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shatteredgess · 4 years

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𝐍𝐀𝐌𝐄 . ––––– 𝐥𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐳𝐨 𝐝𝐞 𝐥𝐮𝐜𝐚 𝐀𝐆𝐄 . ––––– 𝟑𝟔 𝐒𝐏𝐄𝐂𝐈𝐄𝐒 . ––––– 𝐡𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐕𝐄𝐑𝐒𝐄𝐒 . ––––– 𝐦𝐚𝐢𝐧 | 𝐧𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫

tw: death

• lorenzo was born to a mother who was a prostitute, his father remaining unknown even to this day. he had a very simple upbringing with his mother, more often than not being raised by her and the women she worked with. as lorenzo grew older, he became aware of what his mother was. it didn’t not lessen the love he had for the woman, who put food on the table and a roof (albeit it leaking more often than not) over his head. if he heard anyone in school mumbling about his ‘whore of a mother’ he rewarded them with broken noses and teeth, ultimately earning his expulsion from school during his junior year of high school.

• soon after that lorenzo’s mother was murdered in a drive-by shooting, wrong place and time during a drug deal gone wrong. the police wouldn’t help, it was a prostitute off the streets and they had more important crimes to solve. lorenzo took it upon himself to discover who murdered his mother. it all led him to one of the local gangs, a drug dealer who went trigger happy and cost lorenzo his mother.

• at eighteen he already had an affinity for murder, some would call it a gift. the word of the death spread to a local gang leader who sent his right hand to seek out lorenzo and recruit him for the gang. it was money he needed, the job easy for a young man who did not ask questions. lorenzo vowed his loyalty to the gang and never looked back. however, after forming a friendship with one of the others members, lorenzo saw the gang leader for what he truly was and chose to leave the gang for another.

• in the new gang lorenzo quickly proved himself to be an asset, keeping a close friendship with the other gang member who eventually took over when the old leader died. he remained a trusted asset to the new leader, a confidant who would take a bullet without hesitation if the moment came. he followed orders without question and took out anyone who was a threat to the gang.

• indulgence in violence wasn’t lorenzo’s only vice. alcohol and drug-use fueled his nights and the fights between the woman he was with, diana. it all led to their biggest fight, one if you asked lorenzo about today he could not tell you why they were fighting. what he does remember is his hands around diana’s throat and her lifeless body underneath him. it was all covered up by the gang leader but lorenzo swore to never lose control like that again. he took a vow of sobriety so that his mind could stay focused on the mission.

• diana’s death began the process of his tattoo, heavy black lines decorating his arm. every line representing someone he has murdered, one being added every time. over the years it has grown up the length of his arm to his neck, piece by piece a reminder of what is capable of.

𝐧𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫

• in this verse , lorenzo is a hunter of supernatural creatures . his story remains the same with the exception of his mother’s death , caused by a vampire . what truly started him down a path of hunting was when diana was turned , after that he swore to take down every supernatural creature he could find .

#lorenzo de luca. ⟪ all ⟫#lorenzo de luca. ⟪ aesthetic ⟫#lorenzo de luca. ⟪ thread ⟫#lorenzo de luca. ⟪ meme ⟫#lorenzo de luca. ⟪ verse | main ⟫#lorenzo de luca. ⟪ verse | night of the hunter ⟫

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ezradeluca · 4 years

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[ lorenzo zurzolo, cismale, 21 ] did you see EZRA DE LUCA ? looking as broke as ever. rumor has it HE is usually - CALLOUS and -RECLUSIVE but is also known to be +CURIOUS and +SINCERE. we’ll see about that. they kind of remind me of HALF SMOKED CIGARETTES, INK STAINED FINGERS, A MESS OF BRUNETTE CURLS. maybe because they’re a LEO. they’ve been living around here for HIS WHOLE LIFE. i wonder when they’ll make it out…

hello everyone!! i joined way back when this group started but work screwed me over, so i had to disappear but now i’m BACK with a new baby. this intro is going to be TRASH okay (just like ezra), it’s just a jumble of little facts about him and we can delve if you’d like to plot!

