both fundamentally contemporary and ahead of its time. A conceptual palimpsest, the avant-garde requires writing its history over its own past keeping a vulnerable balance between present problems, and possible future solutions. All about contextualizing the perfect timing, what happens when the avant-garde goes out of sync; when its solutions are overlooked for being too premature, or ridiculed for being delayed?


In the past century alone, the avant-garde was victim of two untimely appearances. In the first one, its proposals arrived too early; the world was taken aback by the boldness of its ambitions, by the audacity of its delirium. In the second coming, the avant-garde was too late. Here its stratagems were on a futile mission of inventing a program that already existed.


These consecutive setbacks have concealed the potential of a parallel form of urban intelligence that not only is able to complete even the most ambitious truncated plans of the avant-garde in Europe, but that can also propose and achieve a set of alternative and original forms of urbanism. Can a genealogy of key events in the 20th century reveal the potential of this parallel non-European universe, and its relationship to the avant-garde as we know it?


Le Corbusier 1922
In 1922 Le Corbusier presented the first of his “ideal” cities. La ville contemporaine pour trois millions d’habitants was an urban layout of cruciform skyscrapers, housing slabs and a carpet of parks intersected by juxtaposed grids of car infrastructure. In this urban plan Le Corbusier was not only aspiring for a greener, denser, centralized, bureaucratic, car oriented city, but the plan suggested the ideal conditions for Modern Architecture to flourish.


The Ville Contemporaine was like an abstract diagram. When the modernist plans started to take shape on real cities, first in Paris with the Plan Voisin (1925), then in the rest of the world with the Ville Radieuse (1935), the image of Le Corbusier oscillated between a visionary and a madman. His preoccupations were clearly fundamental problems of his time, but the formalization of his ideas were not always welcomed. Even if the cities of his time had needed more hygienic and organized schemes, buildings that were more suitable to live in, collective housing that distanced itself from the Haussmanian family flat and an overall vision that complied better with the new technological advancements, the people were not ready for Le Corbusier.

Alongside with the criticsm generated by his ideal cities, the core urban values of travailler, habiter, circuler et cultiver le corps et l'esprit, adopted by the CIAM and integrated in the Athens Charter (1933), turned out to be the focus of attacks after the Second World War broke out
in Europe and left the urban and social situation in a much worse and urgent condition than the one that Le Corbusier had rebelled against in the 1920’s.


Bifurcation
After evidencing the destructive side of modernization (of warfare), the social and economic conditions at the end of the war put under harsh scrutiny the urban plans which aimed
to bulldoze the old city centers away. The love for the old city was politically reinforced by the collective memory. With this situation in the background, a young generation of architects willing to continue to explore the possibilities of the modern plan (Team 10 being one of them) wished therefore to distance themselves from the highly criticized urban visions of Le Corbusier.

The war with its obliterating outcome not only represented the destruction of the old-European world, but marked the meltdown of the urban visions of Le Corbusier. After the war a halt was put to the avant-garde and its city, at least on European soil.

However, the year 1956 saw three distant although simultaneous events that marked the fate of the avant-garde for the remainder of the 20th century, not only giving new life to the plans of Le Corbusier, but creating new forms of urbanism. Unfairly overlooked, these events characterize key moments in the development of an international program for “the” city.


Brasilia 1956
In 1956 Brasilia started construction. The Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek orchestrated the creation of the new capital with the construction of the first government building by Oscar Niemeyer, and with the “Plano Piloto de Brasília” competition which was won by Lucio Costa a year later.

Anchored on a virgin site, Brasilia was the apotheosis of the modernist city; a tabula rasa without
the bulldozer. Was Kubitschek the client Le Corbusier always wanted?

At first sight Brasilia makes its aesthetics recognizable to the modernist lens. But, even if in the the Brazilian capital the spotlight tends to shift to the features of Niemeyer’s concrete monoliths and radically thin slabs, a closer inspection reveals an even deeper connection with the Le Corbusian city. The layout with its centralized government, its concrete housing slabs, its grid of streets and avenues, and with the years, the park within the city –all the vegetation and trees— not only appear so strikingly similar but reinforce the belief in the city of the four values. Modern Architecture in a Modern City. Brasilia was, after so many defeats, a victory for the modernist front.


