This conceptual sound installation will let San Franciscans “hear” the sinking Millennium Tower

2019-11-15T15:42:00-05:00

Creating a work about the sinking high-rise was an easy choice, according to Martínez. “We started researching San Francisco, and current events in the city, and the Millennium Tower popped up,” Martínez said. “We knew almost instantly we wanted to do a project that was in some way going to connect with some of most expensive real estate on earth collapsing under the weight of itself as a metaphor for late capitalism.”

Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist of interdisciplinary arts collective Postcommodity were compelled to make an art piece based on the sinking, tilting Handel Architects-designed Millennium Tower in San Francisco, as a timely metaphor for late capitalism collapsing under the weight of itself. The duo made a data map of the tower's minuscule movements and created a conceptual sound-art piece called “The Point of Final Collapse.”

Starting today, the piece will be played for 4 minutes at 5 p.m. from the tower at San Francisco Art Institute's campus on North Beach, and projected to Downtown San Francisco via long-range acoustic devices. The piece will play every day until the tower is fixed or torn down, the artists say in the article.

Seeing the Building for the Trees

2012-01-08T23:32:00-05:00

A REVOLUTION in cognitive neuroscience is changing the kinds of experiments that scientists conduct, the kinds of questions economists ask and, increasingly, the ways that architects, landscape architects and urban designers shape our built environment. This revolution reveals that thought is less transparent to the thinker than it appears and that the mind is less rational than we believe and more associative than we know.

Architecture critic, Sarah Williams Goldhagen wrote a brief piece exploring the use of embodied metaphors in contemporary architecture. Looking at recent works by Junya Ishigami, Jürgen Mayer H., Zaha Hadid and Sanaa for instance, Goldhagen notes that the use of metaphors that allude to trees, river-like space or a habitable mountain-scape, is on the rise. While the possibilities of the ongoing revolution in our understanding of human cognition and their potential for shaping the design of our built environment are unknown she believes that the employment of such metaphors in such projects "point toward how the built environment could — and should — be radically reconceptualized around the fundamental workings of the human mind."

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This conceptual sound installation will let San Franciscans “hear” the sinking Millennium Tower

Seeing the Building for the Trees