Archinect - News

See photos from Harlem Grown and Jerome Haferd / BRANDT : HAFERD's newly-opened 'Sankofa' installation

2023-07-24T17:53:00-04:00

New York-based artists collective Harlem Grown, in collaboration with Jerome Haferd of BRANDT : HAFERD, has shared photos of the new ‘Sankofa’ installation in Harlem’s historic Marcus Garvey Park just months after the announcement of a two-year community-led commission aimed at creating an artistic public gathering space for residents of the area.

Image courtesy Anna Dave

The installation is part of the Mellon Foundation’s Culture, Creativity, & Care Initiative focused on Marcus Garvey Park and the cultural traditions of the community that it serves.

Image courtesy Anna Dave

Harlem Grown shares: "The project involved planning and collaboration with local artists and makers across various artistic styles and media. Despite its bespoke appearance, the installation is based on a modular system and uses sturdy, reusable materials that can be reconfigured for a number of future uses or sites."

Image courtesy Anna Dave

The design of the circular 32-foot canopied struc...

Desert X 2023 features work that highlights the social and ecological consequences in our changing world

2023-03-18T10:00:00-04:00

The fourth edition of Desert X kicked off earlier this month in Southern California’s Coachella Valley with 12 site-specific installations that focus on ecology and the global social and economic consequences of climate change.

Artists were challenged by the “desert, its beauty, harshness, and ever-changing environment,” according to the event’s founder and President Susan Davis. Their responses included evocations of childhood memory, Native American customs, free trade, conspiracy theories, and popularized notions of the American West, among other inspirations.

Desert X 2023 installation view, Hylozoic/Desires, Namak Nazar, photo by Lance Gerber, courtesy of the artist and Desert X.

“Desert X 2023 can be seen as a collection of artistic interventions that make visible how our energy has a transference far beyond what we see just in front of us in our own localities,” co-curator Diana Campbell says. “From deserts to floodplains, finding, building and developing tools and tactics to...

Coachella announces 2023 art installations from Do LaB and Güvenç Özel

2023-01-12T11:24:00-05:00

The art and design lineup for this year’s Coachella festival has been announced ahead of the two-week event, which takes place in the modernism-rich Southern California hotspot from April 13th to the 23rd.

This year’s festival will include installations from Maggie West, Kumkum Fernando, Robert Bose, Don Kennell, Raices Cultura, UCLA IDEAS Studio instructor Güvenç Özel (whom our own Katherine Guimapang sat down with for a 2021 interview), conceptual environmentalist designer and artist Vincent LeRoy, and Do LaB. Another large-scale spiraling viewing platform structure named Spectra from the studio NEWSUBSTANCE will also grace the Empire Polo Field. Each will complement a packed musical lineup that includes The Chemical Brothers, Pusha T, and Bad Bunny, among many talented others.

2023 Coachella Lineup

Their installations will join past works from an illustrious group of international designers and architects who have contributed to past festivals, including Architensions, Office Kov...

James Turrell’s first mountainous Skyspace experience will debut this summer in Colorado

2022-02-17T17:18:00-05:00

The Pikes Peak area’s rugged Front Range vista is about to get a stark new addition this summer in the form of a hikeable installation courtesy of the light artist James Turrell.

Turrell’s latest Skyspace has been given an updated opening date in June as part of the Green Box Arts Festival in the town of Green Mountain Falls ninety minutes south of Denver.

Aimed at attracting visitors interested in “rediscovering the importance of a tranquil unplugged existence,” the annual festival began as a week-long dance residency and has since blossomed into an educational resource with year-round programming for a community actively seeking to bolster cultural tourism with the infusion of a little blue-chip art.

Aerial view of Green Mountain Falls by Buffalo Media Group.

Turrell describes each space as a “specifically proportioned chamber with an aperture in the ceiling open to the sky,” and that Skyspaces “can be autonomous structures or integrated into existing architecture” with apertures t...

Now Central Park has a (temporary) solid gold cube installation courtesy of a German artist

2022-02-02T17:30:00-05:00

This morning, joggers in New York’s Central Park may have come across a curious, rather illustrious sight. A cube composed of 186 kilograms of pure 24-karat gold, conceived by the German artist Niclas Castello who has billed it as a conceptual “socle du monde” (base of the world) sculpture for our time, was wheeled out to the Naumburg Bandshell this morning at around 5:00am.

