Earlier this year San Rocco, recipients of the inaugural Icon Award for Emerging Architectural Practice of the Year in 2013, published a limited single-edition run of a new publication: the San Rocco Book of Copies. Within five volumes of 4120 pages lies what they describe as "a database comprised of images that may be copied in order to produce architecture; a receptacle of a collective form of knowledge that we can provisionally call 'architecture'."
San Rocco have been announced as the recipients of the inaugural Icon Award for Emerging Architectural Practice of the Year.
However, San Rocco is not your typical architectural practice. Departing from the traditional model, San Rocco is a collaboration of firms with different disciplines; Instead of buildings, they are known for their publishing projects.
During the 13th Venice Biennale we had the chance to interview the team behind San Rocco: Matteo Ghidoni, Giovanni Piovene and Pier Paolo Tamburelli.
“… if someone who has a valid point of view wants to give it an audience, he has no choice but to start a magazine.” - Eno Dailor On Pamphlet Architecture 1-10
San Rocco Magazine is a new architecture magazine conceived under a five-year plan which researches on their creators fields of interest. Their second issue covers the subject of ISLANDS in whatever meaning you can imagine for the word “island”. As they wrote:
An island is any piece of land that is surrounded by water. An island is any object lost in an endless extension of a uniform element. As such, the island is isolated. The island is by definition remote, separated, intimately alternative. The island is elsewhere. Islands can be natural or artificial: atolls, rocks, volcanoes, oases, spaceships, oil rigs, carriers.
Based on Gilles Deleuze book, L’île Désert et autres textes, the magazine is divided in two main blocks: oceanic and continental islands. Can we talk, then, about the possibility of architectural islands? More after the break.