Translation coming soon!!

El proyecto se emplaza en un terreno único, una quinta centenaria que subsistió estoicamente a la subdivisión que da origen a los barrios. Las quintas nacen como fincas productivas, generalmente agrícolas, que con el avance de la ciudad hacia su periferia se transforman en espacios ociosos, donde el bagaje cultural de sus propietarios se refleja en el romanticismo de sus paisajes arbolados. En esa transición ociosa, el quincho deviene en la versión vernácula y doméstica del pabellón en el parque, una estructura que brinda un sentido espacial al paisaje, posibilitando un uso libre de programas.

 

Nuestra participación comienza cuando la quinta es adquirida para un futuro desarrollo inmobiliario que busca hacer del parque su principal herramienta de diseño. El quincho, se transformaría entonces en pabellón de recepción, visitas y exhibición, hasta tanto comience la obra, momento en que el mismo sería demolido para dar lugar a otros programas.

 

El proyecto pone el punto sobre la onírica obsolescencia programada del pabellón. Importa una tradición estética oriental que pone especial énfasis en la romántica relación entre recorrido, parque y arquitectura en busca de amparar el lenguaje en el campo de lo extraordinario. Buscamos construir un espacio a la vez mágico e imposible, poniendo en valor esa especie de templo al que otrora peregrinaban sus antiguos dueños en busca de asados y siestas, y que hoy se pone al servicio del imaginario fantaseoso de vecinos y transeúntes que siempre se preguntaron por aquello que habitaba y daba sentido a la última quinta del barrio de Vicente López.

 

Construimos un espacio como experiencia, buscando que brille en sutil agonía hasta desaparecer y fundirse con la leyenda del parque que vivió más de cien años.

Así nació el quincho dorado.

Cliente:

Domus Parque

Fotografías

Javier Agustin Rojas

Efervescente is the name of an award given to young designer and artists organized by the Centro Cultural de España en Buenos Aires (CCEBA) at the mythical Palais de Glace in the Recoleta section of Buenos Aires.

 

The curator of the design section, Wustavo Quiroga, invited us to take part in the show, envisioning our work as a nexus between the two disciplines taking part in the event.

 

We used a small room between two galleries, the one on the ground floor where the work of the artists was exhibited and the one on the second floor where the work of the designers was exhibited. We occupied the whole space with a Tender made especially for the show.

We decided to stray a bit from the registers of the classical documentary in an attempt to create a new visual universe from the video material we had, one that would represent and reinterpret the magic of the experimentation carried out in Barcelona.

Link to Perching Barcelona 

Tender Foster Catena grew out of an invitation to participate in a group show at a gallery specialized in photography. The idea was to come up with a piece that would re-signify a space in the gallery not in use, a passageway too small to exhibit photographs. Tender, then, was based on the architectural need to make, to occupy and to construct space by means of a material system. The work, which is made of 3,000 wooden clothespins, engages the idea of the readymade and, mostly, the connection between the clothespin and the collective imaginary.

 

Through the rediscovery of the everyday, of the clothespin, people appropriate the space, making it their own through memory and touch.

 

This was the first piece we exhibited. While initially it was to be on display for only one week, it turned into an icon of the gallery and stayed up for almost an entire year until it was sold to a foreign collector.

Canasto vs. Barranca is a short documentary in two chapters: “Procesión” and “Barranca.” It shows the ball’s last journey from the entrance of our old studio in the Belgrano neighborhood of the city to its final destination: Las Barrancas de Belgrano, a historical site in the city of Buenos Aires, where it would undergo a number of endurance tests.

Encofrados [Framework] is the first large-format work in the Paraguas [Umbrellas] series, a research project that pays tribute to the work of Amancio Williams by systematically reconstructing one of his most emblematic projects, the shell dome, popularly known as Amancio’s umbrella. The series attempts to rediscover the spatiality of a piece originally designed to be fourteen meters in the air. Encofrado evidences the beauty of those formal discourses lost in the development of the architectural work, elements like concrete framework, by turning a moment of the construction process into an inhabitable space. This project is also the conceptual return of Amancio Williams’s umbrellas to La Rural, the place where they were first constructed in 1966 to crown the Bunge y Born Pavilion. It was on top of those umbrellas that their proud author had the photograph that gave rise to this research project taken.  

Scale 1/2

Developed along Equipo IK and El Espartano
Espacios Comunes Program / General Curador Tomas Powell 

Patio Colonial is an attempt to restore the tile’s original proximity to the body, removing it from its sole use as covering and roof to make it a topography to be used as a bench on the ground floor. What Patio Colonial does, essentially, is engage the poetics of walking or sitting on a tiled surface.

We designed an installation on the ceiling of Tiendamalba, the gift and design shop of the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA). The work, which consisted of a series of Tenderamas, was created for the launching of a limited edition of the product.

Watch Tenderama

Airports have a very systematic approach to spatial and graphic design.

Spaces, boards and signs are designed to help people find the way to their terminal, gate and flight.

 

Our workshop explored an emotional layer to signage throughout a design system that would blend in to the material and spatial language of the airport.

 

By simple means of connecting the dots, the students created a series of singular typographical families using the ordinary airport stanchions as a way to grow the type into space

 

We worked around some of the emotions that run through the users, while they sail across huge halls full of lines, security checks, paperwork and people.

 

Even if they feel as sterile spaces, airports, are full of mixed emotions, happiness, regret, anxiety, fears and dreams.

