Innholdsfortegnelse for issue 22 i Lampoon Magazine International

We started working on this issue of Lampoon over a year ago. Sustainable crafting and manufacturing had been on our radar for years. The word sustainability was already quite widespread — perhaps a utopia. When reviewing any submitted drafts before publishing, I saw that sustainability was only patches covering the front but with gaps on the back — like the blanket in Alberto Moravia’s La Noia. It was not necessarily greenwashing, at least not always. It was, and it is, the complication of the world. I arrived to the conclusion of which I am still convinced today: for every clean drop needed by the ocean, and for every drop we will continue to pour — planting trees increases the chance of rain. What I mean to say is that between…

the warmth of the Rattan, the physical challenge of the craftsman working it, the concentration, the thought of the designer shaped by expert hands. In the human dimension of the company, shared artistic vision and individual talent form a creative community. Lorenzo — rattan and wood sculptor; Khalid — the violinist; Rosa — the weaving master. The concept of the nest is rediscovered by Elia Bonacina belonging to the fourth generation of the family, who entrusts the creation of the work to Lorenzo. The egg is protected by a Rattan core armor. The creation of the void, based on Khalid’s idea, is carried out with a work of subtraction. In the base supporting the nest there is a representation of the number 3, which allows the resolution of the dualistic…

The question is: how can those in the cosmetics world become part of the upcoming circular economy? The answer lies within biodiversity and its protection. Beauty products derive from natural ingredients that have been extracted from plants. Companies are dealing directly with raw materials, components of earth. Andrea d’Avack, President of Fondation Chanel & Global Head of Corporate Responsibility at Chanel claims that preserving not only hotspots of biodiversity but as well as craftsmanship, through the Métiers d’Art, is the corporation’s ode to the future. These processes are not taken for granted by the corporation as transparency is integrated at the roots. D’Avack puts it simply: «There is clearly no luxury without sustainability. It is an integral part of the Chanel brand». The corporation’s chosen attitude towards farming natural raw…

Milano the credit that matters IFCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change At present, twenty countries are responsible for at least 75 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions, with China and the United States contributing the most. This is considerable when both are first world countries, with China remaining the largest textile producing and exporting country in the world. While differential in substance, action in response to the current state of the apparel industry is crucial to preventing and combating environmental harm. Rampant overproduction is fuelled through unnecessary overconsumption, yet a large majority of purchases are rarely worn. This is true when the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe reported that as of 2018, 85 percent of textiles are sent to landfills, equating to 21 billion tons, which would be…

Lecce images Lucas Lehmann agrarian versus urban Chiuri’s vision drew inspiration by cultural anthropologist Ernesto De Martino’s Sud e Magia, a 1959 essay on Southern Italian ritualistic traditions. Apulia is renowned for tarantism, the belief that people could become possessed after being bitten by a tarantula and could be saved through a musical exorcism; the book reviews some cases of young women healing from their apathy and melancholia by dancing the tarantella. «It’s likely they were simply depressed» suggests Chiuri. «I came up with some ironic drawings, where the roles are reversed: the spiders are jumping around and the women keep the rhythm on the tammorra. I wanted to carry this heritage of traditions into the future, so that it could be seen with a different perspective. Apulia has its…

Amsterdam/Helsinki Finnish Futurism Performing Arts Risto Linturi is a synthesizer, using crowd-sourcing to gather people’s ideas and feedback. While he spends a great deal of time thinking about technology, he has an appreciation of the outdoors and of ants, in particular. «We are all but ants and it takes a lot of ants to build a proper anthill – and there is no other way to do it but by unifying our ideas through communication», Linturi says from his cottage in the Finnish countryside. Thijs Biersteker is speaking from the museum where he is finishing the build out of his latest installation: «I use art as a vehicle to tell those stories in ways that people will not be numbed by the numbers». Turning complex environmental data into a tangible…