The one-day installation has its own security detail and will sit aptly in the Gilded Age landmark designed by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted before a turn as the guest of honor at a special celebrity-laden private dinner being held later this evening on Wall Street. A special kiln had to be created in order to pour the tremendous volume of 2,012° F melted gold ore required for the 410-pound piece. The dimensions of the cube are about the size of a typical footstool, although its weight means it is worth over $11.7 million according to Wednesday’s market prices.

Photo: Sandra Mika/HoGA Capital AG

The installation coincides with the launch of a new NFT and not-at-all gimmicky cryptocurrency that the artist calls The Costello Coin. The project is meant to “be seen as a sort of communiqué between an emerging 21st-century cultural ecosystem based on crypto and the ancient world where gold reigned supreme.” Some might view its viral social media reaction as a preview of the splas...

Elyn Zimmerman’s Marabar installation finally has a new home

2021-12-29T19:28:00-05:00

The fate of one of the most iconic artworks in the nation’s capital has been officially resolved months after The Cultural Landscape Foundation assured that its future would be set in stone.

Artist Elyn Zimmerman’s massive granite Marabar installation has found a new home after a planned modernization at D.C.’s National Geographic Society previously caused uncertainty about its future.

The New York Times is reporting that the million-pound installation will now be relocated to the campus of American University following an agreement between the two institutions. The university’s art museum is taking the piece that served as the centerpiece of the David Childs-designed building since its inception in 1984.

The Society had previously announced its intention to do away with the piece in lieu of a new plaza from Hickock Cole and OLIN which featured a pavilion and trendy rooftop garden. The installation seemed doomed after the city’s Historic Preservation Board okayed the removal be...

A closer look at HAKUTEN's light installation [Prism], an Architecture MasterPrize winner

2021-12-08T16:51:00-05:00

The light and air art installation [Prism] by Japanese studio HAKUTEN was recently named as one of the “Best of the Best” winners of the 2021 Architecture MasterPrize.

Situated on an old military installation in Kanagawa Prefecture called Sarushima, the installation refracts light into a colorful array to create a map of the island’s coastal outline using its extant network of gun batteries as nodes that connect each ray of light in a dazzling display meant to evoke the memory of its past historic uses.

[Prism] © Kim Dong-Gyu

Visitors could immerse themselves in the light-saturated sand while taking in views of nearby Yokosuka City as they reflect on the physical space and temporal nature of the site.

According to the architects: “This work does not seek to glorify war. HAKUTEN simply believes that it is important to preserve memories of the past through various expressions of art and design that prevent them from being forgotten,” adding that they wish to “spr...

Artist JR's latest installation transforms the Great Pyramids of Giza, a top-ical new NFT

2021-10-22T19:02:00-04:00

As part of a new exhibition at Egypt’s Great Pyramids of Giza, French artist JR has transformed the 4,500-year-old World Heritage Site into a haunting levitated mass, done over in steel and mesh, that will also be minted as a 4,591-piece NFT representing his first foray into the newfound digital realm .

Titled Forever is Now, the exhibition is put on by Art D’Egypte with support from UNESCO and the country’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

“Egyptian culture is a gift to humanity, and the purpose of this exhibition is to showcase these treasures in a dialogue with the contemporary on an international scale,” Art D’Egypt founder Nadine A. Ghaffar said in a statement. “Ancient Egypt has influenced artists from around the world, and so we bring the world to Egypt and Egypt to the world through art.”

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Art D’Égypte (@artdegypte)

JR says his latest installation is in some ways an expansion on his 2016 Louvre installation...

Check out the first installation images of the now open Chicago Architecture Biennial

2021-09-17T16:34:00-04:00

The 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial has officially opened to the public in its fourth edition.

This year’s theme, The Available City, is explored by 15 installations featuring more than 80 contributors from 18 different countries.

