Milan 2014:a series of talks will launch this afternoon in Nike’s Aero-static dome at Palazzo Clerici, forming part of the FOMO algorithmic publishing project organised by Joseph Grima with Dezeen.
Three afternoons of talks called On The Fly will kick off today with Clemens Weisshaar, Atelier Bow Wow, Folder, Linda Fregni and Bart Hess discussing the theme of weightlessness in design.
The talks will take place at Palazzo Clerici inside a dome created by Arthur Huang, founder of MINIWIZ, which uses Nike’s Flyknit technology to create a temporary events space.
They are free to attend and each afternoon the speakers will tackle a different theme related to design practice, presenting a minimum of two images to accompany their talk.
During the talks a real-time publishing algorithm – developed by Joseph Grima’s design research group Space Caviar and called Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) – will automatically create written articles from live speech and social media streams using the #OnTheFlyMilan hashtag.
The FOMObile in action at Palazzo Clerici in Milan
These will be collated in a PDF that will then be printed and saddle-stitched on the spot from the FOMObile – a roving publishing press with its own built-in power generator and solar-powered wi-fi hotspot. The resulting publication will be distributed for free in Milan and made available on the Dezeen website.
The On The Fly talks will be FOMO’s first test in a real-world environment. Anyone, anywhere will be able to take part by using the #OnTheFlyMilan hashtag on social media on Wednesday 9, Thursday 10, and Friday 11 April between 5.00 and 7.30pm CET.
Today’s event will be moderated by Joseph Grima, founder of Space Caviar and the former editor of Domus.
Talks on Thursday will be hosted by Gianluigi Ricuperati and will include Ianthe Roach, Pier Nucleo and Italo Rota, who will all discuss the theme “seamlessness”. On Friday, Marco Velardi will host Formafantasma, Martino Gamper and Anna Meroni talking about sustainability in design.
Scroll down for the full schedule for On The Fly:
9 April, Weightlessness with Joseph Grima
17:00 Clemens Weisshaar 17:30 Yoshi Tsukamoto, Atelier Bow Wow 18:00 Folder: Marco and Elisa 18:30 Linda Fregni 19:00 Bart Hess
Weightlessness will explore how external masses and strains, or lack thereof, shape the thinking and production of design. How does the experience of our environments impact on the design process? What does this mean for the final product? With a shifting landscape of outside forces, what does this mean for practice? What would freedom, or weightlessness, from this mean for our work and for us?
Seamlessness will ask whether consistency is good for design. Is a process, or product, designed without interruption a good thing? Is a perfectly consistent object or idea something positive? What can the messy convergence or merging of technologies, processes or people add to a project? How do these transitions and interfaces of design change or challenge us for the better?
The Nike Aero-static dome
11 April, Sustainability with Marco Velardi
17:00 Formafantasma 17:30 Brent Dzekciorius 18:00 Anna Meroni 18:30 Martino Gamper 19:00 Arthur Huang
Sustainability will take the practice of contemporary practitioners and explore the social, political, economic, and environmental aspects of sustainability. What is the impact of designing sustainably? How do we sustain interdependence between process, products and disciplines? These conversations will attempt to understand the life cycle of design, and the flows of work systems.
Architectural drawings of a small workers’ shack that featured in an exhibition in Shanghai, China, have been enlarged and used to create a full-scale replica in Auckland, New Zealand.
Tokyo architects Atelier Bow-Wow collaborated with Japanese artist Michael Lin on the design of the original structure, which was based on the workers’ shacks found throughout China. It housed the painters who produced Lin’s large-scale artworks for an exhibition last year at Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum.
Whereas the building in Shanghai was made from welded steel and structural insulated panels, the installation held as part of the Auckland Triennial required a rethink of the materials in order to reduce costs and waste after the event.
Professor Andrew Barrie from the University of Auckland was asked to help develop a more appropriate and efficient solution. “We proposed this idea of making the building out of paper and so a really literal document of what had happened in Shanghai,” he explained in a video published on the event’s website.
“We used some paper modelling techniques that I’d been developing over the last little while to make little models and just blew those back up to the full scale of the building,” Professor Barrie added.
Barrie enlarged Atelier Bow-Wow’s original construction drawings and fixed them to a prefabricated timber frame built by architecture students from the university, using a full scale version of the Japanese paper modelling technique known as okoshi-ezu.
