Joseph Giovannini

This book showcases the work of John Friedman Alice Kimm Architects (JFAK), a Los Angeles-based architecture practice recognized for its creation of iconic, experiential environments that are reflective of culture and context and expressive of inclusivity and identity. Founded by John Friedman and Alice Kimm, JFAK is an American architecture firm in Los Angeles, California, USA that serves clients ranging from small nightclub operators and homeowners to developers, universities, and cities. JFAK's distinct formal landscapes are the result of an inquisitive design process that mines the possibilities and complexities of our contemporary, heterogeneous society. As such, the firm's wide-ranging body of work rejects adherence to diagram, at once represents and redefines the City of Los Angeles, and through its integration of technology and narrative captures a global zeitgeist.This book illustrates, through drawings, photos, and narratives not only of the work but of outside inspirations, the influences that form and define the underlying design logic of JFAK's projects.

In Architecture Unbound, noted architecture critic Joseph Giovannini proposes that our current architectural landscape ultimately emerged from transgressive and progressive art movements that had roiled Europe before and after World War I. By the 1960s, social unrest and cultural disruption opened the way for investigations into an inventive, antiauthoritarian architecture. Explorations emerged in the 1970s, and built projects surfaced in the 1980s, taking digital form in the 1990s, with large-scale projects finally landing on the far side of the millennium. Architecture Unbound traces all of these developments and influences, presenting an authoritative and illuminating history not only of the sources of contemporary currents in architecture but also of the twentieth-century avant-garde and the twenty-first-century digital revolution in form-making, and profiling the most influential practitioners and their most notable projects, including Frank Gehry s Guggenheim Bilbao and Walt Disney Concert Hall, Zaha Hadid s Guangzhou Opera House, Daniel Libeskind s master plan for the World Trade Center, Rem Koolhaas s CCTV Tower, and Herzog and de Meuron s Bird s Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing.

This book narrates the complete detailed history of the New Rome Convention centre in Rome and its construction through numerous and evocative images of the work site showing the complexity of the construction stages and the special techniques that were necessary. There are photos of the completed building, by internationally renowned photographers and an essay by Joseph Giovannini, and is completed with very rich iconographic material composed of technical drawings on various scales, and sketches by the Massimiliano Fuksas, author of the work together with Doriana Fuksas. The NUVOLA (NEW CONVENTION CENTRE) is a work of outstanding artistic merit, featuring innovative logistics solutions, and a choice of technically advanced materials. The structure rises in the historic EUR quarter and covers a surface of 55,000 square metres. The project concept can be defined in three images: the Theca, the Nuvola, and the Lama of the hotel structure. The Theca [display case] is the enclosing structure in steel and double glass facades that encases the Nuvola [cloud], the true core of the project, enclosed inside the Display Case box underlining the contrast between the organisation of free space without rules, and a geometrically defined form. The Nuvola contains an auditorium with seating for 1850, cafés and snack bars, and support services for the auditorium. This highly flexible complex is able to house congresses, exhibitions, and events with a seating capacity of almost 9,000 people. The book has been published on various types of paper and differently sized sheets which are inserted within the pages. Studio Fuksas, directed by Massimiliano and Doriana, is one of the most famous international architectural firms in the world. Over the past 40 years, the firm has developed an innovative approach through a surprising variety of projects all over the world and and has been awarded numerous international prizes.

Oka Doner's life work shines a light on the continuing importance of art and the transformative power of our cosmic and enchanting natural world. Michele Oka Doner is one of today's foremost artists. Her prodigious career spans five decades and numerous artistic media, including sculpture, works on paper, furniture, video, jewelry, and sets and costumes. In addition, she has created over forty iconic public and private permanent art installations. They are the focus of EVERYTHING IS ALIVE. The common thread running through Oka Doner's oeuvre is her lifelong study and appreciation of the natural world, from which she derives her formal vocabulary. In EVERYTHING IS ALIVE this vocabulary hones in on magic, enchantment, and transformation as we are led through the artistic processes informing Oka Doner's prominent art installations. From Micco, the monumental concrete sculptural pavilion suffused with native greenery of the nearby Everglades to Oka Doner's haunting ceramic SoulCatchers and figurative sculptures born of clay at the Nymphenburg Porcelain Manufactury in Munich, to Miami International Airport, where Oka Doner's Sargassum soars overhead and her A Walk on the Beach lies at the feet of over 25 million travelers who traverse its 9,000 oceanic bronze forms each year. Four distinguished essayists, Judith Thurman, Joseph Giovannini, Cynthia Nadelman, and Gregory Volk, serve as guides through Oka Doner's evolution as an artist as seen in these installations, which are brought to life on 240 pages of stunning photographs, original process sketches, and sources of inspiration. EVERYTHING IS ALIVE offers a glimpse into the full breadth of Oka Doner's work. Above all, it shines a light on the continuing importance of art and the worldview that there is beauty to be found in all living things.

Plottegg is one of Austria's most high-profile avant-garde architects. He has been pioneering the use of the computer since the 1980s. However, using the technology purely as an electronic drawing board is not enough for him - programs are intended to generate solutions. The works selected for this publication therefore represent the architect's design concepts and working methods rather than solutions for building projects. The projects are primarily presented in the form of images; descriptions, data and comments have been reduced to the minimum possible. To that extent, this book is also a visual supplement to his essays published up to now. This first monograph on Plottegg's built and planned architecture closes a gap in the documentation of innovative Austrian architects.

The juxtapositions of Zaha Hadid's architectural models and drawings and Judith Turner's photographs of the architect's buildings in this volume reveal that Hadid and Turner are complicit. There is a clear agreement of sensibilities. Each understands the other. Hadid does not design with complete geometries in stable con-figurations, but designs instead with incomplete or distorted geometries that are dynamic and visually unstable. Turner does the same in her photographs, cropping before a form completes itself in a frame that leaves the rest of the form suggested outside the frame. Hadid's work is abstract a permutation of Modernism's trifecta of point, line and plane. Turner's photography, too, is abstract so that Turner's photographs of Hadid's buildings compound the abstraction, arguably intensifying the three-dimension-al abstraction by compressing it into two. Hadid's neutral palette of materials, especially concrete, takes on value in Turner's graphic compositions of black, white and gray, counterintuitively giving neutrality subtle intensity. Hadid structures her designs dynamically with diagonal lines and oblique planes playing with and against each other in three-dimensional fields. Likewise Turner works on the diagonal, always positioning herself obliquely to buildings, shooting glancingly rather than frontally: her diagonal position further dynamizes Hadid's already energized diagonals. Often Turner doubles down on the diagonality by cranking the camera's lens off its up-down axis to heighten the architectural dynamism. Turning her photographic angle lofts Hadid's already anti-gravitational architectural system off the ground. Judith Turner resides in New York where she began taking photographs in 1972. She has had solo exhibitions in various cities in the United States, Europe, South America, Israel, and Japan. Turner has been awarded several grants and fellowships. She received an Honor Award from The American Institute of Architects in 1994 and a Stars of Design Award in Photography from The Design Center of New York in 2007.