Milano July 2020 not an ontological relativism but rather promoting a sort of double simultaneous movement Stefano Boeri Centennial scientist James Lovelock recounts his insight into Gaia as he investigates the possibility of a human species transferring to Mars. He turns, in a sort of conceptual twist, looks at the Earth and perceives its uniqueness. A movement taken by Ersilia Vaudo Scarpetta, the ESA astrophysicist, who explained how the image of the Earth rising as seen from the Moon was a great little catastrophe in the conceptualization paradigm of the planet. Your work may have this sort of conceptual precondition. You both tend to view life and its joints in the plant and animal world as an interconnected system. This is the first point on which I would like to…

Milano September 2020 Agronomist Laura Gatti Vertical Forest Professor Pier Mannuccio Mannucci Pier Mannuccio Mannucci The belief that green areas can prevent and cure diseases goes back to the Medieval period, but it was mainly in the United Kingdom during the Victorian and Edwardian ages that this relation was empirically recognized. The cultural context of the time – for instance, the activity of the Common Preservation Society – toward the preservation and accessibility of public parks, addressed already as the lungs of the city, fostered the debate. The first studies to assess the relationship between people’s health and green spaces were based on the observation of psychiatric patients treated in asylums – structures surrounded by lush gardens. It was when the belief that greenery could help the treatment of mental…

Paris July 2020 in conversation with Patrick Blanc 400,000 known plant species Though Blanc’s designs are complex and sometimes massive – he designed the world’s tallest vertical garden, standing at 116 meters in Sydney’s skyline – he wants people to know that growing plants in vertical gardens isn’t as difficult as it seems. There’s a disconnect between people and plants, he says, but he’s optimistic that the divide can be bridged by conscientious and curious young people. When Blanc was around ten years old in the early sixties, his mother took him to a large flower exhibition in Paris. «At this age, I hadn’t seen many types of plants. There were orchids, ferns, waterfalls. I was impressed by the plants growing out of the soil on the rocks of the…

Replanting trees after disaster is evidently necessary for the wellbeing of the environment, and for humans that interact with and rely on the forest. Reforesting must be done with a focus on building resilience into new plantations, to protect both trees and people from future effects of disaster. One of the immediate ways of building resilience into damaged forests is through clearing the area. When felled trees are left to rot, they become breeding grounds for pests, such as bark beetles, which then infest and kill living trees. After the land is cleared, it might seem most sensible to plant trees straight away, to quickly reclaim what was lost by a fire or hurricane. However, careful planting strategies will create more long-term resilience in forests. In larger, rural areas, letting…

For Felix Finkbeiner, the mission to plant trees must go hand-in-hand with an ecological understanding. Forest restoration strategies range from active planting, where trees are planted at regimented spaces throughout an area, to natural regeneration, where the area is protected and left to reseed itself, with other planting strategies in between. «If you intervene, then the question is which species do you select so that you end up with as much of the biodiversity that would have existed in that place before whatever destruction event happened there», says Finkbeiner, «there are a lot of these choices in that process where ecological guidance is important». Felix Finkbeiner is the founder of Germany-based tree-planting organization, Plant-for-the-Planet. «When you have a site that you want to restore, the first question you need to answer…

North Italy Zegna Forest Heart Casa Zegna conserving forests a forest to be restored Ermenegildo Zenga has introduced a project named ‘Zegna Forest’ launching alongside the Fall 2020 campaign featuring clothes designed by Artistic Director Alessandro Sartori. The aim is the regeneration and long-term protection of Oasi Zegna, which began in February with the help of experts including landscape architect Paolo Pejrone. To fundraise, the company is selling cedar wood hearts, crafted by another family-owned Italian business, Riva 1920, founded in 1920 and a specialist in wooden furniture production. Costing €110, the objects come engraved with the message ‘From the heart of Oasi Zegna’, and proceeds will feed into the reforestation project through Fondazione Zegna. The wood has been sourced from the first phase of work done on the reserve,…

there was the pedestrian who would let himself be jostled by the crowd, but there was also the flâneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forgo the life of a gentleman of leisure. Let the many attend to their daily affairs; the man of leisure can indulge in the perambulations of the flâneur only if as such he is already out of place. He is as much out of place in an atmosphere of complete leisure as in the feverish turmoil of the city. Walter Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, 1939  nestled between the quietly bustling city streets below and the surrounding canyons of concrete, brick and glass above, entering the High Line from its Gansevoort Street entrance in Manhattan’s Meatpacking district feels familiar yet strange. Adapting…