ABOUT EZRA

ezra was born to a single mother in crawford. he never knew his father and isn’t entirely keen on getting to know him.

his mum passed away when he was in high school and he’s been on his own since. he started selling drugs to make money and hasn’t stopped— it’s actually quite a booming business when he’s not sampling his own merchandise (which is often).

he has a handful of friends that he grew up with, but other than that he treats everyone else as temporary and can be quite crass unless they have something to offer him.

he’s almost ALWAYS high, okay, but not in like a goofy stoner way, in a ‘this is my natural state’ kind of way.

loves striking up conversations about philosophy and is a self-proclaimed arTEEST. he’s actually quite good at it, specifically graphic art. the most expensive thing he owns is an electronic drawing pad that he uses when he’s not scrawling on bits of paper.

his constant drug use has kind given him a tortured artist kind of aesthetic and he’s into it, alright. the only issue is he’s TERRIBLE at maintaining relationships because of it. does this bother him? not really. he is quite keen on joining the 27 club so he doesn’t think he needs to plan for his future, unless you count the next six years.

has a CAT ok, he loves this cat more than he loves anything else and it’s basically the only family he has. the cat is called smudge, it is a grey bebe he found on the street when she was a kitten and she’s been the only love of his life since.

he’s the definition of hard boy™ with soft boy™ tendencies because as rude as he can be, he doesn’t actually want to make people’s lives more difficult. not unless they deserve it of course.

WANTED CONNECTIONS

so obviously ezra has been living in crawford his entire life so he needs:

a childhood best friend

the first girl he became infatuated with/his first muse

his clients (ya boi’s got the best shit in town, okay)

an ex fling that ended badly maybe? we love a bit of angst in this house

honestly ANYTHING you can think of- i am open to it all!

SORRY THIS WAS TERRIBLE! PLS MESSAGE ME FOR PLOTS AND FOR FRIENDSHIP I’M LONELY OK BYE.

P.S HERE IS HIS PINTEREST

#drugs tw #crawford:intro #ezraintro #depression/death tw

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chiara-klara-claire · 6 years

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italian music! 🇮🇹🇮🇹

YOUTUBE PLAYLIST

originally made for @polyglotjuden so the title is in swedish (svenska is aesthetics anyway)

I always add songs i find & like at least a little according to my personal taste, it includes classics, not-so-well-known, brand-new hits, children songs….

I suggest to check out also 1, 2 by @langsandlit and @sciogli-lingua

here are some singers and songs i like: (random order, I may update this from time to time)

Cesare Cremonini // lunapop(former band)- Buon Viaggio, Mondo, Il Comico, dicono di me, Hello, figlio di un re, logico, lost in the weekend // 50 special, qualcosa di grande

Måneskin- moriró da re, torna a casa

Fabrizio De André- Il pescatore, bocca di rosa, la guerra di piero, volta la carta, Geordie

Emma Marrone- il paradiso non esiste, dimentico tutto

Ligabue- Happy Hour, Buonanotte all'italia, piccola stella senza cielo, Made In Italy, I ragazzi sono in giro, viva!, niente paura

Jovanotti- Bella, the sound of sunshine, oh vita

I Nomadi- Io vagabondo, salve sono la giustizia, La vita che seduce

Zucchero- indaco dagli occhi del cielo, cosi celeste, il volo

Francesca Michielin- Vulcano, Magnifico

Negramaro- Estate, solo 3 minuti, tutto qui accade

Samuel // subsonica(his band)- La Risposta, Vedrai, la statua della mia libertà // Incantevole

Ermal Meta- vietato morire, a parte te, odio le favole

Levante- Gesù Cristo sono io, Alfonso

Gianna Nannini- Bello e impossibile, Aria, sei nell'anima

CAPAREZZA- vieni a ballare in Puglia, ti fa stare bene

thegiornalisti- pamplona, riccione

Edoardo Bennato: L'isola che non c'è, il gatto e la volpe

Francesco De Gregori- Il bandito e il campione, Vai in africa, celestino, generale

