Ornamento Journal is a visual exploration of the formal values of the architectural detail, independently of its constructive purpose.

The ornament is a taboo concept of modern architecture and has been persecuted with real savagery throughout the 20th century, although indisputable modern masters worked with architectural elements that, without being decorative, exerted an analogous aesthetic function. Today, a deep reflection on the important role of the ornamental in architecture is absolutely necessary.

Consider Ornamento as a reference manual, a catalyst for ideas or design, a catalog of objects loaded with thought that undoubtedly encourage creativity or reflection.

In this third issue we focus on the house of the Japanese architect Kunio Maekawa, in which the rigor and tradition of Japanese architecture are observed and wonderful and surprising encounters are produced between light, matter and transformation.

Between the living and places, between gestures and landscapes; this book analyses, practices and affirms an architecture that is an encounter between bodies and territory. The five architectural forms gathered by Susana Velasco share the same quest: How can the action of building make the profound interdependence of everything that surrounds and shapes us visible. How to overecome material disconnection with the world and commit ourselves as bodies that say and do. What are the intermediate and habitable scales where life can take place in company?

This book is published on occasion of the exhibition From Scattered Fragments that took place at musac, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León in 2017.

Susana Velasco is an architect, teacher and researcher. She founded the artistic collective Luddotek with Rafael Sánchez-Mateos in 2004 and in 2010 the collective Cunctatio, showing their works in all kinds of contexts or institutions such as Campoadentro, Urbanacción or Documenta X. She currently participates in the artistic and pedagogical experimentation platform Traverses et Inattendus in La Chapelle-Faucher. The search for the aesthetic involvement of bodies in the medium through the constructive gesture is a central aspect of her work, which she in turn translates to the learning space at the School of Architecture in Madrid - etsam, where she is professor of Graphic Ideation.

Ornamento Journal is a visual exploration of the formal values of the architectural detail, independently of its constructive purpose.

The ornament is a taboo concept of modern architecture and has been persecuted with real savagery throughout the 20th century, although indisputable modern masters worked with architectural elements that, without being decorative, exerted an analogous aesthetic function. Today, a deep reflection on the important role of the ornamental in architecture is absolutely necessary.

Consider Ornamento as a reference manual, a catalyst for ideas or design, a catalog of objects loaded with thought that undoubtedly encourage creativity or reflection. In this number 2 we go into some of Alvar Aalto’s works, in which his extraordinary sensibility towards the most human scale of architecture is manifested.

Ornamento Journal is a visual exploration of the formal values of the architectural detail, independently of its constructive purpose.

The ornament is a taboo concept of modern architecture and has been persecuted with real savagery throughout the 20th century, although indisputable modern masters worked with architectural elements that, without being decorative, exerted an analogous aesthetic function. Today, a deep reflection on the important role of the ornamental in architecture is absolutely necessary.

Consider Ornamento as a reference manual, a catalyst for ideas or design, a catalog of objects loaded with thought that undoubtedly encourage creativity or reflection.

In this first issue we focuse some of Mies van der Rohe’s works, in which his passionate interest in the abstract aesthetics of the material and its intersections is demonstrated.

"Pensar no es buena idea is full of paths towards reflection. The pages of this book are forceful and they linger etched in our memory like those images that last in our head when we close our eyes. Without a doubt, Rafa Maltés draws so we can think". Paco Roca

"The vignettes by Rafa Maltés are descended from the best examples of Spanish graphic humour, that black humour, scathing and necessary, which since the Transition time until now (and whose best representatives are El Perich, Chumy Chúmez or El Roto) help us, with their sharp irony, to navigate the thick waters of the prevailing disinformation of the media". Paco Pomet

Pointes, sur les: (on point). Ballet term with which those movements executed on the pointed shoes are defined.

POINTES 2010-2015 is a compilation book with 25 articles published in the last five years of the magazine POINTES, which came out as a four-monthly publication on art and architecture in the university sphere in the middle of 2010. A small group of people, coming from colleges of architecture, photography and cinema, decided to create a media that would promote critical spirit, analysis and reflection about the most influential artistic references, spreading the less known or reinterpreting the most universal, always with the intention of resonating with the reader through short essays with total editorial freedom. One of the fundamental ideas of the publication is, precisely, that arts nourish each other in a reciprocal way. That is how it is understandable that all the contents join in a natural way, leaving in the hands of the reader the possibility of establishing unexpected links.

Couples & Mirror Co. 22 Stories of Spanish Architecture proposes one of many possible readings on the recent history of Spanish architecture. A selection of twenty two architectural offices organized around couples, each of them look themselves in a mirror in which to discover how these last sixteen years may be split into two symmetrical and continuous visions although asymmetric and discontinuous in approaches and outcomes.

#Madrid

The present catalogue comes with the sixth montage at La Casita Azul in the Centro Cibeles and is the third publication in the life of this pavilion which, despite its small dimensions, is at present the only space entirely dedicated to architectural exhibitions in Madrid. Until now the program of La Casita Azul has alternated the exhibition of different architecture studios with the revision of issues related to Madrid, its history and urban image.

Atlas Entropía #Madrid belongs to the latter category, the exhibition corresponding to this sixth edition. An exhibition that proposes collecting, in a limited number of emblematic buildings in Madrid, the traces of deterioration and the passing of time on them and the way in which, throughout the years, the appropriation that is implied in their use or continued uses and often unexpected exercises in architecture, have given rise to complex situations. Situations whose contingencies, imperfections, and distance from the ideal, initial, state that was conceived for these buildings in architecture, need to be defended here as a positive value.

Higueras, who passed away in 2008, has left multitude of memorable traces in Madrid, some of them as extraordinary as the Corona de Espinas (Spanish Cultural Heritage Institute) or the Housing in San Bernardo, apart from numerous single family homes and other cases of interest. All these works deserve specific revisions but due to their proximity, this exhibition is not about them but to bring to the present another facet of Higueras’ work that is less close, more exotic and distant as are the projects and works he developed in the Canary Islands throughout his career. An ensemble of works, many of them little known or presented here for the first time, whose choice complements the most urban and confined vision of the Madrid projects and reveals a parallel experimental laboratory.