 

We wanted to capture the eye of those who wander the hallways and connect with their inner thoughts through some secret messages that lead to some possible questions:

 

“Should I stay?”

“How far should I go?”

“Where’s home?”

 

We like to play with the idea that airports have a different set of messages hidden within their corridors. We tried to bring them up through a set of ephemeral typographic installations that would somehow change the passenger trip into a journey. 

Students:

Farrah Li - Jessica Yu - Rick Liu - Viktor Van den Baembussche - Shaonan Zhou - Stephanie Esquivel - Pilar Castillo - Consuelo Velasco.

This project was the fruit of collaboration between Normal™ and Tramando for Tramando’s Fashion Now collection in Japan.

 

Martin Churba invited us to Japan to work on the presentation of its collection at Tokyo Rooms and the launching of the RetroTramando collection at the store Destination Tokyo.

BKF+H Piel is a linguistic reinterpretation of the structure-encasing binary composition throughout Modern architecture.

The project addresses the compositional possibilities afforded by the symbiotic relationship between skeleton and dermis or, in more vernacular terms, skin and bone.

 

The BKF+H12 prototype we installed at Tramando Laboratorio is the structure’s first contact with its textile skin. Conceived as a garment, that skin stretches and adjusts while redrawing the space traced by BFK’s diagonal lines.

 

Link to BKF+H106 Tramando Laboratorio

After the Okupar workshop held in Bogota, we moved to Barcelona, a city with a rich culture of public space. That is where the system found its definitive name: Perching (from the Spanish word percha, which means hanger), inspired by Bicing, the public bicycle rental system that has enabled Catalans to rediscover the Ciudad Condal.

 

The public space of Barcelona was the ideal framework in which to carry out the first urban tests of a system born on the other side of the Atlantic.

 

Perching became an infrastructure of occupation. It evidenced and formalized some of the city’s invisible structures, like a plaza turned into a soccer field, a monument that had become a gathering point, and a wide street that seemed to have invisible lanes for pedestrians.

Link to Perching Barcelona Invasión (Video)

Link to Perching Bogotá

It was the architect’s desire to break away from the tradition of his discipline for a while and to play the part of the developer, the artist, or the designer that, over fifty years ago, led Bonnet, Kurchan, and Ferrari Hardoy to design a chair that would reflect the spirit of their architecture. That ambition was the origin of one of the most widely recognized works of contemporary design: the BKF chair. When MoMA purchased the chair for its permanent collection, the architects seemed to have been catapulted onto the international scene. On their way up, though, they collided with the industry of the knockoff, which took them off the map to such an extent that the piece is now known around the world as the butterfly chair—with no mention of its true authors.

 

We too form part of that brief history of ambitions and bootlegs because, thanks to the chair’s formal complexity and—because a copy—affordable price, we were able to use it as the unit with which to build a tower.

The tower is based on the yearning to defeat gravity, to leave the ground behind and touch the sky. A tower is but a constructed desire, the desire to go beyond the human scale.

 The appearance of the tower makes reference to that moment in the process of constructing buildings when they are still without skin, when they show their skeleton, the structure of a possible and boundless space. In keeping with the spirit of its time, we designed our tower when our peers were beginning to build their first tall buildings according to a new fideicomiso logic whereby the architect becomes the developer. It was designed for a rotunda that was never constructed and then abandoned by the public works bureaucracy. Today, from the banks of a somewhat polluted stream on which Olympic rowers practice, it embodies the spirit of the time.

In early 2011, we were commissioned by H&M through Gainsbury & Withing to design a series of interventions based on our Tender system. The work was to be exhibited at the launching of the new H&M Home collection at its Flagship Store in London.

 

The project was developed over the course of six months. We designed a number of elements, one of them involving a piece crowning the main escalator.

 

The piece was twenty meters long and 1.5 meters wide. It contained a total of 25,000 clothespin hand painted and installed on a slope. The original idea was that people could touch the piece while going up the escalator, as if it were an animal, a snake.

 

A second system was developed for the main window installations, a system conceived as a wall that we called Tender Stack that uses the clothespin as a pixel to generate different configurations.

 

Tender Division is a limited edition of three folding screens designed exclusively for Gallery S. Bensimon in Paris; we have worked with the gallery since early 2011. The screen is a rendering of the system of spatial dividers called Tender Wall.

 

The pieces were produced to be exhibited at Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche, the famous Parisian store, in the framework of the event Design Entre Deux Rives, a collaboration between the store and the gallery.

 

Later, one of the screens was sent to the 2012 edition of the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan, where it was featured at the French pavilion in the Tortona

It all began at a terrace, like a garage band or a bunch of nerds who get together to develop a new app in the recesses of their parent’s house.

 

Tender came into being on my deck, mostly as an excuse to get together with friends and build on the basis of the idea of repeating a piece countless times to see where it would take us. As the afternoon wore on, an unexpected form appeared, a wooden hyperbolic paraboloid, a sensual and simple double curvature shape. From then on everything has been—and continues to be—sheer exploration.

Translation Coming Soon!

El Aguante es para la cultura popular un símbolo de fortaleza, resistencia, tesudez, valentía y bravura. En la jerga futbolera ilustra el soporte incondicional de una afición hacia su equipo. Trascendiendo los límites lingüisticos el aguante deviene en característica física de las personas o de los grupos.
“Hay que tener Aguante”

El taller busca proponer una mirada creativa a la generación espacial mediante la implementación ordenada de un material a través de la sistematización de configuraciones, tanto formales cómo estructurales, puestas a prueba empíricamente.

