INTERIOR......

 interior designer. andy.ferr@yahoo.it

ECO-DESIGN: 2° CONCORSO RIVA

ECO-DESIGN: 2° CONCORSO RIVA:   Dal connubio legno riciclato e vetro nascono alcune tra le più belle proposte, secondo il mio parere, presentate alla sec...

5 SENSI....

Scade il 10 Ottobre 2012.

Luca Curci Architects seleziona artisti, architetti e designer, provenienti da tutto il mondo, per la progettazione interna di un esclusivo Design Hotel incentrato sul tema dei cinque sensi: cinque stanze a raccontare olfatto, gusto, vista, udito e tatto.

Il Design Hotel sorge al primo piano di un elegante palazzo di fine ‘800, situato nel centro di Bari, nei pressi dello storico Teatro Petruzzelli. Si compone di cinque stanze, ognuna delle quali avrà come tema uno dei cinque sensi, di una hall e di una breakfast room.

Lo styling degli interni, progettati dallo studio Luca Curci Architects, si baserà sul concept dei cinque sensi.

Termine presentazione progetti: 10 Ottobre 2012

Maggiori informazioni: itsliquid.com

Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama has created an estimated 50,000 works during a career spanning half a century, is feted in her native Japan and in the US - yet in Britain she remains relatively unknown. Kusama turned 80 in March, but when we meet at her Tokyo studio, she is a vision in a bobbed, blood-red wig and a red one-piece dress covered in her beloved polka dots.

1. Yayoi Kusama
2. Walking In My Mind
3. Hayward Gallery,
4. London
5. SE1

1. Starts 23 June
2. Until 6 Sept
3. Details:
   0871 663 2500
4. Venue website

It is impossible to discuss Kusama's work without making mention of those dots and the omnipresent lined meshed patterns she calls "infinity nets". They appeared in her early paintings, on "living" installations comprising her own naked torso and those of her friends, and, more recently, wrapped around tree trunks in Singapore. Later this month, trees along the Thames will also be given the polka-dot treatment, as part of a collaborative exhibition with nine other artists at London's Hayward Gallery.

The motifs first came to Kusama in childhood. Born in 1929 in Matsumoto in the Japanese Alps, she started seeing a psychiatrist at the age of 10 after she became gripped by visions of dots, nets and violet flowers that covered everything she saw. "I call them my repetitive vision," she says. "I still see them. [They] cover the canvas and grow on to the floor, the ceiling, chairs and tables. Then the polka dots move to the body, on to my clothes and into my spirit. It is an obsession."

Hers was an unhappy childhood. "Not a single day went by that my mother didn't regret giving birth to me," she says. "She was the only daughter of a wealthy family, so my father, as the son-in-law, was able to lead an extravagant lifestyle. He ended up having an affair with a geisha and deserted us to be with her in Tokyo. It damaged my mother. I was stuck in the middle of a long-running feud and I felt mentally cornered. That's why I started hallucinating. I started seeing a psychiatrist, and it was he who first encouraged me to develop as an artist."

She studied, against her mother's wishes, at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts, and by 1950 had moved from traditional Japanese painting to abstract natural forms. In her most fevered periods, in her 20s, she was producing dozens of paintings a day, leading to more conflict at home. "My mother was strongly opposed to my becoming an artist. She was from a very old, conservative family. She was a collector of art and desperately wanted me to become one, too. Whenever I drew or made sculptures, she would fly into a rage and throw paints and canvases at me."

Eventually, in 1957, Kusama left Japan for New York, following a lengthy correspondence with the American artist Georgia O'Keeffe. "I had been a great admirer after coming across her work in an old book I found in a store in my home town. Her works are wonderful, moving. I spent six hours travelling to Tokyo so I could find her address in Who's Who at the US embassy. Amazingly, she wrote back, and we kept writing to each other."

In America, Kusama's installations caught the eye of critics and collectors. Her Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show - a real rowing boat encrusted with phallic protuberances - caused a sensation when it appeared at the Gertrude Stein Gallery in New York in 1963. "That kind of exhibition was extremely avant garde at the time," she says. "Jackson Pollock and abstract expressionism were the big thing then. But they all came to see me and asked me why I did what I did. I said I just do Kusama art." Andy Warhol, she says, asked her permission to use the patterns in his silk screens. She refused. "People were queueing in the streets, waiting to see a Kusama original," she says. "After my mirror room show, other artists like Claes Oldenburg started making soft sculptures. So many artists have been influenced by my art and repeat my vision."

But Kusama's mental health deteriorated to such an extent that, in 1973, she returned home for treatment. In 1975 she checked herself into the psychiatric hospital she still calls home, finding that the routine gave her the order she needed to concentrate on her work. She slowly crept back into the public consciousness, and in 2006 she was awarded the Praemium Imperiale, one of Japan's most prestigious arts prizes.

