Archinect - News

Pharrell calls for reintroducing arts and architecture competitions at the Olympics

2024-08-01T17:54:00-04:00

[Pharrell] Williams is aiming to reinstate arts competitions back on the world’s biggest sports stage, starting with raising awareness through his star-studded Louis Vuitton event Thursday in Paris. He passionately shared his goal to see the tradition revived by the Olympics in 2028 the night before the Games’ opening ceremony.

As we detailed three years ago during the Tokyo games, the modern Olympics were at one time also meant to showcase feats of artistic and architectural talent (although most were tinged by racist theories of the time). Pharrell’s view, which he wouldn’t elaborate, is that having them included would “raise awareness.”

Francesca Aton of ARTnews joined the musician and Louis Vuitton creative director (and avid skateboarder) in espousing: “[It’s] clear that reviving them would not only take a big effort but would also require the support of those active among the categories in each respective field. As recent studies on arts workers reveal gaps in professional continuation and low wages, support for those in the field could be a welcome change and an opportunity for impactful discovery.”

Edoardo Tresoldi's ethereal seafront colonnade opens this month

2020-09-02T12:21:00-04:00

Opera, the new public art permanent installation by Edoardo Tresoldi on Reggio Calabria's seafront, will be inaugurated on September 12th and 13th. The opening will host a series of music, performance, and poetry events administered in compliance with current COVID-19 guidelines.

"Opera was created to celebrate the contemplative relationship between place and the human being through the language of classical architecture and the transparency of the Absent Matter, a relationship through wire mesh," writes Tresoldi in a statement.

Previously on Archinect: Edoardo Tresoldi creates public colonnade consisting of 46 pillars in Italy. Image: Edoardo Tresoldi, Opera, original drawing © Edoardo Tresoldi.

The permanent installation consists of a colonnade of 46 pillars peaking at 8 meters at their highest points within a 2,500 square meter park. The project is due to become a new landmark for the region.

Looking back at One Take Architects' pop-up digital art museum in Beijing, inspired by the Himalayan landscape

2020-03-18T14:57:00-04:00

In 2019, Hangzhou-based One Take Architects completed the Mandala Pop-up Digital Art Museum, which was a temporary structure showcasing an immersive multi-media exhibition inspired by the Himalayan landscape and arts and culture. The architects envisioned the pop-up museum as a utopian, isolated garden in the heart of bustling Beijing.

Photo: Wang Shilu.

Photo: Nan Xueqian.

Featuring facade lines inspired by the Tibetan Himalayan mountain Namcha Barwa, the museum was designed like a set of blocks that can be split and reorganized into a “dKyil-‘khor”, an inner palace in Chinese Buddhism and which translates into “mandala” in English.

Concealed from the outside, the building measured over 50 meters long, was less than 5 meters tall, and had a width of less than 9 meters. As visitors move through the art museum, they could chart their own path to create their own experience, encountering immersive digital art, changing lights, reflective mirrors, sca...

From The Vessel to gallery accessibility, the art world continues to reinforce ableism

2019-08-07T16:14:00-04:00

In 2019, inclusive spaces that are comprised of voices from the neurodiverse and disabled community are still extremely rare. Despite the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) 29 years ago, neurodiverse and disabled communities continue to face collective discrimination from failures to accommodate in access, transportation, employment, education, and many other arenas. Unfortunately, the art world is no exception.

Emily Sara, a disabled, interdisciplinary artist and designer, penned an open letter calling on the art world for stronger support of the neurodiverse and disabled communities, whose everyday needs are often overlooked in American society. She names a few examples of how the art world inadvertently reinforces ableism, such as the controversial Vessel, the accessibility of several New York galleries, and the lackluster representation of disabled artists in exhibitions.

“Regarding the art world, navigating and addressing these issues will require taking fundamental steps toward inclusion, from implementing practical solutions to increasing awareness among art institutions and community members,” Emily Sara writes in her letter. “I am therefore calling on galleries, curators, museums, institutions of higher education, artists, and other art institutions: welcoming the neurodiverse and disabled is long overdue.”

How do you visualize the effects of climate change? Architect Iwo Borkowicz and artist Alicja Biala use data visualization to inform the public

2019-07-22T13:50:00-04:00

In this hyper-visual world, it's becoming more challenging to keep the general public informed and engaged with pressing issues, specifically issues relating to the environment. The quickly changing landscapes, rising sea levels, and temperature fluctuations should be enough of a warning for others to take notice. However, Alicja Biala and Iwo Borkowicz illustrate these issues using public space, data, and art.