Episodio I - Sistema
Es la etapa en la que se estudian e implementan conjuntos de reglas o principios del material, estructurados y enlazados entre sí.

Episodio II - Colapso
Es la etapa en la que se indagan los momentos críticos del equilibrio de los sistemas diseñados.

Episodio III - Aguante
Es la etapa en la que se buscan los momentos estables del equilibrio sometiendo el sistema a una carga.

Episodio IV - Colonia
Es la etapa en la que se interviene el espacio circundante colonizandolo de manera conjunta.

In summer 2009 we were invited to develop an intervention as part of the Ciudad Cultural Konex Summer Program.
So we decided to open a new line of research by rethinking elements loaded with history, that is how we came along the colonial tile.

The colonial tile has imprinted in its name a part of our story, an aesthetic building style forced to this land's culture by the Spanish Colonies.   We wanted to create a space of appropriation playing with the poetics of being on a roof, so the first step for our research was to partially  decontextualize the tile by eliminating its logical function of a water barrier, a roof. So we forced it to the ground, as a topography of use, as a meeting point that carries away the spatial and material feeling of seating on a roof.

We thought the tile as a composed module to generate a new space, far from its constructive heritage, we developed three surfaces that articulated the space entirely. Two walls that functions as a potential stage for acoustic shows and a large topography that might be used as a bench by the visitors of the program.

English transcript coming soon!

BKF+H60 Pasarela Tramando is the first test of the BKF+H linguist-material system based on the structure of the BKF chair.

 

The idea of designing the catwalk for a fashion show grew out of the need to test the system in a setting capable of determining its potential.

 

The set of six successive BKF+H10 arches yielded a unique theatrical pace to each presentation of Tramando’s Fashion Now collection as the fabrics and patterns of the garments were framed by the contemporary lines of a system that was born a classic.

 

Canasto vs. Barranca, the ball’s last journey, from the entrance of our old studio in the Belgrano neighborhood of the city to its final destination: Las Barrancas, a historical site in the city of Buenos Aires, where it would undergo a number of endurance tests.

Translation Coming Soon!

El Aguante es para la cultura popular un símbolo de fortaleza, resistencia, tesudez, valentía y bravura. En la jerga futbolera ilustra el soporte incondicional de una afición hacia su equipo. Trascendiendo los límites lingüisticos el aguante deviene en característica física de las personas o de los grupos.
“Hay que tener Aguante”

El taller busca proponer una mirada creativa a la generación espacial mediante la implementación ordenada de un material a través de la sistematización de configuraciones, tanto formales cómo estructurales, puestas a prueba empíricamente.

Episodio I - Sistema
Es la etapa en la que se estudian e implementan conjuntos de reglas o principios del material, estructurados y enlazados entre sí.

Episodio II - Colapso
Es la etapa en la que se indagan los momentos críticos del equilibrio de los sistemas diseñados.

Episodio III - Aguante
Es la etapa en la que se buscan los momentos estables del equilibrio sometiendo el sistema a una carga.

Episodio IV - Colonia
Es la etapa en la que se interviene el espacio circundante colonizandolo de manera conjunta.

In early 2012, Tramando—the clothing brand directed by Martin Churba—invited us to participate in another project: the conception and construction of its new store, Tramando Laboratorio.

 

Thanks to the synergy between the two creative teams, it was possible to re-adapt the BKF+H system and its unique formal universe to the new store in the Palermo section of Buenos Aires. We wanted to design and construct a space that would connect the user to simple and pure sensations like being inside a metallic skeleton.

 

As if developing a linguistic system, we used 106 “characters” (BKF structures) to build a tunnel intended to awaken the visitor’s sensations when he or she walked into the store. This unique spatial narrative engages the idea of walking into the laboratory of a textile alchemist like fashion designer Martin Churba.

After being rolled through Las Barrancas de Belgrano, where it was “mutilated“ in a number of different ways, our beloved ball of baskets was pronounced dead and archived in our small storage space. Its remains stayed there until one day, hungry for air and company, it went out once again. Though scarred from previous journeys, the ball was brighter and more glamorous than ever.

 

 

The words “make a BKF-style lamp” written on scrap paper was the point of departure for a formal system that would eventually be called BKF+H.

 

The BKF lamp is, indisputably, the origin of a project that would grow exponentially pursuant to the first formal trials. BKF’s spatial language left aside its function as furniture to become system.

 

The lamp idea re-emerged as the first experiment of BKF+H Piel (as BKF+H Skin), a second stage of the BKF+H system in which we played with the possibility of generating a textile or vegetable skin for the BKF skeleton.

 

We worked with Mauricio Matheus (a textile designer) and José Maserazzo (a light engineer) to complete the first prototype for BKF+H2. It still hangs over the cash register at Tramando Laboratorio in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires.

Link to BKF+H106 Tramando Laboratorio

Link to BKF+H12

Love Me Tender is the name of a series of installations we designed for the fashion brand Tramando.
Two full color pieces were developed in the main window and the entrance of Tramando Casa Matriz, the brand's flagship store.
A third black and white piece, was later installed at their recently opened Paseo Alcorta Mall store.
The pieces were our humble hommage to The King, Elvis, and to the creative brand that Martin Churba directs since 2003.

Canasto may be the most personal project to date since it is closely tied to the places of childhood play. The idea was to work with the body’s scale to design/construct something larger than one’s self in order to return to the scale of childhood actions,  like kicking a ball that comes up to your knees or using the boxes that gifts come in to build hideouts.

