FAVOLE IMBANDITE

Illustration and Exhibition

@121 + _Milan Design Week

FAVOLE IMBANDITE

Illustration and Exhibition

@121 + _Milan Design Week

Milano,

2022

Favole Imbandite ("Laden Fairy Tales") is an illustration that Lemonot designed for the book "Playgroundind" - curated by Domitilla Dardi and published by Corraini Edizioni. Together with 9 artists, illustrators and architects, Lemonot staged and exhibition at 121+ during the Milan Design Week 2022.

"This project is a real walk among objects where the scale of the game is blurred with that of the buildings, and the distribution of spaces seems to evoke the urban landscape. In fact, the playing devices create a proportional leap in which visitors find themselves travelling among elements that have the definition and conformation of possible architectural scenarios of a utopian and science fiction city. Even the connections between the various buildings are shown as walkways on the walls and ramparts of a city that is both ancient and futuristic." - Domitilla Dardi

Illustration by

Lemonot

with

Gianmarco Dolfi

Book by

Domitilla Dardi

Corraini Edizioni

STREET FOOD FUNERAL

Play

INDA urban mural

@WTF Gallery

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

SPIRITUAL LINES

Exhibition

@Cho Why Gallery

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

EDIBLE ARCHETYPES

Play

Exhibition and Performance @Festival of Creative Urban Living

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

OPEN PLAYFIELD

Exhibition and Performance @Michael Ventris Trust Award

OPEN PLAYFIELD

Inhabitable game

@Michael Ventris Trust Award

London,

2017

“Games offer play with strategy and chance, rules and competition, winning and losing. They reflect the world we live in and reveal hidden and not so hidden aspects of our nature. What does playing games reveal about you? Are you a secret cheater, a stickler for the rules or a gloating winner?” -Game Plan V&A Exhibition

The world we live in is a intricate network of connections. Today everything is connected. Connecting through digital media, connecting our life with virtual reality, with places. What we do as architects but as well as people is to connect fragments. The way we put together our cultural environment, our knowledge, our influences is what makes your own persona. As architects, we are fully immersed in this fragmented reality. The way we create our work and ourselves is through connecting the parts we get in touch with. It is almost impossible to divide the author and his background from the project itself. Indeed, both in the academic and in the professional world, we investigate the way to assemble informations, discussing the conceptual links between different instances and how to adapt them into physical form. The first and foremost stage is the collection of references, the moment you make your own archive to construct your cultural ground. The way you begin selecting your own fragments creates your own device, your body of production.

However, even though you’re always told to find meaningful connections in this vast ocean of informations, the process of selecting the right ingredients is often assigned to intuition, rarely taught, led or controlled. To design is to choose, our job as individuals is to distill the essential components to achieve a collective product. Therefore, why someone would select one thing to be more relevant

The proposal is a small inhabitable playground to “design” the way you select and collect fragments in the architectural creative process, An ironic attempt to “design intuitions” rather than just proposing an intuitive design. Play has been taken up as a core action of cultural production. The space of gaming incorporates a fundamental dichotomy: chance and chaos together with order and hierarchies.

This machine - a wooden inhabitable maze, where you direct a ball into a hole to drop a selected fragment - is a study of modifications, examining what happens when things combine, interact, change place.The physical instability of the play-field is a metaphor of our contemporary realm, where a cross pollination between disciplines, people and objects relentlessly develops. On one hand you introduce a certain amount of objectivity in the process, designing the parameters of the play-field. You can organise the fragments in the pots as in a zoning act, you can dispose the maze - the obstacles for the ball -as if it was an architectural plan. At the same time you enhance the subjectivity, accepting that the selection of your references is led by chaos to a certain extent. You can’t predict where the ball is going to fall. You can design the play-field but you can’t fully control it. You’re constantly challenged by the chance and its mechanisms.

Lemonot

GAME ON!

Play

Pinball machine

@AA Diploma (AA Prize)

GAME ON!

Pinball machine

@AA Diploma (AA Prize)

London,

2016

The project explores different architectural elements and concepts within the form of a pinball machine. The arcade game, uses a steel ball which starts at the top of the machine, following a number of obstacles until it reaches the end of the complex maze. The primary objective of the game is to score as many points as possible.

