DOOR 19 / PH.D ARCHITECTS

Situated in an yet uninhabited loft on the top floor of ArtHouse, a new residential building designed by Russian architect Sergey Skuratov, the pop-up club Door 19 is in one a restaurant, modern art gallery and a pre-party bar. Open from 25th September to 31st October 2014, the club, in it's concept and setup, merged together high-class and counter culture. The interior design for Door 19 is the work of of PH.D architects, also Russian based. They left the brick, concrete and pluming exposed and used scaffolding construction to form the bar and gallery above it, creating an atmosphere of a work in progress and accentuating in that way the temporary character of the place and the very concept of pop-up. The rough, metal, industrial, functional was combined with expensive and elaborate details, with wood, soft, color. The best street artists from Moscow and beyond have been invited to leave their mark on the space in the form of paintings, murals and sculptures. The experience was rounded off with best quality of food and drinks prepared by Michelin-starred chefs and top mixologists and bartenders, uniforms were specially designed for the occasion by Vardoui Nazarian and Main in Main took care of the sound.

Usually these kind of temporary venues appear in unused and often most unexpected places - old factories, abandoned tunnels, private homes, and are guided by a child like DIY spirit that asks "Wouldn't it be great if ...?", and is not afraid to answer that question and just go for it. By utilizing unused facilities, these then become places of experiment where urbanism, architecture, team work, events, products can be tested. In it's core anarchic, the idea of interacting with space in way is liberating and exciting, and the factor of temporal calls for immediate action because what is here now, will be gone tomorrow and so waiting or postponing is not an option.

According to professor Ali Madanipour, there are two key regards of pop-ups: //One is that they can be a positive way of making more intensive use of urban space// and, on the other hand, //they can be an aid to consumerism in which brands create a stage setting, adding color and texture to the general mall atmosphere that is the backdrop to many of our urban spaces. Pop-up businesses support shopping – they bring a festival atmosphere to shopping.//

Door 19 was being used as a sails catalyst, introducing the visitors not only to the apartments in ArtHouse but also to the potential of ArtKvartal - a government supported project of urban regeneration of a 500ha area in Moscow. //The project is still at the design stage and is expected to take between 10 and 15 years to realize, with a model of gentrification that will fan outwards from ArtHouse, taking into its fold other upmarket art clusters such as ArtPlay and Winzavod. Once it is completed, anyone working in the creative industries, from fashion or film, will have the opportunity to rent a place to live or work in.//

In general, //Pop-up environments bring the realm of the expected into spaces where it doesn’t belong, and better, where its viewers think they don’t belong. It creates an opening not only for artwork to rediscover itself through engagement with an unusual site, and for the viewer who, through their experience of the site itself, finds vacation from normal life and thought patterns.//

[trendland, the guardian, psfk]

THE FINE ART NUDES / RASMUS MOGENSEN

//Photography is for me a search for harmonious shape and composition. What keeps me going is the fact that a creative career is a never-ending evolution in the search for a perfection that does not exist. I love the fact that there is always something you can become better at in the process.//

[ juxtapoz, Rasmus Mogensen ]

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

//What, you’re not allowed to interact with art?//

[ Georgia - Beginners / a: Mary Page Keller / d: Mike Mills / y: 2010 ]

OMOTE / NOBUMICHI ASAI

//[Omote] is a Japanese word for face, or a mask. Face is considered as [mirror] that reflects human soul, a separation between Omote (exterior) and Ura  (interior), and in Nogaku, Japan’s classical musical plays, performers use Omtoe masks to express multitude of dramatic emotions. As we spent more time on the project, we became more aware of its similarities with Nogaku’s Omote masks, and explored further possibilities through Integration of latest technology and classical Japanese art.

I always considered [face] to be the most delicate yet powerful medium for art. Make-up artist Hiroto Kuwahara said, "Face evolved with a sole purpose of conveying emotions, and it is the only body part that effectively communicates and reacts to the most subtle changes and conditions.  It’s not an exaggeration to say that face is one of the most intriguing features."  I totally agree with him, and got interested in the possibility of face mapping, its potential in expressing something extraordinary.// Nobumichi Asai

Omote is an installation that puts a virtual mask on a model's face and then carries on transforming it by projecting patterns and manipulating them in real time. Project is the result of collaboration between Japanese media artist Nobumichi Asai, makeup artist Hiroto Kuwahara and French digital image engineer Paul Lacroix.

[ designboom, Nobumichi Asai ]

URBAN YOGA / ANA HUMLJAN

Project named Urban Yoga is, by the words of it's author Ana Humljan, actually an architectural experiment intended to analyze space potential and the connection between human body, architectural structures and urban settings. This exploration has been documented by a series of photographs in which the author poses in a white bodysuit, striking various yoga positions in unlikely urban scenes. The photograph series has later resulted in a photo book.

In context of questioning how our bodies inhabit urban spaces, this project does not bring much novelty. For more than half of a century now we are able to witness a spectacle in which human body engages the built environment in a dynamic way based on improvisational thinking - skateboarding. Open to the experience, skateboarders have not only developed new ways of moving through space but blurred the lines between right and wrong in the form-function relationship. In the //All is fair in love an war// style. Seeing the city as a landscape instead of user-manual operated machine, opens that possibility for improvisation. The exchange between the user and architecture is not fixed but plastic, changeable and each time a little bit different.

This flexible relationship between architecture and program is explored at large by architects such as Tschumi and Koolhaas. Insisting in the first place on event and program, they use open structure theory and programmatic diagrams as tools to create an architectural framework that supports dynamic relationships between movement, program, and space. 

These concepts are important because we now live in a complex environment that is highly activated and full of uncertainty. As architects we can offer guidelines in form of spatial configurations that hold the possibility for improvisation and offer kind of possibilities about which people didn't think before. 

Still, architecture is a medium that is slow and it is important to know that, to solve a problem, ti isn't always necessary to have an "open structure" but an open mind.

         

EVOLUTION DOOR / KLEMEN TORGGLER

It looks like a normal door, until you touch it. A kinetic art prototype designed by Austrian artist Klemens Torggler evolved into a system called the Evolution Door, a “flip panel door” (Drehplattentür) that uses the force of gravity for the opening mechanism: //The key principle is similar to a balance in the vertical position. In a door consisting of two parts, gravity causes one half to rotate. The physical work is redirected and causes the second, equally heavy door-half to move against gravity. To open and close a gentle touch is all that is needed, after that physics takes over.// Open Sesame!

[ dezeen, Klemen Torggler, this is colossal ]