Elisa: Eppure sentire, Gli ostacoli del cuore

Lo stato Sociale- una vita in vacanza Questo è un grande paese, amarsi male

Francesco Gabbani - Amen, Occidentali’s Karma; tra le granite e le granate, pachidermi e pappagalli

max pezzali, 883- L'universo tranne noi, eccoti, hanno ucciso l'uomo ragno

Annalisa: direzione la vita, Se avessi un cuore, Tutto per una ragione

Negrita- Rotolando verso sud

Marco Mengoni- Guerriero, Pronto a correre

Giorgia- come Neve (ft Marco Mengoni), Tu mi porti su

Laura pausini- primavera in anticipo

irene Grandi- lasciala andare, bruci la città

Gazzelle, Sayonara

COEZ- la musica non c'é

Luca Carboni - Ci vuole un fisico bestiale

Rino Gaetano- il cielo è sempre più blu

Fabio Rovazzi- volare

Lorenzo Fragola - # fuori c’è il sole; L’esercito del selfie li>

SHADE bene ma non benissimo, irraggiungibile

Ghali- Ninna Nanna, Cara Italia

artisti uniti per l’Abruzzo- Domani (several artists recorded this amazing song after a earthquake hit region Abruzzo in 2009)

from “Lo Zecchino D'oro” (a children music festival)- Accendi le stelle, le tagliatelle di nonna pina, Il caffé della peppina, goccia dopo goccia, il coccodrillo come fa

idk if i should write smth abt the singers but i suggest you to play the playlist & find out yourself? sorry i suck

#italian music #langblr #italian #italiano #language blog #polyglot #mine #it #my lists

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theblackshit · 6 years

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“L’Inarchiviabile/The Unarchivable. Italia anni 70” at FM Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea, Milan

FM Centre for Contemporary Art, a new artistic and cultural center unique within Italy, opens with the great exhibition “L’Inarchiviabile/The Unarchivable. Italia anni 70” curated by Marco Scotini in collaboration with Lorenzo Paini, with the presence of almost sixty artists and more than two hundred works from the most prestigious private Italian art collections.

The exhibition presents both a critical review and, at the same time, a widespread survey of the Italian artistic scene in the 1970s with works and historic documents aiming to investigate a great heterogeneity of artistic and editorial formats and which reveal, amongst this vast multitude of forms of collective statements, new linguistic devices and a plurality of subjectivities. This was a decade of great productivity in which culture ‘went beyond’ the field of aesthetics, overflowing into languages that resist cataloguing and into ephemeral practices and actions linked to social performability and based on temporality.

“These were the years in which part of the Venice Biennale (1972 edition) – Scotini states – was dedicated to ‘The book as a place of research’ and in which the expression ‘Off media’ proposed by Germano Celant took hold. This is why we have wanted to include, as well as works of art in the classic sense, also photographic reporting, musical scores, radical architectural projects, forms of film, etc. However, the ‘going beyond’ referred to is that of the emergence of social creativity, of general intellect, substantially. This was an aspiration to go beyond the norm and typologies in relation to an (arguably so) unarchivable desire which can be summarized as the space standing between Nanni Balestrini’s subversive ‘We Want it All’ and Anselmo’s metaphysical ‘Everything’”.

The “unarchivable” refers to the surfacing of various, plural social forces opposing the organization and control of labor, affirmative practices of the multi-disciplinary approach that characterized the 1970s in Italy, as also did the new examples of liberation linked to feminist experiences, the questions around gender and the relationship with the political.

If that which becomes history is always determined by that which has been archived, at the same time, the archive reactivates narratives that have never been told once and for all. Thus memory also becomes continuously revocable in an era in which time is the subject of expropriation. In a continuous dialogue between the artistic paradigm and editorial productions, the works and documents on display find their own conditions of appear- ance and existence in this impossibility of – or reluctance to– being archived. So, “L’Inarchiviabile/The Unarchivable” puts on display the topicality and rediscovery of a decade of great intensity and of linguistic and political experimentation for the Italian and international scene, but also a reflection on the contemporary nature of the archive as a format. All the works from the decade of the 1970s on exhibition are already in the form of an atlas, a catalogue, an inventory and represent in themselves collections, taxonomies, attempts at catalogization on the part of the artists.

