THE REASON OFFSITE

THE REASONS OFFSITE

curated by SUMMARY architecture

financed by República Portuguesa - Cultura

"The Reasons Offsite" is an immaterial exhibition curated by SUMMARY, a young architectural studio based in Porto, Portugal. The project presents a collection of buildings and building systems significant in the historical evolution of modular and prefabricated architecture. This information is shown in virtual reality environment, through VR headset kits, which transport the audience to a 20x20m virtual space filled with panels and architectural models. The goal is to create a radiography of the several stages of this evolution. Examples of different buildings are shown, from the 17th century to the present, from anonymous architecture to Jean Prouvé, Walter Gropius, Buckminster Fuller, Shigeru Ban or MVRDV. “The Reasons Offsite” also intends to point out conflicts between prefab building systems and traditional ones. Standardization vs. customization, machination vs. humanization, science vs. art are examples of the topics over the table. These conflicts are going to be elaborated through the visions of Yona Friedman, Pablo Jimenez Moreno and Pedro Alonso. The contemporary context, with the World’s increasing urban population (in an unprecedented way), the growing need for immediacy based in an Uber/ Ikea/AirBNB-like lifestyle and the level of technological sophistication we have reached, motivates “The Reasons Offsite” as a rediscovery of the concept of prefabrication, understanding its history and envisaging its future.

The Rector of POLIS University Besnik Aliaj visiting the expo "The Reason Offsite"..

PLEČNIK'S STUDENTS AND OTHER YUGOSLAV ARCHITECTS IN LE CORBUSIER'S ATELIER

curated by Bogo Zupančič financed by MAO Museum of Architecture and Design Seven of Plečnik's students worked at the atelier run by the architects Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret at 35 Rue de Sevrès in Paris: Miroslav Oražem, Milan Sever, Hrvoje Brnčić, Marjan Tepina, Jovan Krunić, Edvard Ravnikar and Marko Župančič. In addition, there were the building contractor Fran Tavčar, the civil engineer Janko Bleiweis and the architect Feri Novak. In the studio during the pre-war period, architects from Slovenia, alongside those from France, Switzerland and the USA were more numerous, including up to ten of them, than all those from other parts of the world combined. From Yugoslavia there were seventeen of them altogether. Among Croatian architects, Zvonimir Kavurić, Ernest Weissmann, Juraj Neidhardt, Ksenija Grisogono and Krsto Filipović actively participated in the studio work, while the Serbs were only represented by Milorad Pantović and Branko Petričić, provided that Krunić is added to Plečnik's lot. The Croatian architects were the first to enter the studio, Kavurić arrived in January 1927, followed by Weissman. The value of Plečnik's works and his approach to architecture was again reassessed in the international professional arena with the decline of the International Style and the start of postmodernism towards the end of the 1970s. The exhibition at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1986 holds significant merit for this development. The interest in Ravnikar and other representatives of his generation was not as strong as the interest shown in Plečnik, but today the interest in Ravnikar and his peers is resurging.