The paper surfaces retain the original dimensions and annotations, while additions including an outline of a person, furniture, flowers and a bird perched on a doorframe recall its original inhabited state.
Photography is by Nick Hayes, except where stated otherwise.
Here’s some more information about Model Home 2013:
Model Home 2013
Michael Lin and Atelier Bow-Wow with Andrew Barrie
The Model Home 2012 exhibition was held at the Rockbound Museum in Shanghai. The work of Shanghai-based artist Michael Lin and Tokyo-based architects Atelier Bow-Wow, it’s major elements were a series of huge wall paintings that filled the entire building, and building units that had temporarily housed the workers who had carried out the painting.
Model Home 2013 involved the reworking of the Shanghai project for installation in Auckland Art Gallery’s Lower Grey Gallery for the 5th Auckland Triennial.
The specific design challenge was how to recreate the building, which in Shanghai had been made of welded steel frames clad in structural insulated panels – in the Chinese context, these are very low cost and easily worked materials.
However, recreating this steel design in Auckland presented a design dilemma – it would have been expensive, created a lot of waste when the building was disposed of after the Triennial, and would have been conceptually inconsistent (in Auckland, no one would live in the house).
One possibility explored by the design was to translate the house into the Kiwi timber-and-plywood construction idiom. This would have reduced the cost somewhat, but not solved the dilemmas of waste and conceptual inconsistency.
The solution proposed by Prof. Andrew Barrie was to create a paper version of the house. This was inexpensive, could almost all be recycled after the exhibition, and solved the conceptual inconsistency – rather than being a building, it served as a literal document of the original construction.
This use of construction drawings to represent the building adapted techniques previously developed by Barrie when making contemporary versions of okoshi-ezu, an ancient Japanese architectural drawing technique of making fold-up paper models that served as records and construction documents, particularly for teahouses.
Every aspect of the design and construction sought to minimize costs and test the limits of readily available materials. The construction drawings for the Shanghai building were refined and amplified by Barrie’s team.
The structure was built by a group of architecture students who prefabricated timber frames that could quickly be assembled in the gallery. The roof structure was built only just strong enough to support its own weight, and was carefully lifted into place by riggers.
The walls and roof were made of drawings printed on standard 80gsm printer paper, hand folded, and joined with double-sided tape.
The lighting was simple bayonet fixtures on cables with supermarket light bulbs. A series of paper accessories, including painting tools, household items, super-thin furniture, a human figure and even a sparrow perched in the roof, add charm and recall occupation by the original worker occupants.
After the exhibition, the paper elements will be recycled and the timber frames broken down for re-use in future student projects.
Paper House Design: Andrew Barrie Project Management: Melanie Pau Construction Team: Melanie Pau, Howie Kang, Wade Southgate, Nick Hayes, Rita Mouchi, Patrick Loo, Yusef Patel, Sam Wood.
The first-ever building to have a carbon fibre structure is a mobile studio-cum-stage by Japanese architects Atelier Bow-Wow, which just opened in New York.
The BMW Guggenheim Lab comprises a black mesh-clad box, elevated by the lightweight framework that makes it easily transportable.
Nestled between two existing buildings, the structure shelters a courtyard studio that is open to the street at both ends.
A rigging of lighting, screens, audio equipment and other tools is suspended behind the mesh and can be lowered into the studio for different activities.
A timber hut provides a cafe for visitors where picnic benches are sheltered beneath a fabric canopy.
The lab is hosting a series of programs around the theme of comfort in the city, including talks, exhibitions, discussions, screenings, workshops and games.
As part of a six-year tour of mobile studios, the lab will later be relocated to Berlin and Mumbai, before being replaced by a new structure and theme.
Here are some more details from the BMW Guggenheim Lab:
BMW Guggenheim Lab Opens Aug 3 in New York, Launching Six-Year Worldwide Tour
Berlin and Mumbai are Next Stops in Nine-City Global Initiative
New York, NY, August 2, 2011 – The BMW Guggenheim Lab launches its nine-city worldwide tour tomorrow in Manhattan’s East Village. A combination of think tank, public forum, and community center, the BMW Guggenheim Lab will offer free programs that explore the challenges of today’s cities within a mobile structure that was designed to house this urban experiment. Over the next six years, the BMW Guggenheim Lab will go through three successive cycles, each with its own theme and specially designed mobile structure. Each structure will travel to three different locations, building on-site and online communities around the BMW Guggenheim Lab that raise awareness of important issues, generate ideas specific to each urban situation, and engage with innovative and sustainable designs, yielding lasting benefits for cities around the world. At the conclusion of the first cycle, in 2013, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York will present a special exhibition of the findings of the BMW Guggenheim Lab’s inaugural three-city tour—to New York, Berlin, and Mumbai. The itineraries of the subsequent two-year cycles will be announced at a later date.
