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  COME VEDERE L'ARCHITETTURA CONTEMPORANEA HOW TO SEE CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE
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MAD, Ma Yansong Landscapes in Motion, Hong Kong Design Institute, HKDI, Dang Qun, Hayano YosukeMa Yansong: Landscapes in Motion, Hong Kong [Xianggang] (China), ), 19 january / 7 april 2024

MAD, Ma Yansong Landscapes in Motion, Hong Kong Design Institute, HKDI, Dang Qun, Hayano YosukeAdapted from the Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning’s large-scale solo exhibition that ran in 2023, “Ma Yansong: Landscapes in Motion” has been exclusively curated for the HKDI Gallery by its founder, and principal partner of MAD Architects (MAD) - an architectural collective, MA Yansong. After graduating from Yale University in 2002, MA has participated in various international exhibitions and is now set to debut his first-ever large-scale solo exhibition in Hong Kong, solidifying his status as one of China’s most influential architects. The exhibition presents MAD’s most significant urban architectural projects in history led by MA Yansong, in addition to the artist’s thought-provoking design concepts and imaginative vision. This exhibition offers a glimpse into the future of urban civilization – proffering a harmonious coexistence of urban landscapes, historical sites, and natural environments. 

The first floor of the exhibition focuses on the major projects of MA Yansong and the MAD team, including a series of large-scale models and the brand new interactive installation which is exclusively designed for HKDI. The neon art installation on the same floor “Landscape in Motion” trace MA’s original hand-drawn design concept sketches of the projects highlighted in the exhibition, including UNIC Harbin Opera House, Shenzhen Bay Culture Park, Quzhou Sports Park, and the FENIX Museum of Migration, the piece fills the exhibition hall. Bridging the past and future, MA employs the aesthetics of Hong Kong’s neon heritage to represent a modern way of thinking about architecture, one that sees the building as not only a static structure but as an organic and vivid art form, evoking thoughts about the relationship between architecture, art and nature. 

Before audiences are greeted by this impressive installation, they are first invited to delve into the pieces it references. Attendees can explore the breadth of MAD’s projects across the globe, beginning at the closest – the soon to be finished Shenzhen Bay Culture Park. Located in the Nanshan District of Shenzhen, the park aims to create “a buffer and breathing zone” for people in the busy metropolis. With the key concept of “ancient future”, MAD’s design places a surreal scene of land art into a real urban space. Viewers can explore the parts “monumental stones” of white granite that curve in a natural form, injecting the organic into the constructed. 

MAD, Ma Yansong Landscapes in Motion, Hong Kong Design Institute, HKDI, Dang Qun, Hayano YosukeAs well as spotlighting architecture entirely crafted by MAD, the exhibition also displays impressive renovations undertaken by the collective. For example, MAD’s renovation of FENIX Museum of Migration in Rotterdam, Netherlands, connects the city’s history with the present, updating the original warehouse space by opening up the central façade and roof to form a user-friendly exhibition space while preserving its iconic green steel windows and concrete interior. Once again, the collective invites nature into the space with the addition of two staircases that mimic nature’s most reoccurring construct: the spiral. 

MAD, Ma Yansong Landscapes in Motion, Hong Kong Design Institute, HKDI, Dang Qun, Hayano YosukeUltimately, the exhibition highlights MAD’s mission to create spaces that serve as a conduit to explore cultural life. MA prompts audiences to probe the inner self while observing the dynamic, diverse, and fluid cultural landscape of contemporary society. 

“I am delighted to bring this exhibition to the HKDI,” said Mr MA Yansong. “This exhibition features MAD Architect’s most representative urban architectural projects over the past two decades. I believe all human-made objects, from tools to art, are externalizations of the human spirit, the exhibition brings to the fore impressive and dynamic installations that reflect attitudes towards the external world, both its past and future. This exhibition is an essential viewing that unfolds the human aspect of pioneering scientific architectural technologies.”
Josef Hoffmann: Beyond Beauty and Modernity, Brussels [Bruxelles] (Belgium/Belgique/België), RMAH Royal Museums of Art and History, 6 october 2023 / 14 april 2024
Ettore Sottsass. Design Metaphors, Milano [Milan] (Italy), Triennale Milano, 29 september 2023 / 21 april 2024

Ettore Sottsass, Design Metaphors, Triennale MilanoTriennale Milano is presenting the exhibition Ettore Sottsass. Design Metaphors. After Struttura e colore, Il calcolo and La Parola, the fourth project in the exhibition cycle dedicated to the great architect and designer focuses on the relationship between Ettore Sottsass and photography.

