Young professionals and students of architecture and art: research and work in May with established architects and artists on the works that will be constructed and presented at the Benaki Museum Piraios Street Annexe at the exhibition of the AAO project (June 6 to July 31 2011). The artists with whom you will have the opportunity to collaborate with include Futurefarmers and Public Architecture from San Francisco, Eelko Moorer from Amsterdam working in London, and Santiago Cirugeda from Sevilla.
Futurefarmers is a group of artists, designers and architects who use various media to create work that responds to the time and place around them. A constant throughout their work is a critique of the affects of market capitalism on the material and social environment. They deconstruct food systems, public transportation, rural farming networks and fortune 100 companies as a means to visualize and understand the logics of these systems. Futurefarmers is founded by Amy Franceschini in 1995. Her solo and collaborative work has been included in exhibitions internationally including the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), the Whitney Museum and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Center Pompidou in Paris and the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. She has recently received the prestigious SECA Prize by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2007) and is the recipient of 7 other prizes. She is Professor of Art and Architecture at the Stanford University, the California College of the Arts and the San Francisco Art Institute.
Public Architecture is a non-profit organization established by John Peterson in San Francisco in 2002. Public Architecture identifies and solves practical problems in the built environment. It acts as a catalyst for public discourse through education, advocacy, and the design of public spaces and amenities. Public Architecture is a new model for architectural practice. Rather than waiting for commissions that represent well-understood needs and desires, Public Architecture takes a leadership role, identifying significant problems of wide relevance that require innovative research and design and circumstances where both client and financing must be imagined in new ways. Public Architecture’s national “1% Solution” program, through which firms pledge one percent of their billable hours to the public interest, aims to institutionalize and celebrate pro bono practice in architecture. It received the AIA San Francisco Design Awards-Special Achievement Award. Public Architecture’s projects have received numerous architectural awards as: the prestigious Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome, Global Holcim Awards -Innovation Prize and Silver Award, Contract Magazine -Designers of the Year, AIA National Honor Awards -Institute Honors for Collaborative Achievement, American Institute for Public Service San Francisco -Jefferson Award among many others. Public Architecture has garnered a significant amount of coverage as in the New York Times, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Sun, The Boston Globe and MSN.com.
Eelko Moorer is based in London and Amsterdam. His work focuses on the psychology of use and exploring an individualistic, manual approach to working with mass-production techniques. Results are products for fashion, performances and distinctive personalized designs on the borderline between art and design that define the identity of a person or a space. His work has been included in exhibitions such as “Dutch at the Edge of Design”, Fashion Institute of Technology Museum (New York 2005), British Council Design Exhibition (Milan 2005) and B&B Italia (London 2005), Rotterdam Design Prize, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen (Rotterdam 2003), “100% Design” (Rotterdam 2003 and London 2002), Frozen Fountain (Amsterdam 2000 and 1999), and the New British Design, 2007 Milan show among others. Moorer studied at the Utrecht School of the Arts and the Royal College of Art, London.
Santiago Cirugeda is an urban activist, artist and architect who works on projects which are quite removed from the premises of conventional urban planning. In his urban installations and performances he seeks out unrecognized leftover spaces between the lines of building laws and gives them (il-)legal asylum in the territory of public space. He ultimately works with the same survival strategies of migrants, who have conquered niches in a world that is alien to them to find a place of their own, which society generally refuses to grant them. His projects, recetas urbanas or “urban prescriptions”, go from systematically occupying public spaces with dumpsters to adding prostheses on to facades, playgrounds, courtyards and even on sites. Some of his recent projects include the Poble Sec neighbourhood in Barcelona, the Institutional Prostheses at the Contemporary Art Museum (EACC) in Castellón, and the lecture hall building at the Fine Arts Faculty in Málaga. Santiago Cirugeda advocates citizen participation in the development of the city and for freedom to modify the environment, proposing creative and destabilising actions, ranging from the playful to the practical and even the subversive.
Please complete and submit the following form of interest – a 150 word CV including studies, skills and interests stating (in the comments) the architect/artist with whom you would like to collaborate:
[contact-form 1 “Participation Form EN”]