Archinect - News

#SailsNotSales: public protests after Sydney Opera House displays horse racing ad on its facade

2018-10-15T16:13:00-04:00

After a horse race ad was projected onto the structure’s iconic roof earlier this week, protestors took to the streets in objection to the commodification of their beloved building.

Hundreds of protesters had gathered in the evening hours of October 9 when the, usually, off-white iconic sails of the Sydney Opera House were used as a video projection canvas to promote a major upcoming horse race in New South Wales. The crowd booed and tried to interrupt the projection with a small army of flash lights, chanting "Whose house? Our house".

The protest meanwhile has drawn much wider circles, resulting in a Change.org petition with over 300,000 supporters against any future use of the UNESCO World Heritage Site as a promotional billboard and a rebuke from the Heritage Council of NSW.

Salvatore Settis on the "the commercial rape of Venice"

2018-03-29T14:15:00-04:00

Venice is doomed, says, Salvatore Settis, unless there is a moral revival in Italy. He is a professor of archaeology who has been an advisor on cultural matters to the Italian government and was head of the Getty Center for the Arts and the Humanities in the 1990s. Italians know him from his eloquent denunciations in the press, which say that everything that has made La Bella Italia so beautiful is going to hell in a handcart.

The Art Newspaper reviews If Venice dies, the new book by former Getty Center for the Arts and the Humanities director, Salvatore Settis, and elaborates on his warning calls of La Serenissima's impending doom: "Venice, he emphasises repeatedly, is a paradigm for other cities around the world in the tensions between its historic nature and modern needs, in the delicate relationship between the built city and the environment and in the rush to exploit it for short-term gain."

Rotch Scholar Christopher Karlson publishes yearlong research on European performing arts-based architecture

2014-07-24T20:41:00-04:00

After Christopher Karlson won the coveted Rotch Travelling Scholarship in 2011, he was required to document his research as images, drawings, and text to be submitted as a compilation report to the Rotch Trustees. Now, that report is finally available to the public as a print-on-demand book.

The 363-page document shows Karlson's yearlong journey to 35 European performance arts landmarks as an exploration of commercialized culture in the 'post-Bilbao' period (1997 to the present).

More details on Karlson's research right below:

"Research Brief: A total of 35 examples of performing-arts-based architecture - spanning almost 240 years of civic metamorphosis - was observed in 28 autonomous cities using Europe’s crowded and competitive urban network as a point of reference and comparative analysis."

"The intention is to investigate the results of such completed projects that all encounter distinctive urban scales, cultural settings, and political footing - with focus on engagement in urban re...