Was Lucio Costa Le Corbusier’s Brazilian translator? Or was Le Corbusier’s avant-garde dream unintentionally designed for Brazil? Was his image of the city of today meant to find consecration someplace other than Europe? Was he imagining his cities somewhere where the collective memory wasn’t as infatuated by the past? Was his architecture giving him away all this time—the pilotis, the garden roof, the horizontal window, all so suspiciously tropical?


New Babylon 1956
In 1956 Constant was gestating the ideas of Brasilia’s antithesis: New Babylon. While the first urban avant-garde was evaporated from the post-War Europe and re-launched as poured concrete and asphalt in Brazil, it was in the old continent again where a “new” avant-garde was to set its second attack on the contemporary city.


Constant’s model for urbanization was comprised of an ever-expanding, ever-mutating series of sectors that were to hover above the old European city like a weightless cloud. New Babylon was one of the first Megastructures: colossal complexes that could mix programs and be developed ad infinitum. Architectural plankton accumulating in the urban ocean.


Using automation as the tour de force of the new city, New Babylon proposed to abolish the city from the core values of a Le Corbusier driven urbanism. If Brasilia was centralized, bureaucratic and predictably pre-programmed, New Babylon didn’t have a center, possessed no cars, and its people needed no recreation since there was no need to work. New Babylon was the apotheosis of the laissez-faire lifestyle, an Eden for drifters.


In New Babylon even environmental conditions like daylight were evaporated, giving the homo ludens that inhabited it total freedom to drift à la dérive. The first proposal of a perversely naïve post-war avant-garde, New Babylon was betting on the originality of a plot that like a form-less black hole was to absorb everything into designed disorder.


Southdale Center, 1956
Meanwhile in 1956 Victor Gruen’s Southdale Center, the first air conditioned, enclosed shopping mall, opened to the public in a Minneapolis suburb. Southdale Center was the first of a series of buildings that—like the Megastructures—were to create an artificial environment that would free the users from the complications of the city. A shelter from crime, dirt, and any kind of environmental problem, the shopping mall represented the ultimate achievement of commercial architecture; the apotheosis of consumer culture.


The Shopping mall offered a new type of facsimile reality enclosed in a cluster of walls and juxtaposed corridors. Soon these programs would mutate –like the promise of the Megastructures—to include all kinds of uses, from theme parks, to museums, to housing, working and recreation, in a kind of forced marriage between Le Corbusiean urbanism, and New Babylonian dreaminess.


Was Victor Gruen the architect New Babylon needed? Or was New Babylon the Shopping Mall of the avant-garde? How can the ultimate capitalist enterprise coincide with the ultimate Marxist project? Was the post-war avant-garde dreaming about what the most commercial of enterprises was already achieving? Or was the commercial architect revealing a parallel form of urban avant-garde far from the utopian orthodoxies of Europe?



Après-Garde
This series of urban aspirations and confrontations—the Le Corbusiean city as the Modernist city, Brasilia as a Le Corbusiean city, New Babylon as the anti-Brasilia, Southdale Center as the anti-New Babylon—reveal at least two outcomes that are opposed to the general perception of the role, potential, and limitations of the urban European avant-garde, and highlights the existence of other simultaneous forms of non-European urban intelligentsia.


At first hand, while it can be argued that Le Corbusier didn’t accomplish on European soil the plans envisioned in his first three urban models, the fact that it was in Brasilia that the unavoidable triad—client, urbanist, architect—was finally summoned to concretize the modernist master plan, highlights if not a relay of the avant-garde in South America, a parallel version of it, and exposes the vindication of what at first seemed to be just a frustrated attempt by Le Corbusier to frame the contemporary city with his modernist values.


On the other hand, the struggle of New Babylon to break away from the values of the Le Corbusiean city displayed not just the incapability of the post-war avant-garde to draw a new urban program, but the failure to precede its commercial counterpart in America when trying to “invent” a new form of Megastructure or contained city. This reinforces the idea that a new form of urban intelligentsia that differs from the pre-established canon of the European avant-garde was not only a possibility, but already a fully fledged reality, creating what could be the first urban Après-Garde: a group of architects that not only managed to complete the unfulfilled dreams of the avant-garde, but that were able to “invent” the forms of urbanism that were not yet “created” by the avant-garde.