Pierre-Alexis Dumas Paris / Milano we need to think about the horse in conversation with Stefano Boeri September 2020 On September 4, 2020, a redevelopment of an industrial brownfield site near the city centre of Normandy commences. Pierre Alexis Dumas, Artistic Director of Hermès, lays the first symbolic brick to the Maroquinerie de Louviers — the second site of Hermès in Normandy. The workshop designed by French-Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh will produce more energy than it consumes and follow the Maison’s core values of social and environmental sustainability: the building, will be made only of bricks and wood, and the trees uprooted in the construction site will be retained for the gardens, maintaining the biodiversity of the site. The day before laying the first brick, Mr. Dumas sits down with…

Louis Vuitton  Montreuil, September 2020. my street, my apartment. To photograph someone I love, it’s totally different from the relationship I have with that person: it is another link, it is a relationship without sounds, without conversations, without time, without routine. That day I met Guillaume again and I got in love again, even more…

a staged image series of people with their cameras while taking photos in nature, an artificial documentary, from old video camcorders to the first digital cameras from 2000. Body parts, hands - a bit on a collage look. The camera focuses on the front and the back of the final image, plus different lighting situations happening in the front and the back…

traces of how we once lived. I could suggest that you send me outfits and fashion pieces - I would make some kind of sculptures of the looks which resemble human form…

Happy 50th Anniversary dear Paul! You have been collecting and researching - capturing visuals, colors, prints and combinations of elements. My collection of vinyls, mainly Italian songs that stand eternal, to celebrate your career with music and fun Forever Young xx…

Nylon was first synthesized in 1935 by American gunpowder and chemical manufacturer DuPont, after eight years of research on synthetic polymers that also resulted in the invention of neoprene, Lycra, flame-resistant Nomex, and faux leather Corfam, to name a few. Three elements – coal, water, air – and four chemical reactions were needed to produce nylon. First, coal was turned into coal tar through the process of pyrolysis, or thermal destruction. Coal tar, a thick dark oil, was then processed to obtain adipic acid and hexamethylenediamine, two substances that mixed together with the addition of water caused the formation of nylon salt crystals. The nylon salt was then heated in a pressurized chamber so as to evaporate the molecules of water contained in its atomic structure. The resulting paste was…

Sovico, North of Italy entrepreneurship as a commitment Canali Anthology Erina works on the assembly of the jacket. «Attaching the sleeves is not assembling two parts but creating two parts. Each sleeve is a relationship between me, the jacket, and the machine. The peculiarity lies in the speed, or rather in the slowness, of giving the jacket wearability and harmony at the lap. Each must find their own method of sewing. The rules are not enough, because you are confronted with something that varies, because it is made by people. These jackets become creatures; they are not objects. After twenty-four years, I still cannot say I know how to sew the sleeves. Every day, we must question ourselves». Agnes takes care of the tucking of the garments. She is the…

the Towers of Babylon a message inside a tomato the house and garden as the Other The Towers of Babylon. The greenery to be experienced on the top of a building is a problem that Le Corbusier faced as early as 1923, in one of the essays that make up Vers une architecture. He imagined the pillars set back from the façade, to allow the building body to float, separating and giving relief, lightness, and fluidity to the building mass. The sense of telluric belonging is embodied above, in the toit jardin, hovering towards the celestial arch, which allows the occupants to relax and practice physical activity in a natural setting without leaving their home. The roof terrace gives man back the green, which is not only under the machine…

London Imperial College London Royal College of Art «Everyone knows their tyres wear down, but no one stops to think where that plastic goes to». As vehicles move along our roads, over time as friction occurs, they shed small fragments of tyre material. This tyre tread consists of a variety of compounds that behave as microplastics (less than five millimeter particles of plastic material). When it rains, these particles (in microplastic form) wash off the road surface and into waterways, ending up in the ocean. It has been estimated that the UK alone produces 68,000 tons of tyre-wear fragments every year, and up to 19,000 tons of this ends up in our waterways, rivers and seas. Once in the waterways there is a strong possibility that these fragments of plastic…

