simples

Bienal Building (Óscar Niemeyer)

I visited the São Paulo Architecture Biennale on the 12th and 13th of November, while spending a week there to attend  TEDx São Paulo and interview people for my MFA thesis, Alvorada.

Before leaving New York, I pitched a review of the Bienal to Kieran Long, then editor-in-chief of Architecture Review. He commissioned me a 750-word piece, which I duly delivered. The following month Long told me he had left the magazine, but that the article would be published in the January 2010 issue of AR. It was indeed, but instead of around 750, it had been cut down (and very well, I may add) to just over 300 words.

For the sake of my own archive, I chose to have the whole, submitted piece here and show what bits were edited out.

Vista da exposição, © Susana Pomba

A minha recensão da exposição É Proibido Proibir do MUDE está desde hoje online no site Artecapital.

Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) (1887-1965) Still-Life of the Pavillon de L’Esprit Nouveau, 1924

This morning I visited the Art Deco, 1925 exhibition at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. This world-class, exquisite show would surely please Calouste Gulbenkian, the Armenian-born billionaire to which Portuguese science and culture (and myself, as a FCG/FLAD grant holder) owe so much. His famous motto, “only the best”, made the museum and foundation that bear his name two of the world’s most respected and sophisticated institutions.

Curated by Chantal Bizot and Dany Sautot and masterfully designed by Mariano Piçarra and Ricardo Viegas (graphics), the exhibition is a true arts décoratifs treasure trove. From carpets to glass, jewellery to books, it presents a wide range of (mostly applied) artworks that mirrored the prevailing message of 1925′s International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts: the triumph of the ensemble as an expression of industrial and artistic progress.

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Konstantin Grcic’s 360ºC chair for Magis is a product that defies classification. It’s a chair that doesn’t look like anything we have around us these days. It’s a bit like stool, but it has a sort of a small back. It looks hard, but it’s actually much softer to the touch than one would thing. As with other of Grcic’s creations, it doesn’t look pretty, luxurious or particularly comfortable.

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Metropolis magazine, September 2009

The printed version of Metropolis magazine has shrunk as of last September. The result of a publishing crisis-induced redesign (in corner-cutting times, every inch counts), the magazine’s new size did not resolve its two other most pressing ills: an unclear international ambition and an art direction that doesn’t seem to know its place.

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