STUDIO IN BEIJING

For NOTCH 09, David Garcia Studio has produced two interactive spaces ARCHIVE II and ARCHIVE IV, where information, books and music, become the generating factors for simple spaces full of social potential.
Both works are part of an architectonic research into the character of information storage at a small scale. This Archive Series, exemplifies the unavoidable "weight" of information, whether digital or analogue, and our varied relationships to it. At the NOTCH 09 festival, ARCHIVE II and ARCHIVE IV will be main attractions for social gathering and information hubs.

ARCHIVE II, a round wheel book archive, functions as a nomadic library, where the user can travel with his own books. Once still, it creates a room for meeting and inspiration, generating a special acoustic echo for the reader inside the wheel.
ARCHIVE IV challenges space and weight, by hanging from the ceiling. A wooden cylinder, 3 meter in diameter and 3.5 meter high, suspended from above, serves as a sitting area and as an archive for books and music in its inside. The visitor encounters a quiet space for conversation, and in the centre a rope ladder takes the curious to a level above, a micro lounge room, where one can look out into the crowd. From the outside, the introvert character of the structure hides the human body, only revealing feet at floor level, and the heads of visitors that climb to the top.

Thanks to: Shuyu Chen, Max Gerthel, Marion Spillmann and Lawrence Ebelle.




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EXHIBIT IN NEW YORK





The exhibit opening was a smashing success. Hundreds came and conquered! Thank you all for making this amazing evening possible. MAP was nearly sold out, and Steven Holl took a bunch of them. Moma will now be selling the Studio's publication. Cheers for Storefront team, Nicola and Geoff and everyone at David Garcia Studio!

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HONORABLE MENTION

HB: BX is an open ideas competition to design an arts center that culturally reinforces the physical connection between the Manhattan and Bronx High Bridge communities of New York City. Working in cooperation with the arts organizations Artists Unite and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, ENYA means to draw awareness to the current efforts to restore and reopen the historic High Bridge. This competition is a forum to explore the urban and community improvement opportunities that may come with the achievement of such a momentous milestone.

The aim of the Studio's proposal is to re-establish the significance of the derelict High Bridge as a historic and cultural point/landmark, which links the Bronx to Manhattan, while making evident the infrastructural damage that this site has been submitted to. High Bridge needs to re-conquer its status as a popular destination, a unique inter-borough crossing, and the Manhattan-Bronx link in the Old Croton Aqueduct Greenway without being oblivious to the historic violence that the river and its shore have been submitted to.
To achieve this, we have aimed to maintain the High Bridge as a pedestrian structure, and the symbolic and physical link between Bronx and Manhattan. This artery of social flow and communication will also function as a connection to the different interventions that will house the art related functions, which in turn will stimulate and offer a critical standpoint to the existing landscape.
Five sites (A, B, C, D and E) have been found which describe a vocabulary of disrupted interventions that have happened through time. All linked to the High Bridge as the main artery and access point, these site are used to resolve cultural spaces and mirror their immediate status. Avoiding the romantic or utopian, we wish the use a critical eye to inform the public, with the very space they enjoy, what their environment has been transformed into. The chosen sites have been the result of past isolation, neglect, displacement and disregard for nature and social needs. We have chosen to turn these results into positive actions. Instead of turning our back to the reality that surrounds these sites, the interventions use this context to generate spaces with consciousness, an architecture which is the physical expression of a history of neglect.

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THE STUDIO TO EXHIBIT AT STOREFRONT, NEW YORK




DAVID GARCIA STUDIO is proud to be exhibiting at the prestigious STOREFRONT FOR ART AND ARCHITECTURE in New York, at the "LANDSCAPES OF QUARANTINE" exhibition, curated by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley.
The Studio will be exhibiting and launching the second issue of  MAP (Manual of Architectural Possibilities). MAP 001 focused on Antarctica, and with MAP 002 QUARANTINE will be investigating and questioning the subject through research and projects, and the realm of architectural ideas. Four projects are treated on this issue: A Domestic Isolation Unit, an Instantly Quarantinable Farm, a Zoo of Infectious Species, and a Quarantined Library on a cargo ship. Along with the projects, our fact page will focus on a series of topics regarding quarantine, from the biological to the political, the geographical and beyond. We are happy to have Peter Cook along again, writing the introduction and to Geoff and Nicola for their contribution.

The opening will take place Tuesday evening, March 9th at 7 pm, where MAP will be on sale. 
All invited.

"LANDSCAPES OF QUARANTINE"
9th March - 17th April, 2010
STOREFRONT FOR ART AND ARCHITECTURE
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THE STUDIO'S ARCTIC MEDIA UNIT TO BE PUBLISHED


David Garcia Studio and architect Alanna Baudinet collaborated on a competition for a mobile arctic unit which will be published in the ARCTIC PERSPECTIVE PUBLICATION. The design is to be an open source mobile architecture system capable of functioning in extreme as well as temperate climates and containing mass, industrial and amateur production and manufacturing potential. The unit is to serve as a model for mobile research in extreme cold environments, designed to incorporate high tech solutions while utilizing sustainable resources.