Block Party by Studio Barnes (Miami, FL), in collaboration with Shawhin Roudbari (Boulder, CO) and MAS Context (Chicago, IL), organized in coordination with Westside Association for Community Action (WACA), Open Architecture Chicago, and Freedom House for the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial. Photo: Nathan Keay

The sites of this iteration include the historic Central Park Theater and Danish-backed Soil Lab in North Lawndale. Exhibitions at the Bronzeville Artists Lofts and Graham Foundation feature contributions from SHAU and El Cielo internationally. Essays from Yale University’s Elleza Kelley and Harvard’s Jill Desmini will be available online along with the writings of six other contributors along with a conversation about The Available City them...

Check out SOM's movement-inspired collaboration with artist Janet Echelman in Munich

2021-09-16T17:32:00-04:00

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill has once again come together with American artist Janet Echelman for a site-specific sculptural installation in Munich’s historic Odeonsplatz Square.

Images courtesy of Studio Echelman

The atmospheric sculpture is in constant motion, activating the public space below while changing shape and color with the wind using a 3D data model of the earth’s floor following a powerful 2010 Chilean earthquake from which the ‘1.26’ monicker is taken.

Images courtesy of Studio Echelman

“My artwork reflects an interconnectedness of opposites — flexibility with strength, earth with sky, things we can control with the forces beyond us,” Echelman said.

Images courtesy of Studio Echelman

The sculpture is comprised of more than 361,000 individual knots formed by handmade splices of woven nylon and ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene rope fibers. The sculpture weighs 700 pounds and occupies about 3,300 square feet of total area. Its responsiveness and adaptivity represent th...

Edoardo Tresoldi unveils wire mesh cathedral inspired by Dante’s Inferno

2021-09-03T13:02:00-04:00

Edoardo Tresoldi has unveiled the latest of his signature wire mesh cathedrals, with his installation titled “Sacral” currently on display in the Italian city of Ravenna. Designed for the Dante exhibition at the MAR, Ravenna’s art museum, Sacral is currently on display in the museum’s cloister until January 9th, 2022.

Photography: Roberto Conte

The installation forms part of “A POP Saga,” the third exhibition in the “Dante. The Eyes and the Mind” series at the MAR. In the design of Sacral, Tresoldi drew inspiration from the Noble Castle in Dante’s Inferno, a symbolic place inhabited by the souls of those who left honor and fame behind after death. “They are the great souls of antiquity,” says Tresoldi, “philosophers, poets, scientists and writers — with grave and slow-moving eyes. People who were great in their earthly lives because of their moral qualities but who are destined to eternal suffering because they lack the theological virtues.”

Photography: Roberto Conte

The installat...

LACMA's demolished buildings will live on thanks to this Los Angeles artist

2021-08-02T14:23:00-04:00

The proposed installation is the work of Cayetano Ferrer, a Los Angeles-based artist who has long had an interest in the ways in which issues of design and memory intersect. It is being executed in collaboration with landscape architect Bron Ruf. Ferrer acknowledges that working with fragments of a building whose demolition was loudly contested and for which many Angelenos felt a deep nostalgia is a loaded thing.

The Pereira-designed pavillions have been at the center of the doomed effort to save LACMA's original La Brea campus from what critics say is an unnecessary and expensive redevelopment campaign. Ferrer shares he got the idea while working on a conservation research project at LACMA's Art + Tech Lab in the midst of the debate over the beloved modernist buildings was reaching its conclusion. Ruf is currently a vice president at the landscaping firm Moss and Associates.

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The demolished pieces will be reassembled and installed in a new pocket park adjacent to the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood. Some of the fragments will be exhibited in a one-day show at the Commonwealth and Council gallery in Pasadena.

You can read Carolina Miranda's full interview with Ferrer here.

10 architectural installations & pavilions we liked this week

2021-05-28T13:48:00-04:00

In case you haven't checked out Archinect's Pinterest boards in a while, we have compiled ten recently pinned images from outstanding projects on various Archinect Firm and People profiles.

Today's top images (in no particular order) are from the board Installations.

Tip: use the handy FOLLOW feature to easily keep up-to-date with all your favorite Archinect profiles.

↑ Shiver House in Korppoo, Finland by NEON

↑ Wicker Pavilion in Annecy, France by DJA

↑ The Dancing Wall in Beijing, China by SaaN Architectural Design Consultancy, Inc.