The inaugural BMW Guggenheim Lab is located at First Park, Houston at 2nd Avenue, a New York City Parks property, and is open free of charge Wednesdays to Sundays, from August 3 through October 16. A diverse range of more than 100 programs will address the theme for the BMW Guggenheim Lab’s first cycle, Confronting Comfort, exploring how urban environments can be made more responsive to people’s needs, how a balance can be found between notions of individual versus collective comfort, and how the urgent need for environmental and social responsibility can be met. Programs include Urbanology, a large-scale interactive group game that can be played both on-site and online, as well as workshops, experiments, discussions, screenings, and off-site tours.
The BMW Guggenheim Lab website and blog at bmwguggenheimlab.org offer a global audience a variety of ways to participate in this multidisciplinary urban project. Activities at the BMW Guggenheim Lab will be reported on through the blog, which will also feature posts by notable guest writers and regular interviews with the BMW Guggenheim Lab’s collaborators. Members of the public are invited to join the BMW Guggenheim Lab’s dedicated social communities on Twitter (@BMWGuggLab, use hashtag #BGLab), Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and foursquare.
“New York City has long been an urban laboratory for new ideas and innovative enterprises, so we are pleased to host the inaugural BMW Guggenheim Lab experiment,” said Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. “This creative project provides an important opportunity for New Yorkers to connect and share ideas, and we look forward to the conversations that will take place when the Lab travels around the world.”
“Tomorrow’s launch of the BMW Guggenheim Lab in New York City is just the beginning of what we expect to be an incredible journey,” stated Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation. “The Guggenheim is taking its commitment to education, scholarship, and design innovation one step further. We’re taking it on the road. From New York to Berlin to Mumbai and beyond, we will address the enormously important issues our major cities are facing today and engage others along the way. We sincerely thank BMW for collaborating with us on this worthy endeavor.”
“As a company, we like to take action,” said Harald Krüger, Member of the Board of Management BMW AG. “We are interested in fostering an open dialogue about the challenges ahead for all of us. The world premiere of the global, six-year BMW Guggenheim Lab initiative is a true milestone for BMW, building upon our experience in both sustainability and cultural engagement. We are thrilled to support a multidisciplinary platform for forward-looking ideas and new solutions for megacities. With a great collaborator like the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, we are confident the BMW Guggenheim Lab will thrive.”
BMW Guggenheim Lab Programming in New York
The BMW Guggenheim Lab addresses issues of contemporary urban life through free programs designed to spark curiosity and interaction, encouraging visitors to participate in the BMW Guggenheim Lab’s research by generating questions, answers, ideas, and dialogue.
A central component of the BMW Guggenheim Lab’s programming in New York is Urbanology, a large group game that can be played on-site, in an interactive installation, as well as online at bmwguggenheimlab.org/urbanology. Participants role-play scenarios for city transformation and become advocates for education, housing, health care, sustainability, infrastructure, and mobility as they build a city that matches their specific needs and values. The game experience for Urbanology was developed by Local Projects, and the physical design was created by ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles].
Leading architects, academics, innovators, and entrepreneurs who will give public talks at the BMW Guggenheim Lab in New York include BMW Guggenheim Lab design architect Yoshiharu Tsukamoto (co-principal of Atelier Bow-Wow); BMW Guggenheim Lab Advisory Committee members Elizabeth Diller (founding principal of Diller Scofidio + Renfro), Nicholas Humphrey (emeritus professor of psychology at the London School of Economics), and Juliet Schor (professor of sociology at Boston College); Saskia Sassen (Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University); and Gabrielle Hamilton (chef and owner of the restaurant Prune).
