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Mecanoo's enigmatic theater design stages Jacob's Pillow for a new era of performance in Massachusetts

2024-11-21T13:17:00-05:00

Mecanoo’s next cultural building in the United States, the new Doris Duke Theater for the Jacob’s Pillow dance center in western Massachusetts town of Becket, has announced its opening date of July 9th, 2025.

After the popular Berkshires destination suffered a devastating loss from a fire in late 2020, the $30 million rebuilding effort was launched, focused on creating a new home that, in the words of the center’s Artistic Director Pamela Tatge, is "grounded in the Indigenous history of the land on which we dance."

Image: Robert Benson, courtesy of Jacob's Pillow

Joining Mecanoo for its reimagined design was Marvel, now fresh off the groundbreaking of its new Bronx Museum of the Arts renovation/expansion and work on the esplanade for the new Universal Hip Hop Museum led by Michael Ford’s BrandNu Design Studio.

Image rendering by Mecanoo Architects and Marvel, courtesy of Jacob's Pillow

Francine Houben, Mecanoo’s founder, says: "At the heart of the new Doris Duke Theatre lies a celebra...

New Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance building is completed behind a playful stone facade

2023-06-01T11:43:00-04:00

Construction has been completed on the new Ari Kushner Building at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. Designed by Tel Aviv-based HQ Architects and New York's HWKN Architecture, the scheme is housed in what the team calls an “elegant, playful, stone facade” to bring a “sense of unity and a contemporary, welcoming identity” to the academy’s campus.

Image credit: Dor Kedmi

The 27,000-square-foot cultural building houses new choreography, jazz studios, vocal and opera studios as well as a 115-seat music recital hall, equipping the campus with a central performance venue that it previously lacked. Externally, the development is defined by a “curiosity-generating” facade that extends in front of both the existing building and the new addition, constructed of unfinished Jerusalem stone blocks turned 45 degrees on their side.

Image credit: Dor Kedmi

“It balances the geometric order, natural materiality, and intentional imperfection all in a...

Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects' latest adaptive reuse project takes center stage at Chapman University

2023-05-08T12:36:00-04:00

A new adaptive reuse academic project from Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects (LOHA) for Chapman University is getting students' feet moving following the completion of the Sandi Simon Dance Center this January.

The project remade an aging century-old former fruit packing warehouse space operated by the school’s namesake, the orange growing magnate C.C. Chapman, into a 72,000-square-foot educational and performance facility complete with new five dance studios, breakout areas, classrooms, and a lounge.

Photography by Eric Staudenmaier

Acoustic upgrades were paramount to the project, along with a full seismic retrofit and a new circulation strategy that reorganized the structure’s interior into three levels. An influx of natural sunlight is incorporated through a precise cut into the original floor, allowing for the introduction of new volumes that house separate programs and are connected by a multi-story central atrium.

Photography by Eric Staudenmaier

Phot...

John Leo Gillen's debut monograph remixes the design of temporary utopias from the 60s to today

2023-04-28T18:44:00-04:00

The book explores the history of these ephemeral spaces in club culture. Told through key venues in important cities and moments across dance music history, it examines the rise of localised scenes and clubs, their distinct designs and architecture – as well as their shifts and demises as tastes, clientele and cities evolve.

The Irish-born Gillen studied for a Master's in Ephemeral Architecture and Temporary Spaces at the ELISAVA | School of Design and Engineering in Barcelona. He explains in the book’s introduction: “Club movements are born as causes, in DIY spaces, created out of necessity by marginalised peoples. This often involves some form of ‘hack’ or new model, quickly inspiring copycats and triggering the process of commercialisation.”

The full, 240-page monograph was published April 25th by Penguin Random House's Prestel imprint and is available for purchase here.

MAD Architects unveils design of new dance center in Rotterdam

2023-03-10T08:00:00-05:00

MAD Architects has revealed the design of Danshuis, a world-class dance center built from a former riverfront warehouse in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. It will feature professional dance studios, theaters, and exhibition spaces for dancers from around the world.

Image: Proloog

MAD Architects was commissioned by philanthropic investor Droom en Daad Foundation. The Rotterdam-based organization aims to make the city a world leader through art and culture. Sitting along the south bank of the Mas River Rotterdam, the Danshuis will echo the adjacent Fenix Museum of Migration, MAD’s first European cultural project.

Image: Proloog

For Danshuis, the architects preserved the original warehouse structure while introducing a number of components that express the project’s aim to be a symbol for freedom and pluralism. This is evident through an open-air, semi-circular theater that refers to ancient Greek gathering spaces located in the middle area of the top floor. This performance space will be o...

