loud paper

what we talk about when we talk about talking about architecture

Allais: Architecture is such a good excuse to talk about so many things.
Hyde: And why does it always end up being a discussion about architecture?

Taking a page out of Interview magazine, the new issue PRAXIS features architects in conversation with other architects. Editors Amanda Reeser Lawrence and Ashley Schafer have paired up some of the most emergent firms of the last five years—a group defined by Michael Meredith of MOS in his conversation with Marcelo Spina of PATTERNS as "the "practice" generation."

It's also a group that were able to delve into experimental practice, buoyed by ever-expanding digital tools, Ordos houses, and an economic bubble. Conversations: Continued, a symposium in celebration of the new issue at PS1 this Friday, comes at a time when all these small firms are coping, retrenching, and strategizing in a recession—basically, asking themselves what to do next?

I've been asked to join the dialogue at PS1 as a "provocateur", along with Keith Krumweide, Reinhold Martin, Kazys Varnelis, Michael Kubo, Enrique Walker, and Thomas de Monchaux. So, let's do the math: 11 architects, 2 editors, 2 critics, and 7 people with sharp tongues. It's gonna get loud.

Conversations: Continued

A Symposium & Open Discussion in conjunction with the release of PRAXIS 11 Architects + 12 Conversations

Friday - 25 June 2010

12.30-6pm at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Queens

The symposium marks the release of the 11 Architects + 12 Conversations issue of PRAXIS: a journal of writing and building. The moderated discussion will invite audience participation in an open dialogue that explores shared and contested territory among this emerging generation of practices.

The symposium, "Conversations: Continued", brings together 10 Young Architectural Practices: MOS, NArchitects, WORKac, PATTERNS, Aranda/Lasch, Productora, FAR, Ciro Najle, The Living, and Howeler +Yoon with two critics, Timothy Hyde and Lucia Allais. The event continues the more formal discussion begun in PRAXIS 11, 11 Architects/12 Conversations, by bringing the firms together in a shared conversation, broadening the issues at stake, and sharing the material with a wider architectural and public audience.

We will also take this occasion to celebrate the long anticipated 2010 PRAXIS 11+12 double issue release with cocktails and a preview of Solid Objectives - Idenburg Liu's Pole Dance, the winner of the MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program.

For further information and schedule, please feel free to contact us or visit us online at: www.praxisjournal.net

zines reign in spain

I'm excited to announce that loud paper and a number of "A Few Zines" alumni will be included in the show 'De Zines.' Curators Óscar Martin and Roberto Vidal (who are also inspired artists and designers) have brought together nearly 400(!) independent titles—I'm happy to see loud paper, Face B, Thumb Projects,  Standpunkte, and Mas Context share shelf space with Cabinet, Fantastic Man, Temporary Services and other pubs that span the editorial range from food to art to design and back again.

If you are in Madrid this summer, make sure to stop by the gallery.

Inéditos 2010
La Casa Encendida
29 June to 29 August 2010

Just leave enough time to read your way through this amazing collection of independent publishing—the show celebrates a form that manages to thrive in a dicey economic environment by skirting any easy definitions or making polarities between content and form, print and digital. 

‘De Zines’, tries to reflect what is happening in the contemporary editorial creation on the level of independent publications, how this area relates to the artistic production and social, cultural and current political environment. Around 400 international publications have been gathered from most established magazines in the market until handmade zines and a selection of experimental magazines.
In times of constant technological revolution and immediate access to information through the network, paper, as a media for the dissemination of culture and information seems destined to disappear. However, the number of independent publications do not stop growing. In fact, different forms of communication, digital and analogue can coexist. It’s about different ways, uses and times ranging between the immediacy of digital and the traditional way of disseminating and consuming cultural creation and art. Its contents tend to be more timeless and invite paused reflection. Beautiful design and text written with loving care in a continuous search for seamless integration between content and form. In general, they are still spaces for dissemination, review and reflection on cultural production. Objects themselves, everlasting, pages of printed paper that can be touched with the fingers, means of underground cultural expression. In the case of experimental magazines involves a different way to approach to these publications, full of visual impact, subject to different interpretations, inexhaustible source of emotions and feelings. They already have a notable presence in art fairs, specialized bookstores and museum shops.

These editorial projects, heirs of the phenomenon do it yourself culture derived from punk and art movements such as Dadaism, Surrealism and Fluxus, are living a resurgence. Some have remained fairly true to those principles, others have grown in distribution,  budget and number of prints. They all share an independent spirit in addressing issues like music, film, fashion, design, art, philosophy, economics, literature, photography ... or closer personal projects to more people. In fact, they are a response to dominant culture, with a clear activist attitude, trying to spread other ways to understand their relations with society and even with oneself. Independent publications may be the future of print media. In fact they get a significant speed in the dissemination of current culture with a democratic way to create and share images, ideas and information. Pages filled with an impeccable editorial design, a media for freedom of expression of the obsessions and passions their creators want to communicate, have a voice.

’De Zines’, articulated as a consultation room, a space that does not only creates traffic but a place to stay, increasing the desire to know, trying to help the audience to find a  those issues so that a sense of recognition. In short, create networks among people with a similar vision in a global and plural world.