Archinect - News

BIG creates mirrored installation for Audi at Milan Design Week

2024-04-25T11:46:00-04:00

Bjarke Ingels Group has designed an installation for the car brand Audi, installed at Milan Design Week. Titled ‘Reflaction,’ a play on the words “reflection” and “action,” the installation seeks to convey how “our actions in the world reflect the very essence of our existence,” according to Audi.

Image credit: Audi House of Progress

The installation is configured as a ‘plus’ symbol when viewed from above, dividing the site into four spaces constructed from a minimal selection of materials. The walls of the installation are formed of 33 x 28-foot mirrors, which, according to Audi, “creates an immersive spatial illusion, highlighting the brand's continuous effort to overcome the limits of innovation.”

Image credit: Audi House of Progress

Each space is grounded in a particular theme, namely Community, Knowledge, Performance, and Digital. The Community section features a ‘circular forest’ of Japanese maples to provid...

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...

SO – IL creates 3D knit textile passage for Bruges Triennial 2024

2024-04-22T11:39:00-04:00

SO – IL has completed a passage of 3D knit textiles as part of the 2024 Bruges Triennial in Belgium.

Titled 'Common Thread,' the passage is inspired by the medieval city’s lace-making tradition, using an innovative woven fabric to create what the team calls an “intricate spatial experience in a wave-like tunnel.”

Image credit: Iwan Baan

The installation is set within a passageway that connects the secluded courtyard of a 19th-century monastery with the wider city. In collaboration with a team from TU Delft, the team explored how Common Thread could marry the tradition of the bobbin lace with modern technologies and new geometric possibilities.

Image credit: Iwan Baan

The resulting fabric is knit in varying ratios, with individual threads combining and diverging in ever-changing patterns. The installation’s form and structural framework were further guided by computational simulations and material samples.

Image credit: Iwan Baan

Image cre...

MAD Architects creates Milan Design Week pavilion inspired by mountains

2024-04-18T12:17:00-04:00

MAD Architects has completed its latest installation for Milan Design Week. Titled ‘Amazing Walk.’ the project marks the seventh time MAD has participated in the event.

Image credit: Moreno Maggi

Set within the Cortile della Farmacia courtyard at the University of Milan, the ‘Amazing Walk’ seeks to “blur the boundary between built and natural environments in a surreal way.” Standing 24.6 feet tall, the internal column-free piece is formed of hundreds of triangular elements configured to reflect “the shape of mountains.”

Image credit: Moreno Maggi

The installation is constructed from an aluminum alloy covered in a semi-permeable composite membrane. The resulting finish offers varying visuals under different lighting conditions while, during the night, lights and mist blur the edges of the materials to give the illusion that the pavilion is floating.

Image credit: Moreno Maggi

“This open design invites explorat...

Coachella debuts 2024 art installations, its ‘largest immersive and architectural works yet’

2024-04-16T11:43:00-04:00

The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival has completed work on the 2024 edition of its on-site art program. The acclaimed event is taking place across two weekends: April 12–14 and 19–21.

The three artistic works are described by the festival as "redefining the boundaries of large-scale art, inviting festival-goers to engage with visionary works that ask viewers to question their definition of self, explore the boundaries between reality and imagination & take part in creating a new future together."

"Monarchs: A House in Six Parts" by HANNAH. Image credit: Lance Gerber

"Monarchs: A House in Six Parts" by HANNAH explores the fusion of 3D printing with traditional craftsmanship, comprising a series of pavilions that “invite interaction and contemplation.” A collaboration between Cornell University professors Leslie Lok and Sasa Zivkovic, the piece reimagines architectural design through the lens of digital fabri...

Artist Mary Miss files suit to stop demolition of outdoor installation at Des Moines Art Center

2024-04-09T17:42:00-04:00

Artist Mary Miss has filed a lawsuit in an ongoing dispute over the planned demolition of her outdoor installation Greenwood Pond: Double Site (1996) at the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa.

