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With a little under two months left until the big opening weekend in October, the Chicago Architecture Biennial rounded up a final list of over 100 established and up-and-coming architects, designers, and artists in the contemporary scene. Since the initial roster was announced back in April... View full entry
Architect Frank Gehry has often talked about the influence artists have had on his building designs. [...] An early work from the 1960s by sculptor Larry Bell in the Frank Lloyd show offers a partial template for a Gehry design built three decades ago in Toluca Lake.
Gehry's World Savings and Loan branch at Riverside Drive and Mariota Avenue is a sky-lighted, one-story hall framed by tall facades out front and in the back, as if a full second story had been planned but never built.
— latimesblogs.latimes.com
Hot young Spanish architects José Selgas and Lucía Cano of SelgasCano have designed a pop-up exhibition pavilion for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art's latest exhibition, Africa: Architecture, Culture, Identity. Made of low-cost materials, such as scaffold poles and plastic sheets, which the architects have jazzed up inspired by traditional sub-Saharan settlements, the pavilion is due to travel to Kenya. The show in leafy Humlebaek near Copenhagen closes at the end of September. — theartnewspaper.com
SelgasCano's airy, bright and colorful pavilions are a sought-after commodity this summer: less than a month ago, the practice unveiled its completed design for the 2015 Serpentine Pavilion in London.To learn more about the Africa: Architecture, Culture, Identity exhibition, click here. View full entry
At best, the work in the student shows is committed, hard-worked, brave, skilled, thoughtful and/or imaginative. At worst, the exhibitions offer bad sci-fi, lazy politics (“Let’s all hate America”) and cod poetry. There are cliches that have been going round the schools for decades, such as the idea that the student’s work is a quasi-science (a “surgical operation”, a “laboratory”). Certain buzzwords float around (there’s a lot of “liminal”). — theguardian.com
Architecture critic Rowan Moore goes on to ask: "At root is the central question of architectural education: is it about preparing students for the realities of practice or is it about taking a freedom they will never have again, to dream and speculate?"This has been discussed on Archinect before... View full entry
In Beijing, Ai Weiwei is back with a vengeance. The dissident Chinese artist has had four solo shows in the Chinese capital, ending an implicit exhibition ban that had been in place since his arrest in 2011. The fact that the shows, which opened in June, were permitted with minimal interference beyond one amended opening date surprised everyone, including Ai. “I never planned to have a few shows all at once,” Ai tells us. — The Art Newspaper
Related:Ai Weiwei, Jacob Appelbaum and the dissident experienceArt? An interview with Ai WeiweiAi Weiwei Exhibition Underscores Dangers and Importance of Art View full entry
Adjaye is overseeing the newest installment of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s “Selects” series, which spotlights the little-known West African textiles in the museum’s permanent collection. [...] It also offers the celebrated architect a chance to explore the surprising connections between textile making and building design.
“What’s interesting to me is this idea of fabric and weaving as a kind of abstraction of making places that people come together in,” he says.
— Smithsonian.com
Related: First Look at the Museum of African American History and Culture View full entry
Seoul-based cinematographer and photographer Nils Clauss put together a new film highlighting the works of esteemed sculptor and installation artist Do Ho Suh. Suh's site-specific pieces play with the boundaries of identity and revolve around the physical and metaphorical malleability of space... View full entry
OMA returns to Venice once again in the debut of the Chinese Pavilion they designed for the 2015 International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, "All the World's Futures", which opened to the public on May 9. Commissioned by the Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation, the multimedia exhibition... View full entry
Khôra exhibition curators Robert Trumbour and Aaron Willette organized the Bigger than a Breadbox, Smaller than a Building competition as a means to explore the medium of installation in the architectural realm, specifically the medium's increasing appeal among emerging architects and designers... View full entry
Since breaking ground last summer, the U.S. Pavilion -- titled “American Food 2.0: United to Feed the Planet" -- has opened to the public at the Milan Expo 2015, which is now in its first week. The U.S. joins the more than 140 participating countries that prepared exhibitions and pavilions that... View full entry
The Pompidou Centre in Paris has hit back at critics who say its Le Corbusier exhibition, which opened to the public yesterday, 29 April, glosses over recent accusations that the Swiss-born French architect was a militant fascist with links to the Vichy regime.
A spokeswoman for the Pompidou says the exhibition does not refer to Le Corbusier’s fascist past because “it’s about the proportions of the human body, which are present in his architecture and painting. [...]”
— The Art Newspaper
Previously: Le Corbusier "militant fascist" claims overshadow 50th death anniversary View full entry
“The Landscape Architecture Legacy of Dan Kiley,” an exhibition at the Center for Architecture, shows how modern landscapes often make a better case for modernism than the architecture itself.
Over a span of 60 years, Kiley (1912-2004), a founding father of modern landscape design, worked for the best architects around, among them Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. He was fully versed in architecture’s modernist strategies and overriding focus on form and abstraction.
— wsj.com
This lively effort — mapping — is the subject of a rich exhibition organized by the Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS) and BRIC [...] that pairs the work of 18 contemporary artists with 23 historical maps dating back as far as 1562. For Mapping Brooklyn, BHS opened its collection to the invited artists [...]. The goal of uniting these two components — map and art — is to uncover the common ground: to render, through judgment and artistic process, the world legible. — urbanomnibus.net
Related: Mapping the City: maps through the eyes of street artists View full entry
France's best-known 20th century architect, Le Corbusier, was a "militant fascist" who was far more anti-Semitic and a fan of Hitler than previously thought, two new books reveal.
[...] the latest, far more damning, revelations have shocked admirers and threaten to cast a shadow over commemorations of the 50th anniversary of his death. [...]
"Hitler can crown his life with a great work: the planned layout of Europe."
— telegraph.co.uk
Karen Van Lengen, who created the installation with her husband, James Welty, says to really soak in a building, you need to listen to it.
'If you close your eyes, what you're going to hear are things that you can't hear with your eyes open,' says Van Lengen, an architecture professor at the University of Virginia.
— npr.org
You can also find more about the exhibition on Bustler. View full entry