Kusama has often said that if it weren't for art, she would have killed herself long ago. "I only slept two hours last night. When I get tired from making pictures, I find it really difficult to go to sleep. But it's how I get away from my illness and escape the hallucinations. I call it psychosomatic art." So why does her work seem more like a celebration of life's euphoric moments? "I don't really think about what my emotions are. I don't plan to make them nice and cheerful, but once I start, they just move in that direction. My hands start moving before I can think anything."

Kusama will be happy if the new exhibition "brings people around to the idea of the infinity of the cosmos and the beauty of life. Nothing I do stays in the gallery space. Everything I do is a walk in my mind. There are no limits." It seems almost inappropriate to ask if she ever considers retiring. "No. As long as I have the energy, I will carry on. I'd like to live 200 or 300 years. I want to leave my message to my successors and future generations."

Arum Installation

ZAHA HADID ARCHITECT

This year’s Biennale theme ‘Common Ground’ shows how the work of the major protagonists of contemporary architecture – often regarded as independent individual creations – is in fact based on historical lineages of collective research. This is also true of the work of Zaha Hadid Architects. It is well known that the early work was initially inspired by Russian Suprematism.In our installation and exhibition at the Biennale we want to show that – apart from the dialogue with the work of contemporary competitors that existed all along – our recent work connects to a rather different historical strand of research.

The more our design research and work evolved on the basis of algorithmic form generation, the more we learned to appreciate the work of pioneers like Frei Otto who had achieved the most elegant designs on the basis of material-structural form-finding processes. From Frei Otto we learned how the richness, organic coherence and fluidity of the forms and spaces we desire could emerge rationally from an intricate balance of forces. We expanded Frei Otto’s method to include environmental as well as structural logics, and we moved from material to computational simulations. One particular area of research we would like to explore with our installation is the domain of light – weight shells in combination with tensile structures. We have already designed a number of complex shells as well as some tensile structures.

Here, for the first time, we would like to integrate these two worlds. The Arum shell is an installation made from pleated metal. We will surround the installation with the documentation of our research, including key reference projects of the pre-eminent precursors in this line of research.

We will show the work Frei Otto, Felix Candela, Heinz Isler among others and include work by Philippe Block, a young, contemporary researcher of stone compression shells.

CREDITS

Zaha Hadid Architects
Design: Zaha Hadid with Patrik Schumacher
Exhibition Design: Woody Yao, Margarita Valova
Installation Design and Presentation: Shajay Bhooshan, Saman Saffarian, Suryansh Chandra, Mostafa El Sayed
Structural Engineering: Rasti Bartek, Buro Happold, UK
Material & Fabrication Technology: Gregory Epps, RoboFOLD
Coordinator: Manon Janssens

In collaboration with
Studio Hadid, Universität für angewandte Kunst, Vienna
Jens Mehlan, Robert Neumayr, Johann Traupmann, Christian Kronaus, Mascha Veech, Mario Gasser, Susanne John
The BLOCK Research Group, Institute of Technology in Architecture, ETH, Zurich: Philippe Block, Matthias Rippmann Faculty of Architecture, ETH, Zurich: Toni Kotnik
Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios de Posgrado, Faculty of Architecture, UNAM, Mexico: Juan Ignacio del Cueto Ruiz-Funes

Design: un concorso per premiare strategie d'impresa

Il Portogallo ospitera' il Management Europe award 2012

 MONZA, 22 AGO - La creativita' del design e la concretezza del marketing. Due qualita', in grado di trasformare un'idea in un successo commerciale, che saranno al centro del Design management Europe award 2012. Il concorso, ospitato ogni anno da una diversa citta' europea, premia esempi positivi di una disciplina che unisce il design al marketing integrando la creativita' alla strategia d'impresa, per ''dimostrare i benefici che posso derivare da buone pratiche di management''. A vincere le scorse edizioni del concorso, che quest'anno si terra' in Portogallo, sono state, fra gli altri, aziende come la spagnola Lekue' e l'austriaca Viteo Oudoors. I concorrenti avranno tempo fino al 7 settembre per presentare i loro progetti, che saranno valutati da una giuria di esperti in design management. La premiazione si terra' in 15 novembre a Parades, in Portogallo.

Westfield Presents Good Design- Australia

Westfield Presents Good Design is a series of week-long interactive showcases of the most innovative and well-designed products for 2012.

The showcases will take place in high traffic, high profile, premium Westfield centers in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane throughout August 2012.

80 market-leading products from the 2012 Australian International Design Awards and previous years will be on display.

Shoppers will be invited to interact with the products and supervisors, register their interest to buy products on the spot and receive direct information about the products via phone or email at the display clusters.

The Good Design showcase will highlight the latest in forward-thinking design to over 100,000 shoppers, providing direct access to the products and purchase points.

Australian International Design Awards winner and finalist products from 2005 to 2012 are eligible to be registered. To register your product into the showcase, please contact Premium Media at + 61 2 8003 4185 or email sales at premiummedia.com.au. Deadline for registration is June 8, 2012.

Dates and Locations
Sydney
Westfield Bondi Junction
August 2-8, 2012

Brisbane
Westfield Chermside
August 10-16, 2012

Melbourne
Westfield Doncaster
August 18-24, 2012