↑ Outside-in Pavilion in Watermill, NY by Valerie Schweitzer Architects; Photo: Blaine Davis

↑ Immersive Space Series: Arches by Office of Things

↑ VORTEX in Silo City Row, Buffalo, NY by University at Buffalo students; Project Manager: Kimberly Taracena

↑ Playground in the outdoor gallery "Walking in the Clouds" in Suwon, South Korea by EUS+ARCHITECTS; Photo: Myungho Kang

↑ Super Temporary in Ann Arbor, MI by Synecdoche Design Studio

↑ K11 Fairyla...

Plywood boards used to protect New York establishments are repurposed into captivating sculptures

2021-05-25T17:52:00-04:00

Across New York City’s five boroughs, five new public art installations are on display, each made from salvaged plywood boards that were used for a much different purpose a year ago.

Be Heard by Behin Ha Design Studio.

The sculptural pieces were created as part of New York art nonprofit worthless studios’ Plywood Protection Project. The initiative sought and repurposed discarded plywood boards that were formerly used to seal and protect New York City storefronts closed due to the pandemic and last summer’s protests calling for justice and reform regarding systemic racism and police brutality towards Black Americans. worthless studios notes that during peak protest months across the city, prices skyrocketed to above $90 for a single 4’ x 8’ AC plywood board, and supply rapidly depleted.

In Honor of Black Lives Matter by KaN Landscape Design and Caroline Mardok.

Rather than l...

A circular floating pathway will allow visitors to walk atop Philadelphia's Schuylkill River

2021-05-24T18:35:00-04:00

A captivating, one-of-a-kind structure will allow visitors to seemingly walk atop the Schuylkill River, right along the southern shoreline of Philadelphia’s Bartram’s Garden. Set to arrive in 2022, FloatLab is a large, walkable art installation and learning lab. It is a new project from Mural Arts Philadelphia with support from the William Penn Foundation and is being designed by Boston-based firm Höweler + Yoon Architecture.

The lime green, ring-shaped pathway will change in elevation as visitors walk through it, creating points where one is walking above the water and others where one is eye level with the river. Approaches in architectural design, marine engineering, and naval architecture inform a system of eight ballast chambers below the structure’s surface, which allow FloatLab to remain consistently level and stable as the tide moves in and out.

Image: Höweler + Yoon Architecture and Brick Visual

FloatLab was designed as a means to explore the river and reconnect visitors to...

Edoardo Tresoldi's 2018 Coachella installation arrives in Rome

2020-10-12T10:53:00-04:00

Etherea, the installation created by Edoardo Tresoldi for the 2018 Coachella festival, has arrived in Rome for Back to Nature, an exhibition project curated by Constantino d'Orazio.

The work is made from three translucent sculptures reminiscent of Neoclassical and Baroque architecture. Contemplative in nature, Etherea focuses on the phenomenological aspects of architecture. The use of transparent wire mesh radiates a sense of mirage and the celestial.

Edoardo Tresoldi's ethereal seafront colonnade opens this month

2020-09-02T12:21:00-04:00

Opera, the new public art permanent installation by Edoardo Tresoldi on Reggio Calabria's seafront, will be inaugurated on September 12th and 13th. The opening will host a series of music, performance, and poetry events administered in compliance with current COVID-19 guidelines.

"Opera was created to celebrate the contemplative relationship between place and the human being through the language of classical architecture and the transparency of the Absent Matter, a relationship through wire mesh," writes Tresoldi in a statement.

Previously on Archinect: Edoardo Tresoldi creates public colonnade consisting of 46 pillars in Italy. Image: Edoardo Tresoldi, Opera, original drawing © Edoardo Tresoldi.

The permanent installation consists of a colonnade of 46 pillars peaking at 8 meters at their highest points within a 2,500 square meter park. The project is due to become a new landmark for the region.

Coachella 2020 to include installations by Oana Stănescu and Architensions

2020-01-03T14:45:00-05:00

Mark your calendars, Coachella 2020 has announced their line up of performers and artists participating in April! Besides the music, crowds, and overall desert festival ambiance, Coachella has been a breeding ground for emerging artists and designers showcasing their works.

