In a recent interview presented in collaboration with PLANE—SITE, architect Christian Kerez and curator Sandra Oehy speak about Incidental Space, their exhibition for the Swiss Pavilion in the Giardini at the 2016 Venice Biennale.
Kerez explains, “what we tried to do for this year’s Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale is to really make a building, actually—to build a space, to offer an experience of architecture. Basically, a space at the Biennale doesn’t have to be very functional. You don’t have to live there; you don’t have to work there. It’s really about experience. This is also about the question, how much can you imagine? How can you create a space with the utmost architectonical complexity?”
Throughout the interview, Kerez and Oehy delve into the ideas behind the exhibition, and how a process of experimentation was used to create it. Learn more by watching the interview, above.
Team: 1st year students (2016), Dieter Dietz, Daniel Zamarbide, Raffael Baur, Edouard Cabay, Laurent Chassot, Nicolas Durr, Margherita Del Grosso, Alexa den Hartog Stéphane Grandgirard, Patricia Guaita, Agathe Mignon, Andrea Pellacani, Laura Perez Lupi, Anne-Chantal Rufer, Wynd van der Woude with Thibaud Smith
HOUSE 1 is an architectural installation based on an experimental format for collaborative design and construction by ALICE (Atelier de la Conception de l’Espace) – an international group of young architects and researchers, scientists, and doctoral candidates from the EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), led by the Director Dieter Dietz.
Built initially as proto-structure (primary construction) during a 5-day workshop in April, HOUSE 1 is a 11m x 11m x 11m balloon-frame timber construct holding the ‘genetic code’ for future developments. The project involved over 200 students, who worked in groups under the close guidance of 12 studio directors and the wood engineer Rémy Meylan.
In succession, each team was asked to design and realize a ROOM (a space intended for HABITATION), or a TRANSITIONAL SPACE providing CONNECTIVITY (porch, stairs, doorway).
The boundaries that divide studio projects are blurry zones of negotiation over space, culture, and ideas. Accordingly, each project is strongly influenced by the others as it enters a multilayered discourse with its surroundings. The spatial experience of HOUSE 1 is therefore not that of a homogenous architecture; rather, it is an unfolding evolution of a space that invokes questions, contains possibilities, and is open for interpretation.
Elevation
Alexa den Hartog, one of the 12 studio directors responsible for making HOUSE 1 a feasible project, characterizes the proto-structure and its process of inhabitation as a “restricted physical and temporal – ever changing – landscape that only slowly solidified”. To quote Dieter Dietz, HOUSE 1 reveals its final form “not as something that is done from the top down but something we share.”
After four months of frenetic work and strong engagement, the project has been recently completed and is now open to visitors on the EPFL campus next to the Rolex Learning Center.
This series of images by photographer Jérémie Souteyrat captures the everyday activities of people living in contemporary Japanese houses (+ slideshow). (more…)
Private Residence in Athens is a private home located in Athens, Greece. Completed in 2016, it was designed by Moustroufis Architects. Private Residence in Athens by Moustroufis Architects: “The owners desired an extension to their house that could adapt to the needs of their family and in accordance with their social life, which involves frequent entertaining of guests. George Moustroufis’s design proposed the creation of a double height living room,..
Concealed behind an 18th century Baroque façade in Strasbourg’s Place Kléber, the Café L’Aubette is a dazzlingly incongruous expression of the 1920s De Stijl movement. Designed by Theo van Doesburg, one of the movement’s founders and leading lights, the Aubette’s minimalist, geometric aesthetic was heavily influenced by the work of contemporary artists such as Piet Mondrian. In designing the café’s interiors, Van Doesburg sought to do more than simply place viewers before a painting; he wanted to envelop them in it.