As with the previous three exhibitions, Metafore is being staged inside the Sala Sottsass, which has been home since January 2021 to the permanent installation Casa Lana, a faithful reconstruction for Triennale of the interior of a private residence, designed by Sottsass in Milan in around the mid 1960s, and open to the public thanks to a donation from Barbara Radice Sottsass.

Ettore Sottsass. Design Metaphors brings together a series of photographs taken by Ettore Sottsass between 1972 and 1978 and grouped under the title “Metafore” (Metaphors); the fEttore Sottsass, Design Metaphors, Triennale Milanoirst three groups of photographs – Disegni per i destini dell’uomo (Designs for the destinies of man), Disegni per i diritti dell’uomo (Designs for the rights of man) and Disegni per le necessità degli animali (Designs for the necesssities of animals) – were exhibited in 1976 in Man Transforms, the collective exhibition for the opening of the Cooper Hewitt museum in New York, curated by Hans Hollein with Liza Taylor. The series of photos titled Fidanzati (Fiancées) and Decorazioni (Decorations) were taken after 1976 and after the exhibition at Cooper Hewitt, during Sottsass's travels through America, Greece, the Middle East and Italy. A series of works produced during the same period is also on display at the Triennale.

Marco Sammicheli, Director of the Triennale Museum of Italian Design, affirms: “The use of photography alongside design reveals another of Ettore Sottsass's modes of expression, which, through the use of symbols, experiences and overlapping languages, succeed in taking the observers to places where they can understand, discover, imagine and ask themselves new questions.”

The years between 1972 and 1976 came towards the end of the Radical period of architecture; for Sottsass this was a period of great critical reflection, in which he had almost stopped designing, and instead, thought, drew, wrote and divided his time between the Milan studio and his wanderings around different parts of Spain, including Barcelona, Madrid, Almeria and Granada, but above all the rocky desert areas to the south-east of the Ebro river and the wild valleys of the Pyrenees. During his travels he constructed and photographed: initially, he only made small interventions on the landscape, creating temporary structures with materials such as twine, small pieces of wood, poles, ribbons, cardboard boxes, leaves, branches, stones, and strips of fabric. Then bit by bit the landscape made room for people to come in, with their questions.

The Costruzioni series, completed during the same years as his travels, are also included in the exhibition; these consist of studies in the language of architecture, reflections on the environment, notes on anthropology and analyses of the meaning of design which, while often starting from the study of a real object, can lead the observer onto broader meditations that often lie outside the mere act of designing itself, entering into worlds of symbolism and reflection.


Stefano Boeri
President Triennale Milano


Ettore Sottsass, Design Metaphors, Triennale MilanoEttore Sottsass was a great romantic hero.

What set Ettore apart from the ranks of artists and intellectuals who created the conditions of contemporary thought and criticism is a mysterious balance between depth and lightness. His thought, writings, designs, and photographs often succeed in awakening that impenetrable feeling of ‘being in the world’—the ultimate meaning of our lives, today, on this planet—which we usually bury beneath a thick layer of emotions, memories, and sensations triggered by everyday life.

The truth is that the ideograms, the words ‘written at night’, the ‘photos through the window’, and also his wooden furniture, ceramics with an ancestral profile, and limpid glass, nearly always raise questions about the meaning of things and life that without any effort, complication or rational intervention unexpectedly presents itself. Thus, he gives us a moment’s rest from quick thinking, a break to perceive the depth of doubt and emptiness, and also the vital intention guiding our eye at that moment.

