The other drawings in the exhibition belong to the same period and are grouped in series depending on their setting or compositional system, typically following a layout where architecture is set out as an autonomous object or still life. More generally, the exhibition reminds us of the virtuosity and expertise of Lerup’s drawings, and the way his images are used as a tool to represent not only architectural themes, but also create subtle and elaborate narratives within them.[1]

1234 House, 1985, water colour on paper, 24x18cm

Such is the case with Lukamanier Pass – 8, which shows two sets of hands in the bottom left corner of the image, one resisting the other, which, knife in hand, is about to cut into the structure of a building fragment, as if describing some premonitory event. The classical language of the building, formed by a group of columns and a pediment, is time-related to the robes draping the arms above the hands. These are only half visible, covered by the background, like ghostly images found in unrevealed layers of old documents. The event depicted (the fighting to avoid an attack on an architectural fragment) is a mental passage that takes place in a real location (Lukmanier Pass in the Swiss Alps, which borders the canton of Ticino, famous for its 1980s architecture), and which invites the viewer to figure this whole story out.

Lukamanier Pass, 1986, water colour on paper, 24x18cm

From a representational point of view, most of Lerup’s drawings on display use oblique projection, often combining elements with different perspectives – a smart way to elaborate complex narratives, and something that would be more difficult to achieve with standard one- or two-point perspective. This kind of illusionistic projection also enables the viewer to be located closer to the subject, occupying the same representational centre where the action takes place.[2] As a device, the use of multiple projections recalls German fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh’s favoured medium: ‘Using 35mm is more like talking – conversational photography – while larger formats are like presentation. Thirty-five millimetre is like a part of your body. You talk and you take pictures; how people react to you and to your camera, that’s what you can get on 35mm.’[3] The same conversationalism and commitment to analogue photography can be found in the work of Catalan photographer Xavier Miserachs, particularly the images applied to the walls of his house in Esclanyà. Here Miserachs created a beautiful patchwork of family images, mostly taken on the beaches of his beloved Costa Brava, a region where Harnden Bombelli built the Staempfli house – another architectural subject rendered by Lerup (Cadaqués, 1986).[4] This house, like the others displayed as a part of a series in this exhibition, is depicted as an autonomous object, detached from its urban context and immersed in a wasteland of dramatic scenery, like a poetic manifesto to human dwelling.

Set, Ostia, Italy 1991. Photo by Peter Lindbergh

Cadaques, 1965. Photo by Xavier Miserachs

Cadaques, 1986, water colour on paper, 22x16cm

But beyond architecture, Lerup’s work has also consistently dealt with the equally classical models of urbanity and the academy. From the perspective of his written work, and related to drawing, his latest book about Houston is an example of an author able to work simultaneously with visual and narrative content in order to communicate a wider set of ideas.[5] In this particular case, drawings are used as tools to explain complex urban events and conditions, sometimes of a diagrammatic or schematic nature, and seemingly produced at the same speed as his typing. In this sense, Lerup’s drawings are imbued with a sense of humanity and wilderness that connects with the experience of living within a Texan environment, with its humid, subtropical climate as the everyday experiences of driving fast expensive cars over freeways. Ultimately these contradictory features – yet more fatness and thinness – is what most characterises Houston as a living environment. And although his books suggest larger, more deployed narratives than just drawings, these last ones are ultimate instruments to tell, suggest and put us closer to some of the many stories they contain.

—José Zabala, editor at Quaderns.

_____
[1] For additional Lerup material go to the database of the CCA or see the following link.
[2] See: James S. Ackerman introduction to Massimo Scolari’s Oblique drawing. A history of anti-perspective. MIT press Writing architecture series, 2012.
[3] Peter Lindberg, Artforum May 2016, Volume 54, Issue 9.
[4] Manuel Martín et. al., El Cadaqués de Peter Harnden y Lanfranco Bombelli. (Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya, 2002).
[5] Lars Lerup, One Million Acres & No Zoning. (Architectural Association, London, 2011).

