Looking forward to the 2018 Biennale Architecttura 2018 in Venice this year and to wandering through the garden of international pavilions at the Arsenale, where architects, designers, thinkers, and creators from all around the world are expressing their countries collective visions, interrogations and ideas.

The Biennale Architettura 2018 is titled FREESPACE, a word meant to describe "generosity of spirit and a sense of humanity at the core of architecture's agenda." (http://www.labiennale.org)

The first stop for us will be at Cafe Florian.  In the late XIX Century, it was at the tables of Caffè Florian that the local politicians and art enthusiasts created the Biennale:

 http://www.caffeflorian.com/it...

http://wow-webmagazine.com/inc...

Here we will see Aldo Cibic's Installation that stops in motion a moment of time to provide opportunity to develop a collective consciousness in design.  

DESIGN AS VITAL TO PRACTICE

For many years I worked in Milan & Venice as the Creative Director for Aldo Cibic   We designed buildings, furniture, and objects (sometimes within the same day). We'd design a tall Milanese metropolitan hotel, one day and on another day we would rebrand/recode a city center in a government boardroom.

Besides doing these things, I was fortunate to collaborate as part of round table discussions with great Italian design leaders, to run workshops, and to design installations during bienalles, trienalles, and design fairs.

Regularly the studio would engage professionals, students, designers, and clients in interrogating architecture and design as relates to humanity and the built environment: We would ask about where design can make things better, we would look for solutions to problems that seemed impossible.  We were convinced that our design faculties could make a difference in the world.  We felt it was our duty.  

In following that calling we were alive and inspired.  We worked long and happy hours.  Beautiful buildings were built.  Installations that made people curious and engaged opened the mental spheres.

One of the most poignant aspects of design in Italy that echoes throughout centuries is the sense that this way of thinking and designing, is imperative to the process, and that the abstract intelligence found in creative thinking is the life blood of good design.   

Developing robust ways to increase vitality and support humanity on the abstract plane is crucial to the design process and can be in harmony with technical requirements and deliverables.   Creative thinking combined with macro to micro production can work hand in hand.  Design inspiration can actually help construction documents can go out the door. 

FREESPACE

On the subject of designing-thinking-creating "freely": This years Bienalle focuses on "FREESPACE".  This time pushing the envelope with ideas about humanity and generosity at the core of the exhibit..

"It is examples of generosity and thoughtfulness in architecture throughout the world that will be celebrated in the 16th International Architecture Exhibition. We believe these qualities sustain the fundamental capacity of architecture to nurture and support meaningful contact between people and place. We focus our attention on these qualities because we consider that intrinsic to them are optimism and continuity. Architecture that embodies these qualities and does so with generosity and a desire for exchange is what we call Freespace."

16th International Architecture Exhibition is titled Freespace, by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara and is explained their choice as follows

«Freespace describes a generosity of spirit and a sense of humanity at the core of architecture's agenda, focusing on the quality of space itself.

Freespace focuses on architecture’s ability to provide free and additional spatial gifts to those who use it and on its ability to address the unspoken wishes of strangers.

Freespace celebrates architecture’s capacity to find additional and unexpected generosity in each project - even within the most private, defensive, exclusive or commercially restricted conditions.

Freespace provides the opportunity to emphasise nature’s free gifts of light - sunlight and moonlight, air, gravity, materials - natural and man-made resources.

Freespace encourages reviewing ways of thinking, new ways of seeing the world, of inventing solutions where architecture provides for the  well being and dignity of  each citizen of this fragile planet.

Freespace can be a space for opportunity, a democratic space, un-programmed and free for uses not yet conceived. There is an exchange between people and buildings that happens, even if not intended or designed, so buildings themselves find ways of sharing and engaging with people over time, long after the architect has left the scene. Architecture has an active as well as a passive life.

Freespace encompasses freedom to imagine, the free space of time and memory, binding past, present and future together, building on inherited cultural layers, weaving the archaic with the contemporary.

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

Here in America, there is an insurgence of this creative-intelligence advocacy, through what is being called “thought leadership”. 

Firms are finding out that what separates one firm from the next is the ability to empower the practitioners and professionals in thinking beyond the bottom line.  In my position at NK Architects, I am surrounded by a similar spirit of advocacy for humane dignity in the built environment, from projects in process, to active contributions in the surrounding communities.  One of the great benefits of being in a "legacy firm" is that there is an aspect of integrity that echoes when the founders are still actively engaging with all levels of the practice, and helping everyone to feel they are an important contributing creative-intel agent in the greater whole.

Technology is making it that the concrete is easily reproducible to achieve status-quo.  To do more for our clients, our communities, for the future, and for ourselves, we are being called to expand our minds, to remember why we started walking the path of architecture and design to begin with, and to keep walking it fully engaged. If we don't keep the spirit of design alive when we sit at our once-drawing-boards-now-machines, our industry will cave into copy and paste buildings. This is not what we want.

We are not automatons, and we cannot surrender to being as such.  The space of the mind is free.  Thinking is free.  In elastic time the mind that is thinking creatively and engaging that genius available to all of us, time expands, as do possibilities.

https://2018.sfdesignweek.org/announcing-italian-design-day-2018-with-aldo-cibic/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldo_Cibic

http://www.cristinareolon.com/wordpress/portfolio/la-citta%E2%80%99-degli-orti/

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/aldo-cibic-memphis-design-incomplete

TEDXpordenone Aldo Cibic - Rethinking Happiness

DIVERCITY + BELONGING IN THE CITYExcerpt from the Centre for Urban Design & Mental Health "To study the city means analyzing the full 360 degrees of reality that surrounds us through both concrete appearances, as well as its impalpable truths: time, memory, need and sentiment.There are many... View full entry

SETTING THE FOUNDATION FOR MENTAL HEALTHNK Architects and their Behavioral Healthcare Architecture Team exhale, as SUN Behavioral Health, in partnership with St. Elizabeth Healthcare, opens its newly constructed doors to the community of Northern Kentucky.   On President’s Day,February... View full entry

A Land-of-the-Lost in NJ My husband was telling me about his human discovery yesterday... While enduring freezing cold on railroad tracks, where he was surveying for a client of his that owns the railway, the words “Kean Sees All” stopped him on those tracks. This part of the railroad is... View full entry

URBAN DESIGN FOR COMMUNITY WELLBEING REDESIGNING TOKYO ____________________________________ TOKYO, August 1, 2017 @urbandesignmh      #udmhtokyo “By 2050 two thirds of the global population will live in cities. Urban health and wellbeing is increasingly becoming part of the remit of urban... View full entry

NK Architects' 2nd Annual Knowledge and Networking Event for Atlantic Health Morristown Medical Center was held May 16, 2017 at the Park Avenue Club in Florham Park, NJ. Ben Lee, AIA, CFO and Managing Director, Healthcare Practice, NK Architects, and President of the American Institute of... View full entry

Winter is on the wing, and spring is filtering in with fresh air, fresh thought and sunshine... and Mental Health Awareness Month. This annual opportunity to raise public awareness about mental health was established by the National Association for Mental Health (now Mental Health America) in... View full entry

from: http://www.urbandesignmentalhealth.com/TODAY Friday 7th April is World Health Day, and this year the World Health Organization has announced the theme, which is: Depression: let's talkhttp://www.urbandesignmentalhealth.com/blogWhile the whole world is talking about depression for World... View full entry

http://www.urbandesignmentalhealth.com/blog/world-happiness-report-2017-opportunities-for-designing-social-into-the-environment#comments View full entry