Courtesy of Wikimedia user Claude Truong-Ngoc
The De Stijl movement began in the Netherlands in 1917 by an association of painters, sculptors, decorative artists, and architects. Rejecting the ornamental and spatial dogma of the Beaux-Arts school that had dominated Western design in the 19th century, members of the movement instead advocated for the relative purity of abstraction. Cubism provided a significant inspiration for the movement, which came to be characterized by bold, orthogonal minimalism. The paintings of Mondrian, composed purely of rectangles and straight lines at right angles, gradually abandoned symbolic representations of reality in favor of their own abstract visual rhythm. This rectilinear style lent itself toward translation into three-dimensional form – a task that would be undertaken by one of Mondrian’s contemporaries, a painter and architect named Theo van Doesburg.[1]
Courtesy of Wikimedia user Claude Truong-Ngoc
Born in Utrecht, Netherlands in 1883, Van Doesburg (originally named Christian Emil Marie Küpper) was a self-educated artist and architect.[2] It was Van Doesburg who would, in 1917, begin publishing the journal entitled De Stijl, featuring contributions from many of the artists and designers who had influenced him during his career.[3] He is additionally known for his 1923 manifesto entitled “Tot een constructieve dichtkunst” (“Toward a constructive poetry”) in the Dadaist journal Mécano, in which he expressed beliefs in line with what would become Surrealism.[4] His own design work was focused on the use of color as a means of activating space. This, he believed, helped viewers to better appreciate abstract form. Van Doesburg often worked in collaboration with other artists, rejecting the egocentrism of individual artistry. It therefore followed that when he was tasked with designing several new interiors for the Café l’Aubette in central Strasbourg, he did so in tandem with artist Jean Arp and his wife, Sophie Täuber.[5]
Exterior of the Aubette as seen from the Place Kléber. ImageCourtesy of Wikimedia user Claude Truong-Ngoc
The Aubette was built in 1767 by the architect François Blondel. Commissioned by the French government to construct a building that would reflect the latest style of the time, Blondel created a Baroque structure with a straight façade along the entire northern edge of the Place Kléber. The building’s original use as a military facility gave it the name Aubette, as orders were issued at aube, or dawn. A café was opened in the building in 1845, and in 1867, the Aubette became home to Strasbourg’s School of Music. In 1911, the city government called together 46 architects to redesign both the Aubette and the entirety of the Place Kléber; however, the outbreak of the First World War forestalled the project, which was abandoned by the 1920s.[6]
Axonometric diagram of the Café-Brasserie. ImageTheo van Doesburg
Van Doesburg’s involvement with the Aubette began in September of 1926. Convinced by his clients to set up an office on the Place Kléber itself, he began drawing up plans that would correspond with the new functions of the space. Included in the required program were a café, tea room, two bars, telephone booths, billiard rooms, two banquet halls with an adjoining foyer, kitchens, various offices, and staff quarters.[7] Although Van Doesburg, Arp, and Täuber ostensibly worked as a team, their actual design process was surprisingly disjointed; rooms were designed by different artists with little in the way of organized collaboration, allowing their personal styles to shape the individual spaces of the building.[8]
Procedural painting for the Ciné-Dancing Hall. ImageTheo van Doesburg
While the Arps’ work reflected their former involvement in the Dada movement, Van Doesburg instead saw the opportunity to implement his own theories of Elementarism.[9] Much like Mondrian, he designed in a purely rectilinear, orthogonal manner; the walls were covered in large grids of brightly colored rectangles. However, Van Doesburg did not rigorously bind himself to the principles of De Stijl when it did not suit him; he would break them in the interest of creating more expressive, dynamic spaces.[10]
Courtesy of Wikimedia user Claude Truong-Ngoc
This approach is perhaps best reflected in what he called the “Ciné-Dancing” hall – a space designed to function as both a film theater and a ballroom or cabaret. Here, the characteristic De Stijl rectangles are tilted at a 45-degree angle to the ground, creating a visual tension with the orientation of the doors, windows, and seating cubicles they envelop.[11] Van Doesburg also employed relief to add emphasis and interest to the walls and ceilings; where color would not satisfactorily activate a surface, the slight extrusion of the rectangular panel would compensate.[12] Van Doesburg may have played a large part in codifying the tenets of De Stijl, but in all aspects of his design—from choosing finish materials to creating a new typeface for signage—he worked as much in response to the particular environment of the Aubette as he did within the very guidelines he had helped to create.[13]
Courtesy of Wikimedia user Claude Truong-Ngoc
The radical interiors of the Café l’Aubette, while now lauded as a masterpiece of De Stijl architecture, were not met with great acclaim by the café’s patrons.[14] After less than a decade, the interior style was altered once again; it was not until the 1960s that restoration of Van Doesburg’s design was even considered. The ciné-dancing hall was restored between 1985 and 1994 based on period photographs and architectural drawings; the rest of the interior followed later, with the emphasis being on conservation of the original materials wherever possible. Meticulous care was taken to reproduce exactly the colors chosen by Van Doesburg and the Arps, and by 2006, the Aubette was restored to its 1920s appearance.[15] Now designated a historic landmark, the Café l’Aubette remains a monument to the marriage of graphic design and architecture facilitated by De Stijl’s principles of bold geometry.
