Archinect - News

Monument Lab’s thought-provoking sculptural installation opens on the National Mall

2023-08-22T18:04:00-04:00

An important new sculptural installation commissioned by the Trust for the National Mall opened in Washington, D.C. last week to the acclaim of critics and visitors who helped inaugurate the seminal first edition of the Beyond Granite series from Philadelphia-based collective Monument Lab.

Images of the six sculptures designed by artists Wendy Red Star, Derrick Adams, vanessa german, Ashon T. Crawley, Tiffany Chung, and Paul Ramírez Jonas were shared, showcasing the beginnings of what should be one of the year’s most significant public art exhibitions. Written in the Washington Post over the weekend, Philip Kennicott commended the new installation as being both well produced and thoughtful, adding that “this is the first time a serious art exhibition has been staged there” before remarking on the role of the Mall as a protest space.

Paul Ramírez Jonas, "Let Freedom Ring" Image: Courtesy of AJ Mitchell | Monument Lab

Other reviews highlighted the unique ability of each sculpture to co...

The Mellon Foundation's Monuments Project awards $25 million worth of grant funding to 9 municipalities

2023-06-19T10:00:00-04:00

A total of nine local municipalities have received funding in the amount of $25 million from the Mellon Foundation as part of its ongoing Monuments Project, which to date has provided $151.9 million worth of grants since its inception in 2020.

The latest round of funding includes projects such as Los Angeles’ forthcoming memorial to victims of the 1871 Chinese Massacre, and the Portland, Oregon, effort to replace five of its toppled monuments that were destroyed in the wake of the George Floyd protests three summers ago.

Read more about the nine grant recipients and their funded projects:

Asheville, North Carolina – "The City of Asheville will receive funding to reshape Pack Square Plaza through commemorative projects, storytelling and oral history initiatives, and redesigning portions of the plaza to better represent the multicultural histories of Asheville and cultivate a more welcoming space for all. This includes support for construction of Boosting the Block, an effort to estab...

An 'abuse of metaphors': Rowan Moore on Thomas Heatherwick’s tree-inspired jubilee design (and other UK public monument debates)

2022-05-02T16:03:00-04:00

I’ll pass by the abuse of metaphors (do milestones have hearts?) but not of trees, this being another case of certain designers’ mania for picking them up, moving them around and putting them where they don’t want to be. Those words from the studio also take liberties with the idea of art. They call the Tree of Trees a “sculpture”. Boris Johnson may once have compared Heatherwick to Michelangelo, but David it is not.

The Observer critic joined a plethora of online commentators that picked apart Heatherwick Studio’s “Tree Of Trees” Earth Day announcement by comparing it to last year’s fiasco surrounding the MVRDV-designed Marble Arch Mound, which he described as a “cartoon version of nature is placed in a London ceremonial space by people who don’t seem to have thought much about what it is that makes trees lovely.”

Moore has been critical of Heatherwick’s design inspiration in the past, referring to The Vessel designer as a “pied piper [of the] very rich” in a 2017 missive and famously citing his work as an example of the migration away from “grown-up architecture” in a 2019 piece, in which he derided cloying gimmicks that offer “at most two-liners.”

Moore also touched on the controversial (and recently-rejected) UK Holocaust Memorial proposal, laying its failure on the decision to include a learning center and stating that the government should now “take the opportunity of its verdict to apply...

Catherine Opie will join Christopher Hawthorne and Carolina A. Miranda at The Broad for a discussion on memory and public space

2022-01-19T18:38:00-05:00

Who gets to be remembered in a city, and why? That will be one of the questions on the dais when artist Catherine Opie joins current and former LA Times architecture critics Christopher Hawthorne and Carolina A. Miranda for a conversation on the topic at The Broad Museum in Los Angeles tomorrow evening.

The conversation will take as its focus the works of Opie as they tie-in with the mission of the city’s Civic Memory Working Group that Hawthorne helped found. The museum will also present Opie’s recently-acquired work monument/monumental, which documents a 2020 road trip from Richmond, Virginia and the attempt by Black Lives Matters activists there to reclaim a noteworthy statue that depicted Robert E. Lee. Opie’s work will be presented in the context of how commemoration can best be processed through the built environment in the 21st century using lessons from the past as a critical guide.

From left to right: Catherine Opie, Christopher Hawthorne, and Carolina Miranda. Image cour...

Philadelphia's Monument Lab revises text of Trump's sculpture garden executive order

2020-07-09T19:58:00-04:00

Last week, President Donald Trump's unveiled the Executive Order on Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes, a measure that sets out to create a new "National Garden of American Heroes" to be filled with statues depicting "historically significant Americans.

The executive order, which comes as a national reckoning over the thousands of confederate and other pro-slavery and anti-Indigenous public monuments continues, has been widely criticized as an outdated and likely problematic concept.

Previously on Archinect: "Trump proposes National Garden of American Heroes sculpture park." Photo courtesy of Wikimedia user Bart Everson.

To this end, Philadelphia-based Monument Lab, a group that has led critical discourse on the nature, history, and significance of public monuments with an eye toward equity and justice since 2012, has rewritten the executive order to reflect the group's more expansive vision for the future of American monuments.

The full text of the re-write is hi...

Controversial Dubai Frame to open this month

2015-12-09T13:33:00-05:00

“The project is being transformed from being non-figurative architecture to an overscale figurative photo-frame. That is, from being a modern, public monument to a postmodern pastiche,” [competition-winning architect Fernando] Donis wrote in an open letter.

Described by an internet commenter as "the St. Louis Arch minus the beauty or finesse," the Dubai Frame project is scheduled to open this month to the public. The somewhat controversial monument, which has not only attracted a scathing load of public commentary but an objecting open letter from the architect who initially designed it, will quite literally frame views of both the old and new Dubai skylines. The $43.5 million rectangular wonder isn't just for viewing from afar; visitors will be able to access a sky bridge inlaid with a 25 square meter glass panel.