Product Description

Arquitectura Viva 176 HOMEGRAFTS
Six Iberian Case Studies

Latin America at MoMA · Venice Art Biennale · Carl Andre · Corbu, Mise au Point · DOSSIER: PAVILIONS · Selgascano’s Serpentine, Jaque’s PS1, Chinchilla’s CoD

In Short. Local elections altered Spain’s entire political picture; Rem Koolhaas opened the Fondazione Prada in Milan and the Garage Museum in Moscow; architecture mourns Charles Correa, father of modernity in India.

Houses of Life. As Loos wrote, the house tends to be conservative: more than serving art revolutions, it serves comfort, and in a way, it expresses the social conventions of every period. But sometimes, what the house retains are not habitual schemes, but the specific memory of a previous dwelling, and with it, the life of former inhabitants, without such preservation of marks of the past meaning a renouncement of contemporary language. This is the case analyzed by Víctor López Cotelo, himself an author of exquisite home grafts, in an essay presenting several interventions that have been exemplary in their treatment of memory. The article is followed by a selection of six works in Spain and Portugal: the Scaffold House on the Girona coast by bosch.capde- ferro, with its pragmatic transformation of an isolated construction; the Lude House by Grupo Aranea, which colonizes an attic in the Murcian municipality of Cehegín; the 11.15-NKO House by Lagula arquitectos and Studio Ahedo, grafted with ease into the old quarter of the Navarrese town of Tudela; the Luz House by Arquitectura-G, which appropriates a rural structure to impose on it a luminous geometric world; the house in Lisbon by Aires Mateus, an 18th-century construction enlarged with a pavilion opening on to the Tagus estuary; and the E/C House by SAMI Arquitectura, which uses the old walls of a typical Azores construction as lost formwork.

From Venice to Latin America. The inauguration of the 56th Venice Art Biennale (the most politicized in years) coincided with that of the Reina Sofía Museum’s retrospective on the American artist Carl Andre, and the MoMA’s major show on modern Latin American architecture, its first since the mythical ‘Brazil Builds’ of 1943.

Le Corbusier, mise au point. To observe the 50th anniversary of Le Corbusier’s death, we devote the whole Books section to new publications on the master, from the catalog of the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou to the expanded version of the classic monograph by Wiliam Curtis, with polemic titles in between unveiling dark aspects of Jeanneret-Gris’s life.

Dossier: Pavilions. From picturesque folies to the ephemeral constructions of modernity, with the iron-and-glass structures of the 19th century along the way, pavilions have as a building type been a laboratory for technical and aesthetic innovations. Ángel M. García-Posada writes about three new ones which have gone up in New York and London, designed by Spanish practices: Andrés Jaque is the author of Cosmo, a festive utopia conceived around the water theme at MoMA PS1; Izaskun Chinchilla, of Organic Growth, a struc- ture of recycled waste materials on Governors Island; and Selgascano, of the Serpentine Gallery’s pavilion for this summer, at Kensington Gardens.

To close, a word in defense of energy efficiency in homes, in reaction to controversial announcements taxing personal consumption.


HOMEGRAFTS
Six Iberian Case Studies
Dossier: Pavilions

News
Change of Colors
Koolhaas: Milan to Moscow
Charles Correa, in memoriam

Víctor López Cotelo
Memory Builds

Camouflage Techniques
bosch.capdeferro
Scaffold House, Begur

Parasite Polyhedron
Grupo Aranea
Lude House, Cehegín

Urban Roots
Lagula arq. y Studio Ahedo
11.15 -NKO House, Tudela

Red and White
Arquitectura-G
Luz House, Cilleros

Room with Views
Aires Mateus
House in Lisbon

Formwork of History
SAMI Arquitectura
E/C House, Azores

Art / Culture

Richard Ingersoll
All the Futures of the World

A. Buchner & J. Maroto
Place and Matter

Joaquín Medina
Latin American Lessons

Books
Le Corbusier Special
Medidas del gran hombre
Cracks in the Myth
Dawn and Dusk
An Updated Classic

Technique / Construction

Ángel M. García-Posada
Between Technique and Art
An Aesthetic of Evanescence

Andrés Jaque
Cosmo, New York

Izaskun Chinchilla
Organic Growth, New York

Selgascano
Serpentine, London

Products

Albert Cuchí
Grappling with Energy Prices