It is our profound conviction that a new generational pact must be implemented urgently, to enable every generation to live their lives fully and with dignity; a pact to prevent opportunists from stepping into the shoes of someone else and getting away with it. Of course we are not asking people to pursue some sort of smug utopia or absurd apathetic pacification, but simply to seize an exceptional opportunity afforded by our time.
Keynotes about making art
The artistic complexity of Maurizio Nannucci’s work, which has profound theoretic roots that can be traced in the documents contained in his archives, is being celebrated with a large exhibition at the MAXXI in Rome. Here, he offers Domus readers a small but eloquent sample of background-related texts and images.
Complex Projects
The didactic instruction devised by Kees Kaan for the course he directs at the Delft University of Technology aims to train architects to deal with the complexity of our profession from a different point of view, involving continuous dialogue between teachers and students, and critical thinking that leads to solving diverse problems by means of non-conventional methodologies.
ENSCI-Les Ateliers, French National Institute for Advanced Studies in Industrial Design
Founded in the early 1980s with the precise aim to explore new territories in creative education, this Parisian school has always looked at industrial design from a broad perspective that includes services for the economy and society as a whole. By making flexibility its signature trademark and giving students the freedom to find their personal fields of interest, the school allows different age groups to work side by side.
Alberto Burri’s Teatro Continuo
Twenty-six years after being torn down, a coordinated act of civic responsibility and enlightened patronage by NCTM Studio Legale with the Burri Foundation has brought back to its original setting the outdoor stage designed for the city of Milan by the maestro from Città di Castello in Umbria.
The micro-history of an icon
Telling the story of one of the most celebrated icons of modernist architecture is the complex endeavour taken on by two distinguished scholars and anticipated to our readers here. Written without the reassuring boundaries between disciplines, their reading proposes that the Villa Savoye be seen as a phenomenal laboratory of modernity.
Saul Steinberg in Milan
A recent exhibition at the Milan Polytechnic retraced the eight Italian years of this great Romanian-born American artist, who arrived at the Milan School of Architecture in 1933 and experienced an intense mix of good and bad that much influenced his life and work.
Fontana, Manzoni... and other stories
Manolo De Giorgi met with Nanda Vigo, who generously talked to Domus about her design career – developed in the intermediate territory between art and architecture – immersed in the many objects that fill her house so abundantly as the fruit of that experimentation.
Two names, one story
During a dual conversation, the managing director of Boffi, Roberto Gavazzi, and Luca De Padova, the president of the De Padova company, speak of the circumstances and strategic vision lying behind the recent alliance of these two important Italian design manufacturers. Their sights are set on an increasingly international future.
Ellebo Garden Room, Copenhagen
Hailing from the construction world and experiencing a belated love for architecture, Adam Khan proposes a different outlook on our profession: one that opposes the prevailing subdivision in types of expertise, and that is closer to the ancient figure of the Baumeister, with a global vision of making architecture.
Collectors’ fancy
On the occasion of an exhibition at the Museum of Design in Zurich celebrating an important new donation by the collectors Rüegg and Tropeano, we offer an overview of their enthusiastic, uninterrupted 30-year stint as seekers, saviours and documentarists of an inestimable patrimony of modernist furniture.
The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
The new American museum designed by RPBW takes part in the rebirth of a peripheral area of Manhattan by constructing a building that represents a glorious institution and constitutes a felicitous addition to the meat-packing district, which is transformed by its presence.
Piano’s Whitney
Kenneth Frampton introduces our readers in such a masterly way to this new chef d’œuvre, even regaling them with a short but illuminating description of the person who conceived, pursued and substantiated the beginning of this whole story: Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.
Golf clubhouse, Tielt-Winge, Belgium
In the verdant countryside of Flemish Brabant, this Belgian firm’s recent effort reveals great compositional skill, enhanced by the use of few materials and the design of a roof that echoes the topographical characteristics of the site.
Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw
For this Swiss architect, the renewal of a modernist building represented the opportunity to fully rethink a small urban lot by virtue of the tectonic relationship between facades, apertures and frame, in consideration of continuity with the fronts of the neighbouring historic townhouses.
Solis Silos: feeding on light
Created for the Milan Furniture Fair but on display in the city for the full duration of the 2015 World Expo, the seven silos designed by Mario Nanni bring into being a sequence of evocative atmospheres relating to nutrition and energy. They are objects on an urban scale that speak of a special approach to design.
Art of steel
Written together with such maestri as Alessandro Mendini and Aldo Rossi, the hundred-year story that Alberto Alessi recounts to Domus readers begins in Omegna on Lake Orta, from where his products have reached the entire world, securing the glory of one of the most important factories of Italian design by going where other companies had not yet arrived.
Rassegna: Lighting
Feedback: Jean-Michel Landecy’s Geneva
Elzeviro: We cannot restore anything
What started as the Arab Spring has developed into the Arab nightmare. We are experiencing a new wave of destruction: the Middle East is losing its history. Will we be able to regain anything of what has been lost?
