SCÈNES DE NUIT. NIGHT & ARCHITECTURE
Nocturnal Exhibition at f’ar Lausanne. HEAD — Genève

SCÈNES DE NUIT explores the role of night in the construction of contemporary cities and societies, illustrating how architectural theory and critique are still associated with sunlight and diurnal paradigms. The exhibition seeks to examine and reflect upon the spaces, activities and media deployed in night culture, using evening events and ephemeral scenography as its main display platform.

The five venues SHOP, FILM, CITY, CLUB and FOOD recreate spaces generating practices and night-time rituals on the topics of consumption, film, street, party and food culture, becoming experimental laboratories to focus on and question the relationship between architecture and night. Scènes de Nuit attempts to understand nocturnal spatial phenomena through performative lectures, discussions, walks, meals and screenings. 

Scènes de Nuit is a project by the Interior Architecture Department. HEAD — Genève
 

Javier Fernández Contreras (1982) is an architect, associate professor and the dean of the Department of Interior Architecture at HEAD — Genève. His work explores the relationship between architecture, representation and media, with a specific focus on the role of interiors in the construction of contemporaneity.

Youri Kravtchenko (1984) is an architect, a teacher and the co-coordinator of the MA programme in the Department of Interior Architecture at HEAD – Genève. Inspired by the narrativity and theatricality that spaces can communicate, he blends together in his two complementary practices, narration and construction, to build projects that are as much scenographic as architectural.

Manon Portera (1992) is an assistant in the Department of Interior Architecture at HEAD — Genève and the co-founder of the interior architecture office apropМ, which focuses on light and materials using a sustainable approach.

BERNABAD TYPE AND TERRITORY collects 25 years of professional trajectory of the architecture and engineering firm formed by Francisco Lacruz, Alejandro San Felipe and Daniel Abad. Strongly rooted in its Aragonese territory, the book shows —giving preference to visual discourse through an intense and unitary photographic look by Iñaki Bergera— the hallmarks of a disciplinary and rigorous work, sensitive to typological tradition, technique, landscape and city building. With texts by Miguel A. Alonso del Val, Iñaki Bergera, Pablo de la Cal, Ignacio Grávalos and Fredy Massad.

IMAGINING THE MEDITERRANEAN HOUSE
Italy and Spain in the 50s

This catalogue focusses on the subject of “the Mediterranean house” researching its operative presence in a limited historical background: the 50s. This period is characterised by the decisive influence of two international masters of architecture in Spain —Gio Ponti and Alberto Sartoris—, whose ideology is based on a careful mediation between tradition and modernity.

It deals with a wide-ranging cultural project that was mainly divulged through a contemporary idea of the domestic, emphasising the well-known typology of the “Mediterranean house”; a paradigm that outlines its identity from the singularity of its interrelations with the surrounding environment, from the use of certain materials, from a peculiar distribution of the interiors and from the resource —also symbolic— of some figurative guidelines; strategies implemented with the aim of satisfying the basic demands of contemporary existence, nevertheless in polemic opposition to the alienating uniformity of a mechanised urban civilization.

Through various documental resources of diverse nature —projects, drawings, magazines, letters, publications and photographs— we comprehend the implications of a reflection on architecture which integrates historical, landscaping and anthropological approaches, as well as the personal and professional contacts established amongst renowned protagonists of modern architecture.

This book collects the works presented by the artist Rachid Koraïchi in This Long Journey to your Gaze, an exhibition organized by Casa Árabe in both its headquarters of Madrid and Cordoba between March and July 2019. These are works produced entirely at Factum Arte in Madrid and in Barcelona’s workshops of ceramics, two cities in which the artist has worked intensely in recent years. The resulting sculptures, ceramics and installations are a testimony of the fascinating universe of signs and graphisms that characterizes Koraïchi’s work and for which he has gained international recognition.

Rachid Koraïchi was born in Ain Beïda, Algeria in 1947 and grew up during the French colonial period, which ended with the War of Independence in 1962. He studied at the National School of Fine Arts in Algiers in 1970 and later, after reaching Paris, at the National School of Decorative Arts and the National School of Fine Arts there. He also graduated from the Institute of Urbanism in Paris.