/// The exhibition ‘A Fat House for a Thin Man,’ is being exhibited at Betts Project. Betts Project is a London-based contemporary art gallery specialising in architecture established in 2013 and founded by Marie Coulon.
/// Marie Coulon is the founder and director of Betts Project. She arrived in London from Bordeaux, France, in 2010, having studied at the Ecole d’Enseignement Supérieur d’Art de Bordeaux (EBABX), and worked with Arcade gallery until 2012. At the same time she has worked with curator and critic, Chantal Pontbriand, on a variety of projects including Mutations (Paris-Photo 2011) and Parachute Anthology (2012).
/// We want to say thanks to Thomas Weaver, for his kind advise, reviews and edits on this text.

This year, from 3rd – 17th of July 2014, in collaboration with the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura de Barcelona – UPC BarcelonaTECH, the AA Visiting School will research the topic of “Bodega, Enological Metabolism”. The program can be described with the following texts:

Bodega – Enological Metabolism

The programme is again revolving around the idea of working on associations that exist between wine and architecture, furthermore to search for their interdependence and the influences that they may have on one another. The workshop this year will be the occasion to discover the fascinating cultural patrimony left by the Catalan modernist architects of the so called “Wine Cathedrals” in southern Catalonia.

Emerging as a peculiar building typology in the early 20th century, the modernist winery seems to articulate a reciprocal relationship between wine and its process of making, between the apparatus and the structure, between the content and the container. Can these buildings be understood as machines? How do structure, materials and spatial organisations relate to the process of wine making? What are all the interlaced systems and strategies that exist within these delicate yet astonishing constructions and their context?

The workshop will run as two parallel experiments occurring simultaneously along the two weeks of the course. One as an exploration on the senses, using wine as raw material, will happen as 1:1 performing installations, empirically testing and provoking unusual sensorial reactions on the body. The other, initiated from a methodological understanding of constructive, structural and spatial affinities of the modernist bodega, will lead to the design of new models, or even buildings, for a contemporary winery. Using digitally advanced techniques, these latter explorations will take the form of large scale maps and physical models.

Live Sensorial Laboratory

Wine awakes our sense, such as taste or smell, but what other sensorial reaction can it trigger?

The jargon of the enologist, when he describes taste as a sensorial experience, is all but tangible, yet amazingly precise. He needs to employ the metaphor to relate physical images and sensorial reactions.
Wine does carry images, its taste evokes particularities of the context in which the fruit grew, the flavour reflects the climate, and the colour witnesses its fermentation and aging, the soft smell nuances refer to olfactory perceptual memories… Our body is therefore capable of detecting, through its senses, this endless range of details embedded in the complex process of winemaking, while our mind often seems not to sense it at all…

Playfully creating a “mise-en-scene” with wine, students will explore sensorial experiences that the liquid is not known to usually provoke. We will take the wine out of the glass, into the space, into the air, confronting it to light, heat, wind…
This part of the work will run as a continuous experiment, starting on day one, ending during the final presentation of the workshop!

A corner of the ETSAB will be set up as a “laboratory” where white and red will be predominant. The student, acting as an artist, or a scientist, will be dressed in white and, equipped with photographic, filmic or graphic means, will invent new machinic devices to discern and enhance special nuances of the wine. We will design decanter-like pieces to trigger new or hidden effects that wine can have on our senses.

Winery: Content and Container

The title refers to the inherent symbiosis that exists between wine making and the edifice as its host. The winery is a machine where interlocked mechanisms perform through time, it’s unclear where the building stops and the winemaking starts, the content and the container can therefore no longer be identified and furthermore, dissociated.

The core exercise of the workshop will depart from an onsite cartographical analysis of the wine cathedrals of the modernist movement. We will read the bodega as a set of interlaced systems, occurring in time, orchestrating all the aspects of architecture and wine making: space, structure, light, climate, services, circulation, machines, processes, and transport. With the data collected during the field trip, students will have to describe graphically the way in which they understand these systems and relations. The outcome of this analysis will be formalised as drawings or maps, test models and form-finding experiments, that attempt to dismantle or dissect the systems that compose the winery.

These drawings will come together into one large map which will form the ground for the construction of a large collaborative model both integrating fragments of the historical winery and audaciously propose its reinvention.

We will tackle drawing and model-making with the contribution of digital tools, may they help us to think about cartography, about design, about making… Parametric design will be part of the learning agenda of the workshop. Support in drawing, 3d-modelling, parametric modelling, physical fabrication will be provided by a team of experts.

