Hailing from Trieste, Giulio Tomasi’s project in the WHAT_office kitchen is a continuation of the Italian modernist culinary legacy which started with the Futurist’s Cookbook and more recently was represented in George Legrende’s The Geometry of Pasta. The multiplicity of the Italian kitchen derives from it’s matrix permutative potential: 500 pasta forms + 100 sauce types = 50,000 buoni appetiti! And of course, after eating, voila: welcome to the digestivo café matrix!

Saint George Saint George (c. 275/281 – 23 April 303 AD) was a Greek who became an officer in the Roman army. His father was the Greek Gerondios from Cappadocia Asia Minor and his mother was from the city Lydda. Saint George became an officer in the Roman army in the Guard of Diocletian. He is venerated as a Christian martyr. In hagiography, Saint George is one of the most venerated saints in the Catholic, Anglican, Eastern Orthodox, and the Oriental Orthodox churches. He is immortalized in the tale of Saint George and the Dragon and is one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers. He is regarded as one of the most prominent military saints. Eastern Orthodox depictions of Saint George slaying a dragon often include the image of the young maiden who looks on from a distance. The standard iconographic interpretation of the image icon is that the dragon represents both Satan (Rev. 12:3) and the Roman Empire. The young maiden is the wife of Diocletian, Alexandra. Thus, the image as interpreted through the language of Byzantine iconography, is an image of the martyrdom of the saint. St George’s Cross are a white flag with a red cross, frequently borne by entities over which he is patron (Republic of Genoa and then Liguria, England, Georgia, Catalonia, Aragon, etc.).The cross was originally the personal flag of another saint and key Christian figure, St. Ambrose. Adopted by the city of Milan (of which he was Archbishop) at least as early as the Ninth century, its use spread over Northern Italy including Genoa. Genoa’s patron saint was St. George and through the flag’s use by the vast Genoese trading fleet, the association was carried throughout Europe.

Giulio Tomasi, architetto pizzaiolo alla “COSA”

WHAT_architecture is part research, part practice. Or is that part-design, part-research!? Part university, part office!? Part educational, part commercial? WHAT_architecture seeks to make research a commercially viable yet authentic design vehicle.  Whilst the procurement of larger scale work naturally comes with the mediation of risk, at times experience is a trade off for creativity. Here we present WHAT_internomics. Young talented architects who we give a design voice to demonstrate their capabilities and contributions to both the project as object and also the project as design experience... WHAT_architecture puts the ‘fun back into function’ by joyfully exploring the boundaries of design practice! Agnieszka Kamocka  Cesar Cordoba Ciro Garcia Lopez  Dorota Korolczyk  Karl Lenton  Karolina Knapek Ola Jarodzka Pablo Camara Tadeas Riha [Private]

The recent collapse of HMV, Jessops (and a 140 other High Street retailers according to BBC’s NewsNight) should remind us all that ‘big does not mean better’? In today’s public procurement;, companies are scaled according to financial turnover. Big is better because it less risk. It won’t sink. But big ships do s ink (Titanic). If TfL, LA, BAA, EL AL, ET AL  equate size with risk then perhaps it is time to recall. When you go (home, restaurant, catered upon) for dinner tonight will you go big? A super market? An organic farm? Or are you being served? McDonalds? A Franchise, indeed Frenchise culinary delight: Patisserie Valerie perhaps? Or Michelin-star buy in? Waitrose begerts Sainsburys begets Tesco begets Iceland. In business today, SMEs offer bespoke, handshaker-free, connectivity.

Design Practice Research at RMIT is a longstanding program of research into what venturous designers actually do when they design. The program was established by Leon van Schaik and is probably the most enduring and sustained body of research of its kind: empirical, evidence-based and surfacing evidence about design practice. Two kinds of knowledge are created by this research. One concerns the ways in which designers marshal their spatial intelligence within which they practice design. The other reveals how public behaviours are invented and used to support design practice. Anthony meet Leon for breakfast to talk tactics…

Old Street, new media city? As we stare out of the WHAT_architecture office window and survey the ‘Tech City Silicon Roundabout’ that, this week, was trumpeted from a unified PM and Mayoral bandwagon, we wonder if the redevelopment of the Old Street roundabout will really accelerate (East) London’s ambitions to become Europe’s startup capital? Of course you need financial capital to become a capital city and this roundabout has for some time been a mobility centrifuge of commerce and creativity. Those that walk past our office window have for sometime been readily characterised (chastised?) by their attire as much as their direction: ‘bankers to right, hipsters to the left’. The snappy designation of Old Street Roundabout as “Silicon Roundabout” can be traced to Dopplr’s Matt Biddulph who, in 2008, defined it as “the ever-growing community of fun startups in London’s Old Street area”. Using Biddulph’s Google map as a cue, Wired Magazine then used its readership too crowd source, populate and produce it’s own map of the Shoreditch ‘Ditcherati’ which was featured in the January 2010 issue. There are other European cities however with startup capital city aspirations. In the same week as Boris and Dave powerpointed an artist’s impression (read architectural perspective), the Guardian headlined a story on ‘How poor but sexy Berlin has tapped talent to be Europe’s startup capital…’ with an image of the founder of the online gaming company Wooga (who’s Alexanderplatz office bears an uncanny cartoon resemblance to one of their own games). London vs Berlin? Silicon Roundabout vs SiliconAllee? Game on! http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/dec/06/berlin-boom-new-silicon-valley#start-of-comments

A survey conducted by BD has revealed that 22% of qualified architects in the UK are currently unemployed. The survey included fully qualified architects as well as graduates who are still in training, and paints a bleak picture of the current state of the British architecture industry. Other trends which the survey highlights are a reduction in job security as many architects move to freelance work to stay active, and an average 30% wage reduction for those still in employment.