Arper in New York
From a little town in the North of Italy to USA: the Italian contract furniture company Arper debuts its flagship showroom in New York City, designed by Solveig Ferlund.
In this issue
Domus 988
Drawing based on a design sketch by Konstantin Grcic for the chair Dahlem for Arflex Japan
Editorial: What a project is, again
To fully experience our contemporaneity and so be able to imagine our best possible future, we feel that the question of architectural design, dealt with in last month’s editorial, is so pivotal and of such priority that it is worth adding further reflections here on the same topic.
Terrae Motus: an act of pain and an act of hope
The MADRE museum in Naples is rendering homage to the brilliant Neapolitan gallery owner whose work indissolubly linked the recent history of this city to great contemporary art, to the extent that we can now say that Naples and art belong to each other.
From the Moderrn Art Agency to the birth of Terrae Motus
École d’Architecture de la Ville et des Territoires, Marne-la-Vallée, Paris
A focus on the city and a didactic approach that connects theory to practice are the cornerstones of an atelier led by three French professors. Their master’s degree course is four semesters long and comprises two main phases: the project and the seminar.
TThe Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, architecture and urbanism
Being the successor of the Gropius-founded Bauhaus, the Weimar school today has a highly international standard with 80 partners, substantialising its consideration of architecture and urbanism as a complex system of relationships that encompasses history, sociology and scientific analysis, in addition to craft and modern technology.
Milan and its distance
An extraordinary story brings us yet again with the author to the banks of the Adda river, amid da Vinci’s swirling currents (see Domus 974). This time, we travel back to Milan to discover how the city is rooted to its territory.
Building by adding
In the creative process adopted by this German designer, both analogue and digital tools are wielded to find the right idea and steer it in the correct direction. Starting from scratch, he seeks to give order to a project’s elements and create a kind of beauty that is not driven by form but by intelligence, simplicity of function and quality of construction.
Paola Besana: weaving with structure and three-dimensionality
The design of surfaces by connecting warp and weft is a fascinating play of infinite variables in technique, shape and colour. Several recent projects demonstrate the strong architectural character of the work of one of Italy’s most important exponents in the craft of weaving.
An interior by Nanda Vigo
The interior by Nanda Vigo seen here before its definitive dismantlement brings us back to the elements of her architectural craft: space sequencing as narration; surfaces as the components of an optical device to generate a new geometry of spaces; and furniture as volume and presence – all in a domestic landscape that is fully based on perception.
Mario Bellini: My Domus
The Milanese maestro is celebrating his 80th birthday with a gift to Domus readers, telling us of the great passion that brought him to successfully direct the magazine in the late 1980s. Happy birthday, Mario.
Critique meets construction
The dean of the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art in London asserts the importance of offering diverse approaches to making architecture. In the two-year master’s degree course, his set-up sees design as a blend of social commitment, graphic experimentation and inventive use of materials.
Yenikapi Archaeopark, Istanbul
The project for an entire quarter of Istanbul is allowing this American master to work with some of his favourite instruments – matrices both material and immaterial, and stratifications both natural and artificial – wielded here in favour of unearthing the ancient city.
Empathic trajectories
By following his own sensibility and preserving his company’s roots, Claudio Feltrin, a furniture manufacturer from Veneto, is travelling a path of empathic discovery. The affirmation of his production’s character brought him to identify with the work of Lina Bo Bardi in its construction techniques, fresh colours and materials.
Building on the water, China
The Portuguese master Siza is finding an extraordinary occasion in faraway China to build exemplaryarchitecture that illustrates the high level reached by his craft and art. These projects, developed with one of his right hands of long standing, are beginning to constitute a family of buildings – presented here is one of the first and most impressive to be completed.
Jazz campus, Basel
The new complex by the Swiss firm Buol & Zünd, built to accommodate music studies and events, finds the key to its design in an inner courtyard that connects the school to the city, intensifying the building’s urban character.
Além house, Portugal
South of Lisbon, in the Alentejo region, this Swiss architect has built his own house – not as a summer residence, but as an actual dwelling immersed in nature. The result of this work is a virtual manifesto of how his architecture marries expressive strength with inhabitability.
Jane’s Carousel, New York
A refined architectural box perched on the edge of Brooklyn Bridge Park, across from Manhattan, contains a carousel constructed in 1922 in Ohio. By night, a play of lights and vertical screens turns the box into a luminous lantern, animated by the circular movement of the horses’ shadows.
The story of Jane’s Carousel
Studio with tearoom for ceremonies
This great Japanese photographer painstakingly designed his studio-gallery and all its furnishings at the top of a New York building, mixing the celebrated style and culture of his homeland with American metropolitan living.
A fluid identity
Founded in Beirut, with satellite offices in Europe and Asia, this singular design and production studio defies habitual professional categories and proposes a new global work model. From technological research to design, from production to the documentation of strictly site-specific products, .Pslab pursues its entrepreneurial vision in the conviction that the best projects are ones based on collaboration.
Rassegna: Bagno
Feedback: Adolfo Natalini’s Florence
