Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Hav(ing) Your Say
Thanks to all who came to our meeting last Tuesday, February 24th. It was great to get some feedback from our members, and we would really like to see all of you again (and anyone else who is interested, of course) next week to make some more concrete steps forward. Same bat time, same bat channel (that would be 5:30 in the architecture studio next Tuesday, March 3rd)
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Victoria Acebo review
Our guest for the second event of the fresh-air-kitecture lecture series, held in association with Instituto Cervantes and the Architectural Association of Ireland, was Victoria Acebo, one of the principals of the Madrid-based practice aceboxalonso. Victoria gave the audience a quick summary of the ideologies of her firm, signified symbolically by the letter ‘x’ that fuses the surnames of the two partners in the name they have chosen to represent them in the architectural world. The ‘x’, for them, represents the unknown conditions around a project, the forbidden, the intersection of various layers of information and the properties of multiplication, as opposed to simple addition. Following a question from the floor, it seems that it may now also come to represent the danger posed by the architect herself!
Victoria went on to show us a number of the projects, both built and unbuilt, that her office has worked on in recent years. Perhaps the most fascinating to our audience was the arts centre-dance studio in A Coruña, north-western Spain. The brief called for two quite different buildings, one programmatically dictated and the other utterly free, to be constructed, although both would be under the same management after completion. The architects’ solution was to bring the two buildings together as one in an extremely controlled manner, setting out the pre-defined spaces of the dance studio first, and then allowing the arts centre to occupy the interstitial spaces. The internal roof cladding was composed of a large number of coloured panels which, in a move recalling that of the architects of the Arts and Crafts period, during construction, tradespeople were allowed to install in whatever pattern they desired. The result is a playful, dynamic ceilingscape that brings life to the starker spaces below.
Victoria went on to show us a number of the projects, both built and unbuilt, that her office has worked on in recent years. Perhaps the most fascinating to our audience was the arts centre-dance studio in A Coruña, north-western Spain. The brief called for two quite different buildings, one programmatically dictated and the other utterly free, to be constructed, although both would be under the same management after completion. The architects’ solution was to bring the two buildings together as one in an extremely controlled manner, setting out the pre-defined spaces of the dance studio first, and then allowing the arts centre to occupy the interstitial spaces. The internal roof cladding was composed of a large number of coloured panels which, in a move recalling that of the architects of the Arts and Crafts period, during construction, tradespeople were allowed to install in whatever pattern they desired. The result is a playful, dynamic ceilingscape that brings life to the starker spaces below.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
February 18th 2009 - fresh-air-kitecture - Victoria Acebo
SofA will be holding the second evening talk in the fresh-air-kitecture series, in association with Instituto Cervantes, on Wednesday February 18th at 6pm in the Architecture Studio space at UL (room CG-042). Further details can be found on the poster above, and all are welcome to attend.
You can find out more about Victoria's work here:
aceboXalonso's blog: http://aceboxalonso.blogspot.com/
pushpullbar's forum discussion on their arts centre in A Coruña: http://www.pushpullbar.com/forums/spain/8227-coruna-coruna-arts-centre-acebo-x-alonso.html
studio banana tv video interview with her: http://www.vimeo.com/2973576
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