On November 9th at the World Financial Center, all are invited to watch twenty-six of New York City’s top architecture, engineering and design firms will spend one adrenaline-filled evening configuring over 100,000 cans of food into gravity-defying sculptures for Canstruction, an exhibition, design competition and canned food drive to help feed hungry New Yorkers in need during the Thanksgiving season. While admission is free, visitors to the exhibit are encouraged to support the cause by contributing high-quality non-perishable foods, such as tuna, beans, and canned vegetables.
An annual art show, design competition, and food drive all rolled into one, Canstruction® raises hunger awareness by challenging teams of architects and engineers to create larger-than-life pop art masterpieces made entirely out of unopened cans of food. The eye-popping results will be displayed from November 10 through 21 before being donated to City Harvest for delivery to local community food programs. More information on the exhibit and images of last year’s winners after the break.
To honor the 50th anniversary of Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Municipal Art Society of New York is hosting the Jane Jacobs Forum focusing on Women as Public Intellectuals. The forum will discuss three prominent female writers: Jane Jacobs, Rachel Carson (Silent Spring) and Betty Friedan (The Female Mystique) all of whom challenged the status quo. Their voices contributed to discussions about urban planning, environmental responsibility and the role of women in society. The forum will be moderated by Robin Pogrebin with five other panelists who will address the circumstances of these women’s successes and the role of women engaged in public critique today.
The Institute of Classical Architecture & Art announces a two-day conference on November 11-12 dedicated to a rigorous examination of Postmodernism both as expressed in theory and as put into practice in the fourth quarter of the 20th century in America and abroad. The conference’s goal is to bring together top architects, scholars, and critics to discuss why and how Postmodernism occurred, why and how it was soon largely eclipsed, and why and how it has nonetheless continued to influence the field and broader culture – including its lasting impact on the theory and application of urban planning and design. More information on the conference after the break.
Parsons The New School for Design has announced new graduate programs including a Master of Science in Design and Urban Ecologies and a Master of Arts in Theories of Urban Practice. What makes these programs unique is their focus on urban designers and planners as agents of social change: What kind of deep knowledge do urbanists need to be able to design cities in a much more effectively manner? And how do urbanists use their creative training and visionary skills to engage with the deeper structures of society?The programs represent a wider initiative at Parsons, one of the world’s leading schools of art and design, to offer graduate programs that define the next phase of global design. The programs will launch in Fall 2012. More information on the programs after the break.
The husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames are widely regarded as America’s most important designers. Perhaps best remembered for their mid-century plywood and fiberglass furniture, the Eames Office also created a mind-bending variety of other products, from splints for wounded military during World War II, to photography, interiors, multi-media exhibits, graphics, games, films and toys. But their personal lives and influence on significant events in American life — from the development of modernism, to the rise of the computer age — has been less widely understood. Narrated by James Franco, Eames: The Architect and the Painter is the first film dedicated to these creative geniuses and their work opening November 18th at the IFC Center in New York City.
Since it’s opening on September 16th, the Jean Nouvel acrylic encasement and historic Jane’s Carousel has become a landmark in the heart of Brooklyn Bridge Park for New York families. The welcoming public pavilion offers spectacular views of the East River, the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, and the Manhattan skyline.
Continue reading for more detailed information and images.
Earlier this week, we had the pleasure of touring the Metropolitan Museum of Art ‘New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia’ with Achva Stein on its opening day. Stein, a principal of an ASLA award-winning landscape architecture and design firm Benzinberg Stein Associates and the founding Director of the Graduate program in Landscape Architecture at the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York, was asked to join the MET’s endeavors after her noted publication, Morocco: Courtyards and Gardens, showcased her passion for and understanding of the country’s varied garden types found in regions such as Marrakech and Fez. For the new wing, Stein has created a fantastic 14th century Maghrebi-Andalusian-style courtyard that goes beyond a mere representation, and truly infuses the spirit and essence of a Moroccan court into a small interior space of the MET.