In this sense, these two “discoveries”, the afterlife of the modernist city, and the birth of the Après-Garde, not only highlight the vital possibilities of the avant-garde in a post-Pruitt-Igoe world full of post-modernist non-sense, it emphasizes other forms of urban innovation. And even if it might well be true that these new forms of urban intelligentsia have existed parallel to the avant-garde, the avant-garde’s inherent potential, even with misconceived or untimely proposals is that it is and will always be just a beginning.

What About Original Shopping Malls and Megastructures?


WAI has been featured in Studio Magazine

Milan-based Studio Magazine has released its second issue on the topic "Original". The magazine features Megastructures are the Shopping Malls of the Avant-Garde alongside essays, interviews and Manifestoes by Romolo Calabrese, Spatial Forces, Lorenzo Petrantoni, Luis Urculo, Demetrio Scapelleti, Jean-Cristophe Quinton, Microcities, Suzanne Mulder, Pedro Hernandez, Sara Fanelli, Vittorio Gregotti, Ma Yansong, DPR Barcelona, EME 3, Alvaro Urbano and Daniel Hernandez Pascual, RRC Studio, Nick Axel and Vahram Muratyan.

To order a printed copy go here.

To read the online version go here.



What About the Institute?

Institute of Optimistic Architectures


In the form of a monolithic cube, the Institute of Optimistic Architectures encloses a network of dynamic spaces of a laboratory for architecture, urbanism and spatial politics in China.

An educational center based on the principle of open learning and cross-disciplinarity, the building arranges the multiple programs in a sequence of open spaces and sloping floors that together form a continuous loop of learning experiences. The Institute of Optimistic Architectures is conceived as an avant-garde institution for the education of environmental and spatial design.

The building includes workshops, lecture and performance halls, libraries, printing rooms, leisure spaces, bookshop, exhibition spaces and a cafeteria.

Rather than exerting all its effort on the redundant futility of contemporary architectural form, the building maintains a brutal level of neutrality in its exterior, while its interior acts as a catalyst of spatial dynamism and intellectual exchange.

The building is designed based on the five points of a contemporary architecture:

1 Continuous Plan

The plan establishes the limits of the circulation in a building. With the aim of enhancing interrelation between spaces, and creating a continuous exchange between programs, the floor slabs of the building are connected to each other by means of sloping floors that act like lecture and performance halls, workshops and circulation space.

1.

2 Free Section

By distorting the building not in plan, but in section, a new richness of spatial experiences is achieved. What used to be the regime of the generic space because of the repetition of equidistant slabs now becomes a pluralistic assembly of zones of varying spatial potentials.

2. Free Section

By distorting the building not in plan, but in section, a new richness of spatial experiences is achieved. What used to be the regime of the generic space because of the repetition of equidistant slabs now becomes a pluralistic assembly of zones of varying spatial potentials.

3 Free Structure

Advancements in engineering allow for the distribution of the structure not only to create optimum spaces, but also to divide and delimit, and to support both the free section and the continuous plan.

4 Free Space

Modern Architecture inherited the free horizontal plan from an industrial era focused on mass production. In an era more concerned with creativity and dynamism, Contemporary Architecture integrates the diagonal slab to the free plan; creating spaces that not only avoid the generic monotony now part of every office building but that enhances new visual and physical connections between spaces that otherwise wouldn’t have any relationship.


5 Wall as fenestration

With more advanced and efficient translucent materials available, a new dialectic can be achieved between the building and its surroundings, as it becomes a possibility to “frame” the views to the context without sacrificing the privacy of the building’s interior. The building façade turns opaque during the hours of the day, and becomes a “lantern” during the night.



date: 2011-12
status: study
team: Nathalie Frankowski, Cruz Garcia, Wu Dang Shen
location: Beijing, China









Sabtu, 24 Maret 2012

Painted Rocks - Inspiration and Ideas

Painted rocks have become more and more popular over time.. Many places sell faux rocks with inspirational words on them like dream, inspire, create, etc.. and they are really neat... but you could save some money and make your own if you wanted.  Well, if you have the materials that is.  Whether you want to do them  yourself or buy them, here are some beautiful painted rocks to brighten your day or maybe inspire you:



@Creative Kismet





@Life Span of an Ice Cube





@secondsister suaviloquy





@ZamzamCreations via Etsy





@Simple Life




@zeustones via Etsy





@ThinkingIQ Blog

 I hope is painted rock post has inspired you! Thank you for stopping by :)

Jumat, 23 Maret 2012

Easter Bunny Table

by Regina Gust, Houston, Texas.  How fun and sweet.  Happy Easter!
Texas Home and Living

Rabu, 21 Maret 2012

Spring tablescapes

Houston's Regina Gust created these fresh, fun, beautiful Easter tablescapes for her client. She works with sister, Janet Gust, interior designer for the home.  So pretty.



source
Texas Home and Living

Senin, 19 Maret 2012

What About the Week in Domus?