Urban Foresty, a call to act trees towards cities humans towards forests look at what is happening now it’s not about us contaminating nature it’s about nature contaminating us it’s changing the relation between the natural sphere and the human sphere we need to learn how to conceive of human life by looking at it as the life of a living species submerged, like all others, in the melting pot of life…

Politecnico di Milano September 2020 Anuela Ristani Shirley Rodrigues Maria Chiara Pastore Deputy Mayor Foreign Relations, Tirana Deputy Mayor Environment and Energy, London Scientific Director Forestami, Milano Tirana The vision of becoming a sustainable city requires a mind-shift, one where we omit carbon-saturated means of living and opt for more sustainable solutions. The initiatives that the capital has enforced moul a younger generation that will grow up healthy and active, respecting the natural environment. The Mayor of Tirana himself, Erion Veliaj, has said ‘don’t underestimate the power of children. A city for our kids is a city for all’. Anuela Ristani We are part of a network of cities that are committed to being child friendly through the Urban 95 concept. It entails how the city looks like from the…

London / Milan / Mexico City / Jaipur / Tokyo August 2020 Enrico Alleva Gheppio falcon Fredi Devas Dining companions is the term used by ethologists to refer to animals that live on food waste from other species. In the Old Stone Age, the mouse and the house sparrow lived on rafts that carried the flint found in the villages of their place of habitat. As consumption exploded over the last century, waste has increased — an attraction for animals that have evolved over the centuries in the food-scavenging system. There are many wild animals in the city, but few species — mainly birds and mice. This leads to an imbalance in the city’s ecosystem. Enrico Alleva «Bats, foxes, wild boars cyclically visit the city. This depends on the changing…

Geneva The Perpetual Planet Campaign the Mission Blue program, since 1982 National Geographic, since 1954 Rolex Awards, since 1976 In 2019, Rolex launched Perpetual Planet, a campaign with the mission «to make the planet perpetual». At first glance, it makes sense for a brand with a history of innovation and exploration to align itself with saving the planet. Rolex watches were used in the first successful ascent of Mount Everest, and have accompanied the deepest ocean explorations. Rolex Perpetual Planet is named after the Oyster Perpetual Movement, invented in 1931, which harnesses the wearer’s motion to provide energy to run the watch, rather than manual winding. Rolex watches have a reputation for lasting a lifetime if they’re properly taken care of, and this is reflected in the Perpetual Planet campaign…

Daimen Hardie is the executive director of Community Forests International, alongside designing climate action strategies for the EU. «Tree planting is this thing that we do to give back to the world. It has got charisma and everybody can get behind it. The process of bringing a forest back is an intergenerational process. These forests take decades, if not hundreds of years to be restored. Planting the tree is one of the first steps» says Hardie. If tree planting is not supported by protection and care, forests can do more harm to the climate than good. Hardie’s home country of Canada is a prime example of forest potential, but also the drawbacks of poorly managed or unprotected forest areas. «Canada has huge forests and a forestry industry, and the potential…

For Plant-for-the-Planet, the way to move forward is to collaborate, both with planting organizations and with scientists. «These projects have some sort of collaboration with academia, for an ecological understanding of the site that you are restoring», says Finkbeiner. Academic collaboration has led Plant-for-the-Planet to pursue planting projects closer to the equator, rather than temperate areas, such as North America, Europe, and most of Asia. «First of all, because these areas tend to have a lot of forests anyway», says Finkbeiner, «and second, a tree in the tropics grows faster than a tree in Germany or Northern Italy, and because of that, a tropical tree will capture a lot more carbon. In addition, planting a tree in Mexico tends to be cheaper than planting a tree in the Pacific Northwest,…

