Between music and Performing art.

They are both known for their transgressive attitude and the eccentricity in their performances. 

Lady Gaga, singer, producer and queen of dressing up, and Marina Abramovich, contemporary art’s pioneer, well-known for the intensity in her pieces, together in a common project.

But how did this cooperation start?

Lady Gaga and Marina Abramovich in "Cleaning the house".

Louis Kahn: monumental and timeless architecture

Louis Kahn

Among the greatest architects of the XXth century, Louis Kahn makes his own path, as it happens for every major personality of all time. Despite today his legacy and awards are doubless, he never caught up the fame of the main Modern Movement leaders such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. Why ? 

ARplus Holiday

Lo staff di ARplus vi saluta per le prossime settimane e tornerà presto ad Agosto con nuovi post ;) Auguriamo a tutti una fantastica estate!

Arplus staff will be temporarily out for the upcoming weeks, but be back soon in August with brand new posts ;) Happy and relaxing summer to everybody!

Francesca e Daniela

Every sign is a story.

“Every child is an artist. The problem s how to remain an artist once we grow up.” 

Pablo Picasso

Every one of us should open those dusty drawers where we used to save the memories of our childhood. Between report cards, old exercise books and pictures we could find also many drawings, that we forgot about. It sounds strange but watching those drawings could be very useful to know something more about our childhood, even more than exercise books, because every symbol and every sign tell us about a step in our growing up.

Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Musée d'Orsay, 5 Quai Anatole France, Paris

From the outside it stands just like an impressive and gorgeous railway station of the late ‘800, from the inside it reveals a museum of modern art dedicated to the “golden century”. Great masterpieces by Monet, Manet, Renoir, Gauguin, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cezanne, Van Gogh are only some of a number of other amazing pieces of art displayed at Musée d’Orsay, the French capital museum collecting the “artistic creations of western world between 1848 and 1914” regarding art, sculpture and decorative arts. Framework of such a great masterpieces is the contemporary architectural restoration as the result of the excellent makeover that turned the Gare d’Orsay into the current museum. 

Behind the mask of a Geisha

 “I had the strange sensation of having lost all feeling in my face; every time I touched my cheek, I could feel only a vague sense of pressure from my finger. I did it so many times Auntie had to redo my makeup. Afterward as I studied myself in the mirror, a most peculiar thing happened. I knew that the person kneeling before the makeup stand was me, but so was the unfamiliar girl gazing back. I actually reached out to touch her. She wore the magnificent makeup of a geisha. Her lips were flowering red on a stark white face, with her cheeks tinted a soft pink. Her hair was ornamented with silk flowers and sprigs of un-husked rice.”

Arthur Golden – Memoirs of a geisha.

To tie - Maria Lai's tapes.

In a village called Ulassai,  set in the inside of Sardinia, every child is told about an ancient legend, generation by generation. It’s said that a long time ago (but probably this is a real story that happened in 1861) a house was overwhelmed by a landslip from the mountains around the village and three children died.  But a little girl survived and she brought  a light blue ribbon in her fingers.

In September the 8^th in 1988, le life of Ulassai was embraced by a light blue ribbon once more, this time not because of a tragedy,  but for being involved in an artwork.

Maria Lai

BiodiverCity

The degree of variation of life forms within a given species, ecosystem, biome is called biodiversity. In other words, it’s the “variety of life”, the countless shades through which life shows up around us.

Art Curiosities - True or False?

It’s easy to think that art history is something made of years and years of studies and knowledge. Ok, it takes studies and care to understand all of those historical and social processes that brought us to today’s concept of art. But we are forgetting that artists are just people gifted by a great sensibility, who talk about their own vision or life through art. But…what is so special In their lives? What are the oddities and peculiarities that male their lives so unique?

Let’s discover together legends and adventures of some famous artists through a TRUE or FALSE test.

Loving Frank

Loving Frank book cover

In love with Frank…it’s just what I have always thought, since the moment I first knew him. 

He is Frank Lloyd Wright, She is Mamah Borthwick Cheney. 

From our current perspective: 

He is one of founder of the Modern Movement, father of the Organic Architecture that promotes harmony between human habitation and the natural world through design approaches, American icon, worldwide known; She is the intellectual and cultured woman who chooses the love over her family, who also finds in this love the reason to pursuing her ambitions, in the context of first ‘900s when women were hardly given other roles but wives and mothers. 