The pinball machine is the one game that demands a constant and relentless collision between the ball (the protagonist) and the play field. It celebrates randomness over strategy, and endurance over attack. The project argues that "we adopt a game mentality, because play is a core allegory of cultural production". The designer states that "the more you play, the more possibilities you encounter, all the while you hone your skills and develop your agenda, similar to that of an architect."

The construction which took a whole year to be designed and assembled, includes individual 3D parts which are used to form three separate levels. the first level is of the fragments, where you gather what becomes a part of your collection. The second level is the ground, where these pieces begin to form a distributed landscape of ideas. The third level is the bridges, with which you connect these landscapes together into one continuous and contained little world.

Sabrina Morreale

with

Natasha Sandmeier

Manolis Stavrakakis

Video

Sabrina Morreale

RELIQUARY

Exhibition and Performance @Campo

RELIQUARY

Exhibition and book

@Campo

Rome,

2016

Mankind’s fascination with historic artefacts provides the necessary framework to allow us to cope with our collective existential fears – to, in short, comprehend the magnitude and terror of the natural world. Together they provide a codified, iconographic language which both comforts and instructs us in ways to behave, both alone and together. Throughout history knowledge has been chronicled, transmitted and distilled in the form of myths and narratives embedded within architectural fabric.

GENESIS Extraction is a geological process. The Earth is in a continual process of exhuming and stratifying, pulling apart and colliding with itself. The reconfiguration of excavated material (design) is a pursuit which mankind has utilised above all other activities; we have, for centuries, systematically taken from the ground, translated that which we wrest into objects of use, before burying it once again.

METAMORPHOSIS Reconfiguration might also be read as manufacture. From raw material we make tools to create more of the same – once it is taken from the ground and imbued with meaning beyond its material value, it is changed beyond former utility. This gradual and ever expanding repertoire of objects, forms and tools represents a fascination with evolution – be it of ourselves, the spaces in which we reside, or the environments that we distance ourselves from. The larger desire to manage and configure the natural world—by carving, enclosing and overlaying—is ongoing and, to a certain degree, inevitable.

TRANSLATION The translation material hewn or extracted from the ground—be it stone, clay or ore—is an occupation which is being continuously refined. Two dimensional surfaces bely the three dimensional world, and our instruments of measurement allow us to scale the environment in order to imagine and inscribe new configurations of and for it. The act of translation mediates between the virtual sphere and its implications for the real world.

BIRTH The built world is manifested through the strain and labour of both man and machine. The core elements of architecture—a wall, a roof, an arch, or a column—are able to orchestrate the natural environment and bend it into a comfortable, useful human habitat. Once an idea has been conceived, refined and made buildable the process of nurturing it into reality begins.

LIFE Once a collection of elements have been choreographed into structure, the resultant spaces are occupied. The building, therefore, is subsumed into the fabric of a city and threaded into its civic and quotidian life. It begins to facilitate coexistence, exclusion, privacy, and the public life of individuals.

DEATH As with all things, a lifespan is finite – and often expedited by poor design (consider the conscious act of planned obsolescence). Fatigue, volatility, and irrelevance lead to collapse (a natural end), while others are purposefully put to death: an execution which, by nature of its scale, demands both patience and preparation. The elements of the building’s design and construction are dissolved before they are salvaged and reclaimed.

PROCESSION All life ends ceremoniously. In the case of a building, one configuration has come to pass and another begins; processes of fragmentation and translocation disperse the elements which once comprised a whole. Most are taken to landfill to be fed back into the ground while some are repurposed. Both fates are symbolic: the act of carrying from one place to another should be read as a ritual.

ARCHAEOLOGY Methodically ordered from a chaos of rubble (landfill), individual elements begin to speak of their former use. Set upon and aside from an abstracted topography, they are realigned to a grid in order to find clarity. The passage of time imbues even the most mundane objects with meaning beyond their function or their form, and it is here that we find interest. They represent something beyond our immediate understanding of the world around us.

RELIQUIARY This manufactured landscape entwines multiple worlds into one. As an edifice of repurposed relics, this fragmented and arbitrary terrain becomes a single codified heterogenous landscape. It is a museum of redundant matter scavenged, salvaged, positioned and resurrected as a ruin.

Directed by

OMMX

with

James Taylor Foster

PhotosIllustrations