Vermont inclusive communities reimagining the relationship July 2020 African Americans to the Great Outdoors George Floyd was brutally killed by the police in Minneapolis on May 25th 2020. Earlier that same day, an incident took place in New York City’s Central Park: a white woman called the police falsely accusing an African American man of threatening her life. While lying, she emphasized “African American” several times. Christian Cooper, who was bird watching, had simply asked her to put her dog on a leash. The Central Park episode is of different impact if compared to the lost lives of African Americans: in the first six months of 2020, more than 100 black civilians were killed by the police in the United States. However, it illustrates how complex the dynamics of race…

the concept of mother during quarantine. Madre di me is the visual process through which I reconstructed my Mom’s role, projecting on my sister all experiences, attitudes and confidence that make her another mother. Marianna is a blank canvas on which I have juxtaposed my memories. The first pictures, shot on the ground, reveal the body of this new perception. The second batch was shot outside: the subject is in surreal poses that are in contract with the previous ones. Step by step, flashback: her story and my backstory…

Rockaway Beach, New York - and its inhabitants. A seasonal town. The shoot takes place in a quirky community garden…

early summer days in Berlin, Stine and I. Dog walking became a valuable legitimacy to breath outside the house, to leave the house in the first place, for some. As inside options too were more limited than usual, cutting hair, shaving head apparently became a common distraction from lockdown life…

a collection of large-scale canvases triggering daily rituals. A lot of the recent processes in my work consist of repetition. I found in some of the smaller notepads that it would be filled with the same subject with over twenty different versions. Each time you draw the same subject — be it a portrait or an object — something new will always be added. I found this a useful way to decide which character I should include in my painting. If I paint it over ten times and still find something interesting in it, then I will employ it in a painting of mine. This figure seen on my ceramic is from my recently completed painting, A Flourishing Affair…

Seattle environment, social, governance CSRHub aggregator EGS data sources Cynthia Figge started being concerned with sustainability before it was trendy, before it was considered necessary and inevitable. In 1996 she had already founded EKOS International, a sustainability consultancy: back then, Figge says, she used to travel to Europe often to gather data and best practices from firms and companies. Europe was, and is, ahead of the US in terms of understanding and practicing sustainability as well as the regulatory apparatus that makes it possible. Today, CSRHub is the largest aggregator of EGS data sources – Environment, Social, and Governance. Figge had met Bahar Gidwani, the co-founding partner of CSRHub, at Harvard Business School. Gidwani was a pioneer in systems to digitize stock photos to bring them online, developing big data…

Armani Beauty – My Way Milano Nigel Salter, adviser and facilitator in the global sustainability agenda, has been involved in development of the product, overseeing and advising Armani Beauty on strategies to help bring about tangible change in the beauty industry. With more than twenty year experience in the area, Salter founded sustainability consultancy Salterbaxter and went on to establish BRODIE business consultancy. «What we would be recommending to companies is to try and use a science-based approach to understanding where are the issues for their product or process and that requires them to look along the value chain». Salter explains: «A lot of companies have bought credits without knowing where those credits were being applied. What is the offsetting, where is the offsetting taking place, is it effective? No-one…

captured within his landscapes, often engaged in various stages of contemplation and transformation, Brooks Salzwedel’s lands are fueled with the paradoxical energies of the possible and the imagined. The works show the rules of nature with a bit of chaos, creating unlikely scenarios. One will find oil rigs, fire pits, pills, rainbows, logos, viruses, planes and other various curios creating a greater narrative when pieced together. Salzwedel is using his inner strength and inner child to tell his story: a self-created process involving materials such as graphite, waterproof inks, colored pencil, pen, acrylic, tape, spray paint, collage and glass gives an even further feeling of depth. Bullseye Glass – recyclable glass and sometimes shares of broken glass that would have been disposed of he is reimagining a new life for…

Rome 4 over 17 SDGs Pioneering Renewables The concept of density describes the number of people living in a particular area. In the middle ages, Paris’ population counted 200,000 to 300,000 people. The city’s radius thereby granted the reach of workspaces and people’s homes within thirty minutes of walking time. A Paris income map from the year 1500 showed that well-off citizens bought apartments in the city centers, considering the daily commutes to their workspaces, while the working-class moved to the urban fringes. The case study of Philadelphia on the contrary, underlines the American perspective. The invention of the steam train and public transportation in the 1830s enabled well-situated families to migrate from cities to railroad suburbs to invest in properties and land, ensuring higher standards of living. With public…