Located beneath MVRDV's Baltyk Tower stands Biala and Borkowicz's 9m-tall installation. At first glance, the colorful structures would capture anyone's attention. The intricate patterns and distinct individualist shapes may satisfy social media thirsty individuals, but the message behind each piece represents something far more important.

(L) Totem showcases how much water is used during food production. (R) Totem illustrates plastic use. Image © Alicja Biala and Iwo Borkowicz/Totemy

Totem Diagram. Image Alicja Biala and Iwo Borkowicz/Totemy

Totemy is a multi-layered set of t...

Canadian-based architecture firm KPMB Architects showcase how architects design for art

2019-05-14T13:52:00-04:00

Museums and galleries all over the world house some of the most valuable and sought after art pieces. Not only do these structures house art, but they also create the environment for art to live and be experienced with its surroundings. Canadian-based architecture firm KPMB Architects collaborated with Régis Côté et associés and Architecture49 to help transform and build two new museum experiences in Canada. With an emphasis in exhibiting and developing a new building for prominent art pieces and collections, KPMB and Régis Côté et associés worked on the Ottawa Art Gallery (OAG) expansion and Arts Court Redevelopment. The new mixed-use building functions as a museum as well as a cultural, civic center in the heart of Ottawa. According to the design team, the goal of the project was to "create a destination for patrons of the arts as well as provide an identity for the OAG and the other arts organizations currently housed in the Arts Court."

Ottawa Art Gallery (OAG) Expansion and Ar...

Doug Aitken's Detroit Mirage opens up in once-abandoned bank

2018-10-10T19:14:00-04:00

Doug Aitken's new art installation Mirage Detroit has opened in the once-abandoned State Savings Bank, a century-old Beaux-Arts building in downtown Detroit that has sat empty for decades.

Aitken's latest work brings back his much beloved project for Desert X, which saw a reflective suburban home plopped into the Coachella Valley desert. For the city of Detroit, the art world giant has taken this ranch-style home, given it a perfected mirrored surface, and placed it in the decorative interiors of the old bank.

Installation view of Doug Aitken, Mirage Detroit 2018, photography by Conner MacPhee, courtesy the artist and Library Street Collective.

Covered in hundreds of pieces of mirrors, the large sculpture reflects the Roman arched colonnades and bronze flourishes of its architectural surroundings. A light show choreographed by longtime Radiohead se...

Unbuilding Gender

2018-10-05T18:16:00-04:00

Gordon Matta-Clark’s inventive site-specific cuts into abandoned buildings demonstrated approaches to the concept of home and to the market system of real estate that were anarchistic, creatively destructive, and full of queer promise.

In "Unbuilding Gender," Jack Halberstam extends the ideas of unbuilding and creative destruction that characterize Gordon Matta-Clark's work to develop a queer concept of anarchitecture focused on the trans* body.

Halberstam is the 2018 recipient of the Arcus/Places Prize for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality, and the built environment. The biennial prize is a unique collaboration between the Diversity Platforms Committee of the College of Environmental Design at University of California, Berkeley, and Places, supported by the college’s Arcus Endowment.

Storefront is looking for NYC's next iconic image

2017-12-04T18:57:00-05:00

What model best represents new visions and values of New York City? Cast your vote today for the new icons of New York and influence which souvenirs will represent the city next. The top three winners will be presented to the Mayor Bill de Blasio as New York City's newest icons.

Midnight Commercial by KIT BKLYN

Icons will be selected from The Storefront for Art and Architecture's exhibition Souvenirs: New New York Icons, open through December 9th. This is the second iteration of Storefront’s model show and includes commissions of 59+ objects that redefine New York's iconic imagery. Drawing inspiration from each of the city's Community Districts, over 59 architects, artists, and designers have reimagined the referential images forming the global perception of the city and have proposed new understandings of the urban experience.

Vote for your top three icons here.

Scaffolding around Grenfell Tower may be used as screen for art projections

2017-08-22T12:17:00-04:00

As workers prepare to remove the charred debris from Grenfell Tower, the specially erected scaffolding and netting around the building that will block the view of their work from the public may be used as a kind of projection screen for local children's painting and art. At least, that's what site and remediation manager Michael Lockwood has proposed, in part because the schoolchildren are apparently unhappy staring at the burned out husk of the previously-flammably-clad tower.