Frank Gehry reveals an upgraded design for Downtown LA's transformational Colburn Center

2022-03-16T21:27:00-04:00

The musical fabric of Los Angeles is about to get a significant boost from one of its most famous creative backers after Frank Gehry’s updated plans for the Colburn School were made public for the first time in a live-streamed ceremony at its downtown campus earlier today.

Renderings reveal a 100,000-square-foot expansion of the school’s existing facilities into what will be called the Colburn Center, a dynamic new set of interlocking performance venues and public spaces that will couple with a generous set of scholarship programs to further enhance the 72-year-old school’s educational and artistic offerings.

The project is an integral part of the architect's mission to transform the Downtown Los Angeles landscape beginning with his iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall up the street and culminating with his latest, directly adjacent mixed-use addition called The Grand. Gehry worked together with longtime collaborators Michael Ferguson and Yasuhisa Toyota of Nagat...

Olafur Eliasson links his breakdancing years to spatial thinking in art and architecture

2018-09-17T15:34:00-04:00

“As a teenager I became very interested in street-dance culture and was active on the Scandinavian breakdance scene,” the artist Olafur Eliasson tells his friend and collaborator Anna Engberg-Pedersen in our new book, Olafur Eliasson Experience. This admission is a slight understatement. In 1984, the nascent artist’s three-man troupe, Harlem Gun Crew, actually won the Scandinavian breakdancing championships.

Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson discusses his teenage breakdancing years in relation to how he thinks of architecture and space. Eliasson links the body awareness of moving through an urban landscape in dance to his development in spatial thinking as an artistic practice in design and architecture.

Luis Barragan’s Casa Gilardi hosts a body-bending dance troupe

2018-04-25T18:48:00-04:00

Luis Barragan’s Casa Gilardi is considered one of the most internationally transcendent works of contemporary architecture. His last project before passing, the house shows off the legendary Mexican architect's exemplary use of geometry and eye-popping color. In this new video for the design video channel Nowness, the home acts as the perfect stage for hosting a body-bending dance troupe that twists and moves through the building’s vibrant spaces and rooms.

Explaining his interest with Barragan’s architecture, Director Andres Arochi said: “I wanted to play around with and explore the architect’s design. He knew exactly when and where people stand, and how the combination of light and space makes them feel. When we began shooting, magic started to happen. Light burst in through the window, and the dancer’s bodies started to flow in a way I had not anticipated.”

Watch the full video below.

Explore Soviet architecture while dancing through Moscow

2018-03-01T14:26:00-05:00

A new tour group fusing Soviet architecture with the latest Russian electronica is launching a series of outdoor parties amid the historic courtyards of central Moscow. Culture group MosKultProg will be holding two events in March, mixing historian Sergey Niktin's historical tour along Moscow's legendary Kutuzovsky Prospekt with sets from St Peterburg-based DJ Egor Holkin.

Moscow keeps expanding its options for exploring the city's mesmerizing architecture: if you've done the virtual/augmented reality tours of never-realized icons of Soviet architecture and already 'Pokémon Go-caught' all the famous figures of Russian history via the Know Moscow.Photo. app, you can now take an architectural walking dancing tour while grooving to epic DJ sets of Egor Holkin.

The organizers behind the concept, TanzProg, plan to bring their edutainment initiative also to other European cities this summer, including London and Paris.

How dance could help engineers design new solutions for urban mobility

2017-12-18T14:47:00-05:00

The value of all this for engineering is currently hypothetical. But what if transport engineers were to improvise design solutions and get instant feedback about how they would work from their own embodied experience? What if they could model designs at full scale in the way choreographers experiment with groups of dancers? What if they designed for emotional as well as functional effects?

UCL Urban Design and Culture Researcher John Bingham-Hall writes about how choreography techniques can potentially be used by engineers in designing solutions for better city-planning and mobility.

“We need new approaches in order to help engineers create the radical changes needed to make it healthier, more enjoyable, and less environmentally damaging to move around cities. And my colleagues and I think that dance might hold some of the answers,” Bingham-Hall writes.

Do robots dream of dancing sheep?

2017-11-21T15:28:00-05:00

Harmoniously weaving together the art of dance and the science of mechanical engineering, Huang Yi performs a man-machine dance duet with KUKA -- a robot he conceptualized and programmed -- set to stirring cello by Joshua Roman.

During aTED Talk event in Vancouver, British Columbia, Taiwanese choreographer and engineer Huang Yi performed an absolutely gorgeous pas de deux with an emotionally responsive, intricately reticulating single arm robot affectionately named KUKA. For this performance, KUKA was programmed to move not only in harmony with both the graceful movements of the dance but with the sound of Joshua Roman‘s starkly beautiful cello solo.