 

The first step was to run some formal experiments with a large number of plastic baskets, which meant invading the yard to a family house in Vicente López, a suburb of Buenos Aires. This was the author’s favorite childhood playground, and so it seemed like the perfect place to try to build the largest sphere possible.

 

Though flawed and still unstable, the prototype of the sphere, as well as its final destination, had been established. Conceived to be rolled, this ball made Canasto a traveling research project, one permeable to those spaces that housed it on its way to its final destination; the Barrancas de Belgrano hill, a landmark in the city of Buenos Aires and a park where the author use to ride his bike as a kid.

 

English Translation
Coming Soon!

Terminado el rediseño del Comedor UADE, nuestro cliente nos encargó el desarrollo de un puesto de venta que se conectase estética y conceptualmente con el salón ubicado a cinco pisos de distancia.

Una pequeña sonda que expanda los servicios del comedor a una de las torres de la universidad y que además mutase según los horarios de recreo y demanda.

Diseñamos junto a Oficios Asociados, una cápsula simple revestida en malla metálica, buscando aprovechar las tensiones superficiales del propio material como detalles formales del sistema.
+ sobre Comedor UADE

English Translation Coming Soon

Burrito nace cómo mediador entre el recipiente exhibidor y la experiencia de explorar el territorio. Una vez más se recompone el ejercicio de construir con lo existente un dispositivo para explorar lo desconocido. La construcción se define cómo excusa de movimiento, de mutación, de búsqueda de la constante redefinición de lo establecido.
El Burrito no es estático, no tiene un único uso definido, se establece como posibilidad, doblegando el límite de la función, no es exhibidor sin performance, no es performance sin contexto, el Burrito es dócil, simple, sutil y algo extraño, cómo todo aquello que está Hecho en Japón.

Making of installation of the central piece of the Natural Indigo exhibition at Gallery S. Bensimon, curated by François Leblanc.

View Tender Indigo

After the Fashion Now collection had been launched, Tramando invited us to design its stand for the Tokyo Rooms fair, where its next collections would be presented.

 

Rather than a traditional presentation with blueprints and renders, we decided to build a full-scale prototype. We sent photos and videos of the piece to be approved by HP France, Tramando’s partner in Japan. Though the project was approved, it never made it to Japan due to limited production time.

François Leblanc, the director and curator of Gallery S. Bensimon, saw our work during a brief visit to Buenos Aires. He invited us to participate in a group show called Natural Indigo after that color of natural origin and its different incarnations.

We installed a Tender with five thousand clothespins in different shades of indigo as well as a series of lamps made especially for the gallery    

View Making of (Video)

We were invited to participate in the third edition of Sr. Amor, a creative project organized by the Salvation Army. For that event, different designers were asked to resuscitate garments and objects donated to the Salvation Army and stored in its warehouses.

 

The idea for the third edition of the event was to design a support for two. In keeping with our style, we decided to build an intimate space in which two people would find themselves compelled to come together.

 

Inspired by the futurist imaginary evident in the designs of the first skyscrapers, we attempted to create a space structured by its boundaries; the space in the middle would be left empty to make room for an encounter. For this project, we used approximately four hundred paper folders to gently define the limits of the space.

The series of Tender lamps was the fruit of close collaboration with La Feliz, a furniture firm directed by Patricio Lix Klett and Celeste Bernardini, while we were developing Love Me Tender, the series of pieces for Tramando.

 

The cornerstone of the product we designed together was manual labor. Indeed, that is the basis of all of La Feliz’s products. We wanted the result of our collaboration to be an outgrowth of the formal research we did for Tender but capable of operating on a domestic scale.

 

The initial cluster of objects consisted of ioio (large) lamps and ieie (medium sized) lamps. In 2012, we decided to design a smaller version as well, thus completing the triad we call iuiu.

Barzón Magazine invited us to intervene on its stand at ArteBA 2013, the most important contemporary art fair in Argentina. We proposed something unprecedented for the Tender system: a piece that would intervene on both the ceiling and the walls. We lined with clothespins the fair’s stand, thus beginning our Roja series.

This project consists of the expansion of a commercial space on the deck of an art gallery. When we designed it, seven years ago, we brought together the typical "white box" notion of an art gallery and the classic “Casa Chorizo” design of old homes in the Palermo Viejo section of the city—a design in which a number of rooms are connected to one another and to an outdoor patio. The premise, then, was to respect the typological identity of the neighborhood and the existing infrastructure while also maximizing display space by means of a system of moveable panels.

Without straying from that original premise, but adding to it what we had learned about design and materials over the years, we formulated an idea of respect and conservation on the basis of a hypothetical dialogue between two elements conceived at different historical moments.   

The remodeling work had to be performed without interrupting the gallery’s operations, a requirement that reinforced a non-invasive model by which one element rests gently on another. 

The store space was to be an intermediate step for a growing brand of clothing gradually on its way from operating on the basis of a closed-door showroom model to a flagship store model in one of the most densely populated commercial areas of the city. Along those line, we designed a readily adaptable, open, and uninterrupted volume that would be distributed into a service area—the black box—containing dressing rooms and bathrooms that divides the sales space from the owner/designer’s office/studio. Contact with the outdoor space is provided by a few openings cut into the metal shell of the volume. These openings attempt to forge new relationships between the project’s various spaces.