A district court subsequently decided to issue a temporary restraining order against the institution’s plans, which were to be enacted on April 8th of this year.

Greenwood Pond-Double Site, Des Moines, IA, 1996. Photo © Mary Miss courtesy The Cultural Landscape Foundation

Miss, who is considered a leading figure of the Land Art movement, filed the legal challenge after The Cultural Landscape Foundation divulged the Art Center’s “secret plans” to deconstruct and remove the installation from its grounds over the deterioration of its materials and presumed adversity of potential repairs.

Greenwood Pond-Double Site, Des Moines, IA, Dec. 2023. Courtesy The Cultural Landscape Foundation

Miss is alleging a breach of contract as part of the suit, citing a 1994 agreement and seeking damages through a readi...

In an Ontario plaza, interactive pavements play music ‘as if by magic’

2024-02-28T13:28:00-05:00

Montreal-based studio Daily tous les jours has completed a public space design in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada. Titled 'River Lines,' the project saw the creation of an interactive stage in an urban plaza for big impromptu musical ensembles.

Video credit: doublespace photography

Part of the studio’s wider Musical Pavement series, the interactive wave-patterned pavement is embedded with 62 sensing light rings that “get people moving through musical collaboration exercises.” The infrastructure is formed of twelve in-house tailored audio tiles that have no visible hardware and blend with the wider pavement pattern, meaning “music emanates from the ground as if by magic.”

Image credit: doublespace photography

Located on the site of a 19th-century foundry, the artwork is “a response to the historical nature of the site” and “an exemplar of how investment in the public realm is essential to reimagine and activate places and encourage collective interacti...

Burning Man unveils first-ever Black Rock City Temple design from female BIPOC lead artist

2024-02-13T12:34:00-05:00

Burning Man’s official 2024 Temple for Black Rock City has been unveiled as an optimistic design rising to a height of 70 feet and shrowded in a woven latticed screen cladding with repeated neo-Gothic archways that carry a metaphor of togetherness amidst a backdrop of global conflict.

The design took its charge from notable past iterations from David Best and will be called 'Temple of Together' as denoted by its repeated motif of hands touching in unison. Burner Caroline “Glitter Kitty” Ghosn was the Lead Artist chosen for her design, which is inspired by Lebanese Khaizaran chairs and her battle with multi-generational trauma and illness.

Temple of Together by Caroline Ghosn. Design rendering by Maissa Sader

Organizers say: “We look for a design that is novel, yet still fits within the Burning Man Temple tradition of being a treasured sanctuary ...

Coachella announces lineup for 2024 installation designers

2024-01-17T11:44:00-05:00

The art and design lineup has been announced for the 2024 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. The acclaimed event is set to take place across two weekends: April 12–14 and 19–21.

Besides major musical acts, this year’s festival will include installations by HANNAH, Morag Myerscough, Nebbia, Do LaB, NEWSUBSTANCE, Robert Bose, and Raices Cultura.

While HANNAH describes its work as “inherently derived from materiality, digital construction protocols, robotic routines, new technologies, odd construction techniques, and bottom-up design logics,” Morag Myerscough summarizes her mantra as “make happy those who are near and those who are far will come.” Nebbia Works is “fundamentally driven by a curiosity of all the idiosyncrasies, contradictions and undefined boundaries of our world,” while NEWSUBSTANCE, Do LaB, Robert Bose, and Raices Cultura are returning to the festival where they constructed installations in 2023.

Previously featured Coachella installations

Photo by Lance Gerber,...

Janet Echelman completes rippling sculpture in Riyadh informed by earthquake and tsunami data

2024-01-12T13:52:00-05:00

Janet Echelman has completed a sculpture in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as part of the artist’s Earthtime series.

Named Earthtime 1.26 Riyadh, and installed in the city’s Wadi Namar in December 2023 for the Noor Riyadh light art festival, the sculpture “celebrates the interconnection of sky and earth, flexibility and strength, humans and our physical world, bridging opposites with bold colors and soft curves,” according to the artist.

