War & Art

First World War: 1914 – 1918. 16 Million dead

Second World War: 1938 – 1945. 50 to 85 Million dead. 

Death, devastation, and repression were the bread and butter for many years in Europe and abroad. This loss of humanity, hope, and happiness led artist to see a black, broken, and bloody reality. Braque, Bourgeois, Dali, Duchamp, Picasso, …. all created their own parallel universes through art. An explosion on creativity, where they, and millions others, controlled their own view of a world in pieces.

The western societies have not gone through any major threats to humanity in the last 70 years. There have been wars, Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, … but we have been careful to keep them far from our reach, where only those brave (or naive) enough go. This prosperity is opening the way for conversations on #metoo, #backlivesmatter, social inequality, … But no conversation about parallel realities, no outbreak of intrinsic creativity, no real need for art; just of pleasure.

If philosophy prospers with peace and fortune, art, on the contrary, fades.

Reflection of visit to Museo Reina Sofia.
Madrid Jan 8th, 2018

THE NEW HISTORY IS NOT AT SCALE

There are two exhibitions at the Chicago Architecture Biennial that have the potential to be outstanding, and are actually the most spoken off in social media and in general Biennial conversations: The Horizontal City and The Vertical City. The first is about reimagining interior architecture, whereas the latter is a revisit of the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition in 1922.

However, out of the 24 interiors, and 16 towers, just a handful of models are at a scale where the concept, and its materialization, are consistent. There are many projects that could have been represented at 1:100 with no need to scale it up to 1:5. The same happens with IIT´s College of Architecture collaboration with SANAA, where an unnecessarily big site model with a couple man-made mountains add to Chicago’s flat topography.

In my opinion, the following projects showcase the best use of scale within their exhibits: (more…)

Chicago Architecture Biennial 2017

The Chicago Architecture Biennial has just finished their presentation week and it’s now full blast with it’s great program. Here are last week’s highlights:

1.EXPO CHICAGO

Short and intense, this collection of Modern and Contemporary Art only takes place during  5 days, the first of which is only open to press and VIP. A very “international” event with 25 countries and 56 different cities represented within a 135 of mostly North American Art Galleries. (more…)

Johnson Wax Headquarters

There are 2 types of architects, those who follow current trends, and those who design for the future. The latter are guided by timeless morals that make their designs last through time, and still be seen as iconic decades after.

Frank Lloyd Wright has proved to be part of the second group, leaving us examples such as the Falling Water in Pennsylvania, or the Johnson and Son headquarters in Racine, IL. But, how do you spot which architect was part of what group? (more…)

Infinite possibilities in 70sqm

CASA MJE / Pequeñas Grandes Casas from PKMN [pac-man] on Vimeo.

PKMN architectures has been able to create abhosugin that adapts to a family lifestyle. From just an elder couple to the entire family. How?

With mobile walls that host become the producers of these infinite arrangement of spaces.

Will be talking more about the possibilities of this solution in dense cities such as Manhattan, London or Mumbai.

Housing…What next?

Every single architecture student knows what lectures are taking place in, at least, 3 architecture schools: AA of London, HU-GSD in Cambridge and, hopefully, their own school. Since I recently moved to Boston for my Master of International Marketing, I decided to pick up on my architecture background and attend as many architecture lectures as possible. My first lecture of this year, yesterday: “Housing…What next?” at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

The lecture was organized as an opening for the current exhibition in the Harvard School of Design Hall, “Living Anatomy” is hosting. Four architects, with different approaches, talked about what housing was and is, and try to call out that architects should put more effort in its theoretical and formal development. (more…)

VVArquitectura on C3Magazine

C3_372_Raval-of-the-Sea-Hotel-0of5

The studio was set up in Barcelona (Spain) in 2013 by Alba Vallvè and Pineda Vallvè. What characterizes VVA is it’s freshness of the youth combines with the professional experience of its founders that combine, extraordinarily well, the respect for a place’s culture and history with ravishingly modern forms that create contrast in their work. (more…)

Treatise: Why write alone? / SPEEDISM

beyarch-image

 

BEy.ARCH has partnered up with our fellow friend and architect GIU. Together now ness&giu publishes an upgraded version of this blog. We will be redirecting all the posts to the new site and we hope you enjoy the content as much as we care to publish it.

"Generally the wide notion of architecture includes the pursue of construction but, as happens with life, things are not black or white and, therefore, architecture can become almost anything that includes people's habitat. One of these many architecture "forms" is what, some call, the archeology of future."

To read more you can either click HERE or in the IMAGE

Lunar base by Foster + Partners

There is something we are always talking about in this blog and that is the new relationships human being are developing with the new technologies we are now developing, being 3D printing the most revolutionary in both every day aspects of life and architecture design. We have talked about the possibilities of cooperations and sustainability these tools could provide us. However, we never imagines that, due to these discoveries, we would be able to establish a colony in the MOON.

Well, as it turns our and you can see later in the video, Foster and Partners, the most powerful architecture studio, started working, on 2012, on the possibility of building a new city in the moon. The way the explain it in their video it looks pretty easy and even sustainable. Sending a scaffolding dome that will provide structure for an igloo wise structure that will use the local materials available. Also this structure would provide a protection for gamma radiation, meteorites and also would provide a temperature balance that would allow for 4 astronaut  to work and explore in the interior of this alien construction.

I haven’t made my mind wether I love it or I hate it, but I think feeling will be quite radical towards it. The rest, Foster + Partner’s press release:

 

“In 2012, the practice joined a consortium set up by the European Space Agency to explore the possibilities of 3D printing to construct lunar habitations. Addressing the challenges of transporting materials to the moon, the study has been investigating the use of lunar soil, known as regolith, as building matter. The base is designed to house four astronauts, and provides protection from meteorites, gamma radiation and high temperature fluctuations. The proposed location for the base is the rim of Shackleton Crater at the lunar South Pole, where there is a near- constant ‘peak of eternal light’, and therefore plentiful solar power.”

–ines–