Bancada (Benched) is the logical extension of projects like Piche, Colonial and Canasto through which we developed a production logic known as Espacios Materiales research based on identifying existing everyday elements that, by virtue of their shape, have spatial potential. Poncho Disco Experiment and Bancada seem like a match made in heaven. That white plastic bench that always dreamed of the strobe lights of rock, disco and show time has grown up to become the cornerstone of a high-power show that revisits the best of the golden age of glam. In early 2015, Poncho Disco Experiment also had a growth spurt with a free show in one of the largest parks in Buenos Aires.

Our relationship with Mafia resembles the one between small start-ups and investors insofar as one party recognizes in the other the power to develop and both act to further creative symbiosis. On these ground, we decided to invest our creative-spatial knowledge in a small family business directed by Marcos Mafia that manufactures backpacks, bags, and accessories from scraps of nautical supplies like sails and ropes.

We made use of Caballete—one of our least known systems—to meet the growing need to exhibit Mafia’s products, first at its studio in Buenos Aires and, later, in San Francisco, California, where the company moved, and finally in its new offices in Tokyo, the capital of the Empire of the Rising Sun.

Over the course of this brief sequence of experiences, our relationship with the brand deepened. We came to understand its core values and attempted to contribute to the construction of the brand identity. Burrito was the fruit of that formal evolution, a mediator between the display device and the experience of exploring a territory. Once again the exercise consisted of using the existent to build a device to explore the unknown. Construction is an excuse for movement and mutation, for the constant redefinition of the status quo.

Burrito is not static; it does not have a single predetermined use. It is, rather, a possibility that overcomes the limit of functionality. Without performance, it is not display device and without context it is not performance. Burrito—like everything Made in Japan—is docile, simple, subtle, and somewhat strange.

Photograpy: María Quinzio for Estudio Normal™

Diamando is a unique piece, as special as the love between two close friends of ours who got married in late 2011. For a gift inspired by the classic James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever, we used rhinestones joined in an orderly fashion according to the different facets of each diamond.

The project is an addition to a home that our client shares with his children, an independent and private area for retreat and relaxation. The original space was an industrial warehouse with a loft that was to be turned into a sort of “Fortress of Solitude.”* 

 

The project, which seemed initially to partake of the “Man Cave” tradition—a kitsch sub-genre in North American interior architecture that provides a masculine sanctuary within the home—changed course when, in conversations with the client, we proposed envisioning the space as a reflection of the individual’s intellectual expansion.

 

Our design is based on the library as sole structuring system. We drew inspiration from the old typology of libraries, when they were entire rooms that housed the expansive intellectual universes of their owners. The initially empty grid is the basis for the project, the element that divides it into four diaphanous spaces with scarce programmatic determination.

 

We were particularly interested in developing the limits of the spaces, attempting to shape the emptiness with a specific entity. We experimented with natural materials like Paulownia wood and with crafted languages like French caning to generate soft textures and surfaces that offset the rigid aesthetic of the concrete. 

 

We conceived of the project as a spatial oxymoron, a permeable cave informed by the influences of the library as system constructed to transform the one who inhabits it.

 

*Superman’s Occasional Headquarters

Appeared for the first time in “The Super-key to Fort Superman”

Action Comics N° 241 (June 1958)

The Carrito project attempted to study and to redefine what is perhaps the most popular culinary typology in Buenos Aires: the carrito de choripanes, or trucks where grilled sausage sandwiches are made and sold. The project replicated the carrito’s form and function in an attempt to support design in the framework of the Festival Internacional de Diseño de Buenos Aires held in October 2012. We customized an existing carrito to make a vehicle that drove around the city in order to bring the popular nature of the carrito to bear on local design. The carrito was an attempt to take design to the street and, hence to the people through its typological and formal composition.

The BKF chair was designed in 1938 by Argentine architects Juan Kurchan and Jorge Ferrari Hardoy and Spanish architect Antonio Bonnet, as a complement or industrial correlate to the “international style” that dominated global architecture in the first half of the 20th century. Once acquired by MoMA in New York, the chair quickly became one of the most widely reproduced pieces of modern furniture of its time. Somewhat tragically, it also became one of the most widely copied modern objects of all time and, hence, one of the most popular design pieces.

 

Over half a century later, the BKF forms part of popular formal language. It is a leading feature in all sorts of spaces thanks to its reproducibility, inexpensiveness, and popularity, which make it a material value on itself.

 

BKF+H is a compositional system that investigates the spatial potentials of BKF unfettered by its original function as chair. Here, it is conceived as a construction material for the development of new spatial logics.

 

BKF+H12 is the first experiment in this formal investigation. It is a full-scale prototype of a new and rich language.

Tiendamalba, the Malba Museum design store, asked us to develop a product geared to the general public based on our Tender system.

 

We designed a triangular modular product that could grow by addition to give shape to new surfaces.

 

In its language, Tenderama combines the system’s basic ready-made logic with a do-it-yourself approach to enable everyone to make his or her own Tender at home.

 

Link to Intervention Montage (Video)

After the Performance & Arquitectura exhibition, we met with architect Juan Herreros at his offices in Madrid to plan a joint project. This gave rise to Tender Wall Herreros, the division for a conference room in sector B of his offices in Madrid.

 

The project was developed by the collaboration from designer teams from both firms; we supervised the project from Buenos Aires.

 

The result is a colorful curved wall which provides access to Herreros Arquitectos’ office B.

English Translation,

Coming soon!

