Playgrounds. Reiventar la plaza - Madrid

Until September 22, 2014, at the Reinha Sofia Museum in Madrid is open the exposition "Playgrounds. Reiventar la plaza" (Playgrounds. Reinventing the Square). From the site: "With some 300 works, the exhibition recounts a different history of art, from the end of the 19th century to the present day, in which artists and activists play a part in redefining public space by exploring the city as a game board, questioning modern-day carnival and holidays, vindicating the right to laziness, reinventing the square as a place of revolt and discovering the possibilities of a new world through its waste. The exhibit takes the playground model as an ideological interrogation of an alienated and consumerist present."

Here the exposition's site: http://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/exhibitions/playgrounds

Here a short video:

Children At Play: An American History

Even in these days I’m reading a brilliant book wrote by Howard Chudacoff, Professor of American History at Brown University. The author presents a deeply detailed and very serious investigation about play activity in American during the last centuries. 

This book can prove that, contrary to what I thought, it is possible to build an history of childhood through primary sources (dozens of children’s diaries, hundreds of autobiographical recollections of adults, and wealth of child-rearing manuals). 

Find the table of contents at this link

And the Introduction at this link

Enjoy the great conference about the book's contents here:

Paper at the International Workshop COAC-ETSAB Barcelona 2014.

One more time I presented an article about Architectural toys and their connection with architectural history, education and culture. This time was in Barcelona, Spain, in the  International Workshop COAC-ETSAB Barcelona 2014. The hardest challenge was try to explain in only 15 minutes all the complexity of these narratives, but it was as well a good exercise in order to understand and organize the main core of the issue. 

I also meet some other people that are developing researches in some fields that are very close to mine and that is always good in order to share experiences and knowledge.

Furthermore, four day in Barcelona is always a great opportunity to visiting such beautiful city and some of the best pieces of architecture in the world (as the Mies van der Rohe German Pavilion, a really inexhaustible reference).

Here you can find the abstract. The article will be published in October.