Three Little Worlds: Klaus Toons at the Architecture Foundation

On Tuesday, July 24, I will be opening a small exhibition at the Architecture Foundation in London. The exhibit will be housed as an installation within an exhibition in the context of Jimenez Lai’s super-furnitured Three Little Worlds, currently at display at the AF. Klaus Toons, which will feature a few cartoons blown up to poster size, will be on display till August 18 (but there’s a trick to that). I’m really thrilled by the fact that for the launching event, I’ll have Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today’s Liam Young on my side joining for a conversational presentation, which will hopefully help me overcome my natural inarticulateness and add a note of quality to the event. A big thank you to the people at the AF (with a special acknowledgement to Justin Jaeckle) for their interest, and to Jimenez, for getting it started. I hope he already recovered from sleeping on my couch.

The pic on top should be a cartoon that waits somewhere on my computer to be finished. More on that later. (And of course, for our Italian readers…)

Harvard Exhibition: Dispatches from the GSD – 75 years of design (Reprise)

Click to enlarge

Last week, during the Alumni Weekend at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the exhibition “Dispatches from the GSD: 075 Years of Design” was officially inaugurated. In the GSD Website you can find all the information regarding the events that took place. For some more info and a few pics (including the stand where some of the cartoons from this blog are exhibited) you can scroll down or just click here. 

…………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Some of the events were streamed live, and in youtube you can find videos of the reception toast by Harvard President Drew Faust, and of the looong Faculty & Student Pecha Kucha that took place as part of the 75th anniversary celebration. There’s also a short but nicely illustrated commentary on Harvard Magazine, and a brief at Peter Christensen’s site.

Harvard Exhibition: Dispatches from the GSD – 75 years of design (Some Klaus inside)

Dispatches from the GSD Exhibition – Main Wall.

The 2011-12 academic year marks the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and in order to celebrate it, the GSD will host a number of events regarding the anniversary throughout the whole academic year. Along with those, the GSD is hosting the exhibit “Dispatches from the GSD: 075 Years of Design”, which will be on display for the duration of the Fall semester throughout Gund Hall, including installations in the lobby gallery, Loeb Library and fourth floor.

Instead of showing a chronological approach that would be inevitably incomplete, the exhibition, which was assembled by a team of students, professors, alumni and staff, has been divided into a succession of episodes; moments that Peter Christensen, curatorial director, describes as “journalistic dispatches from the past, each with its own narrative and artifacts”. All these fictional journalistic dispatches, whose texts have been written accordingly, have been arranged within six thematic categories: Design as Research, Design as Critique, City as Process, City as Form, The Continuous Institution, and The Shifting Institution. 

General view of the exhibition in Gund Hall’s lobby

Shown in this last area, The Shifting Institution, item [C02.21: A Comic Take on the Harvard Graduate School of Design] consists of several comic drawings, including some cartoons from “Klaus on the GSD” done in 2009 [I am sincerely flattered]. Here are a couple of pics and the accompanying text:

A Comic Take On the Harvard Graduate School of Design. July 25, 2009.

CAMBRIDGE, MA – If you want to know what happens between the walls of Harvard Graduate School of Design, the comic strip Klaustoons will give you the answer. Written by an Alumnus of the school hiding behind the pseudonym of “Klaus,” the blog offers humorous cartoons that capture moments of academic life, general student culture and critical discussions in architecture. Cartoons aren’t new at the Graduate School of Design, where the students’ drawing abilities have been known to serve satirical purposes since the 1980s.

The cartoons displayed are Changes in the GSD (Hairstyles I), Platform 2008, GSD Lectures 2008: Parametric Design (I), GSD Lectures 2008: Parametric Performances, Bruno Latour and Peter Sloterdijk: Networks and Spheres, On Starchitecture, and Koolhaas at Harvard: Ecological Urbanism. In the same display there are three more cartoons provided by the Special Collections Department of the Loeb Library: one by Fran Hosken (c1940s), and two more signed by Wang, from the 70s-80s (Inés Zalduendo dixit)

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Dispatches from the GSD: 075 years of design
August 22–December 22, 2011

Anniversaries offer the opportunity to consider the past as an active interlocutor with the present and the future. For the GSD, this means foregrounding an array of agents—people, events, objects, and ideas—in a rich institutional history to bring the collective memory of seventy-five years into sharper focus for design practice today and tomorrow. Conjuring a comprehensive account of the institution since 1936—its thousands of alumni, hundreds of faculty and staff, and two homes—would run the risk of homogenizing a history characterized so consistently by heterogeneity and multiplicity.

As such, the exhibition employs an approach that is episodic, reveling in moments of the GSD’s history that are as singular as they are important. In the spirit of framing these moments as stories unto themselves, they have been conceived of as journalistic dispatches from the past, each with its own narrative and artifacts. Writing history in the present tense, as this exhibition does, is an attempt to make the GSD’s vitality clear and to claim a future that is at once inherited and projective.