The results, as models and drawings, will be presented on the last day of the workshop to a panel of experts from the architecture and enological world, in a public presentation preceding the keynote lecture.

/// More info at AA Visiting School Barcelona

“In architecture we can identify a number of processes that bear a great similarity to this botanical process. Preexisting structures, physical or otherwise, are grafted with the new proposal, generating a building that brings together and harmoniously fuses the characteristics of what already exists and what is new. We can find this grafted architecture across the centuries in a great many examples. However it is in the last quarter of the 20th century and the early 21st century where we find a great number of projects in Catalan architecture in which proposals of different types and scales achieve brilliant results.

Grafting transmits the idea of a new organism that combines the strong points of its original components and is more vigorous than either of them on their own, an idea of renewal and growth.”

In order to visualize this concept, they have selected16 projects, that in different ways, share a contemporary attitude of understanding architecture. Some of the selected projects are:

Caldereria petita, housing renovation. Calderon – Folch – Sarsanedas Architects. ©Rodrigo Díaz Wichmann

Cultural center Casal Balaguer. Flores&Prats Arquitectes. © Adrià Goula

Mostly all of the projects are from the 21st century and are therefore vibrant proof of the vitality of this way of approaching things. It is also interesting to see that this attitude is one of the hallmarks of Catalan architecture, and Catalonia is one of the places where it has been developed with the most vitality and diversity.

The projects selected are presented through the process each architect followed in the phases of drafting and constructing the building. They are unique processes allowing us to see firsthand how analysis and decision-making develop through sketches, diagrams, drawings, photos, models, texts and more. Each project must be self-explanatory, making use of all available resources.

Public space Teatre La Lira. RCR Arquitectes. © Hisao Suzuki

The complete list of selected projects is:

—Reforma de la Casa Bofarull (1913-1933, Josep Maria Jujol, als Pallaresos)
— Apartaments a les golfes de La Pedrera (1953-1955, Francisco Juan Barba Corsini, a Barcelona)
— Restauració de l’església de l’Hospitalet (1981-1984, José Antonio Martínez Lapeña i Elías Torres Tur, a Eivissa)
— IES La Llauna (1984-86, Carme Pinós i Enric Miralles, a Badalona)
— Caldereria petita, rehabilitació d’habitatge entre mitgeres (2001-2002, Calderon – Folch – Sarsanedas Arquitectes, a Gelida)
— Museu de Can Framis (2007-2009, Jordi Badia BAAS Arquitectura, a Barcelona)
— Espai públic Teatre La Lira (2004-2011, RCR Arquitectes (Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem i Ramon Vilalta) i Joan Puigcorbé, a Ripoll)
— Apartament Juan (2011, vora arquitectura (Pere Buil i Toni Riba), a Barcelona)
— Auditori a l’església de Sant Francesc (2003-2011, David Closes, a Santpedor )
— 3 estacions de la Línia 9 del Metro: Amadeu Torner, Parc Logístic i Mercabarna (2008-2011, Garcés – De Seta – Bonet Arquitectes (Jordi Garcés, Daria e Seta i Anna Bonet) i Ingeniería Tec-4 (Ferran Casanovas, Antonio Santiago i Felipe Limongi), a Barcelona)
— Espai transmissor del túmul/dolmen megalític (2007-2013, Toni Gironès, a Seró (Artesa de Segre)
— Clínica Arenys – can Zariquiey (2006-2013, Josep Miàs Arquitectes (Josep Miàs), a Arenys de Munt)
— Centre cultural Casal Balaguer (1996 – en procés, Flores&Prats Arquitectes (Eva Prats i Ricardo Flores) i Duch-Pizá Arquitectos (Ma José Duch i Francisco Pizá), a Palma
— Restauració paisatgística de l’abocador vall d’En Joan a Begues (2002 – en procés, Enric Batlle , Joan Roig i Teresa Galí, al Parc Natural del Garraf),
— Torre de 94 habitatges de protecció oficial (2012 – en procés, Josep Llinàs, a L’Hospitalet de Llobregat)
— Projecte de revitalització del districte d’Adhamiya (2012 – en procés, AV62 Arquitectos (Victòria Garriga i Toño Foraster) i Pedro García del Barrio – Pedro Azara, a Bagdad).