Image credit: Janet Echelman

Image credit: Ahmed Hasan

The sculpture is composed of knotted fibers, and designed so that as a single knot moves in the wind, the location of every other knot in the sculpture’s surface is changed in what the artist describes as “an ever-unfolding dance of human-made creation with the forces of nature beyond our control.” The custom-engineered fibers are fifteen times stronger than steel by weight and were knotted and spliced with the help of centuries-old craft techniques.

Image credit: Janet Echelman

Image credit: Janet Echelma...

A Massachusetts architect is drawing crowds with impressive Halloween installations in his driveway

2023-10-31T17:57:00-04:00

The haunting Halloween decorations created by Tom Saltsman, a CalArts and Harvard GSD graduate and the Principal of Boston-based firm SaltsmanBrenzel, are taking the spotlight once again in the architect's own driveway.

Saltsman says the inspiration for his crowd-pleasing designs stems from a desire to create perspective illusions of the home he and his fellow architect wife own in Marblehead, Massachusetts. He has been harkening his background in fine arts to create designs for trolls, a shipwreck, and other sculptural decor. He also told WBUR it takes the family and their fleet of volunteer builders months to plan and complete. Some have been realized at costs under $200.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Saltsman Brenzel (@saltsmanbrenzel)

Visitors from as far away as China have been flocking to see the annual display, which the Saltsman family started 15 years ago. His high school-aged daughter and their neighbor both plan on studying architecture a...

James Turrell's Roden Crater is hiring a construction manager for the iconic artwork

2023-08-16T10:45:00-04:00

Following last week’s look at an opening for a Project Manager at the Center for Zero Waste Design, we are using this week’s edition of our Job Highlights series to explore an opportunity on Archinect Jobs for a Construction Manager at the Skystone Foundation.

The role, based in Flagstaff, AZ, will see the successful candidate “work closely with the artist on all phases of the construction of the Roden Crater project, an unprecedented large-scale artwork created within a volcanic cinder cone by light and space artist James Turrell.” Qualifications held by the ideal candidate include a degree in Architecture with the ability to obtain a license in Arizona, and a proficiency in AutoCAD, Revit, Rhino, SketchUp, Navisworks, and Adobe Creative Suite.

James Turrell. Image courtesy: Skystone Foundation

Why the role interests us

Roden Crater is one of the most famous pieces of landscape art in the United States. The site was acquired by Turrell in 1979, who has spent over four decades design...

See photos from Harlem Grown and Jerome Haferd / BRANDT : HAFERD's newly-opened 'Sankofa' installation

2023-07-24T17:53:00-04:00

New York-based artists collective Harlem Grown, in collaboration with Jerome Haferd of BRANDT : HAFERD, has shared photos of the new ‘Sankofa’ installation in Harlem’s historic Marcus Garvey Park just months after the announcement of a two-year community-led commission aimed at creating an artistic public gathering space for residents of the area.

Image courtesy Anna Dave

The installation is part of the Mellon Foundation’s Culture, Creativity, & Care Initiative focused on Marcus Garvey Park and the cultural traditions of the community that it serves.

Image courtesy Anna Dave

Harlem Grown shares: "The project involved planning and collaboration with local artists and makers across various artistic styles and media. Despite its bespoke appearance, the installation is based on a modular system and uses sturdy, reusable materials that can be reconfigured for a number of future uses or sites."

Image courtesy Anna Dave

The design of the circular 32-foot canopied struc...

Photos of MAD Architects' artistic nexus, The City of Time

2023-06-28T17:15:00-04:00

MAD Architects has shared new images of its recently completed temporary The City of Time installation for the Aranya Theater Festival in China.

The project, which ran from June 12th to June 25th in the seaside resort community, brought together 300 artists and 131 group works under one maze-like design that dissolved after standing on the beach for a period of 300 hours.

Image courtesy Aranya Theater Festival

Using verse and meter, the firm described its intentions for the installation as follows:

The City of Time,
Dissolves after 300 hours.
Revolving around an axis perpendicular to the sea,
It offers a spiritual roost for creators.

