Courtesy of Ivan Toth Depeña
Ivan Toth Depeña’s light-based installation “Reflect” was permanently installed in the Stephen Clark Government Center Lobby in Miami in November, 2011. Commissioned by the Miami-Dade Art in Public Places initiative, the work illuminates the dynamism of the lobby space and encourages a sense of discovery in the visitors.
Vacant land is a looming problem for many cities, especially when it remains undeveloped for years or is transformed into garbage dumps and parking lots. But when designers begin to notice these voids within the activity of a city they are able to unlock the inherent potential in the land. That is precisely what “Not a Vacant Lot”, as part of DesignPhiladephia, did this October. Philadelphia’s 40,000 vacant lots are both a challenge and an opportunity for young designers, artists and architects to tranform these under-utilized spaces into experiences within the fabric of the urban environment. The focal point of the design intervention was at the University of the Arts lot on 313 S. Broad Street, just a few blocks from Philadelphia’s center. It featured a reinterpreted map of Philadelphia by PennDesign students and Marianne Bernstein’s Play House, an 8′x8′ aluminum cube which, in its simplicity, could unlock the potential of this particular lot. But this engagement of vacant land was just one such intervention in a series artist installations throughout Philadelphia. Another such intervention, GroundPaper, was designed by two collaborating artists, Mike Ski and KT Butterfield. The site of their choosing was along the banks of the Delaware River in Fishtown, a neighborhood of Philadelphia.
Read on to see what artists can accomplish with no budget, a vacant lot and an inspired idea.
Courtesy of Arnaud Lapierre
The Ring installation by Arnaud Lapierre in Place Vendôme in Paris, France plays with the context of this urban space through reflections, light and the interaction of passers-by. The piece was created for the FIAC 2011 Conference and sponsored by Audi. It is an aggregation of offset mirrored blocks stacked to form a cylinder.
For more images follow us after the break.
Photo: Wolfgang Volz // © 1999 Christo
Controversial artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude – known for making large-scale architectural interventions in urban and rural environments – have finally gotten approval from the Bureau of Land Management to construct their most recent project “Over the River”, which will stretch along 5.9 miles along the Arkansas River in Southern Colorado.
Read on for details of the project and more images! read more »
Will Scobie
Sir Peter Cook is 75 and to celebrate the iconic British architect and Archigram co-founder’s birthday, 75 established and emerging international artists have produced a portrait of Sir Peter to auction for charity Architecture for Humanity aiding post disaster relief in Haiti and Japan. Both the auction and exhibition started on October 26th and runs until November 9th. The online art auction can be found at The Adam and Eve Projects while the exhibition is up at Space, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, Australia. More images are included here after the break. read more »
Cartoonist Alan Dunn (1900 – 1974) may still hold the record as the New Yorker’s most prolific illustrator, responsible for 1906 cartoons and 9 covers during his tenure from 1926 – 1973. Capitalizing on his background in design, Dunn also contributed many cartoons to Architectural Record, beginning in 1936.
A collection of those cartoons, ‘The Last Lath’ was first published in 1947 and was nicely written about in a blog where we found a lot of his work. In addition to lampooning the modern design trends and technologies of the 1930s and ’40s, much of the humor centers around the terminology used by contractors and architects of the day, as well as realities like WWII-era material shortages and the post-war housing boom. A gallery of Dunn’s cartoons can be found after the break. read more »
© Pato Safko
The “Urban Interventions” civic association, in collaboration with the Vallo Sadovský Architects studio, have prepared an instant urban intervention under a bridge. The situation in regard to quality of the environment at the bus terminal under the New Bridge in Bratislava has been bad for a long time. People have to wait for their bus connections in a totally unsuitable area, and we consider it a disgrace that the city of Bratislava leaves its citizens and tax-payers to function in such an inadequate environment. More images and architects’ description after the break. read more »
Photo by Marie Aschehoug-Clauteaux - http://www.flickr.com/photos/marie-aschehoug-clauteaux/
Architecture often attempts to play with several spatial and formal concepts but the extent of this experimentation is often limited by budgetary and engineering constraints. Sculpture is a medium with which formal and spatial tests can be performed to an aesthetic extent without architectural limitation. There are several modern sculptors whose products can be seen as architecture. Here we will look at the works of Robert Smithson, Richard Serra and Anish Kapoor.
Courtesy of dEEP Architects
This exhibition space design by dEEP Architects is for an art exhibition titled ‘Heaven’ that is being held in Shanghai’s trend setting shopping destination Xin Tian Di Shopping Mall. The form of a rabbit was chosen because in the Chinese culture this year is the Year of the Rabbit. More images and architects’ description after the break. read more »
© holdUP
Designed by holdUP & BLOO NATION, the Waving Wall of Chalkwell is an art installation commissioned by Metal comprising of over 1200, 19L water cooler bottles, demonstrating the vast journey water takes as well as the amount of water used in the production of certain products; a few of which have been depicted in small cabinets, along with information regarding their water consumption. More images and a brief description after the break. read more »
© Barbara Urban
Garden of Nations in Ramallah, one of the first modern public spaces in booming Palestinian capital was meant to become a representation space, where art pieces donated by different countries would coexist. The relatively small scale of the park leads to the inevitable effect of visual overcrowding and competition of free-standing sculptures donated by different national representatives. To minimize the danger of entering into the same logic The Lace is a shadow-maker “glued” to the wall encompassing the park. It allows people to hide from the sun being a sort of tridimensional pocket. The Lace is a steel structure made out of 220 circular modules referring to a decorative Polish folk art motive used for Christmas tree decorations made out straw.
