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Roberto La Forgia is one of those artists whose indisputable talent needs some time to completely bloom. Knowing him since almost six years now we’ve always thought he’s one of the best illustrators and comic artists around, but still, until some days ago, you wouldn’t find a lot of material by him out there. This is no critique at all. Conversely, in a epoch of widespread bulimic production, he used the exact time he needed to investigate and refine his technique, to work on the details, to wait humbly for the moment everything was at its right place, like an old artisan. We remember we received a draft copy of the book he was working on, almost a year ago for a preview. The boards were complete and he only needed some technical overtime to get them ready to print. But Roberto wasn’t completely satisfied with the result and he took his friends’ reviews and comments so seriously he decided to go back and rework half of it. This is something only those few would dare.

Yes, until some days ago, because it happens that his first book – “Il signore dei colori” – is out now and we bet it’s as good as it looks.

“Il signore dei colori” (Lord of colors) is the story of three youngsters becoming adults during a summer. A summer bound to reveal their weaknesses: one will understand he’s not as cool as he thought, another will be humiliated by a little girl, and the third will discover that the love of the adults may hide dark zones, pulsions that one can defend from, only if armed by a genuine naïvety.

The following is the last issue of Mosso, Roberto’s and friend free online magazine, featuring a presentation of the work with comments by Igort, Vincino, Ferruccio Giromini, and Daniel Pellegrino.
Click to download:

Thomas Carpentier’s graduation project at ESA questions the normatization of the human body proportions introduced by early Modernist Architectural manuals such as Neufert‘s, or the “Architectural Graphic Standards” or by the anthropometric scale of proportion devised by Le Corbusier with the name of Modulor.

The ambition of identifing an idealized human proportion was the alleged basis upon which building a new rational and sanitized architecture, but the mere concept of finding a norm out of an ideal body is in fact paradoxical and even discriminatory. Despite that, the Neufert’s manual easily encountered a widespread success, and the standardization today involves not only the human anatomy but also men’s behaviour.

Without futher addition to what has been already and more exhaustively written by Léopold Lambert twice in his blog (“The Modernist Ideology of a Normative Body” and “A Subversive Approach to the Ideal Normatized Body“), we leave you with the work of Thomas Carpentier.

As a parody to the normatization of the body, Thomas focuses his attention to out-of-standard but iconic character’s bodies, such as the one of a culturist, Jabba the Hutt’s, Oscar Pistorius’, Borg Queen’s or David Toole’s. Around their real or fictitious proportions he then re-imagines or create architectural spaces whose main purpose is to accomodate their other standards.

Related:

Frederick Kiesler. Architecture, “Biotechnique”, and a Peek into the Future of the Computer, 1940. Thanks to Ethel Baraona for signaling!

Friends of Think Space, the annual conceptual competition program from Zagreb, Croatia (see our project Grundrisse), have recently unveiled the theme of their 2012 cycle: Past Forward.

Curator Adrian Lahoud looked back to the recent history of architecture and asked the participants to revisit “three competitions that radically transformed architectural culture: The Peak (1982), Yokohama Port Terminal (1994) and Blur Building (1999).” All three winning entries emerged under unique conditions to take up critical positions on the predominant tendencies of their time.”







From the brief:

“The last three decades saw significant change across social, political, and environmental registers. The conjunction of capital flows, mass urbanization and increasingly interconnected cultural and financial networks have reshaped the way we understand, produce and discuss architecture resulting in a breathless cycle of formal and aesthetic transformations. This restless appearance of change conceals an increasing sense of inertia or perhaps even of confusion, in that an intellectual project has yet to accompany the overiding sense of technical virtuosity.”

More infos on Think Space 2012 site.

We’re glad to use this occasion to bring back into surface an old article from the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s architecture magazines archive of the Fabrizi family: here’s the winner of one of the three competitions: The Peak, by Zaha Hadid, a hard-edged suprematist vision for a leasure club in Hong Kong, (Domus 642/1983)

Click to enlarge:

Dream Diary is a series of surreal illustrations depicting house comfort situation with a morbid twist.

From trendhunter:
“Dreams have a tendency to use imagery and emotions that are kept buried within the subconscious, and these illustrations are a great example of that blur between the alert and reverie.”

vakavalo.com

From Things Magazine:  ”The complete archive of Synapse Magazine , a 1970s publication about the nascent electronic music scene”.

Download and enjoy.