Auditorium of Sant Francesc church. David Closes. © Jordi Surroca

An important detail to be mentioned is that, for the first time, there will be on exhibition some facsimile reproductions, in real scale, of the plans and drawings that Josep Maria Jujol did for the Bofarull House, which are part of the Jujol archives.

/// Header image: Renovation of the Bofarull House [1913-1933, Josep Maria Jujol, als Pallaresos] © Guillem Carabí
/// All the info about the exhibition can be found on the web-site Venezia 2014

Alain Pilote wrote on an article published in 1994 that reality —the environment— is sacrificed for the symbol – money. Searching alternatives to the ongoing capitalist system, it’s impossible no to think on how it leads and affects environmental issues. Oil, energy, water, and waste are conducted by economical forces, beyond its geopolitical, social, economic and infrastructural implications. The cycle of extraction, production and recycling has demonstrated to be a failed system and some of the worst environmental disasters in the past years are related with industrial models and the micro-politics of economic power. At this point and with the access to information and digital tools, the response to environmental issues have reached the masses to enable new models, ideas and innovative proposals. Thus, it’s worth to think which can be the architectural response to the emerging conditions presented by climate-changed terrains?

Utopie Dynamit, Gunter Rambow. MoMA Collection

The juror of this competition is Keller Easterling and is called Subtraction. Here you can read her competition brief:

Consider the pleasures of building removal. Whatever the prodigious efforts associated with erecting architecture, the art of causing it to disappear can be equally violent, compelling or satisfying. Methods for demolishing, imploding or otherwise subtracting building material are not among the essential skills imparted to architects in training. Believing building to be the primary constructive activity, the discipline has not institutionalized special studies of subtraction. In fact, for architects, building envelope is almost always the answer to any problem, and subtraction is often understood to be the preparation of a tabula rasa.

In the often indifferent ecologies of building subtraction, marketers, financial experts, planners and politicians man several different kinds of remote controls that can detonate building and landscape creating destruction and political disenfranchisement in ways that are only somewhat slower than warfare. This subtraction generally signals loss while accumulation or accretion generally signals growth. But every act of building is already an act of subtraction. Most buildings today are designed as repeatable spatial products with rapid cycles of obsolescence. Financial industries surround the seemingly static and durable building with a volatile balloon of inflating and deflating value, be it a small house, a massive sports stadium or a 4000-room casino. Populations migrate into and away from cities causing both rapid growth and rapid decline. Buildings subtract other building because they replace a previous structure but they can also, just by their often toxic presence, cause surrounding buildings and landscapes to tumble to the ground.

In the wake of recent crises, catastrophes and population shifts, as buildings turn over and radiate negativity, a significant portion of the heavy machinery used to construct buildings is also now busy taking them apart. Ruin and decay has its own pornography. Demolition has its own TV shows. Disassembly and teardown are now popular art forms. The newest approaches to building removal even appear to retract skyscrapers into the ground. Finally, it is easy to see, with half closed eyes, an accelerated time lapse, like harvest and cultivation, within which large swaths of building and landscape seem to be simultaneously built and unbuilt —an economy where subtraction is the other half of building.

Bringing its own aesthetic pleasures, subtraction tutors an enhanced repertoire of form-making and opens onto a redoubled territory of endeavor. Space making through clearing is one pleasure. Still, subtraction is not simply absence but a moment in a set of exchanges and advances, aggressions and attritions.

Subtraction.

Building subtraction, as a heavy industry and a design protocol, is an emergent lucrative enterprise, a source of employment and a political instrument of extrastate governance. A subtraction protocol might be appropriate in many parts of the world where, for instance, sprawling overdevelopment has attracted distended or failed markets, where development confronts environmental issues, where development would be wise to retreat from exhausted land or flood plains, or where special land preserves are valued for attributes that development disrupts.

A subtraction economy may mark the end of an era within which building is treated primarily as financial instrument. While there are elaborate schemes for manipulating the virtual values of buildings and landscapes —in real estate markets or carbon markets— there are fewer spatial variables of value. Materializing risks and rewards in a physical, spatial constructs, shares and mechanisms in an alternative portfolio of values can be traded in an parallel market. Active forms can be designed as spatial levers, ratchets or offsets in this market. These negotiations can stabilise, compete with or even overwhelm financial markets to grow, contract or erase development.

