When living in tiny apartments without proper ventilation, sunlight, contact with nature, or the possibility of social interaction, people tend to generate creative and flexible design strategies to overcome these difficulties. Private and public spaces can be reconfigured into multifunctional areas by using simple but effective means to create links between home and nature. This text-based essay identifies existing and historical architectural discourse that addresses social, cultural, and perceptual issues as a means to locate conceptual solutions suitable for buildings and flats. An inquiry into William Heath Robinson’s (1872–1944) drawings indicates that these images, while satiric, were inspired by complex issues that crossed disciplinary boundaries, taking architectural narrative into the political, cultural, economic, aesthetic, and social discourse. The satirical engines created by Robinson constitute a socio-political critique through the representation of biting solutions to the difficulties found in new settlements in the post-industrial city. During this period, many people living in the United Kingdom (UK) moved from the countryside to the cities, and consistently found themselves living in small apartments. The difficulties arising from the lack of space were addressed by Robinson’s unbalanced and hypothetical design solutions that included proposing indoor space fabulations that would extend traditional forms of users’ occupation. Though an engineer who identified problems and then invented solutions, his creative work was a strange contraption rooted in impossible ideas. He illustrated the possibilities of bringing life to the common areas of shared housing by transforming tiny apartments by adding mobile solutions with the aim to improve the lives of inhabitants. The concepts behind these creative solutionstraced back one century ago can be seen as a counterpart to contemporary transformative interior design strategies.

La Exposición Universal de Montreal de 1967 representa uno de los entornos experimentales más importante del siglo en cuanto a los medios de comunicación, distinguiéndose respecto a los anteriores por su particular uso de las tecnologías audiovisuales, la reivindicación de las pantallas y las nuevas tipologías teatrales desarrolladas para dar cabida a nuevas formas de proyección. El presente artículo explora algunas de las propuestas desarrolladas en Montreal, donde espacio y tecnología trabajan de manera conjunta en pos de una experiencia total.

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László Moholy-Nagy worked on the prototype for Light Prop for an Electric Stage for eight years, from 1922 to 1930, developing several sketches and designs. The final drawings and model were made with the collaboration of the Hungarian architect Stefan Sebök (István Sebők). The device was built by the AEG company, and it was displayed for the first time in the Werkbund exhibition held in Paris in 1930, where it appeared as an autonomous aesthetic object. This was clearly captured in the film Light Play: Black-White-Gray, in which Moholy-Nagy recorded its kinetic quality in the spirit of the abstract films developed at that time. The film clearly shows the motion of the lighting device as a formal exercise of abstraction using double exposures, special effects and close-ups. The Light Prop underwent several alterations over time to keep it working in a variety of exhibitions around Europe and America. In 1956, after Moholy-Nagy passed away, his widow, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, donated it to the Harvard Busch-Reisinger Museum, where it has remained ever since. After further damage caused by inappropriate restoration and its mechanical instability, the Light Prop was reconstructed in 1969 for the exhibition From Pigment to Light, celebrated at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York (Tsai et al. 2017). The idea of a copy emerged during the planning of this exhibition to preserve the legacy of Moholy-Nagy’s knowledge. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy finally approved this idea in 1970, allowing the production of two copies, one for the exhibition and the other for the 35th Venice Biennale (1970). Both reproductions were kept and sent to the Bauhaus Archive in Darmstadt and the Van Abbemuseum, where the original device had suffered repeated damage during the KunstLichtKunst exhibition (1966). The essay attempts to trace the timeline of modifications from the original device to the reproductions.

OSAKA 1970, LA COLABORACIÓN MULTIDISCIPLINAR EN EL PABELLÓN PEPSI OSAKA 1970, THE MULTIDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION IN PEPSI PAVILLION Resumen La creación de centros de investigación como el EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology, 1966), favorecerán la colaboración interdisciplinar entre arte y ciencia, implicando a empresas de carácter tecnológico, como Siemens, HP, IBM o Philips, facilitando soporte técnico y económico para el desarrollo de nuevos sistemas. Esta colaboración pondrá en relación varias disciplinas científicas así como culturales dando lugar a una serie de intervenciones espaciales que tendrán su mayor visibilidad en algunas Exposiciones Universales. El resultado será, en la mayoría de los casos, la creación de una experiencia audiovisual completa, presuponiendo la indisolubilidad de imagen, sonido y espacio en la creación de ambientes de carácter inmersivo. La colocación del espectador en el centro de la escena y la disposición dinámica de imagen y sonido, crearán una particular narrativa espacial no lineal, concebida para la experiencia. En el presente artículo desarrollamos el trabajo realizado, entre otros, en el pabellón del grupo Pepsi en la Exposición Universal de Osaka (1970). Art and Technology, 1966) Abstract The creation of research centres such as the EAT (Experiments in