Archinect - News

Olafur Eliasson links his breakdancing years to spatial thinking in art and architecture

2018-09-17T15:34:00-04:00

“As a teenager I became very interested in street-dance culture and was active on the Scandinavian breakdance scene,” the artist Olafur Eliasson tells his friend and collaborator Anna Engberg-Pedersen in our new book, Olafur Eliasson Experience. This admission is a slight understatement. In 1984, the nascent artist’s three-man troupe, Harlem Gun Crew, actually won the Scandinavian breakdancing championships.

Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson discusses his teenage breakdancing years in relation to how he thinks of architecture and space. Eliasson links the body awareness of moving through an urban landscape in dance to his development in spatial thinking as an artistic practice in design and architecture.

The Archisutra is an architect's manual to sex positions

2017-12-05T17:59:00-05:00

London-based architect Miguel Bolivar recently released his side project Archisutra, an architecture and design take on the Kama Sutra. This manual gives you all the data with annotated scale drawings and informative descriptions including categorizations of 'Typical Location' and 'Sustainability'. Each position is inspired by an iconic building and often incorporates the use of designer furniture.

Truss Me, in 'Archisutra' by Miguel Bolivar. Photo: The Archisutra/Facebook.

Archisustra's precise drawings were inspired by da Vinci's Vitruvian Man and Le Corbusier's standard model of the human form, The Modulor. Bolivar explains the project arose from questioning how sex should be considered in design, and furthering the idea that architecture should be centered around human life.

The Pompidou, 'Archisutra' by Miguel Bolivar. Photo: The Archisutra/Facebook.

"The best posture is the next posture" – Galen Cranz's body-conscious sociology on Archinect Sessions One-to-One #10

2016-02-08T18:52:00-05:00

In line with this month's "Furniture" theme, I speak with Galen Cranz, an architecture professor at UC Berkeley specializing in body-conscious design. Cranz is trained in the "Alexander Technique" – a method for "correcting" the body's poor habits of movement, that can limit self-awareness in a space.

Before coming to Cal to teach architecture, Cranz received her PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago, influencing her pedagogy of architecture and furniture to primarily be about how humans occupy designs, and how social hierarchies emerge from those conventions.

Listen to One-to-One #10 with Galen Cranz:

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Download: this episode

Shownotes:

Peter Opsvik's Gravity chair ↓

Oscar Newman's Defensible Space (1972)

Le Corbusier's lounge chair ↓

Jane Jacobs...