socks-studio

Dpr-barcelona flickr sets are already worth visiting, but check out this collection about Ugo La Pietra’s La Casa Telematica. (and if you’re in Paris don’t lose the exhibition of lots of Ugo La Pietra’s drawings, collages and sculptures at Mercier & Associés gallery).

Artist, architect and designer, but slightly less known visionary figure among the italian radicals of the 60′s and 70′s, la Pietra shifted soon his attention from the local italian scene to focus on the viennese avantgarde (Hans Hollein, Walter Pichler, Frederick Kiesler, Raimund Abraham …)

The observation of cities dynamics allowed him to develop his research on the relations individual / environment and to address the need for a conquering of the urban territory through an individual experience.

La Pietra worked long on the concept of the Casa Telematica [The Domicile Cell: A Microstructure: within the Information and Communications Systems, 1971], a project he first presented in MOMA’s New York 1972 exhibition “Italy: The new domestic landscape“. Symbolised by the archetypic form of the triangle, the house is a place of gathering, processing and dissemination of information from the public to the private realm and likewise. Anticipating the internet, this project proposes to expand the physical perception of the body and of the domestic cell to the awareness of the influences on behaviour and the mental suffering of the individual produced by the urban fabric.

Via: Ethel Baraona, who took the following pictures at the exhibition “Environments and Counter Environments” in DHUB (Disseny Hub) in Barcelona

An ambitious title for a 1978 obscure yet brilliantly illustrated book by italian scholar studying urban planning in UCLA Giovanni Brino.

Just reviewed on Archinect by Orhan Ayyüce. Here his flickr set on the subject.

Love the titling done with that 70′s digital font, analogous to the one in the “talking” car in 1972′s “Reyner Banham loves Los Angeles“.

Via: Ethel Baraona

Vittorio Marchis, teacher of History of Technology and History of material culture, is the author of a book that will be published next Nov 2nd, called “Centocinquanta (anni di) invenzioni italiane” (150 (years of) Italian inventions), a selection of 150 patents by italian inventors from 1851 to today.

A strict selection of just one patent each year, the book doesn’t just revolve around famous inventions / inventors, but choses to present also less known propositions by simple workers, soldiers, sport players, etc…

Check also the interesting Marchis’s autopsies of machines“.

Did you known that the iconic DeLorean DMC-12 featured on Back from the future, was an original design by Italian Giorgietto Giugiaro?

Here some drawings from the original article on Post.it:

Looking among my dad’s old numbers of Casabella, I’ve found lots of interesting and not-very-known articles by 70′s Italian radical architects.
We’ll publish some of them during the next days.

Here’s the first one:

Archizoom Associati:
Elements and structures obtainable with square pieces of cloth, and with cuts, folds and stitches

On Casabella 384, Dec 1973

Download a hi-res pdf version of these pages (17mb)

Superstudio was an architecture firm, founded in 1966 in Florence, Italy by Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia. Superstudio was one of major part of the Radical architecture movement of the late 1960s.

Related:
on ArchOne
on DesignMuseum
Bok Boks birthday yardcast
in IntotheLoop

On: But Does It Float
Via: Ethel Baraona