Residents take in the burned tower. Image: Catholic Church England via Flickr

According to The Art Newspaper, "Lockwood recently met primary school pupils in the area who said that looking up at the tower is upsetting. 'I asked them if they would like to come up with paintings of what they would like to see on the building,' he said. The works would be projected on to the scaffolding screen."

Christopher Hawthorne on when architecture and performance intersect

2017-06-30T12:06:00-04:00

This interest in performance among architects is less a style or a fledgling movement than a register, a way of working. It’s a means of sketching out a new set of priorities — and giving up older ones that are tarnished or compromised. It’s also open-ended, challenging the idea that a building can ever really qualify as finished. It makes room for perspectives that come from other fields.

According to Hawthorne, this new trend—seen in the work of architects from Andrés Jaque to Bryony Roberts—evidences the appeal of "impermanence and often...informality," putting the work in contrast to the ritzy architecture that seems to dominant these days.

The architecture of grief: inside OMA's "An Occupation of Loss"

2016-09-15T13:09:00-04:00

In OMA and artist Taryn Simon's "An Occupation of Loss," professional mourners create unique performances of grief into an enormous sculpture of eight 45 foot concrete inverted wells that act as "a discordant instrument." It's not just for professional criers: during the day, visitors are encouraged to interact with the sculpture, exploring their own grief while recordings of the previous evening's performance are played in the background.

On display at the Park Avenue Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall through September 25th, the sculpture will be moved to the Artangel in London next year.

As OMA's Shohei Shigematsu noted, “The design was sonically-motivated, focusing on the performative act of loss rather than its physical manifestation, which has been historically marked by multiple scales – from tombstones to the World Trade Center Memorial. The industrial wells were configured into a readymade ruin that responds to both personal and monumental dimensions."

For the latest on OMA:

OM...

Is psychedelia the new black in student architectural work?

2016-07-14T15:22:00-04:00

Architects might be known for wearing black, as if in permanent mourning for the lives they once had, and for spending months searching for the perfect shade of grey. But judging by this year’s student shows, that monochromatic hegemony is under threat: the next generation appears to be plotting a psychedelic revolution.

Incorporating influences drawn from popular media and gaming, architecture is increasingly reflecting the multi-faceted world in which we live, at least if you take a look at this new UK-based student work. Students from The Bartlett at the University College London, The Royal College of Art, and the Architectural Association have created unusually vibrant and occasionally pop-culture referential drawings:

In the mood for more trippy-ness? Here's a sampling:

Eric Owen Moss wins top Austrian honor

2016-07-07T13:17:00-04:00

Very few people have a neutral reaction to Eric Owen Moss: in his conversation and his work, he can be abrasive, challenging, enlightening, and inspirational. For its part, Austria awarded him with its Decoration of Honor for Science and Art on June 21st, celebrating five decades of practice that have produced the Hayden Tract and the Albuquerque Rail Yards Master Plan, among other works.

Culver City's Hayden Tract, which has gradually filled out with Moss' buildings since he was initially commissioned to work on the project in 1991, is arguably one of the most compact yet engrossing architectural walking tours in Los Angeles. Formerly a strip of overlooked industrial warehouses, this part of the city has in the past few decades emerged as a low-slung cultural nexus, rewarding those who take the time to note the unusual and painstakingly rendered structural details. There's a raft of cactuses suspended mid-air, the Cold War afterimage of Stealth, the glass bisected Slash and Backsla...

A video tour of Shigeru Ban's Aspen Art Museum

2016-06-09T14:15:00-04:00

In this video that blends time lapse and slow-motion techniques to fully showcase the visual splendor of the building, director Heidi Zuckerman of the The Aspen Art Museum speaks about how the "modesty" of Shigeru Ban's signature preferred materials perfectly suited the Colorado-based institution, while Shigeru Ban explains, among other things, how he carefully designed the visitor entrance to feature a mountain view.

Here's the full video (with requisite plinky yet inspirational soundtrack):

Inside Yona Friedman's Serpentine Pavilion Summer House

2016-06-08T15:16:00-04:00

At 93 years of age, Friedman is the oldest architect in the group. He took the opportunity to further explain the thinking that has propelled his life’s work, and the origin story behind the structure. The Summer House, Friedman explained, “was improvised from small models that I was putting together and it was reproduced. And for me the most important [thing was] that anyone could make this, and I made this experiment and it was built by children.”