In real cities,
The need for functionality suffocates spiritual spaces.
Building a fanciful city by the sea,
Allows the substance of theatre and art,
To breathe natural life into this space.

Taking flight and transcending reality,
It is a place dedicated to time, human behavior, and nature,
Inspiring contemplation on our relationships with ourselves and the wor...

Harlem Grown and BRANDT : HAFERD's 'Sankofa' will take over Marcus Garvey Park this summer

2023-06-13T18:47:00-04:00

A new public art installation will kick off the Mellon Foundation-funded Culture, Creativity, & Care Initiative in Harlem this summer with an engaging reflection of the history of Marcus Garvey Park and the cultural craft traditions of the various communities which surround it.

Friday, June 16th, will mark the grand opening of “Sankofa,” a circular 32-foot structure that serves as an art gallery and public gathering space for residents of the neighborhood who will meet underneath its mesh fabric canopy’s complex composition print.

Image courtesy Harlem Grown and Jerome Haferd

The project was initiated by the Black-led artists collective Harlem Grown and Jerome Haferd of BRANDT : HAFERD. The design team describes:

“‘Sankofa’ is the first outdoor hub to be unveiled as part of the initiative. ‘Sankofa’ derives from the Akan African folklore, symbolizing remembrance of things forgotten, and means ‘in order to know our future we must look to...

Three playful installations by Snarkitecture: Your Next Employer?

2023-06-12T13:49:00-04:00

Following last week’s visit to Los Angeles-based Johnston Marklee, we are moving our Meet Your Next Employer series to New York this week to explore the work of Snarkitecture.

The firm operates along an ethos of “not art, not architecture,” with a methodology that challenges conventional approaches to materials and structures. Over recent years, our editorial has reported on several creative outputs from the team, who “thrive on opportunities to create unexpected moments that invite exploration, play, and reflection.”

Over on Archinect Jobs, the firm is currently hiring an intern to join their New York office for three months.

For candidates interested in applying for the position, or anybody interested in learning more about the studio, we have rounded up three projects by Snarkitecture that demonstrate their design approach.

BEACH, National Building Museum, Washington D.C.

In 2015, Snarkitecture captured headlines with their BEACH installation in Washington D.C.’s National Buildin...

Snøhetta's Blanton New Grounds redesign opens at the University of Texas at Austin

2023-05-25T12:20:00-04:00

A recently completed project from three alumni Snøhetta staffers at the University of Texas at Austin’s Blanton Museum of Art has delivered an artistic intervention they say stands as a new gateway between the 51,000-student campus and its host city.

Principal and co-founder Craig Dykers, Managing Director Elaine Molinar, and Director John Newman, each School of Architecture graduates from the late-1980s, collaborated to enact a new canopy-like intervention that’s meant as a centerpiece to the museum’s $35 million Blanton New Grounds initiative.

Photo: Sloan Breeden Photography

Their solution involved a series of 40-by-30-foot metallic shade structures formed in the shape of flower petals to create a canopy of the new landscaped garden entrance to the museum while also framing Ellsworth Kelly’s 2018 monumental stone Austin chapel on the Blanton’s Moody Patio.

Photo: Sloan Breeden Photography

The petals double as a rainwat...

Carlo Ratti Associati team creates ‘world’s largest board game’ at Milan Design Week

2023-04-27T10:55:00-04:00

A team comprising Carlo Ratti Associati, Italo Rota, Eni, and Blob Factory Gaming have presented an installation at Milan Design Week which transformed Milan’s Botanical Garden into a 37,000-square-foot interactive game. Titled ‘Walk the Talk,’ the board game saw over 400 energy-harvesting luminescent tiles form multiple pathways and crossroads across the landscape, engaging players in what the team calls “a discourse underlying the future of mobility.”