The Arabic semiotics and graphic gestures in his work evoke figurative imagery and messages intended for a universal audience. His ideas take shape in a wide variety of media, including ceramics, textiles, steel sculptures, bronze pieces, alabaster sculptures, and so forth. He has also authored many books in a fluid dialogue with writers and poets from different eras, such as Mahmoud Darwish, Khalil Gibran, René Char, Michel Butor and Sylvie Germain.

Koraïchi collaborates with artists and craftsmen from all over the world with extensive experience using traditional and contemporary techniques to create works and installations which promote dialogue amongst both local and global communities. The artist has often set up studios in different countries. His works can be found in many museum collections and at foundations around the world.

Ediciones Asimétricas, in collaboration with the Fernando Higueras Foundation, the ICO Foundation, ICO Museum and the Ministry of Development, publishes the second edition of the Fernando Higueras catalog. From the origin.

This book exhaustively compiles the most emblematic works made by Fernando Higueras from his first drawings in 1950 until his death in 2008. Profusely illustrated and rigorously documented, it is the most complete monograph dedicated to the spanish architect. It is organized as a chronological and highly visual journey throughout the work of Fernando Higueras, with original models, photographs, plans, etc. with which the architect talks about his buildings and his conception of architecture. It also includes numerous critical texts about the work and the unrepeatable figure of Higueras.

Edited in Spanish and English, the catalog features texts by the curator Lola Botia and also by Álvaro Martínez-Novillo, Andrés Perea, Óscar Tusquets, Darío Gazapo and Concha Lapayese, Antonio Miró, Iñaki Ábalos, Juli Capella, Josemaría de Churtichaga, Salvador Pérez Arroyo , Felix Candela, Javier Manterola Armisén, Alberto Humanes Bustamante and an extensive essay by María Isabel Navarro Segura.

This publication contains a collection of texts by Santiago Cirugeda and Alice Attout that revolve around the most decisive projects in the long history of their studio Recetas Urbanas. Deliberately reluctant to elaborate a theoretical and analytical discourse, inevitably aseptic and abstract, these texts adopt the narrative form of the anecdote precisely to allow the account of real and concrete “architectural actions”, thus highlighting the uniqueness of each case study and the centrality of people’s lives in all transformation processes, including architectural ones.

Also included are several essays by Elvira Dyangani Ose (curator of the exhibition You are here, senior curator of Creative Time and professor of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College in London), Pascal Gielen (full professor of sociology of art and politics at the Arts Research Institute of Antwerp), Kristine Guzmán (director of the AA Arte y Arquitectura MUSAC series) and Raúl Muñoz de la Vega (assistant curator of the project You are here).

Texts by: Alice Attout, Santiago Cirugeda, Elvira Dyangani Ose & Raúl Muñoz de la Vega, Silvia Longueira y Manuel Olveira, Pascal Gielen, Kristine Guzmán

Why not writing on the city as if it were a blank page? Alain Arias-Misson, experimental poet and personal multimedia artist, invented the Public Poem in 1967 to answer this question. Since then he has made more than twenty of them in different cities around the world, to wich almost always the forces of public order have put the “end point” to them.

The Public Poem is a radically original avant-garde poetry format that considers public spaces as a blank page on which to write but also as a text that must be read to interpret the world. From this point of view, the power of the poetic word, meaningful, renovating, alive, genuine, causes the breaking of codes and landscapes with the aim of recovering the human sense of the polis by reintroducing the inaugural power of the logos.

Clearly differentiated from actionism, performance or body-art, in the Public Poem, the personal intervention of the poet and his eventual acolytes —sometimes coordinated, sometimes spontaneous— transforms their bodies into hands that write, punctuate, mark, indicate or point. By precisely locating linguistic signs of different registers or codes (letters, typographical characters, phonetic spellings, masks, costumes, comic book bubbles...) Alain Arias-Misson generates an urban grammar that brings out a new semantics of the public activating collective representations of the city understood “literally” as a theater of language, while establishing a dreamlike territory with an electrifying atmosphere. And everything, the reappropriation of the street, social criticism and even the exercise of freedom beyond conventions and common places, for a few hours, seems possible.