Category: publications

Architectures Experimentales

May 7, 2011

Editions HYX and the FRAC Centre have jointly published Experimental Architectures, 1950-2000, the Archilab 2003 catalogue. Presented to the public through texts by critics and historians of architecture, it goes through the main figures and movements of innovative architecture: more than 100 architects and movements are presented around emblematic architectural projects of the 20th century. This volume is also a history of utopia and experimentation in architecture.

Tall Buildings

May 7, 2011

Tall Buildings
MA 33+34+35
Edited by Afshin Rafaat

Diagramma Agon

May 7, 2011

 

Peter Macapia and Abbey Dubin, a book that shows the work of an architect and artist interested in problems of space, topology, and politics.  Essays and images collected as part of the NOUS sponsored Borderlines Exhibition curated Nathanael Dorent and Melissa Woolford.

Artillery

May 6, 2011

LOS ANGELES

Peter Macapia at Angstrom Gallery

Peter Macapia’s web of intricate hanging sculptures sweeps through Angstrom Gallery with a lightness and elegance that initially reads as whimsy. However, as we approach these delicate objects made of precisely laser-cut paper, the science and technology visibly involved in each of the artist’s decisions adds weight and complexity to the exhibition.

The show is a continuation of Macapia’s in-depth studies of algorithms for particle physics. Throughout the exhibition, we’re repeatedly confronted with the contrast between the tightness of scientific representation and the excitement of organic beauty. Sculptures encapsulated within acrylic boxes seem a bit abrupt at first, hanging amongst the poetic installation, “Swarm,” but they soon come to make sense as didactic models for the structural forms found in Macapia’s painterly, relief wall pieces and installation elements.

The rhythm of forms enclosing space followed by forms expanding into space is found from piece to piece. This pattern is undoubtedly related to Macapia’s studies, but is used intuitively in the exhibition. Though his research is most critically involved in the process of this work, Macapia’s final execution seems to be steered more by subjective, formal choices than by aesthetically pleasing, observed phenomena — the result is attractively substantive.

—R. Stevie Jones

Turbulent Grid in Arch’It

October 18, 2008

Turbulent Grid

“PRESSURE. There is always pressure. And then there is that kind of pressure in which the relationship between things suddenly shifts. Is this simply a phenomenon of reordering? Or it not the case that the elements themselves suddenly altar? “Ecology” is at once a proposition about these state of affairs and, in a distant way, a means of calibrating them. Think of it as fine-tuning. But in this sense one should also speak of an ecology of techniques. Herein lay the problem of design in contemporary cities of high density. In fact, of design in general. For insofar as the demand for buildings to do certain things is experiencing increasing pressure with regard to matter/energy relations and insofar as the means to analyze such features is increasingly spreading out across the domain of computation, then design itself, it would seem, is mutating. . . ” Arch’It