From Alighiero Boetti’s classifications to Mario Merz’s sequences of Fibonacci numbers to Paolini’s La Doublure, a collection of white canvases that represent themselves in perspective and are differentiated only by their titles on the back. Or Ghirri’s 1973 Atlante, Nannucci’s Zona archive or Baruchello’s Leftover, through to Mauri’s archive of Linguaggio è Guerra, to Franco Vaccari’s collection of passport photos, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s filmic, perfumed catalogues and Nanni Balestrini’s textual assemblages. If in the same period, the radical nature of Italian feminism led Carla Lonzi to abandon art criticism because it is “through her absence that a woman makes a gesture of awareness, liberating and, therefore, creative”, there is a considerable female presence in the exhibition: from Carla Accardi to Dadamaino, from Marisa Merz to Maria Lai, from the photographs of Marcella Campagnano and Lisetta Carmi, through to Ketty La Rocca’s pre-verbal inventory.

“L’Inarchiviabile/The Unarchivable” is a concentrate of these experiences that go through to the Parco Lambro in 1977 as an affirmation of the multitude and of a plurality of molecular insurgencies, constitutionally unarchivable. Alberto Grifi was unable to encapsulate in a finished film the shooting of the events of the Festival del Proletariato Giovanile [Festival of the Young Proletariats] at the Lambro, producing a work that was not a single film but many films at one and the same time, a multiplicity of filming that permits endless new social re-combinations.

It is precisely in the name of this plurality that is no longer able to summarize itself that FM Center for Contemporary Art had decided to open its activities with the figure of the archive, the collection, the catalogue as the interpretative keys of our present day.

“L’Inarchiviabile/The Unarchivable” includes 200 works by 60 artists from the main private Italian collections.

Artists: Carla Accardi, Vincenzo Agnetti, Giovanni Anselmo, Nanni Balestrini, Gianfranco Baruchello, Irma Blank, Alighiero Boetti, Sylvano Bussotti, Marcella Campagnano, Lisetta Carmi, Giuseppe Chiari, Gianni Colombo, Dadamaino, Gino De Dominicis, Mario Diacono, Luciano Fabro, Yervant Gianikian & Angela Ricci Lucchi, Luigi Ghirri, Piero Gilardi, Paolo Gioli, Global Tools, Alberto Grifi, Paolo Icaro, Emilio Isgrò, Jannis Kounellis, Ugo La Pietra, Ketty La Rocca, “La Traviata Norma”, Laboratorio di Comunicazione Militante, Maria Lai, Uliano Lucas, Walter Marchetti, Fabio Mauri, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Ugo Mulas, Maurizio Nannucci, Giulio Paolini, Claudio Parmiggiani, Luca Maria Patella, Giuseppe Penone, Gianni Pettena, Vettor Pisani, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini, Salvo, Aldo Tagliaferro, Franco Vaccari, Franco Vimercati, Michele Zaza, Gilberto Zorio. . at FM Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea, Milan until 15 June 2016

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italianartsociety · 7 years

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By Jean Marie Carey

The combined rites practiced by the cult of the Hirpi Sorani ("wolves of Soranus") in the pagan peninsular countryside and those to honor Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome who were nursed by a wolf, partly explain the name of the Lupercalia, a festival celebrated each February. Though “high Lupercal” is on 15 February, the festival originally began on the Ides, which, in February, is on the 13th. In contemporary times Lupercalia begins today, on 12 February.

Remnants of a Lupercal temple discovered in 2007 15 metres below the Augustan palace were dated to 44 BCE, attesting to the continuity of the festival. But Lupercalia’s best-known attribute is the wolf herself, embodied by the famous Lupa Capitolina.

“Rugged and uncouth though it is, this statue moved my spirit more than all the images that surround it,” wrote German historian Theodor Mommsen when he saw the monument during his first visit to Rome in 1844. In his 1925 treatise on the bronze sculpture French historian Jérôme Carcopino calls the wolf “the most venerable work of Roman archaeology.” Today at her home at the Capitoline Museum in Rome the wolf has many more admirers, visitors whose fingers itch to twirl the regular, S-shaped curls of her mane and to caress her sinewy legs, her elegant tufted paws, and her smooth, distended udders.

