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INDA workshop and exhibition
@H Gallery

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DESIGNING INFORMALITY

INDA workshop and exhibition

@H Gallery

Bangkok,

2020

Bangkok streets are lined with ubiquitous stalls, makeshift kitchens and a large variety of temporary structures selling different food, clothes, and electronic gadgets. This urban condition represents the continuation of a long-standing tradition of informal trade within the community. In such a context, we see informality as an effective response to pre-conceived societal structures, as an instrument to re-organise political and formal imposed conditions. It is rooted in people’s daily life, producing its own social, economic and cultural sphere, manifested through symbolically charged objects and mundane rituals.

The purpose of the workshop was to identify the appropriate design categories to grasp informality into an architectural device. This happened through a speculation built on the pamphlet “Street Food Funeral”, that led to the construction of an inhabitable chariot for a fictional gastronomic requiem: treated as typological device, the chariot became an hybrid synthesis between a market stall and a religious baldaquin.

Researching what the markets already offer, sell and display - we attempted to find a precise logic to curate a variable organization of goods, without misrepresenting the informality and spontaneity of the outcome.

We asked the students to determine the chariot’s architectural conditions, producing a spatial scaffolding to challenge the relationship between the different actors meant to inhabit it: sellers, monks, musicians, guests and pedestrians. Testing a series of imaginary rituals, the ground floor of the H gallery was transformed into a stage-set for happenings and informal gatherings. We thus highlighted the mutual influence between people’s behaviours and designed elements.

The students were encouraged to relentlessly assemble and disassemble a collective product, developing design and construction skills related to the field of movable structures. Particular attention was dedicated to the artisanal crafting of specific ornamental and functional components, to understand the deep connection among aesthetics, mechanisms and spontaneous reactions.

Taught and curated by

Lemonot

with

INDA students

Photos

Prin Tumsatan

INDA urban mural
@WTF Gallery

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STREET FOOD FUNERAL

INDA urban mural

@WTF Gallery

Bangkok,

2018

The mural is a response to the progressive disappearance of Thai street food culture, imposed by the government. It is a representation of its history and its funeral.

“Yet this week, in an attempt to impose some order on the capital’s famed tourist road, the Thai authorities ordered all street vendors selling food, clothes and trinkets to clear off the pavements during the day. “ The Guardian, 2018

“In Bangkok’s Fragrant Street Food, City Planners See a Mess to Clean City planners prefer a more manicured Bangkok, with air-conditioning, malls and Instagrammable dessert cafes — and without the mess and noise of street vendors.” [...] Already, the number of areas designated for street food has decreased from 683 three years ago to 175, according to the Network of Thai Street Vendors for Sustainable Development. [...] “If they want to get rid of us, we can’t do anything to protest because it’s the law,” Ms. Somboon said. “But Bangkok to me is about street food. Without it, it wouldn’t feel the same.” New York Times, 2018

“Thai values on living is a language that has a persuasion and sweet sound. The food they eat is also one persuasion too. But it isn’t just only attract the eyes because it is a traditional way of preparing food in a better way than buying food from a convenience store. But what the government is doing is hurting Bangkok by changing the colorful and beautiful chaos in Bangkok into a boring space to buy food as we are seeing now.” David Thompson (Thai food expert), 2018

“We know each other because of our hunger. You are so chill, we can meet in every place that we want and everytime you make me impressed and gain new experience. “You” - who we are talking about - are “street food”. It doesn’t matter if we’re rich or poor. We already met. We have known street food since we were kids. My grandma always took care of my food, she alway asked me “what are you going to eat today?” until now. [...] Money is the illusion Rice and fish is reality” Street Food Funeral, 2018

Taught and curated by

Lemonot

with

INDA students

Video

Tony

Exhibition
@Cho Why Gallery

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SPIRITUAL LINES

Exhibition

@Cho Why Gallery

Bangkok ,

2018

The purpose of this exhibition is to identify the spirituality behind certain informal assets in Bangkok, filtering them through selected design practices. This happen through the appropriation of one of the most powerful procedures belonging to Thai subculture: the Sak Yant, the sacred protecting tattoos. We dissect their aesthetics, we construe their symbolic meaning - displaced into nowadays cosmopolitan culture and filtered through the logics of architectural representation.