Ettore Sottsass, Design Metaphors, Triennale MilanoThe depth that often springs from Sottsass’ works is like the parenthesis of a temporal abyss—something that perhaps only one other designer, namely Enzo Mari (not coincidentally Ettore’s accomplice in an implicit and intense exchange of feelings and respect), was able to open.

Such parentheses of distilled depth can only be discerned today by studying the works of the few great heroes of the last century European avant-gardes: Nietzsche in philosophy, Mahler in music, Proust in literature, Geddes in urban planning, Borges in fiction...

But Ettore Sottsass also possessed an extraordinary mental agility.

His work functioned through bizarre associations, unpredictable correspon- dences, and epiphanic metaphors, shifting between distant fields of human existence and experience.

He was able to link a pebble in the desert to a part of human history, an anony- mous piece of furniture to a landscape, a political icon to a personal memory, and the portrait of a friend to cold rationality.

Yet the pleasure he took in discovering paradoxes and metaphors, the skilfullness of even his boldest and most risky connections, was almost never limited to the surface of things and ideas. On the contrary, it was often his metaphors and abstruse coincidences that opened the door to his profound thinking.

To the extent that the explanation of his mysterious balance between the surface and abyss of our experience can perhaps be found in his writings, designed, and drawings—in other words in the physicality, gravity, and duration he gave to his deft associations between objects, symbols, words, and faces. As evidence of another reality, as partial views of a merely glimpsed horizon, Ettore Sottsass’ works—whatever the technique or material—are first and foremost ironic and at times actually joyous devices which, combined with a cultured aesthetic equilibrium, raise a profound and unavoidable question concerning our history and our life. I had occasion to visit and interview Ettore in the small apartment he shared with Barbara in downtown Milan, a few days before he died. He became emotional when talking about migrating birds and the currents that enter the Mediterranean. He told me about the time he flew over the volcanoes of the Aeolian Islands and of his being aware of finding himself in the presence of living beings, which had a memory and feelings. Perhaps he was getting ready to enter a new dimension, the very one he had sought to fathom all his life.


DESIGN METAPHORS
by Barbara Radice 

Ettore Sottsass, Design Metaphors, Triennale MilanoThe Metaphors photographs were taken between 1972 and 1978. The first three groups of photographs, Designs for the Destinies of Man, Designs for the Rights of Man and Designs for the Necessities of Animals, date from the years between 1972 and 1976. That is, they were created towards the end of the Architettura Radicale movement. The dates are significant because, after the most turbulent protests, the first signs of reconstruction were beginning to be perceived. The Movimento Radicale Italiano, which grew up parallel to Arte Povera and Arte Concettuale and around similar themes, had been a time of important critical re- flection. Sottsass spoke of it as “a period of emptiness, of introverted meditation, of purification and the removal of what were the laws, customs and vocabulary of rationalist culture”. The topics dis-cussed were vast, involving the rethinking and re-founding of the mechanisms of design, of the role and responsibility of the architect in relation to society and public and private clients.

In those years, Sottsass had almost stopped designing. He thought, drew, wrote, he “wanted to escape”. “I felt a great need to visit deserted places, mountains, to re-establish a physical relationship with the cosmos, the only real environment, precisely because it is neither measurable, nor predictable, nor controllable, nor knowable... it seemed to me that if one wanted to recover anything, it was necessary to begin to recover microscopic gestures, elementary actions, the sense of one’s position...”.

Ettore Sottsass, Design Metaphors, Triennale MilanoIn 1970 Sottsass met a young artist from Barcelona, Eulalia Grau, who for six years was to be his companion in a semi-nomadic life, spent between work in the Milan studio and lengthy wanderings around Spain: Barcelona, Madrid, Almeria, Granada, but above all the stony deserts southeast of the Ebro and the wild valleys of the Pyrenees. Here the first photographs came into being, later called Metaphors. In those same years Sottsass had begun work on a series of drawings which he called “constructions”. They were studies in architectural language, reflections on the environment, notes on anthropology, analyses of what might be the profound, almost primordial meaning of constructing around and within life. Sottsass was looking for the link, the place where the craft takes shape and meaning within the fabric of existence. During his Spanish travels Sottsass begins to “make constructions”. He constructed and photographed. He intervened with a few signs on the landscape, erected temporary structures, put together and held up with fragile, helpless materials. He chose string, small pieces of wood, stakes, ribbons, cardboard boxes, leaves, branches, stones, strips of fabric. For the moment, man is invisible in the landscape. He leaves little trace of himself. Then his voice begins to be heard, his questions ring out against the mountains, in the motionless deserts.