London saltwater over freshwater the issue of waste brine Only 3 percent of the world’s water is freshwater and only 1 percent of that is drinkable. This finite resource is shared by 7.5 billion people around the world, and one in ten of those struggles to access this human right. This increasing water scarcity has encouraged companies to push towards desalination processes. Since the development of desalination facilities in the 1960s, there are more than 15,000 plants globally. Each day 100 million gallons of seawater are pushed through semi-permeable membranes to create 50 million gallons of water and it is expected that this quantity will be on the increase. There are two types of commonly-used desalination processes. The less frequently used of the two is thermal, a process which involves…

001 urban loops  the Anthropocene: Giorgio Vacchiano, Emanuele Coccia nocturnal suburb / Bruto FnZ Tirana, London, Milan – politics and research London, vegetal resistance / Lorenzo Zandri parks and literature: Petra Blaisse the Fragility of a Species / Marina Ballo Charmet botanical considerations, Pier Mannuccio Mannucci, Laura Gatti open windows / Elisa Galluzzo city animals: Enrico Alleva, Fredi Devas taxonomies / Stefano Graziani 300 Vertical Gardens: Patrick Blanc in Paris 002 HeartH  foreword – Rolex Perpetual Planet Aaron Schuman / Vale 2020 Michael Petryck – tree planting and protection Daimen Hardie – reforesting/restore Felix Finkbeiner – Plant-for-the-Planet bio-facturing / Full Grown beyond one’s territory – the Zegna Heart Project 003 the grafted  gentrification: Mitchell Silver New York City High Line: Elizabeth Diller a paradigm of symbiosis / Stefano Ortega inclusive…

Amsterdam August 2020 private commissions as a matter of ethics public spaces as civil commitments BAM - Biblioteca degli Alberi, Milano With Covid-19 pushing us six feet apart and out in the open, dependency on green spaces stands at an all-time high – Inside Outside, as the name insinuates, is a design company that has focused on the intersection between interior architecture and landscape design. Biblioteca degli Alberi [The Library of Trees] sets a precedent in regards to a future proofed integration: «We developed this as a connective park», Blaisse states. «It was intended not only to connect physically, but mentally through diverse fusion of areas, creating space where people can meet and be». Designed as an ‘interface’, the hundred thousand square metres of land fuses a variety of plants,…

it took me three years to photograph what I was looking for. Taxonomies, the entire portfolio consists of more than 120 pictures, while the book I published in 2006 with a+mbookstore contains a sequence of nineteen pictures and an unbound fold-out with all the texts. The project revolves around Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, whom I imagined as a scholar of the visible. I studied his works and his utopian enterprise of ensuring Swedish autonomy by cultivating economically strategic plants such as spices and coconut – the project failed due to the Scandinavian climate, but generated insightful studies on the planet’s flora. I saw the greenhouses I encountered as utopic successes in his effort to acclimatize non-local plants. I have visited numerous collections and institutions such as natural history museums, botanical…

Chronicles from Canada worldwide forestry report Ottawa Quebec Munich / Yucatan Tree Canada’s Operation ReLeaf Community Forests International Plant-for-the-Planet Reforesting debate / part one Michael Petryk arborist The 2020 Canadian Urban Forestry Conference will focus on building climate resilience in urban forests. Michael Petryk is an arborist and manager of Tree Canada’s Operation ReLeaf program, focused on replanting trees after disaster. According to Petryk, the ability to build resilience is «on diversity and it’s on flexibility. We can’t keep rigid ideas that were either ideas of the past or ideas of what exactly the urban forest must be. If we want to have that resilient urban forest, sometimes it’s got to be planting some of the non-natives as long as you’ve done a lot of studies about them». He adds,…

that want to demonstrate leadership on climate, and on social responsibility», says Hardie. They then pursue conservation easements; legal deeds that ensure the land is protected from clearcutting or other damaging practices in the long-term. In cities, individual tree planting needs forethought. Risk of damage from construction, vandalism, air pollution, and poor maintenance create a higher than average mortality rate for urban trees. For city trees to survive their environments, they must be planted with root space for the mature tree. When roots outgrow their given space in paved areas, they damage infrastructure and are at risk of harm. During a tree’s lifetime, it could be disturbed by digging for cabling or plumbing. Underground damage often results in the tree dying, sometimes a year after the injury. It is hard…