Image credit: Marco Beck Peccoz

The installation has been structured as a “metaphorical stroll around Milan” featuring the city’s major landmarks. Each of the 400 wooden tiles and 32 types of icons represents either an obstacle or a solution to the game’s theme of urban mobility, from traffic to public transportation and electric car sharing. Working either alone or in groups, players navigate throughout the ‘city’ by finding solutions to challenges such as overcrowded neighborhoods or a lack of pedestrian areas.

Image credit: Marco B...

MAD details new MOMENTUM installation for Milan Design Week 2023

2023-04-17T14:02:00-04:00

The lead-up to this year's Milan Design Week festival will include a new installation from Ma Yansong and Andrea D’Antrassi of MAD Architects as part of the INTERNI Design Re-Evolution exhibition held at the University of Milan.

Titled MOMENTUM, the 8-by-12.5-meter iron cube structure is tilted 45 degrees from its base and is being commissioned by AXA IM Alts for the duration of the fair. During the day, its ETFE polymer surface will reflect its surroundings while at night, the installation becomes more transparent as it yields to the artificial light source before becoming “the moment, a dialogue between thought and evolution that’s both pure and disarming.”

MAD says its presence “represents the moment when a new awareness is born, when the creative process begins.”

Image courtesy MAD Architects

“At a time when everything is immediate, and everything can be replicated digitally, MOMENTUM is, on the one hand, the spark, the original idea; on the other, it is the study, complexity an...

Adjaye announces new rammed earth commission for The Griot Museum of Black History in St. Louis

2022-11-28T12:03:00-05:00

The Griot Museum of Black History will soon be home to a public art installation from the designer of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Architect David Adjaye will design Asaase III, a monument that surrounds the museum. The structure will be built of rammed earth, a process using soil and other natural materials from the St. Louis region to make solid structures.

The rammed earth installation is the new Order of Merit appointee’s second such following his well-profiled commission for Antwaun Sargent’s Social Works show at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. Adjaye had also incorporated earthwork into his commission for the 2019 Venice Biennale and design for the Thabo Mbeki Presidential Library and has referred to it beyond materiality as “another creature” that will join 30 other designs in the three-month public art installation COUNTERPUBLIC, which debuts this Spring.

“Since it’s outdoors and it's intended to be a community of public peace, we really wanted it to be reflective of that,” the museum’s founder Lois Conley said of the deeper inspiration behind the project. “Some of the soils will be coming from various areas that had relevantly large African American populations, whether they exist anymore or not. We still wanted to have some of that material.”

‘Temple of Boom’ adorns Parthenon replica with optical illusions and floral motifs

2022-11-25T14:14:00-05:00

The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, Australia has unveiled a new installation that celebrates and explores the role of The Parthenon in global cultures. Titled Temple of Boom, and designed by Melbourne-based architects Adam Newman and Kelvin Tsang, the installation sees a one-third scale replica of the famous Greek site adorned with floral motifs, optical illusions, and other designs.

Photo credit: Sean Fennessy

Situated in the NGV Garden, the scheme will host a gradually-changing set of large-scale artworks and murals painted by local artists in three phases between November 2022 and August 2023. The ever-changing artwork within the installation is intended to invite audiences to “consider the effect of time on all architecture.”

Photo credit: Sean Fennessy

The artwork series will begin with floral motifs and optical illusions by artists Drez, Manda Lane, and David Lee Pereira. Themes within the artwork range from bold murals sitting at the intersection of abstract ...

16,000 plastic bottles used to create Stonehenge-like monument in Milan

2022-11-25T13:01:00-05:00

UK-based studio VATRAA has created a monument in Milan, Italy composed of thousands of plastic water bottles. The installation, titled Plastic Monument, seeks to bring attention to the issue of plastic pollution.

“Some plastics last up to 1000 years in our landfills and oceans while others might never biodegrade,” the studio notes. “We could argue that plastic waste is our legacy to many generations to come.”

Image credit: VATRAA / Alessandro Ariel Terranova

In response, the studio created a monument in the form of a trilithon, drawing similarities with the ancient Stonehenge site in the UK. The installation seeks to create a stark contrast between the single-use, disposable nature of plastic waste and the timeless nature of ancient monuments, reminding visitors that “what we are doing today might stay on Earth forever.”