The infinitely abundant images of the wolf on Rome-affiliated merchandise seem to increase rather than dilute the potent aura of the statue herself. So what is it about the she-wolf that continues to make her so compelling to those who see her and such an inspiration for writers and artists through the centuries, even to this day? The Lupa Capitolina wields an undeniable appeal through her form alone; yet her formal qualities cannot be disentangled from the defining attributes that have been attached to the statue in the course of history.

Until the past decade (and no matter her actual date of creation, still), Lupa, first of all, reminded us of the rarity of her kind. Few ancient bronzes from Etruria have lasted to the present day because unlike stone, bronze (an alloy of copper and tin) could be fused and reused, and it often was. From statue to cannonball: This was the sad fate of numerous ancient works of art. Therefore we hold ancient bronze statues especially dear because there are so few of them, and these few tell a story of survival against greed and strife.

One of the values associated with the wolf sculpture is her ostensibly Etruscan pedigree; her startling archaic appearance does not need the lost language of her makers to convey the well-known narrative of her role in Rome’s founding. But has Lupa Capitolina been exaggerating her claims of antiquarianism by nearly a millennium? In 2006, archaeological conservator Anna Maria Carruba, who had been a member of the team of researchers restoring the statue in the late 1990s, announced that the symbol of Rome was created in the 7th or 8th Century or even later.

Carruba’s findings, initially published through the Capitoline Museum itself, have since been questioned by her associates at the same institution. The question about the provenance of the statue is interesting in and of itself, and it does not seem like science will soon provide a definitive answer to them. Statiography and radiography cannot at present be used to exactly date bronze, and Carruba’s finding are based on carbon dating of organic elements associated with the statue (human handling and tiny specks of protein and flora in other words) and on conjecture about the statue’s means of fabrication.

Looking at Lupa

Whenever she was made, Lupa would have been fashioned with the technique called the lost wax (cire-perdu) method. The sculpture began as a detailed, full-size model made out of clay that was then covered with a half-inch thick layer of wax. Some of the details were worked on the wax rather than on the clay; this is true of Lupa’s ears and the crown of curls framing the border between the head and the mane. The model was covered with a thicker layer of clay. The entire piece was then heated so that the wax melted and drained through the holes pierced through the bottom (the holes were later covered with more clay once all the wax was gone). At this point there was a thin hollow space between the clay model and the rough layer of clay that once covered the now “lost” wax. Molten bronze was poured through the small holes into the hollow space. After the bronze hardened the top layer of clay was chiseled away, revealing the bronze statue. Much of the inner clay model was then removed by scraping it out through the bottom openings. With the removal of this inner clay, the bronze statue became hollow and relatively light, rendering it much easier to transport than a marble statue of the same size. Finally finishing touches were applied by working with the hardened metal, and the resulting artwork was an ostensibly unique and unrepeatable product – theoretically, no other replicas could be made from the original model.

The expressiveness of Lupa’s body is extraordinary. The wolf looks ferocious: Her eyebrows raised in bronze imitation of the lighter coloring visible in live wolves, are contracted and expressive; her ears are pricked; her gaze intent, penetrating – individualized, even, through the precision of its expression. Her facial muscles are tense, and the vein running from her nose to just under her right eye is visibly swollen. On her surface, the Lupa Capitolina blends a precise attention to the reality of live wolves with a certain respect for representational convention regarding sculpted animals. This wolf is rigid and expressive, at once static and poised to pounce. The flexed muscles of the wolf, her attentive gaze, her wrinkled brow, all elicit a connection between human and animal, between artwork and viewer. The wolf’s gaze makes the statue’s visible emotions something with which viewers can immediately identify: She looks attentive and ready, protective and fierce. The “unusually complex expression in the face of the wolf,” as artist Stanley Horner described his own aesthetic reaction to the Lupa Capitolina “is more devastating than the Mona Lisa; it can smile and snarl in the same countenance, whichever I wish to project upon it.”

