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MVRDV's The Podium at Het Nieuwe Instituut seeks to showcase the role rooftops can play in urban design

2022-03-01T19:13:00-05:00

Expanding on its long and studied history of demonstrating the capacity for rooftop spaces to produce a better urban environment, MVRDV has now revealed plans for a bright, new, temporary event space on top of the Jo Coenen-designed Het Nieuwe Instituut that will serve as the heart and arteries of Rotterdam’s Rooftop Walk and Architecture Month this summer.

For a little over ten weeks, the 600-square-meter space can be accessed via a 143-step staircase leading into an elevated viewing platform on the pergola of the Instituut and is meant to engage visitors with an informative view of the neighboring Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen and Museumpark in addition to its built-in program of creative inspiration.

Image © MVRDV

Rising to a height of 29 meters (95 feet), the temporary platform is meant to highlight the city's rooftops' amazing potential to reduce the sprawl as it provides Rotterdammers with the ability to pursue a host of green activities ranging from energy product...

Saint Laurent taps Doug Aitken to help present its SS22 line in Venice

2021-07-19T14:43:00-04:00

A temporary installation by Doug Aitken is gracing the runway in Venice thanks to a new commission from fashion giant Saint Laurent.

The artist’s latest work titled Green Lens is a glowing, 10-pronged kaleidoscopic pavilion made from mirrored aluminum panels that sits on a defunct 54-acre military installation hosted on an island called La Certosa.

Image courtesy Saint Laurent.

Aitken uses an admixture of locally-sourced plants, artificially-generated mist, and colorful lighting to create an immersive activated sculpture he says is inspired by the set designs from his favorite Andrei Tarkovsky films. The installation’s focus on ecology and litoral setting elevates a long-held sense of the natural world that the 53-year-old artist has made a focus of throughout his three-decade career.

Image courtesy Saint Laurent.

“It’s something that the viewer can be a part of, the landscape around it can be part of,” Aitken told ARTnews.

Seasonal presentations in the industry had been upended in ...

Trio creates "The Anti-Extinction Library" installation in Brooklyn

2020-10-14T13:48:00-04:00

The Anti-Extinction Library is an installation that permanently shelters the embryonic cells and DNA of rare lifeforms. Created by TED Fellow artists Mitchell Joachim, Chris Woebken, and Oliver Medvedik, the piece seeks to address issues of species biodiversity diminishment through educating local citizens.

"Besides being cryogenically preserved, each strand of DNA has an embedded genetic maker that contains the entire 'Nature Bill of Rights' modified from the UN documents on human rights. These encoded markers support a narrative that all species are equal and all are necessary to a healthy planet," said the trio in a statement.

The installation sits on the East River at Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Rare Isamu Noguchi ceiling installation in New York City is threatened

2020-02-26T14:28:00-05:00

The Museum of Modern Art collects and prizes the sculpture and designs of Isamu Noguchi, a towering figure in 20th-century American art. But just across West 53rd Street, the developer of 666 Fifth Avenue, Brookfield Properties, is planning the opposite: dismantling one of Noguchi’s largest sculptural installations, one that he called “a landscape of clouds” that he designed in 1957 in the skyscraper’s twin lobbies.

Writing in The New York Times, Joseph Giovannini looks into the uncertain fate facing a "landscape of clouds" designed by noted sculptor Isamu Noguchi for the lobby of a 41-story skyscraper that is undergoing a renovation from Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. Preservation groups, including Docomomo and the Isamu Noguchi Museum, have voiced concern over the proposed lobby renovations and are fighting to have the installation preserved in-situ.

View construction time-lapse of the National Building Museum's new summer installation

2019-07-11T12:36:00-04:00

Imagine bringing the feeling of summer indoors. In conjunction with the National Building Museum's annual Summer Block Party Installation, the Rockwell Group turned the museum's Great Hall into a green-hilled summer experience. Complete with painted murals of blue skies, plenty of space to lounge as well as fun summer activities, visitors can roam throughout the transformed hall. Thanks to EarthCam, time-lapse footage of the installation's construction allows for the public to go behind the scenes and witness the building process of the Great Hall transforming into a dreamy summer environment.