An invitation in 1974 to participate in the opening exhibition of the Cooper Hewitt museum in New York, scheduled for 1976, was an opportunity to “get back to work”, to define what is happening, decide on titles, choose themes, pho- tographs. The exhibition, entitled Man Transforms, was curated by Hans Hollein with Liza Taylor, curator of the new museum. There were nine guests: Peter Bode, Richaard Buckminster Fuller, Murray Grigor, Arata Isozaki, Richard Meier, Karl Schamminger, Ettore Sottsass, and Oswald Ungers.

What relationship is there or can there be between people, thoughts, and the space where they stay? This question had tormented Sottsass for a long time.

In 1966 he wrote: “I have never understood why wars are planned or declared from marvellous white buildings, planted in the middle of green meadows...I have never understood why insane people are put in dirty, cold and decaying hospitals which would drive anyone sane mad. I’ve never understood why first-class couches have to be red like those in brothels. I’ve never understood why tearooms for old ladies have to be as pink as baby girl’s bow.

Work on Metaphors was to continue for some years beyond 1976 and after the exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt in New York, where the first three groups of photographs were exhibited. The photographs in the Fiancés and Decorations series were taken during trips to America, Greece, the Middle East and Italy. In these last two groups of photographs man reappears, more or less physically and culturally equipped, a little ridiculous and uncomfortable against the impassive screen of the world. The themes always concern architecture as a background and support for existence, commenting on it through thoughts and occasions of everyday life, with the light-ness and charm of a travel journal.

The photographs in the Decorations series are more distant, metaphysical, allusive. They mark the time of the end of the work, of the finished work. They are also the most poignant. They no longer question, they recognize impermanence, they pay homage to it. Decoration is not just a formal gesture. It can be an attitude, the sign of a predilection, a nostalgia, a ritual.

You can also decorate life with a drawing of its end.
Gino Valle, La professione come sperimentazione continua, Udine, Italy, Casa Cavazzini Gino Valle. La professione come sperimentazione continua, Udine [Italy], Casa Cavazzini Museo d’arte Moderna e contemporanea, 7 december 2023 / 28 april 2024
Sauerbruch Hutton: Drawing in Space, Berlin (Germany), Tchoban Foundation. Museum für Architekturzeichnung / Museum for Architectural Drawing, 3 february / 5 may 2024
Dante Bibi Works. Passato, presente, futuro, Bologna (Italy), Ordine Architetti Bologna, 21 march / 10 may 2024
AALTO. Aino Alvar Elissa. La dimensione umana del progetto / The Human Dimension of Design, Roma (Rome) [Italy], MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, galleria 1, 14 december 2023 / 26 may 2024

AALTO, Aino Alvar Elissa, La dimensione umana del progetto, The Human Dimension of Design, MAXXI, Roma“True architecture only exists when it is centred around human beings.” 
For Alvar Aalto, Aino Marsio and Elissa Mäkiniemi, this statement was the starting point for the creation of a revolutionary concept of architecture destined to leave an indelible mark on Europe and the world. 

AALTO, Aino Alvar Elissa, La dimensione umana del progetto, The Human Dimension of Design, MAXXI, RomaThe exhibition AALTO – Aino Alvar Elissa. The Human Dimension of Design, curated by Space Caviar and to be hosted at the MAXXI National Museum of 21st -Century Arts as of 14 December 2023, testifies to the studio’s unwavering commitment to placing the human experience at the centre of its vision. 

A common thread links different projects and fields of research: from workers’ clubs to town halls, from single-family homes to housing estates, from objects and furniture designed for everyday life to works with glass, textiles, lighting and children’s furniture. 
All of the above testifies to an idea of architecture and design that is conceived for people, welcoming and functional, in balance with the environment and characterised by unmistakable fluid, undulating lines (in Finnish, aalto means precisely wave). 

