Arte en Juego - Diálogos de apolo Y Dionisio | Siglo XIX-XXI

On the 24th, 25th and 26th of January I was in Barcelona at the invitation of my dear friend Oriol Vaz from the University of Barcelona. The challenge was irrefutable: to talk about the relationship between art and play at the Picasso Museum in the company of people like Juan Bordes, Michel Manson or even Alfons Torelló and Lurdes Crirlot. 

And it was what I expected it to be: wonderful. Everyone spoked different languages (Catalan, Spanish, English, French, Italian, Portuguese) but they all talked about the same thing. Like friends who meet after a long time and always resume the conversation at the same point, with the same enthusiasm. All in a magical place where we feel like guests of the great Picasso.

The seeds were planted for many future projects, including a book, an exhibition, and much more... stay tuned!

 

The first six books of Euclid's Elements by Oliver Byrne

Oliver Byrne (c. 1810-c. 1880) was an Irish author and civil engineer that wrote a considerable number of books on subjects including mathematics, geometry, and engineering. Among them, the most famous and really innovative is a very particular version of the first six books of Euclid's Elements that used coloured graphic explanations of each geometric principle.

Published in 1847 by William Pickering, the book has an extraordinary graphic and chromatic similarity with the Bauhaus design formatting. Indeed, in the whole book are used the primary colors red, yellow and blue (beside black of course). Flipping through its pages the reader hardly think that “The first six books of Euclid's Elements” by Byrne was written more than 70 years before the Bauhaus school opening.

The main aim of the book is to spread science, and the strategy is clearly graphical. In the introduction, the author say “The arts and science have become so extensive, that to facilitate their acquirement is of as much importance as to extend their boundaries. Illustration, if it does not shorten the time of study, will at least make it more agreeable”.

The interest of this book is not really the contents (even if the Euclid's Elements is one of the most important text about mathematics and geometry second only to the Bible in the number of editions and published since the first printing in 1482), but the real author’s afford in order to find the best way to show and to explain such complex and abstract concepts. 

Here the First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid on Scribd. Enjoy your reading.

Architectural toys conference at Soares dos Reis School of Arts

Next Monday I'll be at Soares dos Reis School of Arts in Porto for a brief conference about Architectural toys. This event is insert in a large commemoration of 130 years of that School and will be one more opportunity to spread my work for younger people. 

This time I'll talk mostly about the relationship between the design studio exercise, that is a characteristic of all art courses, and the idea of play. Indeed play is an action quite close to the design process in a school context because it is under simulated and controlled circumstances too. Behind that play is, as design studio teaching, a reduction of  complexity and it is restricted in a certain space and time (following the famous Huizinga theory about play as explained in his book Homo Ludens).   Toys are powerful devices in order to educate young children, through play, for the creation as an uncertain and  heuristics thinking route, as design thinking is.

Please find here the main poster:

Juan Bordes Conference at FAUP

Finally, after almost 7 mounts, I ended the editing of the video recorded during the Juan Bordes Conference at FAUP with the title "Los Juguetes que han construído la Vanguardia". This conference was inserted in the course Architectural Toys - Processos Complementares de Reprodução Disciplinar em Arquitectura that I teach at Faculty. It is a amazing narrative because the spanish architecture, sculptor, professor and collector joins several lines between education, arts and architecture following the main idea that vanguard movements were present in the childhood normal life and not only in the academies. Indeed, as Juan stressed, the role of the university education is quite little when compared with the child education that create the very first and more important intellectual bases of each subject. It is incredible to see the correspondences between certain pieces of art and some toys used by child during the beginning of XX century. They are real evidences of a silent relationship that existed in the backstage of the "official" historical narrative.

Please, enjoy the movie…

Matias Bechtold (born 1963)

This post is not even about toys, it is about an artist and his work. Matias Bechtold's works are something that I consider inspiring for everyone that deals with toys for two reasons: the scale and the material. It is something like a paper engineering supported by an Italo Calvino narrative. 

Made by corrugated cardboard their cities evoke scales relations in a view of giant on the urban tissue. Usually without people, his scenarios evoke large cities with skyscrapers and strong scale differences. The use of this kind of cardboard creates a strange monochromatic atmosphere that sometimes remember some "after war" stage or some kind of desert city.

One of the interesting aspect is the use of corrugated cardboard material characteristics in order to achieve pattern effects and scale definition through the design of windows and levels separations in the buildings. Also the streets and the railways are made using the material texture. 

More recently Matias Bechtold worked on the “Im Inneren der Apparate” (On the inside of machinery) project that explore some kind of "inner" architectural point of view building cities with their own detailed interiors.This work is also using recycled material as plastic boxes, televisions or vacuum cleaner in order to create interior complex spaces with a really futuristic and technical look.

Indeed exist, in the Bechtold's works, some kind of exploration around the basic architectural composition elements that exist in the best architectural toys. In fact one of the most important aspct in the toy design is precisely the complexity reduction in order to keep the nature of the object without the "too much information" effect.

More information: http://www.matias-bechtold.de/werkuebersicht/wellpappe