About 600 entries across 25 countries were submitted to Azure’s AZ AWARDS 2011, the magazine’s first annual international competition recognizing excellence in design.  Of these submissions, international experts – Claude Cormier of Claude Cormier Landscape Architects, Craig Dykers of Snøhetta, product designer Patty Johnson, Eero Koivisto of Claesson Koivisto Rune and Glenn Pushelberg of Yabu Pushelberg – have chosen the finalists and winners. We are proud to announce that Valcucine’s Invitrum Base System was chosen as finalist for the category Furniture Systems. Thanks for voting and supporting us! Do you know Invitrum? Discover more about it… What happens now? On June 16 the winners selected by the jury and the public will be announced during a private ceremony and exhibition at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre. All winners and finalists will be featured in Azure’s Awards Annual on newsstands in June. The AZ AWARDS private ceremony and exhibition opening will take place June 16 at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto. The AZ AWARDS winners exhibition will be open to the public June 18 to September 25.

If you feel like going back to thousands of years and fancy natural minimal design, why not taking a visit to the “Stone House”, a real house made of two giant stones at the North of Portugal. In the middle of nowhere, the Stone House emerges as an astonishing piece of building, perfectly amalgamated with nature, directly from a Tim Burton’s movie. Probably inspired by the Flintstones cartoons, this stunning house was constructed between two giant stones on the hillside of Fafe mountains in the portuguese countryside, and its unusual design daily attracts many tourists from all over the world. Is it the prototype for a new old-age generation? It could be the perfect place to live in, actually. In fact, like most contemporary houses, it has a roof, a front door and also windows – with a particular feel of “deep contact to our origins’ lifestyle”. If you are interested in building with sustainable material, well, what better way to do that than actually use nature (rocks in this case) in your architecture projects? This is the case of the Stone House, located in Nas montanhas de Fafe, Portugal. Maybe it’s a little bizarre as a living concept, but we appreciate the idea of looking for a balance between man and environment, especially if we want to escape from the stress of modern living. And what about the interiors? The kitchen? Can you imagine an Artematica Legno inside the Stone House?

The 12th International Architecture Exhibition, with the title of “People meet in architecture”, directed by Kazuyo Sejima and organized by la Biennale di Venezia under the presidency of Paolo Baratta will be open to the public from Sunday 29th August to Sunday 21st November 2010 in the Giardini, Arsenale and in various locations throughout Venice. The preview will take place on August, 26th, 27th, 28th 2010. After a series of editions of the Architecture Biennale directed by eminent critics and historians, this Sector is once again in the hands of an architect, Kazuyo Sejima. The first woman to direct the Architecture Sector of the Biennale, Sejima has recently been awarded the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize 2010 (together with Ryue Nishizawa). The exhibition People meet in architecture will be laid out in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni della Biennale (Giardini) and in the Arsenale, forming a single itinerary, with 48 participants: firms, architects, engineers and artists from around the world. “The 2010 Architecture Biennale should be a reflection on architecture – says Director Kazuyo Sejima. The twenty-first century has just started. Many radical changes are taking place. In such a rapid-changing context, can architecture clarify new values and a new lifestyle for the present? Hopefully, this show will be a chance to experience the manifold possibilities of architecture, as well as to account for its plurality of approaches, each one of them being a different way of living”. Domus with the support of Valcucine will be at the 12th International Architecture Biennale with two events in the Kitchen Monument, a transparent bubble designed by the Berlin architecture studio Raumlabor, which will be a venue for debates, videos and round-table conferences. Here are the events: 27 August from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM – “PEOPLE AND ARCHITECTURE MEET IN PHOTOGRAPHY” A round-table discussion with photographers at the Biennale on the theme of the mutual influence between architecture and photography today. 29 August from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM – “HIC SUNT LEONES” The winners of the Gold and Silver Lion awards describe their works to the public.

Valcucine’s Artematica Vitrum glass kitchen is currently on display at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in Cellophane House, one of five on-site installations in the exhibition: Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling—on view July 20th through October 20th: www.momahomedelivery.org. Part 1 of the exhibit takes us through the history of prefabricated housing with pictures, film and models; Part 2, in an outdoor space to the west of the museum, shows prefabrication as a response to the urgent need for sustainability. Cellophane House is a full-scale prototype house that radically reinvents the way buildings are made: an aluminum frame serves as a matrix on which fabricated floors, ceilings, stairs are attached by bolted connections. The house is an impermanent object to be disassembled—not demolished—at the end of its life. Valcucine’s Artematica Vitrum kitchen makes ecological sense in the context of KieranTimberlake’s Cellophane House. For more than a quarter century, Gabriele Centazzo (chemist, engineer and head designer of Valcucine) has been committed to environmental integrity. Centazzo says, “On the brink of the third millennium, practical and ethical reasons oblige us to make a U-turn, transforming the destructive economy of the industrial era into a system that restores health to our planet and improves the quality of our life.” Valcucine’s Artematica Vitrum cabinetry— like Cellophane House—uses an aluminum structural frame for support. Gabriele Centazzo presented Artematica, its first “dematerialized” panel, in 1988. The cabinet fronts are less than ¼” thick tempered glass, the worktops ½” thick. Artematica’s aluminum frame reduces the amount of material used in the cabinet door by 85%, extending the life of hinges and joints, prolonging the life of the kitchen. Vitrum expresses Gabriele Centazzo’s passion for glass: made from an almost inexhaustible natural material (sand), glass is completely recyclable and sustainable, harder than steel, resistant to humidity and totally emission free. The Artematica Vitrum cabinet fronts in Cellophane House are white gloss, the countertop matte ebony glass. The entire kitchen is easy to dismantle, and labeled for recycling.