Marcelo Faiden: On the Feedback Between Projects
by Editorial Gustavo Gili | 2013 april 16
adamo-faiden is an architecture studio that emerged from the ruins of the Argentinean corralito. After leaving the country and going to study and work in Europe, for Sebastián Adamo and Marcelo Faiden their return to post-crisis Argentina led to them reformulate their role as architects in the new social context they encountered. In their search for new programmes and job opportunities, the condominium of housing and offices (with a tradition in Buenos Aires stretching back to the 1950s) was the typology that permitted the studio to construct its first works, which they intervened in as both architects and builders. Since then, to this frequently explored typology they have added others that have gradually made adamo-faiden one of the most renowned studios in the Southern Cone.
In this interview conducted by 0300TV, Marcelo Faiden reflects on the feedback of ideas and solutions between projects, a phenomenon that behaves differently if one compares ephemeral installations and architecture with actual constructive projects.
The hidden valley
by Editorial Gustavo Gili | 2013 january 09
Text by Mauricio Pezo (Pezo von Ellrichshausen)
This text is a truthful act of reciprocity. Kersten Geers wrote a presentation for our 2G. David Van Severen sent us a picture of our two issues (n.61 and n.63) together with a temporal twist of the visual reading; with the last publication on the left. That suggested landscape, as anyone could verify by placing one issue next to the other, is a continuous natural setting among two domestic buildings; one being a rough perforated handmade mass and the other an addition of smooth and almost hermetic industrial surfaces. This is a rather bizarre coincidence. Andreas Vesalius, however, did a similar trick behind his allegorical unwrapped corpses. As in those camouflaged scientific depictions made by the celebrated Flemish anatomist, OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen’s monograph is both a literal translation of the ways in which the duo produces architecture (in its wider and taxonomical collection of formats) and the very illusory secrets to hide those methods, and even to wittingly veil the buildings themselves.
Life mirrored in architecture
by Editorial Gustavo Gili | 2012 october 10
Stefano Boeri is one of the few practices of international renown that has managed to overcome the difficulties intrinsic to the situation Italy presents for architecture studios and to make of these a virtue. His career as an architect has gone hand in hand with a commitment to teaching, criticism, publishing, politics and cultural agitation, and the projects he has tackled in these fields are numerous. To this we might add an abundant oeuvre—unusually productive in terms of Italian parameters—including public and private buildings. 2G 62 is devoted to the Italian architect and in addition to print edition we publish this article by Francisca Insulza, an interview to Boeri and videos of two of his works.
Casa Cien
by Editorial Gustavo Gili | 2012 may 22
Video by Cristóbal Palma
To watch the video, click on the following embedment.
Families
by Editorial Gustavo Gili | 2012 may 15
Text by Kersten Geers (OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen)
In ten years time, Pezo von Ellrichshausen made a very compact and powerful oeuvre. Against the fashion of the day they spend a lot of time in making buildings to stay. Solid, and brutal, simple and simplified, each of their buildings celebrated the ambiguity inherent to the build artifact as a complex spatial construction, even despite the simplicity of the plan figure.
The office has always used a limited set of tools to make the buildings. Plan, section and axonometric are revived as the main ingredients of a reduced universe. More importantly, they chose to take time to make buildings, rather than desperately longing for an all to easy place in the spotlight of five minutes of fame. From the very beginning, the complex relationship between desire (of the plan, of the project) and approximation has been investigated; not so much on a theoretical level, but simply through empiric exercise, by building slowly. In Pezo and Sofia’s practice buildings take time. They are allowed to, there is no rush. Because of that, evolution is slow, fixations are precise, elements are well considered. As a result, the buildings they develop never come alone, they come in series, in families.
Pezo von Ellrichshausen care a lot about families. Like family members, each building has a name, always made of four letters. It is but one of the many incarnations of the rigid frameworks they apply to organize their work, to organize their time. Systems, grids, elements, squares: It is all there, direct and visible. That is not a surprise, it is only within these very rigid frameworks that certain, very precise deviations can develop over time; they make each project particular in the end. Like a full grown family member, a building shows its character only once the project is completed. Different families represent different building types. These groups of buildings can only be recognized in retrospect, in hindsight. It is as if in the slow development from one project to the other, small transgressions happen, until something entirely different is born: another family, another group of buildings, another type. Ultimately their work is an exercise in typology.
