sustainable architecture:magazine

The sticker that personalizes the magazine’s package with the consumer’s name and address.

The final design of the package.

As you see there is a circle-shape cut out that reveals a part of the front cover and a label on the top that personalizes the product with the consumer’s name.

The first design for the packaging. With a cit out to reveal part of the magazine and a cut out to hold the opposite part when it folds.

The images are taken from the experimental and final products/packages for the dvd.

The first package I produced, unfolded

Front cover (hard cover with a glossy paper wrapping it and folding inside the book to hold it)!

An inside of the book (dps)

China’s earthquake has caused political ans social change that unfortunately affects the reconstruction effort from the governments perspective. Volunteers from all over the country guthered into dissaster areas to work with resque teams. Those people have lost their houses and businesses and the schools that their children was attending. Two months after the quake and those people still live in tents having nowhere else to stay. This issue definetely reflects the ethos of the brand because is a problem that a country faces and it fulfills Postopia’s values. These values are better sustainable communities, safest/friendlier enviroment. Also architecture students have a lot to gain from these projects simply because they get to add to there educational knowledge. By taking part to these projects is like been on a placement.

Today’s branding has prooved that consumers will respond positively if behind a brand there is a philanthropy cause. The success of corporate philanthropy concerning marketing programs has been widely accepted from a business perspective, with 83% of consumers declaring that they have a more positive image of a corporation that supports a cause and 2/3 say that they will buy a brand link with a social cause and only if the price and the quality are equal.

Postopia has become a movement because its main objective is to driven architecture students to a more conscious and ethical vision for the safe of a better, sustainable society. It is not just a brand, a company. Its values are more importand than ordinary corporations. There are similar movements under the umbrella of architecture. Among those, are the Archigram‘ the group was invented by a young group of architects with vision a technocratic, experimental future. Their projects were too futuristic to stay alive, indeed some of their constructions had collapsed and were never rebuild.

Moreover, Superstudio was another architectural avant garde group whose vision was to challenge the modernist orthodoxies that had dominated architectural thinking for decates. They also believed that architecture could become an influence for a the world’s progress.

Postopia’s proposal is that architecture s a social art and should be applied to help those without shelter. As a movement Postopia tries to answer the question “what role can architecture play as a socially responsive endevour in the future”?

1. For 33 years-Art Directore at New York Times
2. For almost 30 years he was working for the New York Times Book Review (1978-2007)
3. Directed Push Pin editions, a package of visual books and with his wife he has produced over 20 books and design products for chronicle books and other publishers.
4. For over 2 decades he has been contributing editor to PRINT, EYE, BASELINE, and ID. Also he has contributed articles, critical essays and columns to other design and culture journals.
5. He has been curator of a number of exhibitions.
6. He received the AIGA Medal for Lifetime Achievement in 1999 the Art directors club Hall of fame Special Educators award in 1996.

In order to show that I have done some thought concerning the Awards ceremony and everything that goes with it, I have designed a little 3D structure, a mock up in other words that shows the idea of the award gift that winners will also receive. The awards as explained in the Postopia.org website, and you must have seen in the creative part of the project, have the theme of a window. The window has three colours for the first three winners. The Gold Window, The Lilac Window and the Black Window. The idea behind it was an open window for new horizons. Window to hope.  Window for a better future. As a structure represents architecture because it is afterall a part of a house. In the images I only show the Gold version of it since I could do the other two. But you can see in the posters and postcards an illustration of the other colours. The 3d is made out of wood. (cheapboard) For the glass representation I used a plastic clear material that I glued at the back of the window (on the wood) and coloured purple. The frame is Gold.

A Black and White version of it to show a bit of contrast.

USSR in Construction was a propaganda magazine whose mission was to promote a better more approachable image of the Soviet Union abroad and at home. It was a monthly magazine and was published between 1930-1940, although in 1949 resumed publication as a general feature publication, and then it change its name as Soviet Union, which is still published today.

Founder was the writer Maxim Gorky and his vision was the magazine to reflect with the help of photography the whole scope and work that was happening in the USSR. Its format was more likely influenced by the German bourgeois ilustrated magazines of the early 1920s, Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung and Muncher Illustrierte Presse. USSR in Construction appeared in four separate editions, German, English, French and Russian. Later in 1930, a fifth edition in Spanish was added.

During the First Five-Year Plan that the Soviet Union created an ambitious program of collecting its agricultural production and transforming the country into a major industrial power, issues emphasized on the huge industrial projects. During the 1930, the magazine exanded to cover a broad range of themes that presented  an image of national unity.

The most prominent designer was El Lissitzky and he was the strongest single influence on the art direction of the magazine. His work demostrated the way that text, images, charts, maps and diagrams could be intergrated into visual narratives that gave appropriate empasis to each element.

The magazine’s initial format included a title page with a large photograph and a masthead whose typography changed frequently in the early years. Also, the editors never used any typographic rules. The magazine had enormous spreads and the art director experimented with foldout pages that sometimes presented huge horizontal photomontages.

At the beginning, pictures were printed in sepia but after several years the editors began to experiment with different colours, that included blue, green, red and purple.