POP RUINS

Archaeological museum

@Cyprus International Competition

POP RUINS

Archaeological museum

@Cyprus International Competition

Nicosia,

2017

A PARTIALLY BURIED COLUMN DRUM - What if the building induces an ambiguous reading of its volume as a fluted column drum partially buried in a garden as a real repository of the archaeological wealth of the island?. Placed over a sunken garden of future ruins, the circular profile of the drum and the emptying of its perimeter to fine tune its scale to the fragmentation of the site provide the building with a strange presence. The main body of the Museum hovers above a set of partially buried gardens and the spaces for laboratories and storage, just touching the ground level in the accesses to the public axis.

A CROSS COMPOSED BY FOUR VAST INTERIORS - What if the interior of the Museum rather than a conventional lobby, hosts a public axis composed by four big public interiors? What if the Museum is a cross and the entrance is right in the center? A series of internalised public spaces: the bronze Canopo which opens onto the square, the entrance open courtyard, the inner lobby and finally the inner garden in connection with the river park. All of them form a varied sequence of spatial compression and expansion (nymphaeum, door, patio, vaulted space, indoor garden and Park) generated by the intersection of the geometrical system of longitudinal naves and spherical caps that produces domes in the interior and craters in the rooftop. These vast Mediterranean interiors will host receptions, lectures, performances by artists, educational programs, minor exhibitions and public events going beyond the role as a museum and becoming a real extended public body.

NAVIGATING THE BUILDING - A sequence of public spaces can be crossed by the visitor where a choreography of spherical caps intersects the vaulted beams to expand perceptually the exhibition spaces of the naves. The arms of the transept are accessible from the lobby above through two monumental stairways, so they are part of it, while functionally independent. On each side of the public inner cross, the stairs, the access to the offices and laboratories and other ancillary spaces are contained within widen and hollow walls perforated with openings allowing to perceive the main exhibition spaces.

PROCESSES OF DISCOVERY - Resembling an archaeological excavation the ground level is partially an excavated land formation and hosts the archive and the laboratories, with parallel naves for the bigger objects, separated by thick storage walls containing smaller objects. Although not open to the public, the archive and the laboratories are visible for the visitors from above, therefore playing also an important role in the museum. Visitors can see the storerooms and watch the staff working in the conservation of the pieces. This museum is not an archive of death pieces but a place for interaction and education where the new need for exhibition as well as storage and research can have place. The flexibility offered by the naves and the easiness to incorporate divisions allow maximum effectiveness, easy access keeping the Museum alive and responding to technological innovations, archaeological discoveries and different curatorial approaches.

POP RUINS: GHOSTS OF FUTURE BUILDINGS - What if the sunken garden is an inverse ruin where ghosts of future buildings grow? The museum is surrounded by a series of gardens based on the same formal mechanisms than the main building. As in an archaeological garden the formal gardens that build spaces with vegetation and low walls will become the expansion of the Museum. The ruins will serve therefore as formal and material bases for the future constructions, inverting the arrow of time: reversed ruins of the future. The satellites will indeed follow a cycle that starts with a garden of ruins, that in a second step is transformed into a cage constructed with vegetal elements, and that in a third step is transformed into an ars topiary piece containing spaces, and as the last step in this process each satellite will be destined to grow and gradually materialise in a stable built element, finally ending in a building containing program, and presumably in the future, becoming a ruin again.

Directed and designed by

Amid.Cero9

with

Lorenzo Perri

OPEN PLAYFIELD

Exhibition and Performance @Michael Ventris Trust Award

OPEN PLAYFIELD

Inhabitable game

@Michael Ventris Trust Award

London,

2017

“Games offer play with strategy and chance, rules and competition, winning and losing. They reflect the world we live in and reveal hidden and not so hidden aspects of our nature. What does playing games reveal about you? Are you a secret cheater, a stickler for the rules or a gloating winner?” -Game Plan V&A Exhibition