Founded in Finland in 1923, Studio Aalto was established at a time of rapid and turbulent change, when the country was building its new identity as a free nation. 
Architect Aino Marsio, Alvar’s first wife, was fundamental in shaping the design philosophy of the studio in the early years. Their partnership would give rise to some of the studio’s most famous projects, such as the Sanatorium of Paimio. 
In 1952, three years after Aino’s untimely death, Alvar married Elissa Mäkiniemi, also an architect, initiating a new, fervent creative collaboration that would lead to an international opening unprecedented in the history of Finnish architecture. 

The exhibition at MAXXI encompasses five decades of Studio Aalto’s work, as recounted through a selection of eleven of its most significant projects, realised from the 1920s to the early 1980s: the Muuratsalo Experimental House in Finland (1952-1954), a summer residence whose façades are the result of the composition of different types of bricks and ceramics, which inspired the set-up project conceived by the Space Caviar studio itself; the Jyväskylä Workers’ Club, Finland (1924-1925), the first major public building designed by the studio; the Civic Library of Vyborg, which at the time of its construction (1927-1935) was still part of Finland rather than Russia; the Town Hall of Säynätsalo, Finland (1949-1952), a building with a unique character, opening up to the citizens with its human-scale environments; the Mount Angel Abbey Library in St. Benedict, Oregon – USA (1949-1925), which is perched on a mountain slope and was redesigned to save two majestic fir trees; Villa Mairea in Noormarkku, Finland (1937-1939) one of the symbolic buildings of 20th -century architecture, also represented in the exhibition by a 1:1 scale reconstruction of the iconic kidney pool; The National Pensions Institute in Helsinki (1948-1957), a complex comprised of several volumes connected to each other both above and below ground; the Church and parish centre in Riola di Vergato, Italy (1966-1980), a posthumously-built project with a complex history that testifies to Aalto’s special, often-reiterated bond with Italy; the MIT dormitories in Cambridge, Massachusetts – USA (1947-1949), capable of accommodating 353 students in 43 rooms of different shapes; the Sanatorium in Paimio, Finland (1929- 1933), a building that would gain the firm international fame, conceived as a medical instrument capable of contributing to the healing of patients; the industrial and residential area in Sunila, a district of the port city of Kotka, Finland, for which Aalto designed the master plan, a paper mill and housing for all the factory workers at different times, from 1936 to 1954. 

AALTO, Aino Alvar Elissa, La dimensione umana del progetto, The Human Dimension of Design, MAXXI, RomaFive in-depth studies are then dedicated to as many areas of the studio’s research and activity: the work with glass, textiles, lighting, children’s furniture and the pioneering company Artek, created by the Aaltos to skilfully tap into the vast potential of mass production in the furniture sector. 
Displayed in the reading room at the start of the exhibition are a selection of furniture pieces that have become true icons of modern design, such as the Paimio chair and Stool 60. 

AALTO, Aino Alvar Elissa, La dimensione umana del progetto, The Human Dimension of Design, MAXXI, RomaThe exhibition is completed by the FPO (For Position Only) project by Ramak Fazel, who was invited by MAXXI to explore with his camera the architecture of Aino, Alvar and Elissa Alto and its impact on the current life of the communities, travelling between Italy, Finland and the United States. 

Finally, there is the videogame Hide and Seek in Architecture, created by the Space Caviar studio on the occasion of the exhibition in collaboration with Meta – an immersive experience in the VR environment of Meta Quest that invites players to hide in the ingenious Experimental House in Muuratsalo.
Paul Andreu. L'architecture est un art, Paris (France), Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine, 14 february / 2 june 2024
Fulvio Irace (ed.), Io sono un drago. La vera storia di Alessandro Mendini, Milano (Italy), Triennale Milano,13 april / 13 october 2024
Gio Ponti, Ceramiche 1922-1967, Oltre duecento opere dell’inventore del Made in Italy, Faenza, Italy, MIC, Museo Internazionale della CeramicaGio Ponti. Ceramiche 1922-1967. Oltre duecento opere dell’inventore del Made in Italy, Faenza (Italy), MIC Museo Internazionale della Ceramica, 17 march / 13 october 2024