This year the works of Romanian architect Oana Stănescu (who made her first appearance here on Archinect as a student blogger), New York/Rome-based architectural studio Architensions, and several others will be showcased at the festival.

2020 Coachella Lineup

Last year's lineup included the works of Andrew Kovacs of Architecture Affiliates and Francis Kéré of Kéré Architecture. Although many Coachella fans love basking in the musical sounds of famous artists like Flume, Peggy Gou, and Frank Ocean, many have grown to enjoy the large-scale installations scattered across the Coachella Valley. With the announcement of this year's lineup, we're positive many are getting their Coachella outfits ready and selfie poses ...

Hou de Sousa's latest iridescent art installation "Atomic" is another delightful pick-me-up

2019-12-16T16:15:00-05:00

In their latest art installation, New York-based practice Hou de Sousa colorfully reinterprets the building blocks of our universe: Atoms. Simply titled "Atomic," the installation was designed for this year's Georgetown GLOW, Washington D.C.'s only curated exhibition of outdoor public light-art installations during the holiday season.

Photo: Hou de Sousa.

Suspended above festival-goers, Atomic is an iridescent canopy made of hula hoops and fishnet fabric. The project is a physical manifestation of the photographic bokeh effect, the designers say, and its multi-hued facets are a visual reference to the stained glass windows of Grace Church.

Photo: Hou de Sousa.

Hou de Sousa participated in last year's Georgetown GLOW with the kaleidoscopic "Prismatic." And fairly recently, they designed another delightful public art installation in their New York home base called "Ziggy," which was the winning proposal for the 2019 Flatiron Public Plaza Holiday D...

FreelandBuck designs geometrically reflective art installation for Palo Alto

2019-12-11T17:47:00-05:00

Bicoastal architecture firm FreelandBuck has designed Cache Me if You Can, a new installation currently on view in King Plaza, Palo Alto right in front of city hall. The installation utilizes imagery that captures the activity that took place within the plaza over the course of one day, documenting everything from fluctuating light levels to shifting shadows.

Each of the 10 triangular panels that make up the art piece contain perforated patterns mimicking the captured imagery. Concerning the design approach, FreelandBuck co-founder and principal Brennan Buck said, "This project follows several of our previous large-scale installations designed as constructed drawings. In this case, we worked with images of the site, articulating them graphically as a pattern of overlapping circles. Each pixel of the photograph produced 5 circles in a range of hues that, when averaged together, match the hue of the original pixel. From a distance, the photograph is clear, but up close, the surface o...

This conceptual sound installation will let San Franciscans “hear” the sinking Millennium Tower

2019-11-15T15:42:00-05:00

Creating a work about the sinking high-rise was an easy choice, according to Martínez. “We started researching San Francisco, and current events in the city, and the Millennium Tower popped up,” Martínez said. “We knew almost instantly we wanted to do a project that was in some way going to connect with some of most expensive real estate on earth collapsing under the weight of itself as a metaphor for late capitalism.”

Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist of interdisciplinary arts collective Postcommodity were compelled to make an art piece based on the sinking, tilting Handel Architects-designed Millennium Tower in San Francisco, as a timely metaphor for late capitalism collapsing under the weight of itself. The duo made a data map of the tower's minuscule movements and created a conceptual sound-art piece called “The Point of Final Collapse.”

Starting today, the piece will be played for 4 minutes at 5 p.m. from the tower at San Francisco Art Institute's campus on North Beach, and projected to Downtown San Francisco via long-range acoustic devices. The piece will play every day until the tower is fixed or torn down, the artists say in the article.

Art student makes cheese from mold found in rental housing

2019-08-05T17:46:00-04:00

That’s exactly what Avril Corroon, an art student at Goldsmiths, has done for her final project. Taking samples from the most cursed fungal growths she could find in rented accommodation around London, Avril made a selection of artisanal cheeses that look good enough to eat. Except, they’re not; they’re stinky reminders of just how terrible rented accommodation can be in one of the richest cities in the world.

Art student, Avril Corroon has decided to take an unfortunate situation and make a statement through art. "The idea is to juxtapose precarious living standards with that of wealth, gentrification and thinking about where money is invested and where it is disinvested, and how often products are all made from a type of exploitation," the young creative expressed in a VICE article on her project.