The 120 dispatches in this exhibition begin in 1936 and arrive at the present day to include a handful of contemporary thought pieces from a cross section of the School’s faculty, each expressing in a single authorial voice a reflection on the state of design today and the challenges of its future. The historical dispatches are organized into six thematic categories: Design as Research, Design as Critique, City as Process, City as Form, The Continuous Institution, and The Shifting Institution. Each section contains dispatches that speak to a greater set of themes spanning all of the School’s programs and departments, various media, and all seventy-five of the School’s years. In momentarily stopping the clock, this exhibition hopes to enliven the GSD, and Harvard University at large, with the engagement and propulsion that the past can offer us today and tomorrow.

—Peter Christensen (PhD ’14), Curatorial Director

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Below these lines you can find some general photos of the exhibition. Make sure to check the GSD website for more pics and updates on the exhibition and events. Also, Bruce Mau Design offer a couple of peeks at the  posters they designed for the event (updated here).

Special thanks to Inés Zalduendo and Mary Daniels (Curatorial Advisors of the exhibition and masters of the Dark), Marta Fenollosa and Igor Ekstajn (all additional photographs by Igor Ekstajn)

 

 

The New City Reader: Classifieds

Click to Enlarge

Cartoon for The New City Reader: Classifieds, guest-edited by Leagues and Legions and drawn quite in a rush, which explains the lack of shadowing. It will get done at some point (hopefully). Click on the images below to read the full issue, which also features a couple of other cartoons by Brady Dale and the inimitable Jimenez Lai, from Bureau Spectacular, or navigate through the assembled version on the New City Reader’s blog.

Update: As of 1.10.2011 it´s also downloadable from DSGN AGNC, thanks to Quilian Riano.

 

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The New City Reader: A Newspaper of Public Space is a project curated by Kazys Varnelis and Joseph Grima. The New City Reader is a performance-based editorial residency designed as a part of the Last Newspaper, an exhibit running at New York’s New Museum from 6 October 2010‒9 January 2011. It consists of one edition, published over the course of the project, with a new section produced weekly by alternating guest editorial teams within the museum’s gallery space. These sections are  available free every Friday at the New Museum and will also be posted in public throughout the city for collective reading. The permanent staff and list of guest editorial teams can be found in Varnelis.net.

From NY to Portimão: Photographic Marathon

Kunst-Haas in the streets of Portimão

Last night, at a conference-dialogue at ISMAT, we launched a Photographic Marathon to go along with the Exhibition Klaus.Toon: From NY to Portimão, organised in collaboration with the Delegação do algarve da Ordem dos Arquitectos. The call for submissions will be open till January 10, 2011. The terms are detailed in the announcement below. Thanks from here to Josué Elizario and Hugo Nazareth for their invitation, to Ricardo Camacho, Rui Vargas and Vítor Lourenço, and to the staggeringly crowded -and participative- audience that granted us with their attention for over two hours.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

KLAUS.TOON – PHOTOGRAPHIC MARATHON

The exhibition Klaus.Toon: From New York to Portimão, which will be displayed in Portimão from November 26 to December 26, 2010, has been conceived as a mixture between a traditional gallery-enclosed exhibition and a piece of guerrilla-art, where the cartoons make part of a performance where art and city interact.

Organised in a threefold structure, that starts at the Teatro TEMPO, with another vertex at the Praça da República and a third meeting point in Bar Porta Velha (Travessa Manuel Dias Barão) the aim of the exhibition is to turn the streets of Portimão’s old centre into a gallery space by displaying the rest of the works on the shop windows of different stores located in Rua Direita, Rua Diogo Tomé, Alameda da República and Rua Vasco da Gama.

Following this logics of interaction the Ordem dos Arquitectos – Delegação Algarve launches a photographic marathon where we invite everyone to record the different situations fostered by the presence of the exhibition in the street. We are looking for pictures that depict the funny, weird, surprising or just casual interactions between people and the exhibition, but also pictures of the cartoons themselves, either in isolation or in context, series of pictures, or whatever other ideas the photographers want to show.

The photos will be uploaded on a Klaustoon’s  Flickr account, and a selection of them will be shown in Klaustoon’s Blog. Also, the best photos will be awarded a cartoon of their choice once the exhibition is over.

We want your photos! Please, send them to klaustoons@gmail.com.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

KLAUS.TOON – MARATONA FOTOGRÁFICA

A exposição Klaus.Toon – “De Nova Iorque a Portimão”, que decorre em Portimão de 26 de Novembro a 26 de Dezembro de 2010, foi concebida como um cruzamento entre a tradicional galeria fechada e a peça de “guerrilla-art”, onde os cartoons fazem parte de uma performance de interacção entre a arte e a cidade.