Studio Mode/modeLab is pleased to announce the first installment of the modeFab workshop series: Strip Morphologies II. As a continuation of the Strip Morphologies workshop held in June 2010, Strip Morphologies II is a two-day intensive design, prototyping, and fabrication workshop to be held in New York City during the weekend of November 12-13, 2011.
d3 and Transportation Alternatives are pleased to announce the winners of the “Close The Gap” design competition, which invited architects, landscape architects, urban designers, engineers and students worldwide to envision the completion of the East River Greenway. Submissions from pla.net Architects and the design team of James and Madeline Stokoe were selected by the jurors for their outstanding work. The competition called for proposals that fundamentally transform how people move through Manhattan by filling in a 22-block gap along the East River. More information on the competition awards after the break.
Forget stairs, elevators and escalators, Carsten Höller is bringing a new method of circulation through the New Museum in New York City. It will take visitors down a three-storey, 102-foot tunnel, and may require helmets and elbow pads. What is this innovative invention? None other than the age-old, kid-friendly slide. This insallation is part of a survey exhibition of Höller ‘s work over the past twenty years in which he has explored “such themes as childhood, safety, love, the future, and doubt” in with an attitude towards his work that is “equal parts laboratory and test site.” [New Museum.org] Höller’s pieces explore human sensory experience and perception by creating environments and experiences that over-stimulate or deprive us of our senses. Read on for a preview of what to expect at the New Museum.
Storefront for Art and Architecture will host a “closing ceremony” for the exhibition, Sacred Spaces in Profane Buildings, an exhibition by Matilde Cassani that explores secret, sacred territory throughout New York, on November 5, 2011 at 5pm. The ceremony will include discussion with local clergy on the condition of religion in the city of New York, focusing on the religious spaces that are built in non-traditional places to worship. The reception is free and open to the public. For more information, visit here.
Production and design firm, The Department of the 4th Dimension (The D4D), created the world’s first pop-up scent museum for Sephora & Firmenich. The Sensorium: Lucid Dreams from the Sensory World is an interactive exhibition exploring the emotions and instincts behind scent.
For more information, continue reading after the break.
The space of sound created by Carlito Carvalhosa’s Sum of Days on exhibit at MoMA until November 14, 2011 is a sublime environment of billowing white fabric and the white noise of the atrium reflected upon itself. The psuedo-boundaries established by the translucent material that hang from the ceiling create a confined space of light and ambient sound – fleeting and ephemeral. Upon entering the exhibit, you pass an array of speakers affixed to the wall. They are emitting a low hum – the sound of voices and echoes that are distant, yet recognizable. It is unclear at first from where these sounds are originating, but behind the fabric bodies are drifting in and out of view. The curtains, which are constantly swaying, direct you in an ellipse to the center of the space where a single microphone hangs, picking up the noise within the exhibit and sending them to the dozens of speakers that hang at intervals inside the curtains, along the walls of the exhibit, and up through the galleries at the mezzanine levels that overlook the atrium.
We’ve been taking you through the two week installations at the BOFFO Building Fashion event, and this week marks the third installation by Patrik Ervell + Graham Hudson. It is quite remarkable to see the transformation that takes place at 57 Walker Street every few days (remember how last time, the fashion and architecture pair Irene Neuwirth + Marc Fornes / TheVeryMany resulted in a crazy atmosphere of organic metallic forms dancing across the room?). Now, visitors will experience a space with crumbling walls, rubble, scaffold and re-bar designed by Hudson in response to the Ervell’s design brand of innovative materials and unconventional application throughout his collections. “Overall, the environment that has been created where destruction —the decay and the beautiful—are transformed into art and design, both literally and figuratively,” explained BOFFO.
More about the designers and the installation after the break.
The MAS Summit for New York City, which occurs at 9:15am on October 14th, will bring together four icons of urban planning, design and architecture to explore today’s challenges and opportunities in creating a well-planned and well-designed city.
Delivering keynote speeches will be Amanda M. Burden, FAICP, an urban planner and civic activist, who serves as the New York City Planning Commissioner and Chair of the New York City Planning Commission, and Witold Rybczynski best-selling author, Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania and architecture critic at Slate. More information on the event after the break.