Nick Cave collaborates with Studio Gang for "Here Hear Chicago", commissioned by Navy Pier

2017-08-23T15:03:00-04:00

A collaboration between the sculptor and performance artist Nick Cave and the architect Jeanne Gang on a site-specific work for Chicago’s Navy Pier is part of the ongoing transformation of the historic waterfront space from tourist trap into cultural destination.

The performance will involve dancers wearing Cave's silver-colored Soundsuits while interacting with objects designed by Studio Gang as a part of the setting. Fabricating a changeable stage that could be used for other performance groups, Gang was inspired by the idea of a clearing for traditional dances, deciding to define the space through designed objects, instead of treating the stage as an object in itself.

Since the pier extends 3,300 feet into the lake, buoys began to figure into Gang’s thinking. “Buoys move back and forth but they are on water; how do you do that in the land?” That led to the physics of self-balancing objects. The objects needed be soft, friendly, large-scale, and to fall down but not stay down. “Everything has an impact on the movement,” said Gang. “The visual impact of it, and the height, and the weight—it is all a balance.”

The collaborative artwork of Cave and Gang is a part of Here Hear Chicago, a performance series which opens on the pier during the fai...

The Chicago Architecture Biennial announces special projects

2017-07-18T20:01:00-04:00

The 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial will be open to the public and on view from September 16, 2017, through January 7, 2018 at the Chicago Cultural Center, located in downtown Chicago.

The Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) announces special projects, including a SO-IL and Ana Prvački collaboration and a Francois Perrin installation at the Garfield Park Conservatory, a new performance artwork by Gerard & Kelly at the Farnsworth House, and James Welling photographs and Gerard & Kelly videos at the City Gallery in the Historic Water Tower.

Steven Holl finds genre-pushing collaborator in Jessica Lang Dance

2015-12-01T17:05:00-05:00

The hour-long performance uses Holl and Lang’s year-and-a-half-long joint research project, Explorations In, as a point of departure. Lang’s dancers bend and glide swiftly, under vivid projections of light, around the structures Holl crafted for Tesseracts of Time. The four sections of the performance—“under,” “in,” “on,” and “over”—evoke the architectural form of the body as the dancers “engage in deep spatial constructions in inspiring ways,” notes Holl

For more thoughts from Holl on Tesseracts of Time (his dance performance collaboration with Jessica Lang Dance for the Chicago Architecture Biennial) and other recent projects, check out our Feature interview with him.

Studios Kabako from Congo wins 2014 Curry Stone Design Prize

2014-10-20T15:12:00-04:00

Congolese performance and theater group Studios Kabako from Kisangani was announced as the 2014 Curry Stone Design Prize winner this past weekend at an awards ceremony in Brussels...Studios Kabako was established in 2001 to address the various emotions linked to the aftermath of civil war. Located in a city that is isolated geographically and culturally, the studio has provided its community a safe creative haven of dance, theater, and music through its urban interventions and cultural programs.

Studios Kabako will start a U.S. tour including in New York from October 21 to November 1, 2014, with two performances at the BRIC theater in Brooklyn.

The studio will receive a $100,000 grant prize, and were also featured in a short documentary by the Curry Stone Foundation, which you can watch entirely below.

Watch Renzo Piano's construction cranes "dance" in Athens

2014-06-27T13:02:00-04:00

While Renzo Piano's Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens (SNFCC) is still under construction, it didn't keep the first performance from being staged last Wednesday on the site. Based on Renzo Piano's own idea, the Greek National Orchestra scored a 15-minute "dance" performance of ten giant cranes on the construction site, conducted by Artistic Director of the Greek National Opera, Myron Michailidis.

The cranes' dance was choreographed by Renato Zanella, to music from Gustav Holst's The Planets -- all with the Pantheon in the background.

The SNFCC is scheduled to open in 2016, and will include the new home for the Greek National Opera, the National Library of Greece, and a 42-acre public park.

You can watch the entire performance below (begins at 10:00):

Plan For Cuban Landmark's Rebirth Sparks Debate

2012-11-04T13:03:00-05:00

Carlos Acosta's plan to inject life into the island's hidebound ballet scene by refurbishing Havana's crumbling dance school and turning it into an international center for culture and dance has ignited controversy for daring to reimagine the original architect's vision. Acosta was visibly frustrated by the flap over what he views as a way to give something back as he prepares to retire from London's Royal Ballet after a celebrated career.

Previously on Archinect: Unfinished Spaces premieres tomorrow night on PBS; Archinect talks to the filmmaker