References [1] Curtis, William J. R. Modern Architecture since 1900. London: Phaidon, 1996. p151-153. [2] Poulin, Richard. Graphic Design Architecture a 20th Century History: A Guide to Type, Image, Symbol, and Visual Storytelling in the Modern World. Beverly: Rockport Publishers, 2012. p79. [3] Raizman, David Seth. History of Modern Design. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2004. P184-187. [4] “Mécano.” DADA and Modernist Magazines. Accessed July 16, 2016. [access]. [5] Raizman, p184-187. [6] Jaffé, Hans Ludwig C. De Stijl. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1971. p232. [7] Jaffé, p233-324. [8] Raizman, p187. [9] Raizman, p187. [10] Poulin, p79. [11] Raizman, p187. [12] Poulin, p79. [13] Jaffé, p235-237. [14] Poulin, p79. [15] “Restoration.” Musées De La Ville De Strasbourg. Accessed July 06, 2016. [access].
We’ve all had great relationships, and poor relationships. We know what happens when we quit, what happens when we stay, and how we feel after it. After all, we’re adults – we’re experts at it!
If that’s the case, how come it is still so hard for us to let go of our feelings for our ex? We all know the course of emotions, regret and why did I do that? feelings after the breakup, but every time it’s the same thing over and over again. We always wish for the days before, wonder why we acted or behaved a certain way, wonder when it was when we started changing and growing apart. We know it’s never going to go back, but we keep on dreaming about it. And for some reason, a couple of years later, we are always in a new position in life and wouldn’t even think about dreaming about going back. What an interesting situation!
How can you explain this repetition of life that we endure every time we break up with someone? It never seems to end once it’s happened but eventually it all ends, like falling asleep and waking up again.
1. Remember that there will be new people entering your life at the right time.
It feels like it takes forever, but you know for sure that at some point someone new is going to enter your life. It happened before and it will happen again. This period feels like it takes forever. You were just with someone, used to their company for so long, and now you feel alone. But isn’t that what happened last time too? And you managed pretty well? And now you are here, in the future, meeting someone new, and maybe even more attractive. Imagine that!
2. There are a million more out there.
When I was younger I “survived” a particularly rough break up, and an older friend of mine was happy to remind me that there were in fact millions more girls out there. It didn’t take me long to realize that, because it’s basic fact! You might be in a small town now, or feel like you know everyone in your city, but it’s not true. The whole world is just teeming at the edges full of new people for you to meet, and call your own one day. You’ll just have to wait to meet them! It’s kind of exciting, isn’t it?
3. Remember how great freedom is?
Now is your chance! You are unhinged. Any little thing that your ex nagged you about, you can do actively to your heart’s content. Maybe your ex kept you in check, and balanced you out when you really needed it. That’s great, in short bursts – and now you have every day to be as weird and colourful and unique as you want to be. Dance in your house, listen to your worst CD’s and get that silly tattoo he always thought would look stupid. You are you and live for you. Don’t forget that!
4. Was it going to last forever?
It might be a summertime fling, a year of dating, or a five year engagement. All of which is just a blink of time in the span of our whole lives. When our grandparents were young they stayed together for a multitude of economic reasons, but in modern times we are unfortunately seeing the end of lifetime vows as people become more sustainably independent and open minded. We will statistically see less anniversary parties when we are elderly – and maybe it’s not a bad thing! By the time you will have turned 50 , 60, or 80 you will have met so many influential people who are coming in and out of your life, inspiring and changing you and guiding your life. Was that guy you w ere dating for two years really the be-all-end-all of relationships? If he was, I’m sorry – if not, well, looks like we still have a few more decades to find him!
5. Don’t be afraid of dating – or not dating.
Now that you’re single you will put a lot of pressure on yourself as to whether you should be seeing new people or not. Just stop worrying about it. Enjoy your own time, and wait for all your feelings to subside before you make any big choices that you will regret later.
If you chase after a butterfly in a field, it will fly away from you. But if you sit and wait in the grass, it might just land on your shoulder.
Sig Nordal 