En nuestra práctica la obra es el proceso. 
Renegamos con el final como verdad única.
El proceso es nuestra escuela, nuestro primer amor.
Absorver conocimiento para crecer.
No perseguimos obras, perseguimos procesos.
Construir nos mantiene con vida.
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Este video extrae porciones de felicidad de uno de los procesos más bellos a la fecha, por la intensidad, la inmensidad, el color, el crecimiento.
El Tender Vortex Amanecer que corona el Hall del Museo MAR en la ciudad de Mar del Plata, es al día de la fecha nuestro mejor aprendizaje.
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Video Directed by Martin Huberman
Edited by Causa RDC
Camera Martin Huberman, Nina Carrara, Leandro Mercado.

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Project Team: Arq. Martin Huberman, Arq. Nina Carrara
Developed by: Estudio Normal™, Arquitectura Constructiva, Phi Producciones.

Exhibit
Horizontes de Deseo (Horizons of Desire), curated by Rodrigo Alonso
Commissioned: Instituto Cultural de la Provincia de Buenos Aires
Museum of Contemporary Art of Mar del Plata
Mar Del Plata, Argentina
December 2014

The ball’s first journey was to Zavaleta Lab gallery. It took place on the occasion of the third edition of Rebel Arte, a show that combines art and fashion.

 

For that event, we redesigned the ball, effecting a systematic triangulation of its component baskets until we had produced two half spheres. This rendered the system more rigid and larger: by doubling the number of baskets used, going from forty to eighty, making the ball 2,5 meters in diameter.

 

Control Copy is a research and development project that revolves around the large catalogue of copies of chairs known as “modern classics.”

 

The study begins with the Eames Molded Plastic & Fiberglass Side Chair—fruit of a long process of material experimentation performed by Charles & Ray Eames in 1950 on molded fiberglass. That prolific model was, among other things, what allowed the market for that chair to expand vastly thanks to mass production and low retail cost.

 

After it was re-launched by Herman Miller in 2013, the chair returned to the global design scene. It regained notoriety around the world thanks to a boom on the social networks. Shortly thereafter, its fame resonated on the global bootleg market and “3D photocopiers” were set to work, making what would become their new pin-up.

 

It was not long before local markets were flooded with low-quality and, of course, low-cost copies that quickly satisfied aspirational consumers while smashing to bits the design value chain.

 

The impact of this bootleg copy on the market has been so great that it can be seen as one of the first cases of dumping on the design market, a phenomenon that has largely ejected from the industry those designers that attempt to make a place for themselves on the basis of their original designs.

 

Does copy kill design?

 

This project addresses the positive effects of the copy on the design industry, understanding it as a possible key to new creations, new horizons for designers interested in a design ecosystem that allows them, as it once allowed the Eames, to investigate, experiment, and develop their own designs.

 

The two pieces produced break with the motionlessness for which the feet of the chairs were designed, turning into mobile structures, a sort of Frankenstein, both classic and modern, that bears the name of the original designers, Charles & Ray.

IInspired by the futurist imaginary evident in the designs of the first skyscrapers, we attempted to create an extraordinary space that users would discover through use; Thus, Carpetópolis came into being as a compositional system made from almost four hundred paper folders; it gave rise to a space for encounter within the framework of the third edition of Sr. Amor.

 

Participants in Sr. Amor, an event organized by the Salvation Army, included the most prestigious textile designers in the country: Complot and Bandoleiro; Amores Trash Couture and Marcelo Giacobbe; Evangelina Bomparola and Pablo Bernard; Ay Not Dead and Paula Selby; Hermanos Estebecorena and Celedonio Lohidoy; Tramando and 12-na; Garza Lobos and Laurencio Adot. Its third edition also included designers and architects such as Perfectos Dragones, Gaspar Libedinsky, A3, PLAN, Normal™, Federcio Churba and Martin Wolfson. The project is geared to creating a collection of haute couture garments on the basis of donated items.

Designed by Martin Huberman & Normal™ Studio, Belen García Pinto and Andrés Jacobi

Project Team: Beatriz Palacio, Marcos Altgelt,

Collaborators: Arq. Nina Carrara

Photos: Cristobal Palma and Normal Studio

 

Public Spaces Program / Curator Tomas Powell

Pila [Stack] is an experiment that gives free rein to the automatic act of piling things: blocks, pieces of wood, bricks, stones, items that, through the hand, find the way to become something else. But what happens when the basic unit is monumental in scale? When, though larger in dimension than the hand, it is still light enough to be handled? Pila is the formalization of the idea of constructing something monumental with our own hands.

English translation coming soon

Fuimos convocados por François Leblanc, director de Gallery S. Bensimon a participar de "Eyes on the World / un rendez-vous argentin à Paris" un proyecto de colaboración que conectaba a estudios de diseño, de Buenos Aires con pequeñas empresas productoras de la región de Paris. 

Drops es una serie de prototipos, un espejo y un módulo para curtain wall, que desarrollamos en conjunto con Saazs, una empresa especializada en proyectos de innovación aplicada al uso del vidrio. Nos enfocamos en explorar las capacidades formales del sistema Créalite, uno de los sistemas del catálogo del grupo Saint Gobain, que permite termoformar el grandes superficies de vidrio.

La presentación del proyecto se realizó en la Galería "Passage de Retz", entre el 4 y el 9 de Junio de 2013 en el marco de la 13° edición del "Designer´s Days" en París.