The Renaissance Addition of the Twins

The manufacture of the free-standing bronze twins set a higher technical challenge than the production of low relief scenes like those of the reliquary doors designed by the Pollaiuolo brothers Antonio and Giuliano, and there is good reason to think that whoever was directly responsible for the commission – whether Giuliano or another member of the Sistine court – looked to Florence (where the Pollaiuolos were from) for someone with the commensurate skills in bronze casting. Stylistically the treatment of the children’s bodies is generically Donatelloesque; the rounding out of male musculature in the torso, the soft peaks of the nipples and the comically pendant buttocks are like those of Donatello’s bronze David. Vassari related the plump forms of the bronzes to the infants Cain and Abel in Antonio Pollaiuolo’s drawing of Eve in the Uffizi while Charity’s child on the reverse of the Uffizi panel offers a precedent for a slightly stockier, suckling baby, with chubby bent legs. The rather awkward (in terms of the comfort of posture for the babies) setting of the heads on the necks also brings to mind the foreshortening of the left-hand angels of the Staggia Elevation. But the problem remains that the unusual nature of the Roman task – to produce free-standing sculptures that would complement a revered ancient bronze – limits the usefulness of such comparisons.

The addition of the twins helped if not to fix, then to control, the ancient work’s meaning. From a fearful symbol of judicial authority, the wolf was reinvented as an appropriately beneficent source of miraculous succor to Rome ancient and modern.

Jérôme Carpocino, who was so moved by the statue of the wolf, insisted that the myth of the Capitoline Wolf did not yet exist when the bronze wolf was produced: The story of Romulus and Remus dates back to the second half of the fourth century BCE whereas the bronze was cast in the course of the fifth. In any case the Lupa is not a comfortable object for those in search of authenticity. It is physically available to us today as a material bridge to a lost world, a bygone era. A large part of Lupa’s impact on her viewer is due precisely to her vivid aura of authenticity, undiminished and perhaps even increased by her frequent reproduction. The legendary she wolf may be historically distant but she is physically even immediately present. The symbolic values of the Capitoline Wolf remain untouched by the progress of knowledge. They live on and in fact are nourished by ideals belonging to a metahistorical perspective.

Reference: Anna Maria Carruba and Lorenzo De Masi. La Lupa capitolina: un bronzo medievale. Rome: De Luca editori d'arte, 2006.

Capitoline Wolf: c.500-480 BCE or c. 1300 CE? Etruscan or Medieval?

Gothic She-Wolf with the Symbols of the Allied Cities inlaid floor work from the Duomo of Siena. The twins-facing posture of the wolf also mirrors the encircling concentric frames.

A side view of the sculpture at the Capitoline Museum in Rome shows how the wolf is best experienced by moving around the bronze.

Capitoline Wolf with figures of Romulus and Remus (possibly created by Antonio del Pollaiuolo) added c. 1472.

She-Wolf, Romulus and Remus. Silver didrachm, 269-266 BCE, shows an active trio of figures.

Detail of hair on the head of Lupa.

Further Reading: Jérôme Carcopino. La louve du Capitole. Paris: Société d'ed. “Les belles lettres,” 1925.

Francis D.Klingender, Animals In Art And Thought To The End Of The Middle Ages. Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T.: Press, 1971.

Carol C. Mattusch “In Search of the Greek Bronze Original.” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 1, The Ancient Art of Emulation: Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity (2002), pp. 99-115.

Dietmar Popp. “Lupa Senese. Zur Inszenierung Einer Mythischen Vergangenheit in Siena (1260-1560).” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, Kunst als Ästhetisches Ereignis (1997): pp. 41-58.

Emeline Hill Richardson, “The Etruscan Origins of Early Roman Sculpture.” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 21, The Ancient Art of Emulation: Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity (2002), pp. 75-124.

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architectnews · 4 years

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MVRDV to convert disused Shenzhen factory into creative office space

Dutch architecture firm MVRDV has announced its plans to renovate a deteriorating concrete building in Shenzhen, China, to create the If Factory offices and a maze-like roof garden.

Located in the historic district of Nantou, the 11,000-square-metre disused factory will be transformed into rentable workspaces for creative companies and a home for the Urban Research Institute of property developer Vanke.

MVRDV has revealed its plans to renovate a disused factory in Shenzhen, China

Rather than demolishing the factory, MVRDV's priority for the scheme is to preserve its history by restoring its original concrete frame, which has become exposed as the building has deteriorated.

The studio will then reconfigure its interior layout and insert a giant central staircase, before adding a rooftop garden called The Green House.

The building will be converted into a creative office block named If Factory

Once complete, If Factory will be enveloped by the original building's existing grid-like frame, which will be treated to resist ageing and punctured by large windows.