She has decided to make cheese from the mold "she could find in rented accommodation around London." And her creations look disturbingly edible, but are actually quite dangerous. "You would hurt yourself," she says in response to an inquiry on eating the fermented mold cheese. The student hopes to shed light on the living conditions in London, and her project undoubtedly provides a bold and creative stance.

Interested in designing public installations and art exhibitions? Here are 9 firms offering architectural job opportunities

2019-08-01T15:56:00-04:00

This week, Archinect has selected jobs with firms whose work focuses on creative and imaginative public installations and art exhibitions. Whether permanent or temporary, these spaces allow for experiences outside of people’s daily interactions through art and the built environment. Below are 9 firms located in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, and Manhattan looking to hire the right candidate to join their team.

Fluidity Designs Consultants seeks a Junior Designer
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Fluidity Design Consultants is a Los Angeles-based leader in water feature design and engineering. The firm collaborates with many of the world’s most respected architects, landscape architects, institutions and developers in the realization of creative and technically refined installations around the world, mostly in the public realm.Work will entail concept development, modeling, visualization, materials research, the exploration of architectural assemblies, and related efforts. Candidates must have profici...

A closer look at Francis Kéré's colorful Coachella installation

2019-04-17T20:56:00-04:00

With the second weekend of Coachella underway, many festival-goers have already flooded social media with their experiences and favorite Instagrammable installations. Laid across the Coachella Valley are mesmerizing installations by architects and designers whose work blends art, architecture, and design exploration. One project in particular who has kept people buzzing is Francis Kéré's towered installation, Sarbalé Ke. Founder of Kéré Architecture Kéré was inspired by the Burkinabè baobab tree, a significant tree in African culture. Kéré reflected on the tree's cultural significance and used that as inspiration to further explore themes surrounding the topic of a village. The project's name Sarbalé Ke translates to "the House of Celebration" in Moore, a language spoke in various parts of Burkina Faso. Twelve baobab towers are placed around each other each varying in height and color.

Sarbalé Ke by Francis Kéré at the Coach...

Francis Kéré, Office Kovacs and others unveil installations at Coachella

2019-04-15T18:18:00-04:00

Weekend one of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival has concluded. Amongst the food trucks run by celebrated chefs, and sets by Grammy artists such as Kacey Musgraves, architects like Francis Kéré were busy activating the polo field with large-scale art installations.

The Berlin-based Burinabé architect, who has designed the highly-coveted Serpentine pavilion, revealed a new project this week. Inspired by the baobab tree, native to his home country, Kéré and the Coachella team built 12 conical structures, some as tall as 60 feet, that provided shade to festival-goers.

Thanks to Paul Clemente, the festival's art director, the art at Coachella has continued to grow in scale as the festival has become an increasingly popular place for architects and artists to showcase their work.

“You don’t have to bring people to architecture, you can bring architecture to people,” Andrew Kovacs told the New York Times of his interest in Coachella. Mr. Kovacs, who designed a collection of...

Olafur Eliasson produces architecture with artistry

2019-04-05T15:37:00-04:00

Few artists have dedicated their work to architectural space quite as much as Olafur Eliasson. His objects transform walls by their luminescence; his projections cast structure on structure; his geometry bends over backyards to multiply the qualities of sites. It is without doubt that one can place him on a list along with spatial artists including Dan Graham, Gordon Matta Clark and Kurt Schwitters.

Unspoken Spaces (Studio Olafur Eliasson), published by Thames & Hudson.

Perhaps the fact that Eliasson's contributions to architectural affect have been historically undermined led to Thames & Hudson's publication of Unspoken Spaces, a monograph of the artist's most architectural work. It begins with an introduction by Eliasson that highlights his innate inability to separate art from architecture: "The artwork in this book are mostly models for space, defined by movement. They are world-makers."

Cirkelbroen, by Studio Olafur Eliasson.

One of Eliasson's recent architectural projects, for ...

Snark Park, Snarkitecture's permanent exhibition space, opens at Hudson Yards

2019-03-18T14:27:00-04:00

With the opening of New York's Hudson Yards, a myriad of highly-anticipated restaurants, shops, and other attractions have begun greeting visitors. Amongst them, is a new exhibition space that will give the firm Snarkitecture 6,000 square feet to unveil a rotating cast of art and architecture installations that have become characteristic of the practice.