Perching is a workshop that creates constructive systems on the basis of the notion of module yielded by interconnecting a standard triangular object like a plastic clothes hanger.

 

During the first week of the workshop, each group of students established a set of compositional rules for its system and defended its potential on the basis of small spatial configurations.

 

One of the systems designed was chosen to be built collectively in the main courtyard of the university campus.

Link to Perching Barcelona

Performance & Arquitectura was a group show organized by the Spanish Ministerio de Cultura and curated by architect Ariadna Cantis.

 

Along with other artists and architects, we were invited to intervene on one of the spaces in Tabacalera, a building in downtown Madrid that housed the Antigua Fábrica de Tabacos de Madrid,.

 

Each intervention had to involve a performance, so we proposed that the 12,000-clothespin Tender be finished by the visitors in an action we called Cuelgue Colectivo (Collective Hangout) that formulated a collective construction of space.

 

To take full advantage of the work’s potential, we drew inspiration for its coloring from the Wiphala, the flag of Andean native peoples. This sacred symbol is used in social gatherings; it represents a community system based on fairness, equality, harmony, solitary, and reciprocity.

Outsider BA Festival was the ball’s last stop before reaching its final destination.

 

The festival lay siege at an old power station in the La Boca neighborhood of Buenos Aires and invited different artists and designers to intervene in the space.

 

We were interested in subjecting the ball’s structure to traction, so we hung it at the entrance to the show where it would serve as a sort of meeting point for visitors. Due to the weight of the plastic baskets, the ball became ovular.

 

Paraguas (spanish for umbrella )is a research project that originates in a photo where Amancio Williams, an Argentine architect known internationally for the experimental and avant-garde nature of his works, is standing fourteen meters above the ground on one of the two shell vaults he built in 1966 for the Bunge and Born pavilion at La Rural fairgrounds in Buenos Aires.

After fifteen years of research, scale trials, and countless frustrated projects, Williams finally stood before the constructed work. Confident, proud, and somewhat defiant, he decided to walk through it from end to end, and to put to the test the structural soundness of the vault by standing on top of it. The portrait captures the moment when the master architect discovers the full spatial expanse of a piece to be seen solely from below.

As if playing a game, we accepted the challenge of exploring the spatial potential of the upper surface of the shell vault, popularly known as Amancio’s Paraguas (Umbrella), in a research project and tribute we call Paraguas.

We pay tribute to Williams by reconstructing that piece on different scales and in different formats, making available to everyone the spatiality that Williams seems to be enjoying in the photo. Paraguas is a research project that began in early 2012 and that we intend to continue in large-scale pieces in order to popularize the icon in object form.

 

The first intervention is a small scale model in interlocking parts and a set of instructions to reconstruct a shell vault like the ones at the Bunge and Born pavilion. This piece is of interest because of how it literalizes and popularizes the research project through an object to be assembled or as a gift. We attempt here to connect people with the project’s principles, boiling the research down to a concrete object and reconstructing the moment captured in that mythical photo.

Revolución

On the occasion of the celebration of the bicentennial of the Argentine Revolución de Mayo, we furthered the research first started at Ciudad Cultural Konex with an installation that attempted to revolutionize the aesthetic paradigm that the colonial roof tile brought to South America.

 

Due to the trapezoidal shape of the tiles, a natural curve is produced when they are lined up and stacked. This made it possible to form an almost perfect circle by means of the repetition of the teja-biteja module (a piece that had been developed during the previous project, Patio Colonial). We used the term “surface revolution” to refer to that which is generated by rotating a unique piece on a steering axis.

 

Revolución is the origin of a cluster of projects we call Espacios Materiales, all of which make use of everyday elements whose form contains a possible spatial configuration. The piece is approached as a module that can be repeated and multiplied, and hence becomes part of a constructive system with simple and specific rules, like the ceramic cloister of tiles.

 

The installation also included a graffiti piece that makes use of the typography characteristic of political graffiti in the streets of Buenos Aires. We paraphrased Marie Orensanz’s To Think is a Revolutionary Act in one of our battle cries:

 

To Design is a Revolutinary Act 

Love Me Tender is a three piece series that we designed for Tramando the fashion brand directed by Martin Churba.
The installations were born from a beautiful collaboration between the creative teams of both offices, which lead to an evolution of the Tender system towards the adoption of color.
Adopting one of Tramando's traditional color codes we developed three really different pieces at Tramando Casa Matriz.

Love Me Tender was the beginning of a creative alliance between Tramando and Normal™ that lead to many projects throughout the years.

View Making of (Video)

This was our first test of the Perching system in the streets of Barcelona. We generated a perfect, 40-meter-long wave, reinventing the close tie between the buildings and the neighbors in the Barrio Gótico.

 

Link to Perching Barcelona

Link to Perching Barcelona Invasión (Video)

The main idea behind the Tender Vortex is to create a tubular space large enough to hold a person. It came into being as we were designing items to propose to H&M Home. Somewhat later, I asked a friend if I could build it in a part of his house with double-height ceilings, using a plywood ring we discovered in his shed for the structure.

 

That led to a very personal project I call Tender Friends——based on giving away pieces from the Tender system to friends and the people who put me up while I was traveling, but on one condition: they had to help put the work together.

Tender Vortex attempts to provide a simple and honest translation of human fascination with natural phenomena, evidencing the sentiment that leads us to observe, study, grasp, represent, and even wish to “inhabit” those phenomena, if only for an instant.