The world we live in is a intricate network of connections. Today everything is connected. Connecting through digital media, connecting our life with virtual reality, with places. What we do as architects but as well as people is to connect fragments. The way we put together our cultural environment, our knowledge, our influences is what makes your own persona. As architects, we are fully immersed in this fragmented reality. The way we create our work and ourselves is through connecting the parts we get in touch with. It is almost impossible to divide the author and his background from the project itself. Indeed, both in the academic and in the professional world, we investigate the way to assemble informations, discussing the conceptual links between different instances and how to adapt them into physical form. The first and foremost stage is the collection of references, the moment you make your own archive to construct your cultural ground. The way you begin selecting your own fragments creates your own device, your body of production.

However, even though you’re always told to find meaningful connections in this vast ocean of informations, the process of selecting the right ingredients is often assigned to intuition, rarely taught, led or controlled. To design is to choose, our job as individuals is to distill the essential components to achieve a collective product. Therefore, why someone would select one thing to be more relevant

The proposal is a small inhabitable playground to “design” the way you select and collect fragments in the architectural creative process, An ironic attempt to “design intuitions” rather than just proposing an intuitive design. Play has been taken up as a core action of cultural production. The space of gaming incorporates a fundamental dichotomy: chance and chaos together with order and hierarchies.

This machine - a wooden inhabitable maze, where you direct a ball into a hole to drop a selected fragment - is a study of modifications, examining what happens when things combine, interact, change place.The physical instability of the play-field is a metaphor of our contemporary realm, where a cross pollination between disciplines, people and objects relentlessly develops. On one hand you introduce a certain amount of objectivity in the process, designing the parameters of the play-field. You can organise the fragments in the pots as in a zoning act, you can dispose the maze - the obstacles for the ball -as if it was an architectural plan. At the same time you enhance the subjectivity, accepting that the selection of your references is led by chaos to a certain extent. You can’t predict where the ball is going to fall. You can design the play-field but you can’t fully control it. You’re constantly challenged by the chance and its mechanisms.

Lemonot

GAME ON!

Play

Pinball machine

@AA Diploma (AA Prize)

GAME ON!

Pinball machine

@AA Diploma (AA Prize)

London,

2016

The project explores different architectural elements and concepts within the form of a pinball machine. The arcade game, uses a steel ball which starts at the top of the machine, following a number of obstacles until it reaches the end of the complex maze. The primary objective of the game is to score as many points as possible.

The pinball machine is the one game that demands a constant and relentless collision between the ball (the protagonist) and the play field. It celebrates randomness over strategy, and endurance over attack. The project argues that "we adopt a game mentality, because play is a core allegory of cultural production". The designer states that "the more you play, the more possibilities you encounter, all the while you hone your skills and develop your agenda, similar to that of an architect."

The construction which took a whole year to be designed and assembled, includes individual 3D parts which are used to form three separate levels. the first level is of the fragments, where you gather what becomes a part of your collection. The second level is the ground, where these pieces begin to form a distributed landscape of ideas. The third level is the bridges, with which you connect these landscapes together into one continuous and contained little world.

Sabrina Morreale

with

Natasha Sandmeier

Manolis Stavrakakis

Video

Sabrina Morreale

RELIQUARY

Exhibition and Performance @Campo

RELIQUARY

Exhibition and book

@Campo

Rome,

2016

Mankind’s fascination with historic artefacts provides the necessary framework to allow us to cope with our collective existential fears – to, in short, comprehend the magnitude and terror of the natural world. Together they provide a codified, iconographic language which both comforts and instructs us in ways to behave, both alone and together. Throughout history knowledge has been chronicled, transmitted and distilled in the form of myths and narratives embedded within architectural fabric.

GENESIS Extraction is a geological process. The Earth is in a continual process of exhuming and stratifying, pulling apart and colliding with itself. The reconfiguration of excavated material (design) is a pursuit which mankind has utilised above all other activities; we have, for centuries, systematically taken from the ground, translated that which we wrest into objects of use, before burying it once again.