“Yantra” is a sanskrit word derived from “yam”, which means control or restrain, and “tra” which means freedom or liberation. The majority of people in Thailand are Buddhist but the Thai people have preserved a religious flexibility that forbids easy categorising and the concept of a single religious truth. In Thailand Sak Yant are as much a manifestation of these open mindsets as they are tools of social control. Perhaps the Sak Yant tell us that life is full of contradiction not meant to be resolved.

Indeed, we see architecture as a relentless interplay between precision - the construction of hierarchies - and expression - the representation of symbolic mechanisms. We see the act of drawing as a combination of figurative instances and geometrical abstraction, as well as a medium to address the spirituality embedded into people’s interactions.

Lemonot and Reminisce Tattoo collaborate to deconstruct architectural drawings and Sak Yant, hybridising layers and elements, to highlight methodological parallelisms and to trigger a creative exchange between these two disciplines.

The event took place at Cho Why, set in a beautiful shophouse in Chinatown. Through different crafted experiences, staged across the three floors of the gallery, visitors discovered and engaged with the nature of contemporary spiritual lines.

Directed and curated by

Lemonot

with

David Fernandez

Reminisce Tattoo

Video & Stencils

INDA students

Workshop and exhibition
@AAvs El Alto

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CULTURAL ASSEMBLING

Workshop and exhibition

@AAvs El Alto

Crucero del Sur _ El Alto,

2018

The AA Visiting School El Alto questions the ideas of identity, folklore translated into architecture – that becomes thus a collision among multiple symbolic fragments, far beyond its disciplinary boundaries and conventional testing grounds.

Act 1 - Defragmenting We started constructing a new architectural artefact in a chaotic process of fragmentation and re-assembly, transfiguring each element we would use, charging it with symbolic and aesthetic sense regarding the cultural power of the “Diablada of Oruro”. In the process of understanding this, we dived into the first week of the workshop to dismantle our own, identitarian fragments and combining them with a protagonist of the Diablada that was assigned to each one of us. The task was to take the essence out of the characters and ask ourselves: what defines that persona? Is it something visual, symbolic or both at the same time? What does that mask transcend in human nature? How can we make an ancient dance contemporary?

Act 2 - The Kingdom of Fragments The elements we selected and arranged did not work in a vacuum. We are all part of a bigger picture. The process of designing continued with the production of the surroundings. The context, made out of ceramics became our frame to play within. Each one of us had its own totem shaped out of geometrical cones, in different shades and sizes. Through these totems we fueled the design of the entire ground, where synthesis and syncretism aroused.

Act 3 - Assembling the choreography The last week we worked in one of the cholets of Freddy Mamani Silvestre. The place itself suggested us to make a centerpiece as in each of its buildings, the shapes and columns meet and intertwine almost in a knot right in the centre of the rooms. This centerpiece involved the assembly of the miniatures in a series of stages that resemble the sequence of building up any architectural project. The action of translating and appropriating objects, placing them in a new context gave a new symbology for our ground. We used objects as a medium to construct architecture. The whole project got unveiled through a performance, revealing the meaning of this ground: an inverted ceiling with a complex chandelier in the middle. Our painting became a fresco, our centerpiece – a chandelier, our totems - ceiling lights and our movements were trajectories to our ideas

Taught and curated by

Lemonot

with

Delphine Blast

Fernando Cajias

Ronal Grebe Crespo

Mario Sarabia

Freddy Mamani Silvestre

Childrens’ library
@Pinocchio International competition

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THE FACTORY

Childrens' library

@Pinocchio International competition

Collodi,

2017

“The child who concentrates is immensely happy” - Maria Montessori

The Factory is a platform for children’s playing and learning. The Factory is a park within the park, both isolated and connected with the exterior through envelopes of transparent bricks. An artificial mountain, where a linear library encloses clusters of different workshops. Each one of them allow the children to explore, to concentrate, therefore to be happy.