Yona Friedman officially describes his ephemeral, elegantly 16mm steel-framed Serpentine Summer House as "a space-chain construction of 4 + 1 levels...composed of cubes defined by 6 circles of 1.85 metre in diameter" that rest upon the ground. It's "essentially a movable museum and exhibition."

Luckily, Archinect's very own U.K.-based correspondent Robert Urquhart, who covered this year's Serpertine Pavilion in depth, had the opportunity to speak with Friedman, who noted that “I think that architecture is first of all social, it has to be manageable, the interior is made by the inhabitant. An architect can invent the sculpture of reality.” For more of what Robert and Yona discussed, check out the piece in the link above!

A milkman's drawings capture Bristol through 8 decades

2016-06-02T16:38:00-04:00

[Garth England's] extraordinary drawings, made in Hengrove Lodge care home between 2006 and 2013 and published in a beautiful book called Murdered with Straight Lines, capture the changing city through the eyes of this post-war everyman. Born in Bristol general hospital in 1935, England spent most of his 79 years in the city’s suburban south: in Knowle West, Hengrove, Bedminster and Totterdown...

The essence of a city isn't just contained in its physical brick and mortar, but in the memory of its denizens. Garth England, who managed to see virtually every type of structure in Bristol in his work as a milk delivery man, began to draw his artistic recollections while in a retirement home, many of which are not only of historical architectural value, but incorporate stories of how certain objects and structures played a role in daily, intimate life:

As the piece notes, “There is something very truthful to Bristol’s suburban development in the details, almost like a social history,” says architectural historian Andrew Foyle, who lives in south Bristol. “What struck me was how extraordinarily accurate to specific houses a lot of Garth’s work is. If you put the Grange at 258 Wells Road, Knowle into Google Maps, for example, you can see he’s completely there.”"

For more on the intersection between art and architecture, check out these original Archinect features:

paraSITE: the bandage...

David Chipperfield selects Simon Kretz as his 2016-17 Rolex Arts protégé

2016-05-24T17:20:00-04:00

Swiss architect Simon Kretz is the lucky protégé who will get to work with David Chipperfield in a year-long architecture mentorship from the 2016-17 Rolex Arts Initiative. The prestigious philanthropic program allows rising young artists worldwide to team up with globally esteemed professionals in their respective disciplines in Architecture, Film, Dance, Literature, Visual Arts, Music, and Theatre. Imagine exchanging ideas with figures like Peter Zumthor, Kazuyo Sejima, or Álvaro Siza, who have all been previously appointed as the architecture mentor.

In selecting his protégé, Chipperfield conducted one-on-one interviews with the three finalists, which included Kretz, Luis Callejas of Colombia, and Anna Puigjaner of Spain — who in fact, won the 2016 Wheelwright Prize just last week.

Gaining experience in Zurich-based firms as well as big-name practices like OMA Rotterdam, Kretz co-founded Christina Nater und Simon Kretz Architekten in 2010 and then he became founding partner of Chri...

Architecture as urban regeneration: Theaster Gates, Art + Practice, and Assemble

2015-11-03T18:19:00-05:00

Most architects don’t build economic engines into their projects, and [Assemble's Anna] Lisogorskaya is quick to note that this type of intervention doesn’t make sense everywhere. [...] But she does argue that things such as economic sustainability and local jobs are inherently interconnected with any effort to rehabilitate a neighbourhood. The architecture is only part of the project, and can only do so much on its own.

Frank Gehry Awarded Getty Medal For "Changing the Course of Architecture"

2015-05-21T17:21:00-04:00

Gehry becomes the first designer or artist to win the award that the Getty launched in 2013. The prize – a bronze medal with a profile portrait of J. Paul Getty – recognizes lifetime contributions in various art-related fields that are part of the Getty’s mission, including philanthropy, art-history research, archeology and conservation of art and architecture, as well as art-making.

Frank Gehry can now add the Getty Medal to his collection of esteemed prizes, including the Pritzker, the Order of Canada, and the AIA Gold Medal. The Getty Trust announced the awarding of the medal to Gehry, with an official dinner to follow on September 28, 2015. The award seems fitting for a man who, while he has never been comfortable calling himself an artist, last year stated that "I don't beg for work. I don't have publicists. I'm not waiting for people to call me. I work with clients who have respect for the art of architecture."

As J. Paul Getty Trust President and CEO James Cuno noted, "There have been very few individuals in all of history who have changed the course of architecture, and Frank is one of them. He effectively reinvented architecture with his use of new technologies in the design of beautiful and iconic buildings. And architecture will never be the same as a result.”