METAMORPHOSIS Reconfiguration might also be read as manufacture. From raw material we make tools to create more of the same – once it is taken from the ground and imbued with meaning beyond its material value, it is changed beyond former utility. This gradual and ever expanding repertoire of objects, forms and tools represents a fascination with evolution – be it of ourselves, the spaces in which we reside, or the environments that we distance ourselves from. The larger desire to manage and configure the natural world—by carving, enclosing and overlaying—is ongoing and, to a certain degree, inevitable.

TRANSLATION The translation material hewn or extracted from the ground—be it stone, clay or ore—is an occupation which is being continuously refined. Two dimensional surfaces bely the three dimensional world, and our instruments of measurement allow us to scale the environment in order to imagine and inscribe new configurations of and for it. The act of translation mediates between the virtual sphere and its implications for the real world.

BIRTH The built world is manifested through the strain and labour of both man and machine. The core elements of architecture—a wall, a roof, an arch, or a column—are able to orchestrate the natural environment and bend it into a comfortable, useful human habitat. Once an idea has been conceived, refined and made buildable the process of nurturing it into reality begins.

LIFE Once a collection of elements have been choreographed into structure, the resultant spaces are occupied. The building, therefore, is subsumed into the fabric of a city and threaded into its civic and quotidian life. It begins to facilitate coexistence, exclusion, privacy, and the public life of individuals.

DEATH As with all things, a lifespan is finite – and often expedited by poor design (consider the conscious act of planned obsolescence). Fatigue, volatility, and irrelevance lead to collapse (a natural end), while others are purposefully put to death: an execution which, by nature of its scale, demands both patience and preparation. The elements of the building’s design and construction are dissolved before they are salvaged and reclaimed.

PROCESSION All life ends ceremoniously. In the case of a building, one configuration has come to pass and another begins; processes of fragmentation and translocation disperse the elements which once comprised a whole. Most are taken to landfill to be fed back into the ground while some are repurposed. Both fates are symbolic: the act of carrying from one place to another should be read as a ritual.

ARCHAEOLOGY Methodically ordered from a chaos of rubble (landfill), individual elements begin to speak of their former use. Set upon and aside from an abstracted topography, they are realigned to a grid in order to find clarity. The passage of time imbues even the most mundane objects with meaning beyond their function or their form, and it is here that we find interest. They represent something beyond our immediate understanding of the world around us.

RELIQUIARY This manufactured landscape entwines multiple worlds into one. As an edifice of repurposed relics, this fragmented and arbitrary terrain becomes a single codified heterogenous landscape. It is a museum of redundant matter scavenged, salvaged, positioned and resurrected as a ruin.

Directed by

OMMX

with

James Taylor Foster

PhotosIllustrations

BREWING DEMOCRACY

Political brewery

@AA Diploma (Honours)

BREWING DEMOCRACY

Political brewery

@AA Diploma (Honours)

Ouagadougou,

2016

22 June 2016 Architectural Association, London

Burkina Faso means “The Land of Free Man” in Moorè, but for the past 30 years the country has been under a strict military regime. Politicians formed a sterile opposition, and civilians had absolutely no role. A democratic process has now begun and the activists of Le Balai Citoyen meet the Dolotières – women exclusively in charge of the dolo brewing ritual - to create a communal arena, where the production and consumption of beer supports political emancipation.

A space of accumulation growing from a marketplace, whose verticality is juxtaposed to the modernist tower of the BCEAO bank, a witness to the French influence over local economy. This assembly is a different bank, where grain, beer and political utopias are stored. A compound of functional silos, whose absence carves out different public spaces – protected within an inhabitable cladding, a framework to create a fragile mass and a direct involvement between people and architecture.

A clash between contemporary sophisticated techniques and tribal animistic instances, essential to conceive and celebrate a raised political brewery – run by women - in such a context.

Lorenzo Perri

with

Diploma 5

Cristina Diaz Moreno

Efren Garcia Grinda

Benjamin Reynolds