A exposição é organizada em três partes, começa no “Tempo” ( Teatro Municipal de Portimão), tem um vértice na Praça da República e termina num terceiro ponto de encontro no Bar “Porta Velha” (Travessa Manuel Dias Barão). Tem o objectivo de transformar as ruas do centro histórico de Portimão numa galeria aberta ao envolver o resto do trabalho nas montras das várias lojas da Rua Direita, Rua Diogo Tomé, Alameda da República e Rua Vasco da Gama.

Seguindo esta lógica de interacção, a Ordem dos Arquitectos – Delegação do Algarve e a Casa Gran Turismo – Silves, promovem uma maratona de fotografia que convida todos os interessados a participarem e a recolherem fotográficamente várias interpretações ou situações, que a presença da exposição nas ruas possa proporcionar. Procuram-se imagens que possam suscitar o alegre, o esquisito, a surpresa ou simplesmente a interacção casual entre as pessoas e a exposição, imagens dos próprios cartoons isoladamente ou num determinado contexto, séries de imagens ou qualquer outro tipo de ideias que os fotógrafos queiram transmitir.

As fotografias serão publicadas na internet, na conta Klaustoon Flickr e as seleccionadas divulgadas no Klaustoon’s Blog. Será ainda atribuído às melhores fotografias um cartoon a cada, escolhido pelos premiados. Os trabalhos deverão ser enviados até dia 10 de Janeiro de 2011 em formato jpeg 800×600 (72dpi).

Precisamos das suas fotografias! Por favor, enviar para klaustoons@gmail.com.

 

Cartoon Location Plan (Design by Filipa Cabrita)

 

You can also download the flyer of the exhibition with the cartoon guide here.

Klaus in Portimão

 

From November 26 to December 26 2010, there will be an ongoing cartoon exhibition in Portimão (Portugal). It is an initiative of the Delegação Algarve of the Ordem dos Arquitectos and the Casa Granturismo office, in collaboration with the Teatro TEMPO, the bar Porta Velha and the association of store owners of Portimão’s historical center. The exhibition is a combination of traditional exhibit and guerilla art that uses both enclosed gallery spaces and also the streets of the old town in Portimão.

The opening took place yesterday at the Bar Porta Velha, with an introduction by Vítor Manuel da Costa Lourenço, president of the Algarve Architects Society, and a presentation-conversation between me, Ricardo Camacho -principal in Casa Granturismo and also principal instigator of the event- and Osvaldo Sousa and Rui Vargas, from ORV.

I can’t start to explain how thrilled I feel when seeing the cartoons printed an exhibited at such a scale, so for the moment  I’d like to thank the organizers for coming up with this idea and sponsoring it, and everyone who attended the presentation for their kind attention and the warm atmosphere that was created there. Also, many thanks for the people who helped put the exhibition together, and especially to Filipa Cabrita for the long hours she spent in every aspect of the production. I’ll be posting some images and a real explanation of the exhibit (with due acknowledgments to all the participants) in a later post.

The New City Reader

Click to enlarge

 

 

This cartoon is a collaboration for The New City Reader: A Newspaper of Public Space, a project created by the hyperactive and always brilliant (he’s a rather handsome guy too) director of the NetLab, Kazys Varnelis, and the also eminently able Joseph Grima, former director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture and current editor of Domus. The New City Reader is a performance-based editorial residency designed as as part of the Last Newspaper, an exhibit running at New York’s New Museum from 6 October 2010‒9 January 2011. It will consist of one edition, published over the course of the project with a new section (Editorial, International News, Business/Economy, Politics…) produced weekly by alternating guest editorial teams within the museum’s gallery space. These sections will be available free at the New Museum and—in emulation of a practice common in the nineteenth-century American city and still popular in parts of the world today—will be posted in public throughout the city for collective reading.

The permanent staff and list of impressive guest editorial teams can be found in Kazys Varnelis’s original launching announcement at Varnelis.net, which I have cannibalized to write this post.

A taste of the newspaper itself can be found in The Last Newspaper Blog, in its tumblr. Blog or in its Twitter account.

Some other information can be found in this entry at manystuff.org, and the original press release can be found here.

Kazys can be found in the cartoon.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

On a completely unrelated note, I’d like to recommend Aude-Line Duliere/Clara Wong’s Monsterpieces: A Retrospective of Retro-perspective, an exercise on un-learning architecture history with essays by Antoine Picon, Spyros Papapetros, Timothy Hyde, Monica Ponce de Leon, Jonathan Solomon. The book speculates on the future state of post-occupancy of contemporary architectural icons, creating a retrospective of future archeological studies.

It will be presented on Monday 25.10.2010 at 6.30pm in a Book launch, reception and discussion panel with Liam Young, Penelope Haralambidou, Oliver Domeisen and Ben Campkin at the AA Bookshop in London.

Iterations: Kunst-Haas

 

Collage from the installation “KUNST-HAAS”. Harvard GSD, May 2009