The second issue in the exciting and experimental cross-disciplinary series “Findings on…” by Astrid van Baalen and Hester Aardse from the pars Foundation is centred on Elasticity in the broadest sense of the word. What happens when one gives a simple rubber band to an architect, historian, choreographer, chemist, artist, mathematician, physicist, economist, anthropologist, and geologist and asks each of them for a statement on elasticity? The economist studies the elasticity of supply and demand of market forces. The architect calculates the elasticity of the steel structure of a building during an earthquake. The anthropologist studies the flow of people returning to their homes in the wake of a natural disaster. “The Pars Foundation” draws researchers out of their specialized niches in order to publish their brilliant, crazy, important, or bewildering results and assembles them in this interdisciplinary volume. “Findings on Elasticity” is the second part of a publication series that together will constitute an atlas of creative thinking. There are no guidelines for the form their contributions must take. It may be images, poems, essays, sketches on coasters, formulas or a piece of sculpture; the editors only ask that a contribution reflect the respondent’s own field as well as his or her passion for the topic.

During three spring seasons between 2006 and 2008, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa taught at the School of Architecture at Princeton. The SANAA Studios explored Japan's contemporary society as a context for architecture and considered its particular perspective on space, the personal and the public realm. Design exercises were situated within the specific demographics and social variables of three distinct sites in Japan. This book forms an attempt to capture the atmosphere in which the studios were conducted and register some of the findings gained out of exploring the office, its methods and its context. As an overall thematic it asks: What can we learn from SANAA? It tries to frame SANAA’s compassionate search for new architectures within a larger societal context. It combines analyses, essays, documentary, design proposals and “objets trouvé” within one book. For this publication, Iwan Baan, Dutch architectural photographer, has revisited the 3 sites where the studios took place to capture the spirit of its context and the SANAA buildings in use.

With Photographs by Iwan Baan

Anonymous snapshots are the ideal projection screen: they inspire the imagination to invent stories. The photographer and artist Luciano Rigolini demonstrates, however, that these images, freed from their context, can also convey a visual experience. Rigolini pieces together his findings from flea markets, archives, or the Internet to create a new, independent work - a grammar of seeing and perception. Consciously or unconsciously, we become primarily aware of form and structure in the compiled snapshots, and the specific content of the images becomes inessential. This results in a fascinating aesthetic play that radically questions our habits of seeing. In this cleverly arranged sequence the photographs can no longer be read as simply likenesses of reality. They turn out to be artifacts that construct reality. What You See presents a multiplicity of surprising, confusing, and surreal photographs from a rich fund of anonymous photography.

With an essay by Peter Pfrunder

The Pars Foundation was founded from the conviction that art and science are both essentially creative processes. Artists begin with an idea that is ultimately expressed in the form of music, images, or words. Scientists begin with a hypothesis, sketch an idea, and then test and describe it. Every year Pars invites artists and scientists to make a contribution to creative thinking. The book on the topic “Ice” demonstrates a variety of different perspectives and ideas by artists and scientists, and functions as a visual and textual introduction.