Architect: Centrala
Location: Ramallah, Palestine
Designer: Jakub Szczęsny
Collaborator: Tomasz Gancarczyk
Project Coordination: Barbara Urban, Office of the Representative of the Republic of Poland
client: Office of the Representative of the Republic of Poland to the Palestinian National Authority
Photographs: Barbara Urban and Centrala
Courtesy of Kjellgren Kaminsky Architecture
In the summer of 2011, Joakim Kaminsky and Maria Poll, of Kjellgren Kaminsky Architecture, went into the deep forests of Medelpad in northern Sweden. With them they brought 15 meters of mirror coated fabric aiming to create an installation that would interpret the life cycle of this pine forest. More images and architects’ description after the break. read more »
© Bregenzer Festspiele / Karl Forster
André Chénier, the most famous work by the Italian composer Umberto Giordano, is brought to life for the ‘Opera on the Lake’ floating stage of the 2011 Bregenz Opera Festival in Bregenz, Austria by stage designer David Fielding under the artistic direction of David Pountney. The brilliantly vivid historical drama and human tragedy of shattering intensity is presented on the waterproofed set built directly into lake constance. It is then mounted upon a concrete core anchored into the base of the lake, while wooden poles support accessory structures of the stage. More images and project description after the break. read more »
© Ian Thomas
Hadrian Predock + John Frane’s project for the 2010 GLOW festival in Santa Monica titled “Luminous Passage” links the City to the Ocean as a porous and luminous land bridge. Connecting the existing Bay Street boardwalk to the ocean’s edge, the passage makes visible the connection across the sand to the edge of the Pacific. This is a physical tensile structure that supports light and connects the urban landscape of Santa Monica to the edge of the water, but also forms a conceptual leap that transitions from the “logics” that define the city to the those of the ocean. Taking the vertical nature of the city and merging it with the horizontal impulses of the pacific, a visceral and intense space twists and emerges. Composed of luminous lines of color (Electroluminescent wire – EL wire), the ambitious scale of the project is a relatively simple construction with only six fixed paper struts as primary support.
Architect: Predock Frane Architects
Location: Santa Monica, California, USA
Project Year: Fall 2010
Photographs: Ian Thomas
rendering main interior daytime
Critically engaging the emerging Abu Dhabi context of Masdar City, Zayed University and other tabula rasa territories, Predock_Frane Architects’ project proposes an antidote and refuge to the frenetic future-scape internationalism of the rapidly developing Arabian coast. In proposing a new abstract art space that allows for escape and contemplation Predock_Frane Architects’ project positions itself as a hybrid landscape/environmental machine that can both deliver power and engage the radical phenomenon of the desert. Along a path connecting Masdar City to Zayed University, a low-slung, energy producing sensitive field beckons public engagement.
© 2011 Balmond Studio
Balmond Studio has been exploring educational ideas through art installations as part of a series of research studies. The interactive art proposal, which will be installed in Casper College, a school in Wyoming, USA, transforms the forgotten spaces of hallways, corridors and lobbies into thriving community and learning zones, celebrating the students’ daily experience. The designs are based on advanced geometric thinking developed by Cecil Balmond, founder of Balmond Studio.
© Jakub Szczęsny
Most design and building processes relay on pre-determination and accuracy, plus an efficient coordination of data input leading to a physical realization representing previously conceived ideas as closely as possible. Parametric and generative design add an extra element of “objective” formulae playing role of legitimizations of designer’s intentional design, while the choice of data pools, algorithms or auto-generative formulae is in fact another intentional element.
Architect: Centrala
Location: Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany
Designer: Jakub Szczęsny
Assistant: Helmut Dietz
Project Year: 2011
Photographs: Rolf Wohrle, Hagen Betzwieser and Jakub Szczęsny
© Francois Lauginie
Designed by Marc Fornes (THEVERYMANY), nonLin/Lin Pavilion is a prototype which engages in a series of architectural experiments referred to as text based morphologies. Part of the FRAC Centre permanent collection in Orleans, France the prototypes, beyond their visual perception of sculptural and formal qualities, are built forms developed through custom computational protocols. The parameters of these protocols are based on form finding (surface relaxation), form description (composition of developable linear elements), information modeling (re-assembly data), generational hierarchy (distributed networks), and digital fabrication (logistic of production).
A complete project description, photographs and drawings following the break.
© Praveen Mohandas
Lijo Jos and Reny Lijo recently displayed their exhibition of “Space Specific Installations” in the Kerla Lalithakala Akademi Art Gallery of Kerala, India. The architects filled the gallery with figures that intruded upon the space occupied by visitors and forced interactions between the work and the users of the space using a wide range of materials. The exhibition ran from May4th-10th so if you missed it be sure to look through the gallery for images of Lijo Jos and Reny Lijo’s work after the break! Photographs by Praveen Mohandas. read more »
© Librado Romero / The New York Times
Just 800 yards from the tip of Lower Manhattan, Governors Island is hosting Mark di Suvero’s monumental sculptures, organized by Storm King Art Center. The sculpture garden is open to all visitors to Governors Island, which will be accessible this season until September 27, 2011. More images and information after the break. read more »
Combinatory Urbanism: The Complex Behavior of Collective Form
Thom Mayne recently sent us his latest book, Combinatory Urbanism: The Complex Behavior of Collective Form. MIT Professor of Urban Design and Landscape Architecture, Alan Berger, hails this book as “nothing short of a tour de force and should be…
Thermally Active Surfaces in Architecture / Kiel Moe
Departing from the simple question Why do we heat and cool buildings with air?, this book focuses on the technique of thermally active surfaces. This technique uses water in building surfaces to heat and cool bodies – a method…
Passive Solar Architecture / David A. Bainbridge and Ken Haggard
David Bainbridge, founder of the Passive Solar Institute, recently sent us his book Passive Solar Architecture. The book is a great introduction for anyone interested in passive solar architecture. The content is kept simple and straightforward. It allows any…
