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Pavilion _competition
@Festival of Creative Urban Living

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THE INFLATABLE HUT

Pavilion _competition

@Festival of Creative Urban Living

Milton Keynes,

2019

Milton Keynes ‘s community will soon experience a set of urban mirabilia: roundabouts will be turned into agoras, crossing lines into playgrounds and parking lots in gathering compounds.

In such a context we propose an inhabitable festive object. An optimistic round shape to attract and cuddle the visitors, a lightly monumental framework to strengthen the celebratory apparatus of this festival.

A temporary structure that is indeed ephemeral and utopian. Feel free to walk through it or to stay for longer - a pleasant breeze will blow filtered by the hanging telescopes. A rigid basement which acts as an urban carpet - punctured by three different paths: from two sides extravagant portals are welcoming pedestrian, fast bikers, and slow thinkers while a tiny path entering from the small mouth of the balloon is large enough just to crawl in. A privileged door only for curious children.

Once inside, the basement itself becomes a smooth bench; then, rings of soft seats arise from the perimeter, framing a 360 intimate theatre: a place to rest alone or to laugh together. Eventually, anchored on top of everything, this colorful balloon stands silently: an architecture to be questioned - impalpable yet very present.

Designed by

Lemonot

Exhibition and Performance
@Low Fat Art Festival

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INTIMATE MEMORABILIA

Exhibition and Performance

@Low Fat Art Festival

Bangkok,

2019

"Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging." - Walter Benjamin

The Thang Nguan Vintage House is a place where time freezes: from its decadent walls and faded colors to its neighboring communities, you suddenly find yourselves in another era. Once inside, after the narrow staircase that gives access to the terrace, visitors are immersed within layers of objects, still imprinted with collective personal memories.

The project, developed through a series of ephemeral rooms, does nothing more than emphasizing and creating a path between these fragments that were once used and nowadays are still intact: the aim is to preserve their peculiar value through pure matter within a theatrical space. The exhibition has been designed as an architectural still life, where, through delicate surfaces and heterogeneous openings, you are able to be face to face with these objects. This curated space is a point of departure to be part of someone's recollection of playing - eating - travelling.

As architects, we not only assembled personal relics, images, photographs, and other documents but we became archivists who, shaping the geometry and the materiality of the rooms, were able to frame multiple views on this intimate past. For the first time, this private space is open to the public, which becomes the main actor, in dialogue with belongings and pieces of uncle Poonsak's story.

During the festival the deck of this house became a meeting point for all the people of the neighborhood, with events during the day and concerts in the evening. After the dismantling of the exhibition, the stage set has been used for performances by local artists.The whole structure is super light, composed of three metal curved rails, coloured in bright pink, holding white translucent curtains to frame three different spaces - punctured by an intricate path made of terrazzo-like rubber scrap. This linear carpet guides through the objects on the floor, leaning also towards the central table – a sculptural piece constructed with inverted traditional Thai wooden trusses, found on site.

Designed and directed by

Lemonot

with

Wayla Amatathammachad

Riewparboon Watnaree

Kanich Khajohnsri

Atichart Watanapichetpong

Praewrung Chantumrongkul

Natcha Thanachanan

Photos

Prin Tumsatan

Workshop and exhibition
@AAvs El Alto

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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

Childrens’ library
@Pinocchio International competition

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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.

Designed by

Lemonot

with

Dario Marcobelli

Illustrations

Sabrina Morreale

INDA students

Archaeological museum
@Cyprus International Competition

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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

Political brewery
@AA Diploma (Honours)

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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.

Designed by

Lorenzo Perri

with

Diploma 5

Cristina Diaz Moreno

Efren Garcia Grinda

Benjamin Reynolds

Milton Keynes, 2019
Bangkok, 2019
La Paz, 2018
Collodi, 2017
Nicosia, 2017
Ouagadougou, 2016
lemonot

Sabrina Morreale, AA Dipl
Lorenzo Perri, AA Dipl (Hons)

projects@lemonot.co.uk

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lemonot

Sabrina Morreale, AA Dipl
Lorenzo Perri, AA Dipl (Hons)

London, Vienna, Stockholm, La Paz and Italy

projects@lemonot.co.uk