The book (Milieu Edizioni) is edited by S.a.L.E-Docks and Escuela Moderna. More than 80 architects, artists, performers and activists have sent in images, projects and texts reflecting on the state of exception. Is this a tool irretrievably in the hands of the constituted powers, useful for restricting the spaces of dissent? Or is it possible to consider the exception as an objection, as a physical, cultural, social and political space, open to the experimentation of radical democracy?
Reblogged from S.a.L.E. Docks
Architetture Precarie (Precarious Architecture)*
Infirmitas, Inutilitas, Invenustas
Is the work of the architect useful, stable and beautiful? Or has it become ugly, useless and precarious? How can an ugly, useless and precarious job produce useful, stable and beautiful architecture? These are the questions we are asking ourselves two thousand years after the publication of Vitruvius’ De Architectura.
Architetture Precarie (Precarious Architecture) is a practice born in opposition to the contradictions of making architecture today, proposing a design methodology based on self-construction, self-production, participation and recycling of materials. Redefining the production system of architecture in a radical way helps us rediscover the Vitruvian paradigm: we can build solid architecture, even using recycled materials; useful architecture, which benefits from the involvement of small communities throughout the process; beautiful architecture, which does not damage the land thanks to constructive reversibility. Together with the modus operandi, a certain margin of freedom is redefined: architecture can finally confront other disciplines, social and artistic, on an equal level, freeing itself from restrictive mechanisms imposed from above. Architecture returns to being a spontaneous process, an event that helps the community with which it develops to resolve a contingent need, but this time it can count on the effectiveness of the result.
*Alessandro Zorzetto is an architect who graduated and qualified as a professional architect in Venice in 2006, and has been a member of the Order of Architects of Pordenone since 2008. The creator of Architetture Precarie (Precarious Architecture) in 2010, he works as a freelance architect in Venice, where he currently resides. www.architettureprecarie.net
Rural Boxx*
Rural Installations
Contemplation of the rural landscape leads us to some observations on the authenticity of what is presented to our eyes. An area that is in some ways romantic, but fundamentally abstract, almost surreal. Few traces of nature remain, in a factitious, constructed landscape, even in the areas called “reserves”.
This is the context in which Rural Boxx operates, which could be defined as a gym of self-construction, a margin of freedom in which a small collective of professionals practice emancipation from work in a pragmatic way. There are three phases to the group’s interventions: the production of street furniture using hay as a trait d’union between city and countryside; the application of mathematical models found in nature in the creation of geodesic domes, reciprocal and tensegral structures; the use of bamboo to self-finance complex, high-performance structures at low cost.
*Rural Boxx is a group of friends, architects and artists who work together to identify intervention strategies in harmony with nature, designing with materials such as clay, hay, wood and waste materials, and promoting recycling and self-building as fundamental techniques for creating low-cost architecture and objects. Alessandro Zorzetto, Francesca Modolo, Luciano Aldrighi. www.ruralboxx.blogspot.it
SPAZI D’ECCEZIONE // SPACES OF EXCEPTION
Photo gallery of the exhibition at S.a.L.E. Docks
Magazzini del Sale, Dorsoduro 265, Venice // 26 may > 30 sep 2016