Financial systems are good at haphazardly deleting building and landscape, but since architects have been trained to make the building machine lurch forward, they may know something about how to put it into reverse.

/// More info about the Think Space Money—Environment Competition ‘Subtraction’, including deadlines and registration requirements, here.
/// Keller Easterling will be presenting the competition today Feb. 28th from 7pm CET live-streaming at www.think-space.org

This series presents four international firms whose provocative work addresses the viewer with an increased sense of immediacy. Challenging conventions of form and materiality and ignoring the traditional distinction between representation and construction, the inventive work presented in the series suggests new ways to produce and read architecture, bringing the discipline closer to art and life.

/// Wednesday, January 22
JAN DE VYLDER
Co_founder, architecten De Vylder Vinck Taillieu. Gent, Belgium
Reception sponsor: Walter P Moore

/// Wednesday, January 29
JOSÉ SELGAS
Co_founder, Selgascano. Madrid, spain
Reception sponsor: clark condon associates

/// Wednesday, February 05
PHILIPP SCHAERER
Architect. Zurich, Switzerland
Reception sponsor: Kendall/Heaton Associates

/// Wednesday, february 19
CARLOS BEDOYA IKEDA
Principal, Productora. Mexico City, Mexico
Reception sponsor: Haynes Whaley Associates, Inc.

Curated by Jesús Vassallo, assistant professor, Rice School of Architecture.

ON IMMEDIACY by Quaderns

The model was built following Under Tomorrow’s Sky, a think tank held at MU Foundation, Eindhoven in 2012, by Liam Young and the architects from Tomorrows Thoughts Today laying the groundwork for Future Perfect. As part of Close, Closer, the 3rd edition of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Future Perfect brings together an ensemble of mad scientists, design mavericks, literary astronauts, speculative gamers, visionaries and luminaries to collectively develop the props, spaces, machines, cultures and narratives of a future city, an imaginary urbanism, the landscapes that surround it and the stories it contains.

UNDER TOMORROW’S SKY from stichting MU on Vimeo.

The model will be formed from extraordinarily intricate 3D printed and resin cast buildings, lighting systems, fibre optics, detailed painting and graffiti. It will be a hyper real cityscape that extends traditional architectural models into a world of fiction and popular culture. Miniature model making of this form has a long tradition in science fiction filmmaking. This workshop is an opportunity to learn these techniques from experts in the field and to be part of Triennale’s creative team. Workshop participants earn 8 credits from the Portuguese Architects Guild.

Under Tomorrows Sky movie miniature model installed in MU, Eindhoven. Image by Boudewijn Bollmann

/// ENROLLMENT IS NOW OPEN:
Special price for early bird until 14 July
– 10€ discount

/// Enrol until 21 July
– Complete workshop (2 weeks): 175€
– Only the first week: 100€
– 20% discount for Triennale Friends

More info: edu@trienaldelisboa

Liam Young is an architect who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. Founder of the Tomorrows Thoughts Today think tank, a group whose work explores the possibilities of fantastic, perverse and imaginary urbanisms, he also runs the Unknown Fields Division, a nomadic workshop that holds annual expeditions to the ends of the Earth to investigate unreal and forgotten landscapes, alien terrains and industrial ecologies. Liam’s projects develop fictional speculations as critical instruments to survey the consequences of emerging environmental and technological futures.

/// Header image: Workshop Futuro Perfeito © Susana Gaudêncio

The wide range of proposals includes city swimming pools built in the interwar period, school buildings that set new standards for learning environments in the mid-twentieth century, and new administrative buildings through which the state represented itself, to carefully planned layouts for architectural sites in the mythic spaces of history, railway stations that signified modern transportation hubs, and hotels that in socialist Yugoslavia were built by municipal governments with the aim of developing tourism. Slovenia is located in Central Europe at the crossroads of main European cultural and trade routes, and this position has been in the source of the rich history of architectural ideas, ideals, ambitions, and visions can be read in public buildings.