WAI in Domus “Best of the Week”

In the recap of recent events at Domus Magazine, WAI’s “Cities of the Avant-Garde” has been featured amongst the Best of the Week of the Milan-based International publication.

The highlights include Pritzker Prize ruins in Porto, Ethel Baraona Pohl’s From Line to Hyperreality (available in Italian with Dalla linea alla iperrealtà), a house in Kyodo by Go Hasegawa, an article by Massimo Menichinelli about the emerging Italian maker community and an urban revision of Cape Town by Design Indaba.

Jumat, 16 Maret 2012

What About Architecture Representation in Domus?


WAI has been featured in Domus

The issue 956 of the Italian Magazine Domus features an article by Ethel Baraona Pohl that discusses architectural representation today.

From line to Hyperreality dissects samples of the work of WAI, Aristide Antonas, Como crear historias, Perry Kupler, Equip Xavier Claramunt, Francois Roche , the School of Architecture (ESARQ) at UIC and Greg Tran to expose a “timeless dialogue between specific architects whose distinctive hallmark is the transmission of their ideas.”

Apart from doing a great job of bringing all these forces together by recognizing their contribution to contemporary architectural representation, the article’s innovative spark is reached through the enhancement of Augmented Reality. With the use of Aurasma (an application which combines image recognition technology with animated links on the net) several of the images in the article are brought to life.

In From line to Hyperreality, the collage “Cities of the Avant-Garde” sends the spectator through a journey into the subconscious of WAI with “Le Poème de WAI”.

Copies are in the newsstands and in your favorite bookshops now.

Get your online copy here.

Kamis, 15 Maret 2012

DIY Baby Shower Decor Ideas

Baby Boy Shower Decor @ Celebrate Everyday
Check out this baby shower table decor at Celebrate Everyday.  Isn't this cute! I love the big jelly bean jar and how they are all different shades of blue.  You can find all sizes of glass apothecary type jars at garage sales, thrift stores, Dollar Stores, etc... So you don't have to pay a lot for those.  Click on the link for more about this blue themed baby shower.





Pretty Pink Flower Shower@Hostess with the Mostess
 Are you as amazed as I am at the cuteness factor here?  This pink flower decor just blows my mind.  From the cute round flowers in the white vase to the big bottles of party punch sitting on the pedestal. Everything about this screams fabulous!!!  For more beautiful photos and to learn how it was done, go to Hostess with the Mostess





Diaper Cake Centerpiece@homemade by jill
This diaper cake would make a beautiful centerpiece for any baby shower.. I love the simplicity of this one with the flowers and layers of green leaves between each tier.   I am especially grateful that jill has shared the tutorial for this. You can make your own diaper cake and do it as simple or as embellished as you would like. The possibilities are endless!  Go here for Jill's diaper cake tutorial.






Paint Dipped Baby Food Jars@Oh Happy Day
Have you been saving old baby food jars or do you know anyone that does? What could be cuter for baby shower decorations than baby food jars used as little vases or candle holders?! These are paint dipped with blue paint but you could easily do it with pink, yellow or green.. or actually with whatever color you prefer... You could even paint a little pattern on if you wanted.. Here's the Tutorial!







Striped Candle Holders@Martha Stewart Crafts
Martha Stewart Crafts has to how-to for these super cute pink candle holders.. They are shockingly easy to make and you can make them in whatever colors you want.  Get cylinder vases super cheap at thrift stores, yard sales, Dollar Stores (especially the Dollar Tree is great!)and places like that.







Tissue Paper Pom Poms @ Fun Baby Shower Ideas and More
Whether you are doing a shower for a boy or girl, these fun tissue paper pom poms would look gorgeous hanging from the ceiling, used as centerpieces etc..  For the tutorial on how to make these and TONS of other tutorials and great ideas for a baby shower go to Fun Baby Shower Ideas and More.



Most of these decor ideas are more girl colors but any of this can be adapted for a boy as well.... so, if you are planning a baby shower, I hope you have found some inspiration here.  Thank you for stopping by!