Buenos Aires: a space for designers under 35 in a former bronze foundry
The Argentine daily newspaper La Nación features the rehabilitation of an abandoned industrial space. Two young designers have turned it into a creative community for creatives in a range of disciplines: furniture, textiles and ceramics.
The design community is already revving up for SaloneSatellite 2022: the young creatives are pressing on with their research work, coming up with new ways of expressing themselves and solutions to everyday problems, as we saw at the Lost Graduation Show at the recent “supersalone.” The Argentine daily newspaper La Nación reports that in Buenos Aires, the architects Marcos Altgelt and Tasio Picollo, both 32, have turned the spaces of a former bronze foundry into a gallery, a shop, and a collaborative design space for young designers under 35. It’s called Concepción Local: “The factory was in a state of total abandonment, in every possible sense. We came across a large number of foundry tools such as moulds and crucibles,” said the author Vivian Urfeig.
There are objects in Travertine marble by Gastón Badii and wooden ones by Sur del Cruz, rugs by El Espartano and lamps by Huup Iluminación. There are also commercial pieces, ceramics, printed tablecloths and the Salchi Banco by the Grupo Bondi (Eugenio Gómez Llambi and Iván López Prystajko): a seat made of coloured cement sausages. Their faux capitonné benches are already part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires (MAMBA) and garnered an Honourable Mention at the 2014 Red Dot Awards, in the Urban Design category.
Marcos Altgelt and Tasio Picollo, who head up the RIES studio, feature with some of their work, including a lamp that uses water as a means of diffusing light. “When it’s turned on, the constant brightness causes the Marimo – a type of algae that grows in the form of velvety spheres in cold lakes in Northern Europe and Japan – to float to the surface to maximise its photosynthetic ability and then descend when turned off,” is how they describe the Arquitectura para Plantas series, which covered the hall at the Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires (MALBA) in 2019.
Their new space promotes “diversity, multidisciplinarity, experimentation with materials, open perspectives and a common factor: the promotion of the national industry in a transformative space,” concludes Urfeig.
Credits
Original Text: Vivian Urfeig
Photo: courtesy of La Nación
Magazine: La Nación
Publisher: MNMS Holding, Mitre Family