Gio Ponti, Ceramiche 1922-1967, Oltre duecento opere dell’inventore del Made in Italy, Faenza, Italy, MIC, Museo Internazionale della CeramicaAl grande architetto, artista e designer Gio Ponti (1891-1979), promotore e divulgatore del “fare” italiano, è dedicata la prossima mostra del MIC Faenza che apre al pubblico il 17 marzo per rimanere allestita fino al 13 ottobre 2024.

La mostra dal titolo “Gio Ponti. Ceramiche 1922-1967”, a cura di Stefania Cretella, espone in quattordici sezioni oltre duecento opere - tra ceramiche, vetri, arredi e disegni - attraverso le quali viene analizzato, dal 1922 al 1978, il lavoro di Gio Ponti in relazione alla sua visione dell’abitare e di un nuovo vivere moderno.

“Impari le cose fatte con le mani. Nulla che non sia prima nelle mani”, questa sua emblematica citazione racchiude il suo pensiero, che fin dagli esordi recupera la tradizione classica (etrusca e romana) e il fare dell’alto artigianato artistico, adattandoli al gusto moderno. Ponti è stato una figura chiave nella definizione dello stile italiano non solo attraverso la propria attività progettuale, anche grazie alla fitta rete di relazioni con artisti, industriali e artigiani, ma soprattutto grazie alla direzione di due riviste divenute storiche del settore come “Domus” e “Stile” e alla costante partecipazione a mostre ed esposizioni.

Ponti è infatti protagonista delle Biennali di Monza, delle Triennali di Milano e di eventi internazionali come la mostra itinerante “Italy at Work. Her Renaissance in Design Today” tenutasi negli Stati Uniti tra il 1950 e il 1953, volta proprio a promuovere oltreoceano il “Made in Italy” presentando i massimi rappresentati del design e dell’alto artigianato artistico italiano.

Gio Ponti, Ceramiche 1922-1967, Oltre duecento opere dell’inventore del Made in Italy, Faenza, Italy, MIC, Museo Internazionale della CeramicaIl suo rapporto con la ceramica inizia appena laureato. Tra il 1921 e il 1922 Ponti giunge alla Richard-Ginori e comincia il rinnovamento del repertorio storico della manifattura proiettandola verso il nascente gusto déco. La mostra mette a fuoco il fondamentale contributo apportato dal nuovo direttore artistico nel corso di circa un decennio, proponendo anche confronti con designer e artisti attivi negli stessi anni presso altre manifatture italiane, evidenziando le ricadute che il modello pontiano ha avuto sul contesto contemporaneo.

Dai primi anni Trenta Ponti si avvale della collaborazione del giovane apprendista Giovanni Gariboldi che diventa suo assistente di fiducia e poi suo successore in casa Richard-Ginori. Terminati i rapporti con la manifattura nel 1933, Ponti torna saltuariamente a collaborare con l’azienda proponendo idee di grande estro creativo e inizia a stringere nel tempo rapporti con il mondo delle arti decorative e del design. In oltre cinquant’anni di attività collabora con Pietro Melandri e il contesto faentino (famose le cartepeste realizzate con i Dalmonte), con le Ceramiche Pozzi, Gabbianelli, Venini, Fontana Arte e Sabattini, per citare le principali aziende con cui promuove percorsi e progetti unici e straordinariamente attuali.

La cifra stilistica di Ponti è un segno senza tempo, contemporaneo, che ha stimolato dialoghi con artisti e designer della sua epoca, ma ha anche ispirato ceramisti del XXI secolo. La mostra si conclude infatti con una sezione dedicata all’eredità di Ponti e alle influenze che questa ebbe su autori quali Alessandro Mendini ed Ettore Sottsass, per giungere ai contemporanei POL Polloniato, Diego Cibelli, Bertozzi&Casoni, Andrea Salvatori.
 
 
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