The ARCTIC PERSPECTIVE – THIRD CULTURE project is supported by the European Commission Culture 2007-2013.
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THE STUDIO EXHIBITS IN CHINA AT NOTCH 09, BEIJING





For NOTCH 09, David Garcia Studio has produced two interactive spaces ARCHIVE II and ARCHIVE IV, where information, books and music, become the generating factors for simple spaces full of social potential.
Both works are part of an architectonic research into the character of information storage at a small scale. This Archive Series, exemplifies the unavoidable "weight" of information, whether digital or analogue, and our varied relationships to it. At the NOTCH 09 festival, ARCHIVE II and ARCHIVE IV will be main attractions for social gathering and information hubs.

ARCHIVE II, a round wheel book archive, functions as a nomadic library, where the user can travel with his own books. Once still, it creates a room for meeting and inspiration, generating a special acoustic echo for the reader inside the wheel.
ARCHIVE IV challenges space and weight, by hanging from the ceiling. A wooden cylinder, 3 meter in diameter and 3.5 meter high, suspended from above, serves as a sitting area and as an archive for books and music in its inside. The visitor encounters a quiet space for conversation, and in the centre a rope ladder takes the curious to a level above, a micro lounge room, where one can look out into the crowd. From the outside, the introvert character of the structure hides the human body, only revealing feet at floor level, and the heads of visitors that climb to the top.

Thanks to: Shuyu Chen, Max Gerthel, Marion Spillmann and Lawrence Ebelle.





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THE STUDIO OPENS A PLAYGROUND INSTALLATION IN DREJENS

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David Garcia Studio inaugurated this prize winning installation in September 2009. Combining simple geometry with playful intentions, the 6 elements were designed to enhance play and inspire two different age groups of a newly built kinder-garden in Drejens, Denmark.  Shifts in scale and direction, and variations in space, from intimate to shared and open, define the social qualities of the interventions. But it is the simplicity of the compositions, which allow for open interpretations, that has received so many compliments and have proven to be an instant hit with children. The installation was carried out in collaboration with artist Pernille Worsøe and designer Martin Larsen. The works were manufactured by boat builders Årøsund Bådværft.
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MAP 001 ANTARCTICA, IS ON SALE!!




www.MAP.davidgarciastudio.com


MAP (Manual of Architectural Possibilities) is a publication of research and visions; research into territories, which can be concrete or abstract, but always put into question. Map is not a magazine (it only has two pages) and is not a book (it is issued twice a year). Map presents itself as a folded poster (A1) where information is immediate, dense and objective in one side, and architectural and subjective on the other. Map is a guide to potential actions in the built environment, a folded encyclopedia of the possible, a topography of ideas, or a poster on the wall.


MAP 001 ANTARCTICA is introduced with a text by Peter Cook
The first issue of MAP has cast itself upon the unknown, but also the very physical. Although the Antarctica has only been a building site for slightly over 100 years, the scenario is, to say the least, disastrous and marvellous at the same time. Building is almost impossible in some areas, but Mac Murdo Base Station seems a mining station with a vengeance, in size and appearance. In other regions, buildings are being literally devoured by the ice and spat out into the ocean. Just the mere climatic contradiction that the Antarctica (larger than Europe) is 70% ice, but a dessert at the same time, makes it an unavoidable subject to be studied. Brainstorms precipitate, MAP is the result.


CONTACT: map@davidgarciastudio.com

MAP is printed on both sides of a single A1 sheet on 80g COLORIT 72 paper, and folded to 297mm x 105mm











Peter Cook and Odile Decq enjoying MAP



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URBAN SKY LINK

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The history of the skyscraper is inherently linked to that of the elevator. It is interesting to note that although structurally speaking the skyscraper has evolved enormously, it is still a vertical structure, dictated by the elevator, which in its effort to go up, it only meets a dead end. The lack for alternative methods of moving through floors (the elevator’s refusal to bend) has determined the typology of the skyscraper for the last hundred years or so.

This proposal wishes to expand the understanding of high-rises, beyond a high FAR structure, or an extrusion of a plan. The proposal’s main concept is simple: that the idea of moving up in a building can also mean moving to somewhere else in the urban fabric, taking the pedestrians’ relationship to the city as decisive design factor.
The concept converts the traditional structure into a double-ended skyscraper, making it rise and fall again, linking two sites and transforming the structure into a wormhole in the city. As thus, the building also becomes a public transport system, and accessible landscape. The skyscraper could link unconnected sites, or salvage topographic barriers such as rivers, or link different levels with in a city.








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ASAE 09 SYMPOSIUM

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David Garcia will be lecturing on the 4th of September at 17:30, at the Anual ASAE Symposium, where MAP publication will be introduced.


ASAE is an annual two-day seminar at the School of Architecture, Lund University. It celebrates the beginning of the academic year. The aim is to keep an annual ongoing discussion about international education programs and architectural education strategies. ASAE promotes encounters between different schools of architecture in Europe, America and other countries, taking into consideration the objectives of the School of Architecture in Lund: Architectural Design, Experiment and Construction.
ASAE is meant to be a public event and the ambition is to also engage local and international architects, teachers, students, politicians etc. in an open discussion about architecture and design.
The first ASAE was held in the autumn of 2003 and has since then become an ongoing autumn semester event at Lund University.

Invited Lectures:


Sir Peter Cook [CRABstudio]
Thom Mayne [Morphosis]
Hernan Diaz Alonso [Xefirotarch]
Florencia Pita [FPmod]
Odile Decq [ODBC]
Geoff Manaugh [BLDGBLOG]
David Garcia [David Garcia Studio]
Drura Parrish [Parrish | Rash]
Megumi Matsubara [With Assistant]
Daniel Golling [forumAID]




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