Railway Station, Jesenice_Stanislav Rohrman, photo: MAO archive

General Hospital, Izola. Stanko Kristl, photo: MAO archive

It is impossible to deny the relationship between politics and architecture, insofar as politics and economy are the driven forces behind the power that manages architecture in periods of restructuring society. In this context, mostly all of the exhibited projects are from the decades between early 1940s and late 1960s, the socialist period of Slovenia, an era when the country started to enjoy a relatively autonomy. We can read about those years:

“Between 1945 and 1948, a wave of political repressions took place in Slovenia and in Yugoslavia. By 1947, all private property had been nationalised. Between 1949 and 1953, a forced collectivisation was attempted. After its failure, a policy of gradual liberalisation followed. A new economic policy, known as workers self-management, started to be implemented under the advice and supervision of the Slovene Edvard Kardelj, the main theorist of the Yugoslav Communist Party. In 1956, Josip Broz Tito, together with other leaders, founded the Non-Aligned Movement.”

France Prešern Primary School, Kranj. Stanko Kristl, photo: Janez Kališnik

The necessity of learning from the past, to contextualize the present and envision new futures in the architectural scenario is part of the main task of the curators. With this exhibition they propose to take a deep look at past models of building placement within the landscape to open up questions about the contemporary relationship between the architect’s responsibility and administrative regulations. And they add, “Today, governments at various levels are reducing the scope of public institutions and transferring a segment of public services into the hands of private companies. In this regard, an examination of the role of architecture in the public domain encourages us to think about the social state and the contribution to the quality of life made by the public institutions created in the past.”

Exhibition space.

The exhibition space has models, photograph and drawings, some of them showing old utopian dreams represented through the city symbols. New conceptual approaches can be found on the work of several Slovenian architects from the 1940s onward, including Feri Novak, Stanko Kristl, Janez Lajovic, and Branko Simčič among many others. In the curators words, “public buildings always testify the development of a country and its institutions; they speak of how people live and function as an organized community; they tell of the wealth of our public services and our concern for the common good.” That’s why the diverse scales and typologies are useful to understand a rich period on public buildings.

All this information is being expanded by numerous events, from guided tours to Sunday creative workshops and MAO debates.

—Ethel Baraona Pohl, editor.

/// Under a Common Roof.
25 April–15 September 2013
Museum of Architecture and Design, Ljubljana.
More info at MAO web-site.

Close, Closer, the third Lisbon Architecture Triennale, is initiating a discussion on the future role of contemporary architecture as a wide-ranging spatial practice. We are addressing architecture in its broadest sense: as an agency for the transformation and design of space. Architecture as a living, social, cultural and artistic force that manifests itself in a plurality of outputs that go far beyond traditional construction.

At the London preview on 13th June, curators Beatrice Galilee, Mariana Pestana, Liam Young and participant Daniel Fernandez Pascual, will be sharing their ideas and plans for the third Lisbon Architecture Triennale, wich will take place from 12 September to 15 December 2013.

Close Closer curators. © Lynton Pepper

At the curatorial statement, we can read:

“The third Lisbon Architecture Triennale is being forged at a critical juncture. Far from distancing ourselves from this fact, we have chosen it as one of the main anchors of our curatorial approach, as well as to the challenge we have put forward to our participants and audience. We will even take it one step further. In the current scenario of contracting market economies and scarce resources, we propose to approach architecture as a platform for generating solutions and strategies, fostering debate and participation in designing a shared space and future.

What Close, Closer proposes is a vision of spatial practice as reaction, namely to the current economic and political climate, the social concerns and civic deficit we are facing. Driven by integration, this reaction is grounded in interdisciplinary dialogue and gathers momentum and strength through participation. “

At Close, Closer 2013 LONDON PREVIEW, they will be discussing all the ideas, exhibitions, installations and actions that will make up Close, Closer, the third Lisbon Architecture Triennale when it opens in September this year. The talk is organised by Building Design magazine, and places are free but do reserve your seat: bdrsvp@ubm.com

/// Thursday 13th June, 7pm
KPF London
7a Langley Street, WC2H 9JA

And a reminder that our Début Award for young architects (under 35) is closing on 21 June! A €5,000 prize and a place on our list of 10 honourable mentions is up for grabs. Download the guidelines here.