Designed by

Lemonot

with

Dario Marcobelli

Illustrations

Sabrina Morreale

INDA students

Exhibition and Performance @Festival of Creative Urban Living

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EDIBLE ARCHETYPES

Artefacts and prototypes

@Festival of Creative Urban Living

Lisbon,

2017

Edible Archetypes begins with the Florentine Zuccotto, credited to be one of history’s first frozen desserts, and an “archetype” of the traditional Italian patisserie. With roots in Renaissance culinary history, the Zuccotto, or “pumpkin”, is a cream-filled pan di spagna sponge cake flavored with pink Alchermes liquor and covered in a chocolate ganache. Its shape is said to be derived from soldiers who used their helmets as a mould. Its appearance reminds us of a proper architectural archetype: the dome.

Beginning with Brunelleschi’s famous design for the dome of the Florence Cathedral, the largest brick dome in the world and a masterpiece of European architecture, Edible Archetypes aims to reinvent the Zuccotto through the lens of five different cities and their signature architectural domes. Each new recipe is developed as part of a typological investigation for an extravagant yet consistent family of dome-shaped cakes, creating a series of outcomes based on the combination of architectural variables and dessert construction

Rather than designing for food or with food, Edible Archetypes is an attempt to trigger a new collaborative understanding: designing through food. The whole project goes beyond aesthetic experimentation—we are drawing a methodological parallelism, combining techniques and procedures belonging to different creative fields. As architects, we recognize that the blurred lines between disciplines like art, music, cinema, politics anthropology and gastronomy creates new fertile grounds for unexpected assemblages. We believe that this approach helps architects design and shape the contents of our contemporary world.

We are using architecture as a methodology to challenge the way patisserie is made, making architectural categories the connecting mechanisms, juxtaposed and applied to raw edible ingredients. Each recipe has its own assembling process, where the morphology of each new dessert is treated as a dome prototype: the result of architectural suggestions, mistakes and trials.

Architects and pastry chefs often use similar tools and elements with the same density and composition, independently adopting similar strategies to address structural problems and material behaviors. In this spirit, the models and drawings for Edible Archetypes were both influenced and responsible for directing the cooking process. And here resides the paradoxical beauty of the project: working in parallel, we learned how to represent a recipe as a design and vice-versa, combining architectural and gastronomic languages in a faceted making process.

Eventually, the project aims to create not only new desserts, but perhaps the machinery and the conceptual tools for them, brought back as ingredients for architectural strategies. Edible Archetypes keeps the two disciplines both autonomous and methodologically connected, determining a fine boundary where one ends and the other starts. And it is exactly there, where we practice architecture. Our favorite “spaces” to produce architecture are indeed the borders between different disciplines (in this case patisserie and architecture itself). We value ambiguity as a positive and productive intellectual tool.

MATERIALITY (MILAN) The traditional Milanese Panettone is combined with the St.Honoré to create an hybrid between the flavours of the Zuccotto and the tactile textures of Italian industrial design products from the ’60s. A basement of naked stracciatella—obtained through a sophisticated horizontal layering of frozen cream and chocolate—could replace the laminate support for a Sottsass animalistic lamp. Here, it sustains a cylinder of yellow crumbs and several rings of spiky almonds. They puncture a pink icing cap, 3D-printed as a 15cm diameter semi-sphere in more than six hours, almost as long as a full size panettone needs to rest after being baked.

