SPIRITUAL LINES

Exhibition

@Cho Why Gallery

SPIRITUAL LINES

Exhibition

@Cho Why Gallery

Bangkok ,

2018

The purpose of this exhibition is to identify the spirituality behind certain informal assets in Bangkok, filtering them through selected design practices. This happen through the appropriation of one of the most powerful procedures belonging to Thai subculture: the Sak Yant, the sacred protecting tattoos. We dissect their aesthetics, we construe their symbolic meaning - displaced into nowadays cosmopolitan culture and filtered through the logics of architectural representation.

“Yantra” is a sanskrit word derived from “yam”, which means control or restrain, and “tra” which means freedom or liberation. The majority of people in Thailand are Buddhist but the Thai people have preserved a religious flexibility that forbids easy categorising and the concept of a single religious truth. In Thailand Sak Yant are as much a manifestation of these open mindsets as they are tools of social control. Perhaps the Sak Yant tell us that life is full of contradiction not meant to be resolved.

Indeed, we see architecture as a relentless interplay between precision - the construction of hierarchies - and expression - the representation of symbolic mechanisms. We see the act of drawing as a combination of figurative instances and geometrical abstraction, as well as a medium to address the spirituality embedded into people’s interactions.

Lemonot and Reminisce Tattoo collaborate to deconstruct architectural drawings and Sak Yant, hybridising layers and elements, to highlight methodological parallelisms and to trigger a creative exchange between these two disciplines.

The event took place at Cho Why, set in a beautiful shophouse in Chinatown. Through different crafted experiences, staged across the three floors of the gallery, visitors discovered and engaged with the nature of contemporary spiritual lines.

Directed and curated by

Lemonot

with

David Fernandez

Reminisce Tattoo

Video & Stencils

INDA students

CULTURAL ASSEMBLING

Play

Workshop and exhibition

@AAvs El Alto

CULTURAL ASSEMBLING

Workshop and exhibition

@AAvs El Alto

Crucero del Sur _ El Alto,

2018

The AA Visiting School El Alto questions the ideas of identity, folklore translated into architecture – that becomes thus a collision among multiple symbolic fragments, far beyond its disciplinary boundaries and conventional testing grounds.

Act 1 - Defragmenting We started constructing a new architectural artefact in a chaotic process of fragmentation and re-assembly, transfiguring each element we would use, charging it with symbolic and aesthetic sense regarding the cultural power of the “Diablada of Oruro”. In the process of understanding this, we dived into the first week of the workshop to dismantle our own, identitarian fragments and combining them with a protagonist of the Diablada that was assigned to each one of us. The task was to take the essence out of the characters and ask ourselves: what defines that persona? Is it something visual, symbolic or both at the same time? What does that mask transcend in human nature? How can we make an ancient dance contemporary?

Act 2 - The Kingdom of Fragments The elements we selected and arranged did not work in a vacuum. We are all part of a bigger picture. The process of designing continued with the production of the surroundings. The context, made out of ceramics became our frame to play within. Each one of us had its own totem shaped out of geometrical cones, in different shades and sizes. Through these totems we fueled the design of the entire ground, where synthesis and syncretism aroused.

Act 3 - Assembling the choreography The last week we worked in one of the cholets of Freddy Mamani Silvestre. The place itself suggested us to make a centerpiece as in each of its buildings, the shapes and columns meet and intertwine almost in a knot right in the centre of the rooms. This centerpiece involved the assembly of the miniatures in a series of stages that resemble the sequence of building up any architectural project. The action of translating and appropriating objects, placing them in a new context gave a new symbology for our ground. We used objects as a medium to construct architecture. The whole project got unveiled through a performance, revealing the meaning of this ground: an inverted ceiling with a complex chandelier in the middle. Our painting became a fresco, our centerpiece – a chandelier, our totems - ceiling lights and our movements were trajectories to our ideas

Taught and curated by

Lemonot

with

Delphine Blast

Fernando Cajias

Ronal Grebe Crespo

Mario Sarabia

Freddy Mamani Silvestre

THE FACTORY

Childrens’ library

@Pinocchio International competition

THE FACTORY

Childrens' library

@Pinocchio International competition

Collodi,

2017

“The child who concentrates is immensely happy” - Maria Montessori

The Factory is a platform for children’s playing and learning. The Factory is a park within the park, both isolated and connected with the exterior through envelopes of transparent bricks. An artificial mountain, where a linear library encloses clusters of different workshops. Each one of them allow the children to explore, to concentrate, therefore to be happy.

Lemonot

with

Dario Marcobelli

Illustrations

Sabrina Morreale

INDA students

EDIBLE ARCHETYPES

Play

Exhibition and Performance @Festival of Creative Urban Living

EDIBLE ARCHETYPES

Artefacts and prototypes

@Festival of Creative Urban Living

Lisbon,

2017

Edible Archetypes begins with the Florentine Zuccotto, credited to be one of history’s first frozen desserts, and an “archetype” of the traditional Italian patisserie. With roots in Renaissance culinary history, the Zuccotto, or “pumpkin”, is a cream-filled pan di spagna sponge cake flavored with pink Alchermes liquor and covered in a chocolate ganache. Its shape is said to be derived from soldiers who used their helmets as a mould. Its appearance reminds us of a proper architectural archetype: the dome.