Lawn. Image © Timothy Schenck.

A great way to experience a summer day without breaking a sweat, the Rockwell Group aimed to make the installation as green as possible, literally. All of the materials used, from the artificial astroturf to the repurposing of the site's scaffolding. The artificial grass is made out of plant-based materials by SynLawn. In addition to the grassy slopes, the muse...

The contemporary site-specific art exhibition, Desert X, returns to Coachella Valley

2019-02-14T12:41:00-05:00

Desert X, the enormous site-specific art exhibition set across the Coachella Valley, has returned this weekend for its second edition. Run by a nonprofit organization that includes artist Ed Ruscha on its board, the 2019 biennial features 18 works that respond to the desert's history and embrace a "range of ecological, environmental and social issues that have been driving conversations about our role in the anthropocene," says artistic director Neville Wakefield.

Revolutions by Nancy Baker Cahill. Photo by Lance Garber.

After an incredibly successful inaugural run in 2017, the biennial has expanded its programming this year to include film and augmented reality projects, such as Nancy Baker Cahill's Revolutions and Margins of Error, both of which bring colorful animations to the Valley's windmill farms and the Salton Sea, respectively, through the use of the 4th Wall app. Fifty miles away in Palm Springs, John Gerrard, the Irish artist known for his digital simulations, has brought...

Art collective Meow Wolf's cool new model for artists to make an excellent living

2017-07-13T13:53:00-04:00

Full-time creative positions, like architects and sound engineers, come with considerable salaries and benefits. “We have 20-year-olds making $50,000 a year with us,” remarks Everett.

Meow Wolf may have put the starving artist trope to rest in the form of a magnificent new business/installation model.

Photo by Kate Russell. Courtesy of Meow Wolf.

As this article explains:

Since the Santa Fe-based art collective Meow Wolf opened its permanent installation, the House of Eternal Return, in March 2016, the project has been an unmitigated success in terms of viewership and profits. Housed in a 20,000-square-foot former bowling alley, the sprawling interactive artwork welcomed 400,000 visitors in its first year—nearly four times as many as expected—and brought in $6 million in revenue for the collective’s more than 100 members.

Founding members of Meow Wolf: Corvas Brinkeroff, Sean Di Ianni, Vince Kadlubek, Caity Kennedy, Matt King. Courtesy of Meow Wolf.

In even better news: at this time of this report Meow Wolf is currently hiring!

Dive into James Corner's field of ICEBERGS, now at the National Building Museum

2016-07-06T20:07:00-04:00

Walk into the Great Hall of Washington D.C.'s National Building Museum right now and you'll find a glacial landscape of geometric "icebergs" floating before you. Landscape architect James Corner worked alongside the NBM to design the chilling scene, as part of the museum's 2016 Summer Block Party. In the past, the yearly series hosted Snarkitecture's monochromatic BEACH and BIG's gigantic maze.

Opening this past Saturday, ICEBERGS lets visitors catch a break from D.C.'s hot, humid summers. The installation is based on themes related to physical experience and landscape representation, according to James Corner Field Operations, welcoming visitors with an “interactive and playful space of respite and reflection”.

Encased in a large blue net, the installation comprises over 30 prismatic triangular pentahedrons and octahedrons constructed from translucent polycarbonate panels, and range from 16-56 feet in height.

Visitors can cool off as they lounge on chunky, triangular beanbags strewn a...

"En Pointe" by Heather Roberge strikes a balance between past and present

2015-07-15T11:08:00-04:00

In his Untimely Meditations, Friedrich Nietzsche asserts, “…We must seriously despise instruction without vitality, knowledge which enervates activity, and history as an expensive surplus of knowledge and a luxury…” History must be at the service of living, he advocates, not the other way around. At the same time, history has its uses, and total amnesia is neither possible nor desirable. The German philosopher wrote in an era he perceived as detrimentally historicist; we, on the other hand, are coming out of a period of unhistorical thinking, where the past seems to have become obscured by a fin de siècle fog, the discharged by-product of technological novelty – at least according to one possible reading.