SCALE (PARIS) Transparent isomalt spheres—flavoured with Alchermes—are filled with cream, pan di spagna and chocolate ice cream. The entire Zuccotto is thus contained into a platonic shape with a diameter of 2.5cm, reproducing and inverting the scalar process of the Newton Cenotaph, where Étienne-Louis Boullée imagined the whole universe inside a building as an homage to Sir Isaac Newton. The spheres are grouped on top of four dome slices cantilevered from a chocolate stick. Casting and joining elements are the most similar procedures in the two disciplines, with actions choreographed in the same way. However, the artificial powder will never be as expressive as a thin, crunchy sesame vault.

ORNAMENT (ISFAHAN) A double-layer of chocolate crust supports rows of Zoolbias, Baklavas and other typical Iranian fried pastries between its inverted muqarnas, creating a dome, where structure and ornamental envelope become almost indistinguishable. The overall shape recalls a rationalised cluster of grapevine, angur in Iranian, which becomes a geometrical set of three ingredients, playing different roles: the grapes have a neutral taste with a bit of acidity, the insulating nests of fried honey is extremely sweet and the chocolate perforated layer, as a plaster counter-facade, balances the whole compound with its bitterness.

STRUCTURE (ROME) Following the structural system of Hadrian’s Pantheon in Rome, the edible bowl for creamy desserts is treated as an inverted dome, constructed with layered rings of caramelised bricks forming a hole in the centre. They are an hybrid between Florentine biscuits and slices of Roman Pangiallo, oriented radially in the same direction: a yellow, shiny and smooth texture on the exterior contrasts with a crispy conglomerate of nuts pointed towards the interior, reproducing the light and dark effect of a cave. Dried fruit become smashed rubbles of terrazzo tiles, casted into bricks of transparent resin, while the liquid silicon reveals its natural resemblance with the egg yolk density.

FORM (MOSCOW) Highlighting the similarities between jelly pieces and the colourful domes of Saint Basil’s church in Moscow, this cake creates an interplay between what is solid and what is soft, below a deceiving envelope. As in a matryoshka doll, there are different strata—a thin crust of pink icing hides a layer of jelly where, raisin and dry fruit are floating. The baked part of the traditional Kulich is displaced in the middle, as about to come out from the homogenising drape with a vertical pinnacle. This pivotal element organizes a series of colourful plans, thorough result of the horizontal sectioning of the gelatinous volume.

Designed and constructed by

Lemonot

Sabrina Morreale and Lorenzo Perri are architects, educators and founding partners of Lemonot – a duo for spatial and relational practices, architecture and performative arts. We graduated together at the Architectural Association and we’re now based between London and Italy.

Our projects re-invent the relationship between urban fabric and human rituals through a wide range of media: pavilions, exhibitions, short films and designed performances. We relentlessly seek new forms of togetherness, with a contextual yet transterritorial approach that aims to detect, celebrate and trigger the spontaneous theatre of everyday life. 

We experiment with the language of artistic strategies in public space, empowering alternative narratives and unexpected interactions – to initiate unconventional acts of place-making. We explore how architects can contribute to a peculiar reinterpretation of the city, defining novel 1:1 experiences through short and long-term occupational strategies. Dealing with multiple stakeholders at the same time, we often intervene as both facilitators and designers – constructing supporting spatial structures to make things happen.

Our constant engagement in academia is a crucial part of Lemonot. In 2018-19, we taught as Adjunct Professors at INDA in Bangkok and we’ve been Programme Heads of the AA Visiting School El Alto (Bolivia). Lorenzo taught at the University of Applied Arts Vienna  (dieAngewandte) in Architectural Studio 1 from 2020 to 2023, while Sabrina is currently Studio Master in the Foundation Course at the AA in London. Together, we now lead the Architectural Design Studio 7: Convivial-ism at the Royal College of Art in London. 