"This preserves the traces of the building's history, keeping the concrete frame that is now exposed due to the building's dilapidated state – in line with principles of sustainability and the circular economy," explained the studio.

MVRDV will preserve the original structure and add a large staircase that leads to a roof garden

Inside, the office spaces will be set back from the concrete exterior to make space for balconies and circulation around the building's perimeter.

This excludes the main staircase that MVRDV will build at the heart of the building to connect the ground floor to the rooftop.

Described by MVRDV as the "most notable new addition" to the building, the central staircase will protrude from the facade on the fourth floor and be clad in wood to contrast with the concrete-dominated material palette.

It will also be lined with windows that provide views into the office spaces and filled with neon signage to pay homage to Shenzhen.

All other circulation will be placed around the building's perimeter

"Windows built into the staircase provide glimpses into the work being done in the offices, ensuring that this creative hub acts with transparency and remains connected to the community life of Nantou," explained MVRDV.

"Inside the staircase, mirrored glass and vibrant neon signage offer an aesthetic reminder of the early days of Shenzhen's urbanisation."

Some of the offices will be available to rent by creative companies

Another key part of the If Factory is The Green House, a rooftop garden that will be lined with greenery and bamboo arranged like a maze.

Nestled within the network of paths and hedges will be The Green Rooms, a series of spaces for visitors to relax that are each focused on a different activity – ranging from dancing and exercising to reading, dining and gathering.

A temporary facade mimics the If Factory proposal is currently wrapped around the building

An expected completion date is yet to be disclosed, but construction work has begun and a temporary canvas facade by MVRDV will remain in place until its opening.

This fabric facade is an image of "how the building will look once complete", disrupted by a large zipper graphic that opens to a ground floor entrance where there is currently an exhibition. Following the building's completion, the canvas will be recycled into tote bags.

According to MVRDV, If Factory forms a part of a wider masterplan and ambition to transform Nantou into a cultural and creative hub.

It also marks the second time MVRDV has carried out a project within the factory, following its Vertical Villages exhibit at the 2017 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture.

"Nantou is a special and fascinating place," said MVRDV founding partner Winy Maas. "It's really rewarding to return to this building after we exhibited here during the Shenzhen Biennale in 2017 with our 'Vertical Villages' and ideas for the future of cities," he continued.

"Our proposal draws on that ambition to make this part of Shenzhen a creative force, but it also remains in touch with the people of Nantou, their needs, and the history of the place."

The canvas facade will be transformed into tote bags when the project is completed

If Factory was commissioned by the Shenzhen Nanshan District Bureau of Public Works and Chinese property developer Vanke. MVRDV has collaborated with the Urban Research Institute of Vanke, vaLue Design, and the Shenzhen Bowan Architecture Design Institute on its design.

It is one of a number of renovation projects proposed by Vanke in the city, which will all be developed by local and internationally renowned architects.

MVRDV is an architecture studio based in Rotterdam, founded in 1991 by Maas, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries.

Elsewhere in Shenzhen, the studio is also developing an "urban living room" called Shenzhen Terraces as well as a 250-metre-tall skyscraper that was also commissioned by Vanke.

Visuals are courtesy of MVRDV and photography is by Gao Yu.

Project credits

Architect: MVRDV Founding partner in charge: Winy Maas Partner: Wenchian Shi Design team: Lorenzo Mattozzi, Guang Ruey Tan, Peter Chang, Cai Zheli, Echo Zhai, Pim Bangert, Elien Deceuninck, Daehee Suk, Monika Wiecha, Alberto Menozzi, Alexis Lode, Anamarija Vrzina, Enrica Perrot, Luca Beltrame, Michele Tavola and Hengwei Ji Visualisations: Antonio Coco and Pavlos Ventouris Director MVRDV Asia: Steven Smit Strategy and development: Jammy Zhu Project planning and design management: Urban Research Institute of China Vanke; vaLue Design Co-architect: Shenzhen Bowan Architecture Design Institute Landscape architect: Yuanye Landscape Design Lighting designer: GD-Lighting Design Facade consultant: PAG Local interior architect: Biaogao Design

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