Spurred by the development of computer-aided design technologies, the architectural styles at the vanguard of the last few decades have largely abandoned historicist tendencies, reveling instead in the vast potentials of parametric modeling. But, the novel quickly loses its shiny ve...

The "Bigger than a Breadbox" competition, exploring the medium of installation, nears its final deadline - Last chance to submit your proposals!

2015-02-12T15:54:00-05:00

Just a few days left to submit your ideas to the Bigger than a Breadbox, Smaller than a Building competition! Entries need to be received by Sunday, February 15, 2015 via the competition website btabb.archinect.com.

Khôra exhibition curators Robert Trumbour and Aaron Willette are the organizers behind this call for submissions, hoping for an exploration of the medium of installation design within the architectural realm and its duality of spatial-artistic traits.

The winning entry will be realized in the lobby at the Boston Society of Architects' BSA Space during the fittingly titled gallery exhibition Bigger than a Bread Box, Smaller than a Building, June 17 – October 4, 2015.

Some more details from the brief:

"From June 17th – October 4th of 2015 the Boston Society of Architects' BSA Space gallery will host 'Bigger than a Bread Box, Smaller than a Building,' a gallery exhibition that will examine the appropriation of installation in contemporary architectural practice. While in no way...

The "Bigger than a Breadbox" competition is accepting proposals!

2014-12-23T14:57:00-05:00

Bigger than a Breadbox is a current open international competition that examines the role of installation design and its hybrid artistic-spatial qualities that have made it an increasingly popular investigative medium in contemporary architecture practice.

Recently launched by organizers and Khôra exhibition curators Robert Trumbour and Aaron Willette, participants will explore the use of installation design specifically through the lens of the design-research process. Participants will be required to submit the following:

"A past built installation project that used the medium to engage a topic (disciplinary or not) external to the installation itself."
"A proposed installation for the Boston Society of Architects' BSA Space lobby at 290 Congress Street that builds upon the work done in the first project." The 290 Congress Street lobby proposals should be presented as a continued deeper exploration of the past built installation, and not simply be a re-applied concept.

An overall idea ...

A piece about light and life

2014-11-30T13:17:00-05:00

"The tradition I’m coming from is not pleasure. It’s a certain shamanistic excess"

Ted Loos explores the work of sculptor Thomas Houseago, whose architectural installation 'Moun Room' is currently showing until January 17th 2015, at Hauser & Wirth New York.

Parametrizing the sound of the street - SONAR installation

2014-07-28T12:08:00-04:00

The SONAR installation was conceived and built during the 1st Parametric Design Workshop at Universidade Católica de Pernambuco (UNICAP), Brazil. Applying Grasshopper and Rhinoceros as key design tools, the idea was to capture the lively relationships that take place on the main integration axis in the Campus to where social gatherings, daily conversations and meals converge, bringing these into the Architecture School building, a typical modernist structure punctuated by long boring corridors.

Parametrizing the sound of the street - SONAR installation

Do the sounds of the street have shape?

This installation was conceived and built during the 1st Parametric Design Workshop at Universidade Católica de Pernambuco (UNICAP), Brazil, a pioneer initiative in the State, which focused on applying Grasshopper and Rhinoceros softwares as a design tool. For six days, a group of 25 architecture students and young architects, under the guidance of professors Victor Sardenberg, Ana Luisa Rolim and Robson Canuto da Silva, gathered to discuss theoretical aspects of and practice parametric design, aiming to build temporary low-budget installations at UNICAP campus. The Sonar was one of these installations.

As opposed to typical campuses in Brazil, mostly designed under modern architecture principles that reproduced the garden city model, privileging the maximization of open spaces, the campus at UNICAP occupies traditional urban blocks in the heart of the city of Recife - a major capital in ...