Wirksworth, UK wood design Gavin Munro not trained in gardening* The number of city-trapped workers buying plants in an attempt to keep a hold on nature has been on an upwards trajectory. Rather than explaining this away as millennials wanting a touch of green in their lives, there could be a more nuanced reason. The biophilia hypothesis is one that sees humans as having an innate desire to actively seek out the natural world to create connections with it. This urge to connect with other forms of life can be neglected in this fast-paced environment, yet the human body still yearns to be brought back to nature. Gavin Munro, Managing Director of Full Grown, is working with this innate need for connection and, through his grown furniture, has brought the…

the High Line - New York City Fiume Verde - Milano urban projects to be compared July 2020 re-embracing living nature The High Line is a 1.5 mile park, transformed from a defunct railway stretching from the Meatpacking District to the Hudson Rail Yards in Manhattan. The Shed, a multi-disciplinary kinetic structure, is a mobile carapace that can be rolled out on wheels. Celia Lyttelton As humankind enters the Covid era, it is challenging for the architect as how to approach designing buildings, in a pragmatic and holistic way. It is crucial to take a non-anthropogenic approach in all fields, especially architecture. How do you both see a post pandemic paradigm in your practices? Elizabeth Diller We have a medical problem which needs to be resolved. We need to ensure…

Hans Ulrich Obrist April 2020 Serpentine Galleries, London Stefano Boeri Triennale, Milano Cornelia Lauf I thought we’d take the occasion of the world’s circumstances to use this as more than an interview and as a possible manifesto, since we are at a pivot regarding life as we know it. How is the current situation impacting you? Hans Ulrich Obrist Last night I spoke to the people in Bergamo, via the GaMeC, and the question was how we can find a transnational solution, a topic you and I have been speaking about, Stefano. Stefano Boeri I started to know about the Coronavirus in January and I closed my office in Shanghai, at the end of the month. And then we followed China from Milan, and we closed in Milan, on February…

St Jean de Luz, France mother bought a house in the South of France. The stormy Atlantic side, not the Cote d’Azur. She got the keys a few days before lockdown, leading to an unexpected four months in total solitude, armed with nothing but a small suitcase of weather inappropriate clothing. The house is large, abandoned, gutted of its interiors apart from the remains of the quaint Sixties decor throughout. It’s an eerie ghostly place with its heyday placed in the past. Someone must have been proud of those candy coloured bathroom suites a long time ago. Two Dobermans who at one point guarded the residence have shredded the patterned fabric wallpaper into pieces. Some heavy furniture left faded markings on the old carpet, creating an imprint of the house’s…

how to keep your parents educated and entertained during lockdown Marlon Rueberg…

Man Ray’s photograms of the Twenties were a technical study in the materiality of photo paper. I built a basic darkroom in my bathroom with cheap construction material. Along with fashion items, I incorporated found objects from my home, limiting myself to my confinement. The whole process felt very scientific, like I was a chemist. This impacted my sense of composition which became more calculated and rigid. I studied how we experience incandescent light through its interaction with objects. A photogram is a recording of the physical nature of light. Although we can’t touch it, it has a direct, chemical response on photo paper…

I’m not sure when or how it happened the strong cobalt blue has been my colour. It seems to catch my attention whenever it’s within sight, it’s almost like discovering a close friend in a crowded space when I didn’t expect to. I use my particular cobalt blue as the red thread so to speak. It’s the starting point where friends, objects and clothes with different textures and gloss merge…