Image credit: VATRAA / Alessandro Ariel Terranova

To complete the monument, which stands 25 feet tall, 16,000 plastic bottles were pressed together into bales, and...

Olafur Eliasson's mirrored desert installation in Qatar asks visitors to 'look down at the earth and self'

2022-11-04T12:36:00-04:00

Olafur Eliasson has completed a site-specific piece of public artwork in a northern-Qatari desert. Titled Shadows travelling on the sea of the day, the Icelandic-Danish artist’s work is inspired by the “interplay of human perception and the natural world.”

Eliasson’s piece comprises twenty mirrored circular shelters along with three single rings and two double rings. The rings are positioned according to the axes of a fivefold symmetrical pattern, while at the center, ten of the piece’s shelters are connected and arranged to form a five-pointed star.

Photo credit: Iwan Baan

Beneath the shelters, the ceilings are mirrored to reflect the earth. “Looking up, you come to realise that you are, in fact, looking down: at the earth and at yourself,” Eliasson explained. “Above and below, sand envelops you, together with anyone else sharing the space. To test what you see, you might extend an arm and wave to yourself or wiggle a foot while looking at your reflection. It is a kind of realty ch...

MIT Mextrópoli installation provides a critical exploration into the use of sustainable construction materials

2022-09-28T14:50:00-04:00

A new architectural installation from MIT’s Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) for the Mextrópoli Architecture and City Festival in Mexico City is leveraging the school’s recent innovations in materials research to weave a narrative about the centuries-old capital through four materials: paper, wood, earth, and concrete.

With the help of collaborating artist Marisa Morán Jahn, faculty members Sarah Williams, Caitlin Mueller, and Rafi Segal worked to create two pavilions for the installation that is meant as an invitation to visitors to explore the city’s history and future potential under the title Sueños con Fiber/Timber, Earth/Concrete.

Image by Future Urban Collectives

Photo by Marisa Morán Jahn

Photo by Walter Shintani

Photo by Rafi Segal

The first pavilion, Fiber/Timber, repurposes the city’s iconic wood Montaña Rusa rollercoaster in a form inspired by the colorful Pre-Columbian art practice called papel picado, which again offers itself as a portal to the ci...

Cristina Iglesias’ Landscape and Memory taps into the forces lying just beneath our urban grid

2022-06-03T16:55:00-04:00

The Madison Square Park Conservancy’s second 2022 commission has opened with a new installation by Spanish artist Cristina Iglesias called Landscape and Memory.

In a harken back to the time when the eastern edge of Manhattan island was dominated by natural features like Collect Pond and other wetlands, Iglesias’ exhibition hinges on the arrangement of five subterranean bronze sculptures connected to a flowing stream whose presence is meant as a reminder of the unchanged ancient systems lying beneath the feet of 8 million New Yorkers.

Cristina Iglesias, Landscape and Memory, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Madison Square Park Conservancy. Photo: Rashmi Gill.

"Madison Square Park has a rich history, witnessing and participating in several hundred years of New York City’s growth and evolution," the Conservancy’s Executive Director Keats Myer said of the significance of the site, which before the 19th century had been called Cedar Creek. “[Cristina’s] commission digs deep into this his...

MVRDV's vibrant new Rotterdam Rooftop Walk is officially open. See the first photos here.

2022-05-27T13:13:00-04:00

MVRDV’s latest public installation is underway as Rotterdam Rooftop Walk officially commenced on Thursday, Ascension Day, in the nation’s second-largest city.

The installation is conceived of as the studio’s decades-long experimentation with urban rooftop space and commemorating the start of Rotterdam Architecture Month, the 600-meter-long (1,968 feet) bright orange walkway made its debut for the press ahead of a public unveiling of the adjacent viewing platform called The Podium scheduled for June 1st.

