What About Archizines in Buenos Aires?

Archizines Debuts in Buenos Aires

The Archizines Exhibition (Curated by Elias Redstone) together with Revista Plot  brings the world traveling exhibition of independent architectural publications to the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT) in Buenos Aires. The show that will be on display 17 May – 7 June 2013 includes both WAIzines, What About It? Part 1, and Part 2.

What About Artifice Catalog?

Pure Hardcore Icons featured on the Cover of Artifice Books Autumn 2013 Catalog

Pure Hardcore Icons on Artifice Books Catalog

WAI’s upcoming publication Pure Hardcore Icons: A Manifesto on Pure Form in Architecture (August 2013) is featured on Artifice Books on Architecture Autumn Catalog.

The Catalog can be downloaded here.

Pure Hardcore Icons catalog summary:

In the kingdom of architecture the shape reigns supreme. Ever since the beginning of history, pure geometric form has been one of architecture’s recurrent obsessions. A genealogy of buildings shaped as pyramids, spheres, and cubes can be traced back to ancient times, while contemporary projects, either as poured concrete or virtual bytes, often resemble stacked boxes and looping skyscrapers.

Despite torrents of pure shapes flooding with evidence magazine pages and computer screens around the world, architecture lacks a written work to declare its intentions. Pure Hardcore Icons is the first manifesto on pure form in architecture.

WAI Architecture Think Tank, directed by authors Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia, have created a vademecum with provocative collages, essays and an interview that promise to bring form—a persistent taboo in the theoretical discourse—to the forefront of the architectural discussion. Through a mixture of perspicacity, conviction and humour, Pure Hardcore Icons aims to raise awareness about the dialectic of pure form and architecture, hoping that its potential and limitations could be fully grasped either in practice, academia, or as a cultural and intellectual exercise.

Artifice Books Autumn 2013 Catalog

What About Blindness?

Blindness

Blindness from WAI Think Tank on Vimeo.

Blindness is the second installment of the trilogy of animated architectural narratives created by WAI Architecture Think Tank (Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski)  to explore the essence of architecture.

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Wall Stalker narrated the journey of three characters in search of the essence of architecture. After an exhausting odyssey from a city of icons to a mysterious wall, the wanderers were confronted with a blinding whiteness that not only blurred their hope to find what they were looking for, but put in question their true intentions.

Continuing where Wall Stalker left, the plot is resumed after the characters (now on a first person point of view) are washed in the whiteness of the wall they initially came to see in their search for answers. Once stricken by a white form of agnosia resulting from the purging experience of the mystical wall, the characters are unable to tell if what they think they see is either a memory of times past or unknown possibilities of new paths to be taken. Going through desolated landscapes, the characters face a dichotomy on which path to take: if the one that points to the uncertain abstraction reminiscing of the wall that left them confused or if to the clearly defined urban iconography that can be recognized in the distance. Once drawn by the hypnotizing sharpness of symbolism, the protagonists are sequestered inside Atlas, an urban maze of unremarkable buildings overlooked by four pyramidal monoliths, one of them containing what will make the wanderers discover—against their will—the last part of their journey.

Like Wall Stalker, Blindness is a graphic radiography of the fictional subconscious of architecture. This time using pieces from Jan Garbarek, Eberhard Weber , Agnes Buen Garnås, Rainer Brüninghaus, and Naná Vasconcelos as acoustic landscape the architectural narrative is built once again around twelve chapers / photomontages that depict a journey to find meaning in architecture. The images evolve around fictional landscapes that evoke a new kind of blindness of symbolism and meaning.

www.wai-architecture.com
www.waithinktank.com
http://cargocollective.com/garciafrankowski