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2020, Architectural Review
Like a Matryoshka, Smiljan Radic’s Teatro Regional Biobío in Concepción, Chile grows from one layer of the building to the next: from the solid play-spaces at its core to the translucent façades, from the volume of the building to the city outside and the landscape beyond. In a set of Russian nesting dolls, the outermost wooden figure separates at the middle, splitting top from bottom. Such division reveals a nearly identical figure inside, which in turn contains another smaller version inside of it, and so on. When opening the first doll, the user generally knows what to expect – until the last, solid doll suddenly brings the game to an end. In Radic’s theatre, every layer takes on a different nature, with its own rules and aesthetics. Hidden rooms and rehearsal spaces only reveal themselves once inside the building, with changing material expressions, colour palettes and atmospheres. There are green rooms, yellow-painted wooden surfaces and red-coated fire stairways. There are black-painted wooden surfaces and layers of coconut covering floors, walls, and ceilings. Through transparencies, openings, and spatial connections, the pieces of the building coalesce into a unified whole.
"Contemporary Homo Ludens", Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2016
Performing Architectures. Projects, Practices, Pedagogies, 2018
from PERFORMING ARCHITECTURES: PROJECTS, PRACTICES, PEDAGOGIES (London: Bloomsbury, 2018) This is the author's version of chapter 3 from the book co-edited by Andrew Filmer and Juliet Rufford, Performing Architectures: Projects, Practices, Pedagogies. Please refer to the published text when you quote from this chapter. This chapter of the book Performing Architectures examines two theatres by Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi:the iconic Teatro Oficina and the SESC Pompeia Theatre, both located in São Paulo, Brazil. The Teatro Oficina is exemplary of the sort of theatre architecture envisaged by Nietzsche – a dynamic choric space where the boundary between spectator and performer is always in question. The two theatres discussed in this chapter, though hugely significant, are still not widely known and discussed. The research demonstrates the culturally radical nature of Bo Bardi’s architectural practice, which, conducted in collaboration with artists and artisans, enabled the development of such provocative spaces of assembly. Besides, the text emphazizes Bardi’s architectural practice, and describes her negotiation of European and indigenous Brazilian ideas and practices.
Colours, toys and light are the basis of our research. The design of the technology is one of the major innovation in architecture of the last ten years. We apply this principle to urban design and sustainable architecture. The mechanical and technological systems are the very centre of contemporary design and these must be managed aesthetically. A colored building is a symbolical building: in this way architecture will achieve a new role, thanks to its presence and it will not need any external lighting: it will send its own light and colours, and will dialogue with people and with the city. Our spaces are marked by some symbolical figures, typical of the toys world. The colour, considered untidy in a neoplastic matrix lines (from Mondrian to El Lisitskij), draw new furniture built to be like a toy, even before being volumes designed to contain things. The relation between objects and toys become strictly dualistic: it’s not a simple container, it should be a toy that contains others object-toys (a kind of “matrioska”). In this context other objects-toys are relaxing toys, but also working toys. This is why Toys is at the very heart of our project, and the whole school complex has been designed using the shapes and colours of children's games. Identifiable from afar, the school stands out from its rural surroundings thanks to the movement of the roofing (at times rotating thanks to photovoltaic panels that track the sun, other times becoming a mere sail-like covering). Ultimately, these iridescent roofs which alternate higher and lower volumes, horizontal, with vertical and slating lines, hark back to that image of a city we see epitomized in paintings from the XIII and XIV centuries right up to the early Italian Renaissance. Another important inspiration for this intervention were the seaside colonies constructed along the Adriatic Riviera during the first half of the XX century. In addition, we alluded to two of James Stirling’s projects: the Olivetti Training School at Haslemere (Surrey), and the Southgate Housing at Runcorn New Town. In order to define a credible integration between Architecture and Nature (where Nature plays a seminal role in the life of a student, between toy and discovery), the buildings were designed from a planimetric point of view as a series of parallel bars of varying lengths and widths. The longitudinal links to the plot are varieties of pathways inside/outside the buildings (pavements grafted onto the interconnecting areas between the main structures) which trace out a web of pedestrian passageways. The continuity of routes, running all the way through the building, means there is no real distinction between the constructed and Nature, on the contrary it seems as though the constructed is some kind of artificial wrinkling of the earth. In addition these routes become visual sights trained on the landscape in between the buildings. The gentle wrinklings of the earth along the buildings' which help the disposition of the volumes to be assimilated by the horizontal rural landscape, as well as becoming places to let the students play and study in safety. There is no real main entrance, but from all of the internal pathways it is possible to access the buildings via glass doors: this expedient makes the use of the spaces flexible and sectional, allowing the various features to be used separately, also by spur-of-the-moment users. As extensive study of tracking solar panels allowed us to incorporate the most up-to-date technology on the market into the building's architecture. The turning cubic roofs each feature an average of 100 sm of exposed panels with double rotation gear - horizontal and vertical - so as to adapt themselves like a sunflower to the position of the sun. In addition the panels include not only photovoltaic cells but also solar heating, so as to produce hot water and electricity, thus making the buildings fully self-sustaining. References - Giotto, Cacciata dei diavoli da Arezzo, Assisi - Benozzo Gozzoli, Cacciata dei demoni da Arezzo, Arezzo - Clemente Busiri Vici, Colonia Marina “Le Navi” (XXVIII Ottobre), Cattolica (RN) - J. Stirling, Olivetti Training School, Haslemere Surey 1969 - J. Stirling, Southgate Housing, Runcorn New Town 1972 - Fausto Pagnamenta - Neeresh, Cromoterapia per bambini, Edizioni del Cigno 1996
Theatre Topics, 2018
Room One Thousand, 2014
CULTURAL AND ARTISTIC TRANSFERS IN THEATRE AND MUSIC: PAST, PRESENT, AND PERSPECTIVES
Context Matters! Exploring and Reframing Games and Play in Context, 2013
The intent of my article is to outline a process-oriented framework able to connect the micro and the macro context of the ludic experience, in order to point out an integrated vision of the phenomenon. Concerning the former, I adopt the concept of “Magic circle”, interpreted in socio-semiotic terms (Eugeni 2010). Regarding to the latter, my reference is to the “Circuit of culture” suggested by Du Gay and al. (1997). Furthermore, these dimensions are analyzed through two intersected continuums: the scripts, the repertory of practices that set our heuristics (Abelson and Schank 1977), and the frames, the conceptual pictures we employ in order to visualize and fix our symbolic systems (Eco 1975; Goffman 1974). This proposal is empirically tested following a qualitative methodology (Silverman 2013) through observations, ludic reports, collective and single in-depth interviews with three gaming groups.
Institut international de philosophie, 2020
Intersezioni. Rivista di storia delle idee, 2012
University of Manchester, 2015
Research Journal of Social Sciences and Economics Review (RJSSER), 2021
arXiv (Cornell University), 2022
Programa Congreso Testimonio y Ficción, 2024
Nederlands tijdschrift voor geneeskunde, 2006
World neurosurgery, 2018
Crimes eleitorais comentados e processo eleitoral, 2024