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FreelandBuck's new Washington Metro art installation invites viewers to an engrossing play on perspective

2024-04-23T13:24:00-04:00

FreelandBuck has released images of a recent art installation for the Washington Metro Area Transit Agency (WMATA) in Washington, D.C. Staged as an optical illusion, their new piece titled ‘Tunnel Vision’ works by projecting an image of a metro station over three intersecting aluminum cones that are suspended from the ceiling in the lobby of the organization’s new Alexandria, Virginia, offices.

Image courtesy FreelandBuck and WMATA

The sculpture's grid pattern and convex geometry center a 3D image of an iconic coffered station designed by Harry Weese in the viewer’s vision field, creating the effect of watching a metro train approach while standing on the platform. The firm says, "The piece suggests both realism and familiarity, inciting curiosity for passersby to come take a closer look."

Image courtesy FreelandBuck and WMATA

Brennan Buck, the firm's principal and co-founder, told the Washingtonian magazine recently, "We thought it was just a real...

JR debuts latest Italian commission 'La Nascita' for Milan Design Week

2024-04-11T13:03:00-04:00

French street art pioneer JR has debuted his latest piece, a massive illusory trompe l’oeil piece animating the facade of Milan’s Stazione Centrale railway station, in advance of the start of Milan Design Week in the Italian cultural nexus.

His latest commission is titled La Nascita (Italian for “the birth”) and will run until May 1st, following two previous Italian projects at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and Palazzo Farnese in Rome that were completed in 2021.

“In spaces that have social issues, my work is about bringing people together. In a place like this, a huge range of people come to catch the train. When they find themselves in front of an exhibition, they will suddenly have a different kind of interaction,” he told The Art Newspaper at its unveiling.

More of our coverage of Milan Design Week can be found here.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by JR (@jr)

Artist JR 'cracks open' Florence's Palazzo Strozzi with monumental optical illusion installation

2021-03-22T19:10:00-04:00

Titled La Ferita, Italian for “The Wound,” the work creates an optical illusion of a great gash running through the institution’s external walls. Through the cracks, those on the outside can once again peer into a black-and-white vision of the interior of the shuttered building, with some of Florence’s famous artworks and cultural heritage on view.

The new site-specific trompe-l'œil installation — measuring 28 meters/92 feet tall and 33 meters/108 feet wide — by prolific French artist JR opened on March 19, shortly after many major Italian cities were ordered back under another COVID-19 lockdown.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Palazzo Strozzi (@palazzostrozzi)

"By including iconic works of Florence’s art heritage and directly citing real places such as the library of the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, JR proposes a direct and evocative reflection on accessibility not only to Palazzo Strozzi but to all cultural sites in the era of Covid-19," explains the project description.

Related on Archinect: How Art and Design Museums Switched to Working From Home and Sharpened Their Digital Experience. Photo: Wikimedia Commons user BRENAC/CC-BY-SA-3.0.

"Palazzo Strozzi becomes the spectacular stage for a symbolic yet painful wound suffered by all cultural institutions both in Italy and abro...

Portuguese street artist combines tagging, illustration, and animation to create building-scale optical illusions

2019-09-16T19:30:00-04:00

A Portuguese graffiti artist who goes by Vile has been painting since he was a teenager, a depth of experience that, when combined with his skills in animation and illustration, allows him to "create stunning optical illusions whereby his name appears as a window cut into the side of a wall," as My Modern Met reports.

"The most challenging part of his creative process," My Modern Met explains, "is color matching, as the palette must be selected carefully in order to make the final product convincing."

Below is an image of the wall before the painting:

Image courtesy of Vile

Check out his instagram for more of his work.

For its 30th birthday, Artist JR creates a large-scale optical illusion at the Louvre Pyramid

2019-04-01T19:05:00-04:00

When built in 1989 by Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei, the glass pyramid was derided as a sacrilegious addition to the historic Louvre Museum. But three decades later, the once-reviled Louvre Pyramid has become a beloved Paris landmark and highly-visited tourist attraction.

This weekend, the iconic project celebrated its 30th anniversary. For the festivities, the Paris museum enlisted the French street artist JR who, three years ago, covered the pyramid in a giant trompe l’oeil that made it disappear behind a giant black-and-white photo.

A continuation on this prior piece, his latest work saw the help of 400 volunteers, who worked for four days to surround the glass pyramid with 2,000 strips of paper. His latest stunt installation, the collage created the optical illusion that the pyramid was rising from a rock quarry.

Shortly after its announcement, it was destroyed underfoot as visitors left the paper collage in shreds. On the project's planned destruction, JR said "the imag...

Lithuanian design studio Gyva Grafika transforms bathroom tiles into apartment block windows

2018-03-21T19:43:00-04:00

A couple of years ago, Lithuanian design studio Gyva Grafika was tasked with redecorating the bathroom of a local restaurant in the city of Kaunas, about 62 miles west of Vilnius. They came up with a uniquely nostalgic idea: bathroom tiles that make the stalls take on the appearance of the panel buildings that came to represent the whole of the Eastern Bloc (and spread to other Communist countries, like Cuba).