Beginning with Brunelleschi’s famous design for the dome of the Florence Cathedral, the largest brick dome in the world and a masterpiece of European architecture, Edible Archetypes aims to reinvent the Zuccotto through the lens of five different cities and their signature architectural domes. Each new recipe is developed as part of a typological investigation for an extravagant yet consistent family of dome-shaped cakes, creating a series of outcomes based on the combination of architectural variables and dessert construction

Rather than designing for food or with food, Edible Archetypes is an attempt to trigger a new collaborative understanding: designing through food. The whole project goes beyond aesthetic experimentation—we are drawing a methodological parallelism, combining techniques and procedures belonging to different creative fields. As architects, we recognize that the blurred lines between disciplines like art, music, cinema, politics anthropology and gastronomy creates new fertile grounds for unexpected assemblages. We believe that this approach helps architects design and shape the contents of our contemporary world.

We are using architecture as a methodology to challenge the way patisserie is made, making architectural categories the connecting mechanisms, juxtaposed and applied to raw edible ingredients. Each recipe has its own assembling process, where the morphology of each new dessert is treated as a dome prototype: the result of architectural suggestions, mistakes and trials.

Architects and pastry chefs often use similar tools and elements with the same density and composition, independently adopting similar strategies to address structural problems and material behaviors. In this spirit, the models and drawings for Edible Archetypes were both influenced and responsible for directing the cooking process. And here resides the paradoxical beauty of the project: working in parallel, we learned how to represent a recipe as a design and vice-versa, combining architectural and gastronomic languages in a faceted making process.

Eventually, the project aims to create not only new desserts, but perhaps the machinery and the conceptual tools for them, brought back as ingredients for architectural strategies. Edible Archetypes keeps the two disciplines both autonomous and methodologically connected, determining a fine boundary where one ends and the other starts. And it is exactly there, where we practice architecture. Our favorite “spaces” to produce architecture are indeed the borders between different disciplines (in this case patisserie and architecture itself). We value ambiguity as a positive and productive intellectual tool.

MATERIALITY (MILAN) The traditional Milanese Panettone is combined with the St.Honoré to create an hybrid between the flavours of the Zuccotto and the tactile textures of Italian industrial design products from the ’60s. A basement of naked stracciatella—obtained through a sophisticated horizontal layering of frozen cream and chocolate—could replace the laminate support for a Sottsass animalistic lamp. Here, it sustains a cylinder of yellow crumbs and several rings of spiky almonds. They puncture a pink icing cap, 3D-printed as a 15cm diameter semi-sphere in more than six hours, almost as long as a full size panettone needs to rest after being baked.

SCALE (PARIS) Transparent isomalt spheres—flavoured with Alchermes—are filled with cream, pan di spagna and chocolate ice cream. The entire Zuccotto is thus contained into a platonic shape with a diameter of 2.5cm, reproducing and inverting the scalar process of the Newton Cenotaph, where Étienne-Louis Boullée imagined the whole universe inside a building as an homage to Sir Isaac Newton. The spheres are grouped on top of four dome slices cantilevered from a chocolate stick. Casting and joining elements are the most similar procedures in the two disciplines, with actions choreographed in the same way. However, the artificial powder will never be as expressive as a thin, crunchy sesame vault.

ORNAMENT (ISFAHAN) A double-layer of chocolate crust supports rows of Zoolbias, Baklavas and other typical Iranian fried pastries between its inverted muqarnas, creating a dome, where structure and ornamental envelope become almost indistinguishable. The overall shape recalls a rationalised cluster of grapevine, angur in Iranian, which becomes a geometrical set of three ingredients, playing different roles: the grapes have a neutral taste with a bit of acidity, the insulating nests of fried honey is extremely sweet and the chocolate perforated layer, as a plaster counter-facade, balances the whole compound with its bitterness.

STRUCTURE (ROME) Following the structural system of Hadrian’s Pantheon in Rome, the edible bowl for creamy desserts is treated as an inverted dome, constructed with layered rings of caramelised bricks forming a hole in the centre. They are an hybrid between Florentine biscuits and slices of Roman Pangiallo, oriented radially in the same direction: a yellow, shiny and smooth texture on the exterior contrasts with a crispy conglomerate of nuts pointed towards the interior, reproducing the light and dark effect of a cave. Dried fruit become smashed rubbles of terrazzo tiles, casted into bricks of transparent resin, while the liquid silicon reveals its natural resemblance with the egg yolk density.

FORM (MOSCOW) Highlighting the similarities between jelly pieces and the colourful domes of Saint Basil’s church in Moscow, this cake creates an interplay between what is solid and what is soft, below a deceiving envelope. As in a matryoshka doll, there are different strata—a thin crust of pink icing hides a layer of jelly where, raisin and dry fruit are floating. The baked part of the traditional Kulich is displaced in the middle, as about to come out from the homogenising drape with a vertical pinnacle. This pivotal element organizes a series of colourful plans, thorough result of the horizontal sectioning of the gelatinous volume.

Designed and constructed by

Lemonot

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