Hasta La Ideas

Milan 2014: Space Caviar’s algorithmic publishing project will be travelling to Venice for the architecture biennale, with the final issues from Milan design week now available to download – including contributions from Formafantasma and Martino Gamper (+ slideshow + download).

Joseph Grima‘s design research collaborative Space Caviar created a new realtime publishing algorithm, called Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), which combines text produced using voice recognition technology with text and images posted on social platforms like Instagram and Twitter.

The software debuted in Milan last week with a series of talks called On the Fly providing the core content for the resulting publications, which were printed instantly from a travelling publishing unit known as the FOMObile and based on an Open Structures modular system designed by Thomas Lommee.

Participants in the talks, which took place in Nike‘s Aero-static dome at Palazzo Clerici, included Martino Gamper, Clemens Weisshaar, Atelier Bow Wow, Bart Hess and Formafantasma. Members of the public from all over the world were also invited to take part by using the #OnTheFlyMilan hashtag on social media networks.

“The idea behind FOMO is to explore the potential of event metadata as source material for a performative publishing process, but the print component is important – the whole thing made a lot more sense when we bound it all together into a single volume at the end on the FOMO sewing machine,” said Grima.

The FOMObile will be in residence in Venice in early September and may also make an appearance during the opening weekend in early June.

“From a Dadaist perspective I think the Milan experiment went very well – almost everything about it was unexpected, such as how moments of intensity and moments of inactivity are revealed in the blanks and overlaps,” said Grima.

“What we’d like to do next is explore the other end of the spectrum, perhaps creating something that is indistinguishable from a conventional publication, for example working with the social media and physical interactions between people on a weekday in one of the piazzas of Genoa,” he said.

The project was inspired by a comment from futurist and writer Bruce Sterling, who said that “events were the new magazines”. Sterling was among the visitors to the project during Milan design week.

Download issues nine to 12 of FOMO from Milan:

» Formafantasma – download here
» Brent Dzekciorius – download here
» Anna Meroni – download here
» Martino Gamper and Arthur Huang – download here

Download issues four to eight of FOMO here.
Download issues one to three of FOMO here.

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prepares to visit Venice appeared first on Dezeen.

News: architect Rem Koolhaas, the director for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014, has revealed that the title for next year’s show will be Fundamentals.

“Fundamentals will be a biennale about architecture, not architects,” said Koolhaas, principal of OMA, speaking this morning at a press conference held by biennale president Paolo Baratta at the event’s headquarters in San Marco, Venice.

Koolhaas explained that event will “focus on histories” and the “evolution of architecture” in the last 100 years. “Architectures that were once specific and local have become interchangeable and global. National identity has seemingly been sacrificed to modernity,” he said.

Starting a year earlier than previous directors, the architect hopes to coordinate the exhibitions in each national pavilion to follow a coherent theme. “The exhibitions in the national pavilions will generate a global overview of architecture’s evolution into a single, modern aesthetic, and at the same time uncover within globalization the survival of unique national features and mentalities that continue to exist and flourish even as international collaboration and exchange intensify,” he concluded.

Koolhaas was confirmed as director earlier this month, when he first announced: “We want to take a fresh look at the fundamental elements of architecture – used by any architect, anywhere, anytime – to see if we can discover something new about architecture.”

Koolhaas was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2010 biennale, while for 2012 OMA presented an exhibition of buildings designed by European local authority architects in the 1960s and 70s.

The Venice Architecture Biennale 2014 will run from 7 June to 23 November.

Last year’s event, directed by David Chipperfield, was entitled Common Ground.

We’ve filmed a few movies with Koolhaas, including his introduction to OMA’s Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow and a series filmed at the OMA/Progress exhibition at the Barbican in London – watch them all here.

See more stories about Rem Koolhaas and OMA »
See more stories about the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale »

Here’s the full statement from Rem Koolhaas:

Fundamentals will be a biennale about architecture, not architects. After several Biennales dedicated to the celebration of the contemporary, Fundamentals will focus on histories – on the inevitable elements of all architecture used by any architect, anywhere, anytime (the door, the floor, the ceiling etc.) and on the evolution of national architectures in the last 100 years. In three complementary manifestations – taking place in the Central Pavilion, the Arsenale, and the National Pavilions – this retrospective will generate a fresh understanding of the richness of architecture’s fundamental repertoire, apparently so exhausted today.

In 1914, it made sense to talk about a “Chinese” architecture, a “Swiss” architecture, an “Indian” architecture. One hundred years later, under the influence of wars, diverse political regimes, different states of development, national and international architectural movements, individual talents, friendships, random personal trajectories and technological developments, architectures that were once specific and local have become interchangeable and global. National identity has seemingly been sacrificed to modernity.

Having the decisive advantage of starting work a year earlier than the Biennale’s typical schedule, we hope to use this extra time to introduce a degree of coordination and coherence among the National Pavilions. Ideally, we would want the represented countries to engage a single theme – Absorbing Modernity: 1914-2014 – and to show, each in their own way, the process of the erasure of national characteristics in favour of the almost universal adoption of a single modern language in a single repertoire of typologies.

The First World War – the beginning of modern globalization – serves a starting point for the range of narratives. The transition to what seems like a universal architectural language is a more complex process than we typically recognize, involving significant encounters between cultures, technical inventions and imperceptible ways of remaining “national”. In a time of ubiquitous google research and the flattening of cultural memory, it is crucial for the future of architecture to resurrect and expose these narratives.

By telling the history of the last 100 years cumulatively, the exhibitions in the National Pavilions will generate a global overview of architecture’s evolution into a single, modern aesthetic, and at the same time uncover within globalization the survival of unique national features and mentalities that continue to exist and flourish even as international collaboration and exchange intensify.

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Venice Architecture Biennale 2014 appeared first on Dezeen.