A drawing is simply a line going for a walk. _Paul Klee Over a charrette, Atelier RZLBD pursued an open series exploring the act of drawing an analogue line. We present 64 lines, each created to push the boundaries of how we understand line. As computer aided drawing takes over the art and... View full entry »
100 Rooms: Many Untold Parables of The Empty Room As a sequel to The Empty Room: Fragments Thoughts on Space (2020), this book elaborates the same theme with one hundred iterations of a square room, each of which tells a different story of the emptiness between the walls. The Empty Room, in the... View full entry »
100 Series* / Kyoto Towers If you do it right, it will last forever. _ Massimo Vignelli The Casigliani Kyoto dish set is a classic designed by Massimo and Lella Vignelli in 1979. The basic concept behind this stackable set of melamine dinnerware was to simplify the operation of collecting plates... View full entry »
RIT appoints inaugural Vignelli Center Designer in Residence The Vignelli Center for Design Studies has appointed RZLBD (Reza Aliabadi)as the inaugural Vignelli Center Designer in Residence. This position was created to assist with an upcoming campus project to design and build a series of... View full entry »
Before the Canadian winter is totally gone, RZLBD (Reza Aliabadi), in his most recent site specific temporary installation, explores the boundaries between art, architecture, and nature. Location: Don River, Newtonbrook Creek / Villaways Park, Toronto, ON. Canada Medium: Cotton – Acrylic... View full entry »
Coal Watch The future depends on what you do today._ Gandhi While at an artist residency at Crowsnest Pass in Canada’s Rocky Mountains, twelve variously-sized pieces of actual coal are gathered from Crowsnest Pass Valley, an area with a long history in coal mining, and arranged onto a plywood... View full entry »
100 Series* / Abject Towers (Yellow) To each ego its object, to each superego its abject. _ Julia Kristeva These days any built form has become either purely a servant to commercial establishment or a commodity for the media culture. Architecture is not an exception. As an art form it hesitates... View full entry »
From 17mm to 56km Reza Aliabadi (RZLBD), a distinguished artist and architect, is a featured speaker for the Vignelli Center for Design Studies' Design Conversations Lecture Series. Aliabadi is scheduled to virtually present at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 20. Registration is... View full entry »
100 Series* / illy Coffee goes with my line of work. Without coffee, I am going to feel like something is missing in the day. I am going to feel awkward._ Al Pacino In the occasion of International Coffee Day, and dedicated to illy, for this short video only 100 variations (from indefinite... View full entry »
Primitive Future: Learning from the beginningComposed of diagrams and an essay, this latest issue is a manifesto that imagines radical reformations of today’s society at both micro and macro scales. The proposal intends to address that a sustainable future starts by establishing a new standard... View full entry »
100 Series* / Planomorph Planomorph is an operating system programmed to continuously iterate the underlying geometries of an eligible space. Infinitely defining spatial choreographies in a field of probabilities. It is exceedingly variable and readily assumes different compositions; stretching... View full entry »
Atelier RZLBD has proposed a 56km long tower, to be hovering above Toronto’s Yonge Street — the longest street in the world. The mega structure made of space-frame and shipping containers will accommodate 134,400 habitats, to reduce the gap in the struggling housing market. This seemingly... View full entry »
100 Series* / Abject Towers (Grey) To each ego its object, to each superego its abject. _ Julia Kristeva These days any built form has become either purely a servant to commercial establishment or a commodity for the media culture. Architecture is not an exception. As an art form it hesitates to... View full entry »
100 Series* / Light-Sifters Structure is the giver of light._ Louis I. Kahn It is no secret that how deeply I am obsessed with light! Light always stands for purity and clarity, and poetically it is the ultimate purifier itself. Yet the theme for this iteration was to distill the light itself. For... View full entry »
100 Series* / Doors I go to the windowand I am opened,I go to the doorand the handle presses me down._ Peter Handke Doors are decisions, sometimes simple and sometimes complex. We constantly choose and there comes the consequences. Opening or closing a door always leads to other choices. Doors are... View full entry »