Because of their focus on typology, Pezo van Ellrichshausen’s architecture appears as very simple, almost simplistic. Still, their simple things are always inherently complex. As a curious exercise in economy of means, their complex buildings and even their complex solutions —eg their window plans, their facades—appear after investigation fundamentally simpler, dryer and more considered as one would ever guess.
Ten years time shows an exceptional oeuvre. A set of simple iterations and modulations of architectural language that is systematically invested in its most tactile and tectonic incarnation: the building: architecture (here) is building typologies.
2G 60 Lacaton & Vassal > Multimedia presentation with an introduction by Felipe de Ferrari and Diego Grass
by Editorial Gustavo Gili | 2012 february 02
Lacaton & Vassal: on form
In rough buildings such as those designed by the French architects Lacaton & Vassal, great confidence is shown in reality, and that confidence is palpable. On the other hand, the architects do not seem to have much confidence in their designs on an abstract level.
(Ishigami, Junya, ‘Dialogue: Approach to Architecture. Ryue Nishizawa x Junya Ishigami’, Japan Architect, no. 72, Tokyo, winter 2009.)
When Junya Ishigami speaks of ‘abstraction’—and the lack of it in the work and thought of Lacaton & Vassal—he is referring to a fundamental term in his search to attain what he calls ‘space or architecture of the future.’ In our opinion the diagnosis Ishigami makes of the two French architects is not entirely correct, since in actual fact it is not a question of a lack of confidence but rather of renouncing the ethereal formal exploration the Japanese architect himself has accustomed us to. The French architects see little interest in utilizing abstraction as a synonym for creative freedom—the opposite in fact. From the conceptual and constructional point of view, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal have spent more than twenty years doing practically the same thing: redefining the parameters their commissions (direct or via competition) are based on, lowering the aesthetic expectations (always relative) of their clients, and privileging a logic in which a greater amount of space is associated with a greater quality of life. Understood as a synthesis of rather hard data, abstraction is decisive in order for the French architects to be able to offer their clients extra space, a space that not even they themselves had contemplated. In their buildings this ‘extra space’—which is generally formalized in a greenhouse—introduces the vector of freedom that other architects try and attain via formal operations that seem drawn, as if by magic, from a conjurer’s top hat. Asking Lacaton & Vassal to make exclusive use of their creative authority in its aesthetic version is to ask the impossible from them.
Kazuo Shinohara: souvenirs de voyage
by Editorial Gustavo Gili | 2011 december 28
In 1976 Kazuo Shinohara made a sudden, brief trip to several West African countries in an active spirit of reconnaissance, having only once before left Japan to travel in Europe and Morocco. He later visited the U.S., Australia, and again Europe, plus a relatively brief trip to South America, including Machu Picchu.
Photo feature > Shinohara's House in Uehara, by Sakaguchi
by Editorial Gustavo Gili | 2011 november 02
Here we present images of the House in Uehara (1975-1976) taken by the Japanese photographer Tomoyuki Sakaguchi. They offer a different view of this iconic work by Kazuo Shinohara (2G 58/59).
Video > Kazuo Shinohara in 'Kochuu'
by Editorial Gustavo Gili | 2011 october 21
Between 2001 and 2002 Kazuo Shinohara took part in the filming of Kochuu: Japanese Architecture/Influence & Origin, a documentary by the Swedish director and producer Jesper Wachtmeister that deals with Japanese architectural tradition.
New issue > 2G 58/59 Kazuo Shinohara. Houses
by Editorial Gustavo Gili | 2011 september 26
Kazuo Shinohara (1925–2006), who received a posthumous Golden Lion at the 2010 Venice Biennale, is a legendary figure in modern architecture who transcended the borders of his native Japan. This is due to two things: the spatial quality and intensity of his single-family housing projects (some of them already architectural icons), and his strict control over how and where his work was published.
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