Since its founding ten years ago, the New York-based studio has become known for their whimsical, 'pop-up' experiences. Examples include "the BEACH," which transformed the National Building Museum's Great Hall into a massive ball pit, and "Playhouse," which sandwiched a shed-like structure between two brick, buildings for Exhibit Columbus.

Snarkitecture: Ben Porto, Daniel Arsham, Alex Mustonen. Photo by Noah Kalina.

At Hudson Yards, Snark Park—the name for their space on the second floor of 20 Hudson Yards—will give Snarkitecture their fist ever permanent playground to design and curate from start to finish. Hosting three shows a y...

Artist Sebastian Errazuriz to project livestream of Earth in 20-foot “blu Marble” installation in Manhattan

2019-03-11T20:27:00-04:00

Known for his interdisciplinary, experimental works, New York-based artist, designer, and activist Sebastian Errazuriz created a 20-foot public artwork called “blu Marble” that will show a livestream of planet Earth from outer space. The installation will be on display at 159 Ludlow Street in Manhattan starting March 13. And for one night only during the launch, blu Marble will be projected onto the New Museum.

Rendering of Sebastian Errazuriz's “blu Marble” at the New Museum. Image courtesy of the artist.

Visible throughout the day and night, the installation features a custom-made LED screen that projects Earth in real time from outer space. To do this, Errazuriz's team created a bot that stitches together live photos of Earth from a NASA satellite.

“Blu Marble is a reminder of our miraculously fragile existence. It places our very existence in perspective at a global level — as a tiny spec in space — beckoning us to live fully with an awareness and mindfulness of our limited time...

Are there other ways to imagine sculpture's relationship to architecture?

2019-01-31T18:36:00-05:00

We’re used to images of nature reclaiming abandoned buildings – but artists Filthy Luker and Pedro Estrellas have put a playful twist on this concept. They’ve erected a giant sea monster that appears to burst through an abandoned warehouse in Philadelphia’s Navy Yard.

The relationship between public sculpture and architecture has been the subject of sharp criticism among architects. James Wines of SITE famously referred to most of what the sculptures typically installed in building plazas as "plop art," suggesting that they rarely contribute to the architecture on their sites but rather carelessly sit in front of them. Rachel Whiteread, a British sculptor, has taken on the same criticism, suggesting that much of the public art in her native London is “ill thought-out and put in places that it shouldn’t necessarily be.”

While Wines, Whiteread and other designers of the built environment continue to search for ways to integrate sculpture into architecture, Group X may have found a bold way forward. The anonymous art collective produced ‘Sea Monsters HERE,’ made up of 20 tentacles, each around 40 feet long, bursting through an abandoned warehouse’s steel skin and windows in Philadelphia's Navy Yard.

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Th...

The Muzeum Susch is an "alpine chalet, primitive grotto and Bond villain’s lair in one"

2019-01-22T15:59:00-05:00

In this beguiling new gallery in the Engadin valley, it is hard to tell where nature ends and artifice begins. It is located on the site of a 12th-century monastery, in a rambling complex of buildings... The young architects Chasper Schmidlin and Lukas Voellmy have concocted a magical place where the historic fabric, contemporary art and the raw geology of the landscape collide.

Exterior. Photograph: (c) Studio Stefano Graziani, courtesy Muzeum Susch, Art Stations Foundation CH

Though the outside of this gallery in the remote Eastern section of Switzerland appears perfectly ordinary, stepping past its entrance reveals a world of difference.

Interior. Photograph: Studio Stefano Graziani/courtesy Muzeum Susch and Art Stations Foundation CH

Muzeum Susch, one of the newest galleries in Switzerland, has been receiving attention for its novel approach towards the conflation of natural rock formations and exhibition space. 68-year-old Grażyna Kulczyk conceived of the private museum after building her first in a former brewery in her hometown of Poznań, Poland.

Given the natural irregularity of the walls, the space will primarily exhibit floor sculptures, including those from Magdalena Abakanowicz, Sara Masüger and Adrián Villar Rojas.