An ongoing series of off-site experiments will allow participants to use special equipment to measure the effect that different areas of the city have on the brain and body. Another series, organized by spurse, a creative consulting and design collaborative, will explore the complexities of comfort through a multiweek series of on- and off-site programs with public participation.
Screenings will take place at the BMW Guggenheim Lab on Wednesdays and Sundays. The first two screenings will feature Blank City by Celine Danhier (2011, USA/France, 94 min.) on August 3; and Last Address by Ira Sachs (2010, USA, 9 min.) and Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell by Matt Wolf (2008, USA, 71 min.) on August 7.
Architecture and Graphic Design
The mobile structure for the first cycle of the BMW Guggenheim Lab has been designed by the Tokyo-based Atelier Bow-Wow as a lightweight and compact “traveling toolbox.” The 2,200-square-foot structure can easily fit into dense neighborhoods and be transported from city to city. In New York, the two-story structure is nestled between two buildings on a three-quarter-acre T-shaped site; at its southern end, it opens out onto an inviting landscaped public space and cafe.
The lower half of the BMW Guggenheim Lab structure is an open space that can be configured to meet the particular needs of the various programs, shifting from a formal lecture setting with a stage to the scene for a celebratory gathering or a workshop. The upper, “toolbox” portion of the structure is loosely wrapped in two layers of semitransparent mesh, which creates a shimmering moiré effect and allows visitors to catch glimpses of the extensive apparatus of “tools” that can be raised or lowered on a rigging system to configure the lower space for the different programs. Remarkably, the BMW Guggenheim Lab is the first building designed with a structural framework composed of carbon fiber. Videos and images of the structure and the construction process can be viewed at youtube.com/bmwguggenheimlab and flickr.com/bmwguggenheimlab.
“Rather than architects educating the public on how to behave within spaces, it is the public who should have the autonomy of spatial practice in their cities,” stated Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima of Atelier Bow-Wow. “We have always been advocates of people regaining ownership in order to shape the city around them, and are very pleased to participate in the launch of the BMW Guggenheim Lab. We always conceived the Lab as a public space without enclosure.”
The inaugural BMW Guggenheim Lab will leave behind permanent improvements to the once-vacant East Village lot on which it sits, including the stabilization and paving of the site, replacement of sidewalks, and new wrought-iron fencing and gates.
The graphic identity of the BMW Guggenheim Lab has been developed by Seoul-based graphic designers Sulki & Min.
BMW Guggenheim Lab Team
The BMW Guggenheim Lab is organized by David van der Leer, Assistant Curator, Architecture and Urban Studies, and Maria Nicanor, Assistant Curator, Architecture, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Selected by an international Advisory Committee composed of experts from various disciplines, the members of the New York Lab Team are: Omar Freilla, a Bronx, New York–based environmental justice activist, cooperative developer, and founder and coordinator of Green Worker Cooperatives; Charles Montgomery, Canadian journalist and urban experimentalist, who investigates the link between urban design and well-being; Olatunbosun Obayomi, Nigerian microbiologist and inventor and 2010 TEDGlobal Fellow; and architects and urbanists Elma van Boxel and Kristian Koreman of the Rotterdam-based architecture studio ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles].
Public Information and Amenities
The BMW Guggenheim Lab and all programs are free and open to the public on a first-come, first-served basis during operating hours. Advance registration for selected programs will be available online. Hours of operation are 1 to 9 pm on Wednesdays and Thursdays, 1 to 10 pm on Fridays, and 10 am to 10 pm on Saturdays and Sundays. The 42-seat BMW Guggenheim Lab cafe, operated by the Brooklyn-based restaurant Roberta’s, is open 1 to 9 pm on Wednesdays to Fridays and 10 am to 9 pm on Saturdays and Sundays.
Future Venues
Following the New York presentation, the BMW Guggenheim Lab will move on to Berlin in the spring of 2012, where it will be presented in collaboration with the ANCB Metropolitan Laboratory in Pfefferberg, a former industrial complex. In winter 2012–13, the first three-city cycle will be completed when the BMW Guggenheim Lab travels to Mumbai. The Mumbai presentation will be organized in collaboration with the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum.
Dezeen Screen: BMW Guggenheim Lab by Atelier Bow-Wow
Dezeenwire: at Design Miami next month, products from Dutch design brand Droog will be presented in a specially-designed house by Japanese architects Atelier Bow Wow. See press release below. (more…)
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