From their current perspective: 

He is a rising architect, not yet such famous the way we know today. Besides he was surely well known at Oak Park (Illinois – USA) where he settled down with his wife and six children and he started performing the style of the prairie houses, then travelling around the world, in Italy, Germany, Japan. By his side Frank wants Mamah, who he designed the refuge of Taliesin (Winsconsin – USA) for, dreaming of a happy ending and hoping to escape prying eyes. Unfortunately it will be the set of a tragedy instead; She and her husband gives him the job to design their house in 1903, just like the most of Oak Park residents at that time, and this is how they first met. Silent and sadly quite, she ends up falling in a overwhelming love that gives her a new life, makes her carve out her career and support feminism. This huge passion yet splits her heart with the sense of guilty for acting like an unnatural mother who had left her young children behind. 

F.L.Wright and Mamah Cheney

Loving Frank is a novel by Nancy Horan that depicts this love story, truly happened between 1907 and 1914. A scandal relationship, but yet so passionate and heartfelt, which seems to be cursed by destiny into its tragic end.

Revolutionary women in art history: Gentileschi - de Lempicka - Kahlo.

Everywhere In art history, we can meet beautiful and famous women. Some of them were princess, queens and noble ladies. But most of them they were just models chosen by artists for their beauty and charisma. We can easily recognize their faces and their shapes, and a lot of artists became famous for their productions of women’s portraits. Maybe they were their lovers, maybe they were just simple people in town.

Maya desnuda - Francisco Goya - 1800

But what about female artists? What do we know about women in front of the canvas? 

Architecturally incorrect ?

Upside down house - Teferns, Austria

If it’s true that every architecture is to address a functional, esthetic, representative function - and hopefully a mix of them all – and if it’s true as well that those who make use of it are people – and not the designers that much – it has a fundamental importance their judgment, from minds to word of mouth, which rebounds on the piece of architecture. It seems quite fair though, if we admit that designing is a real job! There has to be a dealing with the real design results in terms of more or less approvals. Nevertheless, I believe it is a designer’s job always adding a fair amount of innovation as it can benefit both the experience and the usability of every building work. 

How then does the architectural innovation meet and clashe with the public judgment and how is it more or less understood by people ? How do we react to the unusual made up of new spaces, technologies and materials? 

"Rhapsody in blue" - The sound of NYC

Close your eyes and dream about walking in a very crowded street in downtown Manhattan. Done? Can you feel the taxies running so closed to you, can you hear the sounds of people chatting, walking, talking about what they have to do, or where do they have to go? Try to smell the air, try to feel the nice fragrance of flowers and wet grass in Central Park. Try to feel the smell of toasted nuts, and hot pretzel, and hot coffee, by the street. Someone is walking very fast just behind you, and you can just suppose where is he going. You can hear the terrible sound of cars running on the street, but you can also hear a happy music that is advertising a show in Broadway. 

Can you feel everything? This is “Rhapsody in blue”.

Photoframe of "Rhapsody in blue", "Fantasia 2000" version by Walt Disney

"All". Maurizio Cattelan at Guggenheim Museum, New York.

There are many, many ways to find a little bit of Italian spirit in New York City, starting from the famous Mulberry street, heart of Little Italy, to restaurants, tourists, immigration’s stories.

But those people who were there in November 2011, could also take advantage of a very peculiar event, to breathe a little bit of Italian culture. In those days, in Solomon Guggenheim Museum, the very first, big retrospective has been opened by the artist who most of all dominates the Italian artistic world, Maurizio Cattelan, that’s why between November 4^th 2011 and January 22^nd 2012 it was very easy to hear there a lot of Italian voices, visitors’s attracted by the event, curious people’s, journalists’s.

“All”, that’s the name of this spectacular exhibition that showed all Maurizio’s artworks. Even if he lives in New York City, he has been a critic witness and a sarcastic storyteller about Italian vicissitudes, and this big exhibition makes him a worldwide known artist.

9 + 1 Ways of Being Political: 50 Years of Political Stances in Architecture and Urban Design.

During the second half of the past century, we can notice how Architecture showed its political potential, responding actively to attitudes, problems and evolving conditions of urban society. This is what the exhibition “9 + 1 Ways of Being Political: 50 Years of Political Stances in Architecture and Urban Design” is about. Presented at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, it runs until March 25th 2013 in the Architecture and Design Galleries, third floor. A chronological path leads visitors to discover the 9 ways plus 1 through which politic attitude had interfered with architects’ and city planners’ design proposals. The exhibition is organized by Pedro Gadanho, Curator and Margot Weller, Curatorial Assistant and it presents a number of institutional critiques putting architectural stances in dialogue with the works of other urban practitioners such ad artists, photographers and designers.