ARCH 1390-2013 - Chris Abboud: September 2013

Emilio Ambasz

· Emilio Ambasz was born on the 13^th of June 1943(currently 70 years old)
· He is argentine
· Architect and an industrial designer
· Ambasz has a ‘green’ architecture style he describes this style to be “green over grey”
· High school completed in Argentina
· Studied in Princeton University, America
· Brought up with his parents very well
· Decided he aspired to be an architect when he was 11 years old
· First architecture project when he was 15, designed a house for a couple of teachers, it was a cubistic kind of house

· Viewpoints on Argentina and comparison to everywhere else (see below)

“Argentina is a marvelous place. Argentines are great bankers of information. They import information; if someone sneezes in Milan or in New York they clean their faces very fast there. They re-elaborate these ideas and provide theoretical MoMA Archives Oral History: E Ambasz page 4 of 68 structures much faster than in their original locales. At the time, Andy Warhol was doing Pop art in New York and artists paying attention to him, already there were people doing Pop art in Buenos Aires with a few months' delay. It's an extremely sensitive echo chamber. At the same time, it is a very faraway place where the sky is heavy in stars. At night when you go out on the balcony and you look out, the stars are very prominent, and your loneliness is very perceptible. You have the feeling that you are really at the other end of the world and that the historical moment is passing you by. At the same time, you have a people who have, on the one hand, a great high level of awareness, of what is historically possible from social-political-cultural viewpoint; on the other hand, they have this extraordinarily undernourished economy that does not allow them to put into practice what they know could be. So you have a people who live mentally on one historical dimension and physically or economically on another. That creates a great amount of tension, which in proper Argentine way we solve by inner-directing our violence. In other countries people shoot each other; in Argentina we eat ourselves from the inside.”

~ Emilio Ambasz

http://www.moma.org/docs/learn/archives/transcript_ambasz.pdf

· Reason to aspiring to move to America (see below)

SZ (interviewer): So [going to America] was to escape this and other....

EA: To escape this and other little numbers. When I was fifteen, I wanted to do a show of American architecture, and I went to see the cultural attaché of the American embassy, who told me that, oh, miracles, a Museum of Modern Art show was offered to him if he could arrange to bring it down. Then I went to see the mayor of the city and asked him if he would lend me a large place which belonged to the city--I had a friend who knew the mayor, so I could do it--and he said, yes, yes, of course. So I went to see the military attaché at the American embassy and asked if I could get a Buckminster Fuller--at fifteen I thought Buckminster Fuller was God's gift to architecture; I grew out of him to expand my definition of "God's gift" and of architecture, too--so they said yes, and the exhibition came, the Buckminster Fuller”

http://www.moma.org/docs/learn/archives/transcript_ambasz.pdf

Brief

Size: fairly large - 1000 m^3 <

Structure:

· Colors used must be predominantly white and solid colored materials

· combination of rigid box like shapes and fluid curved shapes

· Building should be open to the environment

· Depends on some sun light for the general lighting of the building

· Enjoys a large amount of continuous space

· Columns used must be circular

Space Requirements

· 1 Master bedroom with an ensuite