We collaborate with several cultural institution – including Arquine, La Biennale di Venezia, DPR Barcelona, LINA European Architecture Platform, S AM Basel, Architecture at the Edge (West Ireland) – and our projects have been exhibited and awarded internationally: among the others, at the Young Talent Architecture Award 2016, at the ATT19 Gallery in Bangkok, at the RIBA, at Vienna Design Week, at Bangkok Design Week, at Milan Design Week, at Archifest Singapore 2019, at Mextropoli 2021 in Mexico City, at FAR-Architecture Festival of Rome 2022 and at CAFx Copenhagen Architecture Film Festival 2023.

Furthermore, Lemonot is one of the 9 selected architectural practices for the Padiglione Italia – curated by Fosbury Architecture – of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, and Sabrina has been appointed as the 2024 Enel Foundation Italian Fellow in Architecture at the American Academy in Rome.

Lina Fellows 2022/2023

“Spaziale” – Padiglione Italia, Venice Architecture Biennale, 2023

This is Tooltip!
Bangkok, 2018
Bangkok, 2018
Bangkok, 2018
Milan, 2018
La Paz, 2018
Collodi, 2017
London, 2017
Lisbon, 2017
Milan, 2017
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lemonot

Sabrina Morreale, AA Dipl
Lorenzo Perri, AA Dipl (Hons)

projects@lemonot.co.uk

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This is Tooltip!
lemonot

Sabrina Morreale, AA Dipl
Lorenzo Perri, AA Dipl (Hons)

London, Vienna, Stockholm, La Paz and Italy

projects@lemonot.co.uk

ABOUT

This is Tooltip!

Sabrina Morreale and Lorenzo Perri are architects, educators and founding partners of Lemonot – a duo for spatial and relational practices, architecture and performative arts. We graduated together at the Architectural Association and we’re now based between London and Italy.

Our projects re-invent the relationship between urban fabric and human rituals through a wide range of media: pavilions, exhibitions, short films and designed performances. We relentlessly seek new forms of togetherness, with a contextual yet transterritorial approach that aims to detect, celebrate and trigger the spontaneous theatre of everyday life. 

We experiment with the language of artistic strategies in public space, empowering alternative narratives and unexpected interactions – to initiate unconventional acts of place-making. We explore how architects can contribute to a peculiar reinterpretation of the city, defining novel 1:1 experiences through short and long-term occupational strategies. Dealing with multiple stakeholders at the same time, we often intervene as both facilitators and designers – constructing supporting spatial structures to make things happen.

Our constant engagement in academia is a crucial part of Lemonot. In 2018-19, we taught as Adjunct Professors at INDA in Bangkok and we’ve been Programme Heads of the AA Visiting School El Alto (Bolivia). Lorenzo taught at the University of Applied Arts Vienna  (dieAngewandte) in Architectural Studio 1 from 2020 to 2023, while Sabrina is currently Studio Master in the Foundation Course at the AA in London. Together, we now lead the Architectural Design Studio 7: Convivial-ism at the Royal College of Art in London. 

We collaborate with several cultural institution – including Arquine, La Biennale di Venezia, DPR Barcelona, LINA European Architecture Platform, S AM Basel, Architecture at the Edge (West Ireland) – and our projects have been exhibited and awarded internationally: among the others, at the Young Talent Architecture Award 2016, at the ATT19 Gallery in Bangkok, at the RIBA, at Vienna Design Week, at Bangkok Design Week, at Milan Design Week, at Archifest Singapore 2019, at Mextropoli 2021 in Mexico City, at FAR-Architecture Festival of Rome 2022 and at CAFx Copenhagen Architecture Film Festival 2023.

Furthermore, Lemonot is one of the 9 selected architectural practices for the Padiglione Italia – curated by Fosbury Architecture – of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, and Sabrina has been appointed as the 2024 Enel Foundation Italian Fellow in Architecture at the American Academy in Rome.

Lina Fellows 2022/2023

“Spaziale” – Padiglione Italia, Venice Architecture Biennale, 2023