Image courtesy MVRDV

Located on the pergola of the Het Nieuwe Instituut space designed by Jo Coenen in the city’s Museumpark district, the installation is first accessed via a set of 143 bright pink stairs and serves as a showcase for the coterie of creative professionals displaying the capacity for such spaces to be used for greenery, water storage, food production, and energy generation.

Architensions takes over Coachella with a playful new subversion of vertical design

2022-04-18T18:02:00-04:00

After two years of cancellations and wait, the exciting re-opening of Coachella took place over the weekend with a new installation by Architensions titled The Playground.

The studio’s installation joins others by Estudio Normal, Kiki Van Eijk, Oana Stanescu, Christopher Cichocki, and LosDos and is meant to evoke a “vibrant urban landscape” based on the ideas of play expressed by the prolific Dutch intellectual Constant Nieuwenhuys in his visionary idea for a speculative anti-capitalist mecca called New Babylon.

Photo by Michael Vahrenwald/ESTO

Composed of four separate steel towers totaling 42 and 56 feet in height respectively, the installation hinges on a visual grid meant to “an open space that opposes the isolation and homogeneity of technologically mediated experiences” in ways similar to that of Cedric Price’s seminal early-60s Fun Palace design.

“The Playground is a fragment of a city,” Architensions co-founder Nick Roseboro explained, “a node for engaging festival-goers in ...

Suchi Reddy on the bridge between neuroaesthetics and experience

2022-03-21T12:14:00-04:00

I think of architecture as embodied art. It's about holistically experiencing our world through all of our senses, and so architecture is the perfect matrix for considering neuroaesthetics. The same parts of your brain that teach you to think about the future are the same ones that are manipulated by your experience of space. The better your space is, the better you are going to be.

The outsized impact architectural forms have on the human psyche is still a growing field of research and has been behind Suchi Reddy’s recent installations at the Salone del Mobile and Smithsonian Institution as well as her ethereal design for the first Google storefront in New York City.

The Reddymade founder also spoke about her upcoming Canadian project entitled Becoming, and why the personal experiences behind her creative process have led to similar forms of heartfelt architectonic expression.

“The work is inspired by the liminal experience of an immigrant. Tectonically expressed as an arch form, it represents both a gateway and a process of transformation. Inspired by the multi-national demographics of Surrey, I felt it was important to propose an artwork that celebrates the process of becoming oneself, expressing the transmutation of people through cultures and lands as an el...

Local LA hero Lauren Halsey’s Met rooftop installation will focus on utopian architecture, Afrofuturism, and community

2022-03-15T20:36:00-04:00

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced the commission of artist Lauren Halsey for the tenth edition of its popular annual Roof Garden Commission series with a new work titled the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I).

The 34-year-old artist’s temporary installation will feature an inhabitable structure that at once weaves the museum’s ample holdings of Egyptian art with elements of her own personal history and visual inventory in order to create a “monument to living architecture” overlooking Central Park and Fifth Avenue.

Halsey is known for inspiring work that examines the shifting dynamic between architecture and community-building as influenced by her upbringing in and around South Central Los Angeles. Her installation is thus taken from the desire to produce, as Met director Max Hollein put it, “a powerful form of documentation” that engages with the history, iconography, and local material culture of the neighborhood remixed with ele...

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has paused both countries' participation in the Venice Biennale… for now

2022-02-28T20:14:00-05:00

As Russian troops and tank convoys sweep into Ukraine from three sides, the future of its cultural contribution has also been cast in doubt after the announcement that the embattled country has, at least for now, placed a hold on all activities related to its pavilion from the 59th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale.

In a press statement released to the group’s Twitter account on Thursday, the team representing their country’s Pavilion planned for this April’s Biennale has announced the suspension of all activities related to the installation and exhibition until such time as the crisis within Ukraine’s borders can be resolved.

“At the moment this statement has been published, we are not in immediate danger, but the situation is critical and changes every minute,” part of the group’s statement read. “Presently, we are not able to work [on the] pavilion due to the risk to our lives.”

If you’d like to sign up under this statement, please leave your name in the comme...