Inspired by the pictorial-scientific imaginary that underlies the study of tornados, hurricanes, and storms, and by the sheer pull of their simple and powerful forms, we attempted to test the tender as material language, using it to construct a full-scale wooden tornado. 

The chromatic scale of Vortex and the resting place beneath it, the two works in the sculptural pair also on exhibit at MAR , is inspired by the wondrous sight of sunrise on the sea, where the sky is broken down as night becomes day. The same spectacle takes place again hours later at sunset when day turns into night. The work is inspired by that moment of natural light that culture has given a name of its own, as if it were a rite of passage involving dueling forces—night and day—a meeting of opposites that cannot coexist.

That precise moment when the sun comes on the horizon is eternally frozen in a work that interrogates the qualities of human desire as manifested in science, which observes and attempts to understand and to reconstruct what ensues in nature, on the one hand, and, on the other, in the fantastic, which endows natural phenomena with the power to divide reality and to act as a gateway to other worlds, like Dorothy traveling to Oz.
From the simplicity of the clothespin as constructive unit to the complexity of seeing oneself reflected in the eye of a frozen storm at the end of a tunnel of color, the work attempts to make an impact, to open up spatial awareness, and to reawaken viewers’ senses to commonplace encounters with the vastness of the natural world.

 

The two pieces exhibited in the show Horizontes de Deseo at Museo Mar in Mar del Plata (Sunrise Tender Vortex and Paraguas Armadura) come from two different lines of formal research or “families” that the studio has been pursuing steadily for some years; their origins are as disparate as formal and historiographic-conceptual research. Nonetheless, both works address a common concern: making the invisible—in this case, gravity—visible. Embedded in the final form of these works is the effort to render evident how gravity operates on them, a concern that lies at the core of almost all the research carried out by Normal™. At stake is the possibility of rediscovering beauty in the existent by means of a sensorial yet informed re-reading.

Designed by:

Martin Huberman & Normal™ Studio

Project Team: Arq. Martin Huberman, Arq. Nina Carrara

Developed by: Estudio Normal™, Arquitectura Constructiva, Phi Producciones.

Exhibit:

Horizontes de Deseo (Horizons of Desire), curated by Rodrigo Alonso

Commissioned: Instituto Cultural de la Provincia de Buenos Aires

Museum of Contemporary art of Buenos Aires

Mar Del Plata, Argentina

December 2014

 

Details:

Dimensions: 11m high x ø4,5m.>ø1,5m.

68.000 died wooden clothespins, nylon net

Metallic structure and laminated mirror ø4,5m

 

Tender Terraza is our longest-standing piece to date. It is the natural evolution of an old prototype that was later purchased for a private collection.

 

In this case, we consciously decided to make it evolve: we planned an outdoor space in which to test out new compositional rules while also adjusting the work to the dimensions of the terrace.

 

With the passage of time and exposure to the sun, the clothespins underwent changes: the sound they made when they brushed against each other grew higher in pitch and the wood became paler and more brittle.

 

As years have gone by, the piece’s form has become less distinct and its downward slope deeper and heavier.

Carrito

In our region, a lack of urban planning often means that the city is built from the ground up, that is, from the street to urban legislation.

 

In the living organism that is the streets of Latin America, legal, as well as physical, vacuums become opportunities for those who know how to read between the lines of the city.

 

Windshield cleaners, car attendants, street vendors, jugglers, trash-pickers, vegetable sellers, and many others are among the actors in the urban environment who have been able to grasp and to take advantage of what the street has to offer, making it their own to become a part of the urban grid.

 

Out of their endurance, inventiveness, and—in some cases—necessity, these actors become small urban institutions with their own pseudo-uniforms, physical bearing, and even common laws.

 

In this context, the little stands known as carritos where foods that form part of the traditional Argentine asado are sold have become a fundamental piece of the city’s infrastructure and public space.

 

Carrito is a project/intervention jointly designed and planned by Normal and Monoambiente, Galería de Arquitectura y Diseño directed by architect Martin Huberman. The project places the carrito’s typological language at the service of design disciplines.

 

The Carrito project took place in the framework of the IV Festival de Diseño de Buenos Aires, organized by the City of Buenos Aires’s Centro Metropolitano de Diseño.

 

We customized an existing carrito to make a vehicle that drove around the city in order to bring the popular nature of the carrito to bear on local design. The carrito was an attempt to take design to the street and, hence, to the people through its typological and formal composition.

 

We were invited by Praxis International Art as the exhibition designer of Sobremesa, a design exhibit curated by our brothers of Monoambiente. We took this as an opportunity to present a new version of Caballete (Sawhorse) the exhibition system we created along Celeste Bernardini of La Feliz.

The system reinforces the traditional relationship in between the sawhorse and the table, developing a functional language by which we create different exhibit possibilities.

Sobremesa presents objects and projects by:
The Andes House – Bravo ! – Nicolás Oks- Los Gogo - La Feliz - Federico Churba & Heidi Goldfeder - Gonzalo Arbutti - Gabriela Horvat - Grupo Bondi - Normal™.

BKF+H60 Pasarela Tramando is the first test of the BKF+H linguistic-material system which is based on the unit of the BKF chair’s structure.

 

The idea of designing the catwalk for a fashion show grew out of the need to test the new system in a high-impact setting capable of determining its potential.

 

The set of six successive BKF+H10 hoops yielded a unique pace to each presentation of Tramando’s Fashion Now collection as the fabrics and patterns of the garments were framed by the contemporary lines of a system that was born a classic.