Nodi
Idee per una casa italiana a Bangkok

SESV Spazio Espositivo di Santa Verdiana
Florence, 14 Mar.-4 Apr. 2003

“Our hypothesis: in today’s world what really matters is your network. Your contacts, their number, the shape of their graph. The world of architecture and design does not constitute an exception. If our hypothesis happens to be true, the consequences are many and interesting.”

Done in collaboration with SESV Spazio Espositivo di Santa Verdiana, this volume illustrates the genesis and development of eleven projects devised by the Cliostraat group: the Area Lenzi (Quarrata, 1995-2001), the Mole Rovesciata (Turin, 1995), Baci Urbani (Turin, 1996), Moto Perpetuo (Turin, 1996), City of Water (Bangkok, 1999), PC-House (Tokyo, 2000), Dumia (Turin, 2002), Paper Fish in Plastic Water (Quarrata, 2002), Grace under Pressure (Venice, 2002), Italiana 2002 (Bangkok, 2002) and the project of an Italian House in Bangkok. As the authors themselves state in the Introduction, “ten of these projects are from our past, each one a drawer full of memories. The eleventh, the Italian house in Bangkok, has just started; from day zero it is already acting like a crafty engine of subtle connections and contacts. We want to cast a net of human relations in the sea of circumstance”.
The knots mentioned in the title are the relationships, collaborations and more or less casual acquaintances that each time proved instrumental to the projects’ success. The book includes an essay by Marco Brizzi entitled Architects in Knots.

The SESV exhibition also witnessed the launch of the new website
www.supermoderno.com.

Cliostraat Group: a collective project, born in Turin, Italy, in 1991 with the idea of group-work on the urban territory, a practice capable of contaminating procedures and techniques of architecture and town-planning with art, photography and cinema. Different expressive forms coexist in a sort of collective work-in-progress, focusing on the investigation and the production of new imageries. Professional experience on the territorial and architectural scale interfere with the research activity and temporary events in a continuous confrontation with other Italian and foreign groups.
Cliostraat are: Cristina Casula, Alessandra Esposito, Timothy Heys Cerchio, Stefano Mirti, Matteo Pastore, Luca Poncellini, Alessandra Raso, Matteo Raso, Francesca Roatta, Francesca Sassaroli, Stefano Testa.