Lost Cities The city however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand. _ Italo Calvino Lost Cities are a series of conceptual handsfree drawings, exploring the idea of memory, footprint, trace, proximity, and of course the city, the high ambition behind its very formation... View full entry »
100 Light-Traps Material casts shadows, shadows belong to light. _ Louis I. Kahn In my recent book — The Empty Room — there is a snippet where I confess how much I am preoccupied with light and space, and of course the love affair between the two. Light needs the space as medium, and space... View full entry »
Dear friends & colleagues, Hope this note finds you well.Approaching the World Architecture Day in a couple of days, it is my pleasure to share with you an open letter enclosed. This very short essay is reflecting on Space as the main raw material for architecture. And since it was a... View full entry »
Space to architecture is what spirit is to a cocktail. _ RZLBD Spatial Cocktails are a series of conceptual drawings / paintings exploring the idea of space as the very essence of architecture, and the spatial experience as its highest mandate. These drawings intend to represent architectural... View full entry »
The form of things can be discerned better at a distance. _ Italo Calvino Population for a long time was used as a factor in evaluating the tempo of a city, for example Aristotle believed that the ideal city contains not more than 5000 citizens. Later factors such as size, culture, ritual and... View full entry »
Odyssey Along the Axis (Part of Project X*) The axis is the regulator of architecture. _ Le Corbusier In every building, space, and objects, there exists only one (preferred) axial or one-point perspective among an infinite number of (random) diagonal perspectives. Human eyes tend to observe the... View full entry »
100 Series* / Tar Pits: To LACMA with love** Inspired by the La Brea Tar Pits, I submitted myself, every night for 100 consecutive days, to improvise an amorphous silhouette with only one continuous stroke — opening & closing a profile with an ink pen. This led to a playful exploration of a... View full entry »
The Empty Room: Fragmented thoughts on space _ From the book back-cover: Part aphorism and part manifesto, this book by Canadian architect Reza Aliabadi (RZLBD) references his ideas and thoughts about space. He suggests ‘the empty room’ as the very essence of architecture, and ‘the spatial... View full entry »
100 Series* / Restless Cube During the winter of 2012, I had submitted myself to the space-making exercise of drawing a different isometric cube every night, for 100 consecutive days. In accordance with this spatial vision, subtraction was the only allowed operation in order to create... View full entry »
Dwelling on Abstraction This short video compiles 40 abstract photos of the projects built over the past decade. In each photo, the building is unrecognizable, which frees one from preoccupations of the context, function, structure, form, and the like, leaving only a pure composition to see. A... View full entry »
RZLBD Today, the decade it was ... This short video revisits 18 infill projects completed over the past decade in The Greater Toronto area, to see how they have survived within their contexts, finding the right balance between adapting and resisting to what is around. Yet, these crops of their... View full entry »
We are proud as @rzlbd_ Flipped House has been chosen among the Honourable Mentions in residential category at 2018 Architecture Master Prize (AMP) > @architecturemasterprize < View full entry »
@rzlbd_ has received the second prize at The Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition for 100 House. The 2018 edition was to envision the House in the era of AI (Artificial Intelligence). We are honoured as the proposal will be featured @shinkenchikusha and @au_magazine100 House is an ever... View full entry »
@rzlbd_ is very humbled, as for the second consecutive year one of Reza's drawings is among the commended works.The annual International Architecture Drawing Prize is curated by @soanemuseum, @make_architects & @worldarchfest. Spatial Cocktails (Night) is currently on display among... View full entry »
The new issue of rzlbdPOST has been released on the first week of November 2018. In this issue we present an essay called “The Discipline of Syntax” which takes the story behind rzlbd’s old/new logo to the next level!P.S. This issue will also mark the 10th anniversary for rzlbd periodical... View full entry »