A sample tile design by Gyva Grafika

Without having to replace the pre-existing tiles, the firm created stickers that, placed on top of the tiles, would create the appearance of a Soviet-era public housing block. The design intervention was done for Galeria Urbana bar—a hipster hot-spot in the city of Kaunas, Lithuania—and carried out by Gyva Grafika, a local studio specializing in graphics and design. The project has been so successful that the studio has even begun selling them.

The many faces of MVRDV's shape-shifting Baltyk Tower

2017-06-22T15:27:00-04:00

Turning iconicity on its head, MVRDV have designed a striking building that purposefully refuses easy categorization. Depending on the angle from which it is viewed, the Baltyk Tower seems to assume different forms, a look that is achieved by a series of scenic terraces and a rippling glass-fronted concrete facade.

Image: MVRDV

From one angle, the tower appears to be svelte, a compact wedge on Poznan, Poland's streets. However, from another perspective the tower broadens and becomes a kind of gigantic civic staircase. Regardless of where one views the building, the inventive facade gives the structure a dynamic, shifting quality.

Image: MVRDV

As MVRDV co-founder Nathalie de Vries explains, “When we came to Poznań for the first time, the goal was clear: we were to realize an office building with public functions on the first two layers and at the top. But also that offered a range of amenities for the community and general public. We realised if we could control...

Tour the optical illusion of Giovanni Vaccarini's facade system for the SPG Headquarters

2017-02-16T13:59:00-05:00

Relax, you don't need new glasses: the closely spaced, suspended panes of glass on Giovanni Vaccarini's SPG Headquarters in Geneva purposefully create a blurred/vibrating effect, especially when viewed from a distance.

However, producer The Piranesi Experience and filmmaker Claudio Esposito have made a film about the SPG called "Deep Into the Surface" which, according to the filmmakers "investigates the abstract and conceptual dimension that architect Giovanni Vaccarini imparted to the façade system that characterizes the building of the SPG Headquarters in Geneva. A game made of simple rules, whose reiteration produces a complex play of elements to the point that its perception varies with weather and lights. The photography by Fabio Paolucci and the original soundtrack by Populous underline the exploration of these qualities and let the spectator perceive the depth of the surface and its apparent movement." You be the judge:

The optical illusion behind Copenhagen's Bryggeblomsten residential tower

2016-06-15T13:43:00-04:00

With a floor plan designed around the concept of petals furling outward from a flower's stem the anodized bronze-toned aluminum and glass tower known as Bryggeblomstem ("the Brygge Flower"), has been granted the "Best Residential Building" award by the Copenhagen Municipality. The 8,100 square foot, 15-floor, 58-unit apartment building designed by Mangor & Nagel architects makes use of natural light to create well-illuminated apartments with views of the city, the harbor, and the surrounding landscape.

In a press release, the architects stated that they purposefully rotated the floor plans thirty degrees relative to each other to increase the number of corners and corresponding vertical lines, thus using an optical illusion to make the building appear taller than it actually is.

Claus Jørgensen, creative director and architect at Mangor & Nagel's Copenhagen office, noted that "I'm really pleased with our floor plan design. The result is some extremely well-appointed apartments that ar...

FABRIC's zoetrope-inspired "Trylletromler" pavilion in King's Garden, Copenhagen

2013-11-04T19:27:00-05:00

The "Trylletromler" pavilion by Dutch firm FABRIC has attracted plenty of public attention in King's Garden, Copenhagen since its public opening this past September. The installation was built after FABRIC won a temporary-pavilion design competition earlier this year. (Check out our previous coverage here on our sister site Bustler)

The concept of Trylletromler comes from the Danish word for the 19th-century zoetrope device, which gives the illusion of movement in a still image. Based on this idea, the pavilion's fence is built as a paradoxically transparent maze that creates the illusion of motion as one walks through it.

Here's a more detailed project description and some recent photos we received from FABRIC:

"...The Renaissance garden design of Rosenborg Castle is the oldest known example of garden design in Denmark. The design draws heavily on principles of Euclidean geometry. This language of absolute space was long regarded as the construction principle of the worl...

Dalston House

2013-06-28T11:53:00-04:00

Wainwright - "So Leandro we are sitting on a window ledge in Dalston. Can you tell us why we're here? Erlich - "The idea is to create a facade that will resemble the architecture of the . . . neighborhood and um - that has always been part of my interest to bring the ordinary architecture as a stage for the public to participate in a kind of fiction that would be built through the experience."

Though edging on the sphere of art, Erlich's Dalston House provides a publicly accessible perversion of what would otherwise be banal architecture. This project uses that unexpected architectural content to foster rich narratives both as unique experiences and serendipitous performances. As Erlich says "Reality is what we build; it is not something given."

How A Parisian Artist Created This Stunning Optical Illusion

2011-07-07T11:45:10-04:00

This work of art looks like a giant grass sphere, but it's actually flat. This land art is an anamorphosis which is a distorted projection that comes to life when viewed at the proper angle. Stand to the side and you will see angular grass and dirt. Stand at the correct angle and the 3D image jumps out at you.