Archinect - News

Anish Kapoor completes 'mini-Bean' at Herzog & de Meuron's 56 Leonard

2023-02-06T13:51:00-05:00

After years of delays, New York City finally has a shiny silver bean of its own. A new sculpture by Anish Kapoor—modeled after his famous Cloud Gate, known as the Bean, in Chicago—was officially unveiled this week. [...] Despite its resemblance to Cloud Gate, is different in several key ways, reported Tribeca Citizen in 2018. For example, while Chicago’s Bean is bolted securely to the ground, Manhattan’s mini-Bean is more free-flowing, able to move and shift depending on the weather.

The $8 million freestanding sculpture has been teased since 2008 when renderings for Herzog & de Meuron’s domineering 56 Leonard Street tower were first revealed to the public. It has a less-expensive twin at the MFA Houston and will get an official name later in the coming months, according to Hyperallergic.

“[It’s] small change for these people,” Kapoor (who purchased a condo in the building in 2016) said, speaking of developer Alexico Group’s private financing. “They should be giving something back already, and more, honestly.”

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Into the abyss: An artist has created a deeper shade of black in an ongoing quest for design purity

2021-08-11T13:34:00-04:00

A design world arms race to make the blackest black has intensified this week after an artist revealed his latest creation called Blink.

Stuart Semple created the ink over a period of two years after launching a precursor called Black 3.0 in 2019. The artist had been reacting to the controversy surrounding Anish Kapoor’s being given exclusive rights to Vantablack, the pigment that was initially developed for use on satellites owing to its high absorption rate.

Semple began experimenting with black after a farcical attempt to engineer a purer pink in parody of Kapoor. A more serious effort took shape after the 2019 release and following a beta testing period in which he assembled a team of other artists and designers to provide feedback for the darker and more opaque shade.

“Chemically there are similarities, but the acrylic resin in Black 3.0 is fundamentally different in Blink because we nee...

Anish Kapoor is remodeling a grand Venetian palace to be the new home of his foundation

2021-08-03T19:04:00-04:00

An 18th-century palazzo fronting Venice’s Cannaregio Canal is getting a bespoke makeover thanks to funds of a blue-chip British artist.

The Art Newspaper is reporting that the Palazzo Manfrin will be the new home of the Amish Kapoor Foundation following a renovation that will add a studio space, gallery, and art depository to a former school with help from UNA studio and local firm FWR Associati.

The original Palazzo was kept as the seat of the Priuli family until the 19th century when it formed an early version of the Galléria dell’Accademia before eventually falling into disrepair like many of the city’s other grand palaces in the shadow of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection nearby.

Per UNA studio: “The Palazzo Priuli Manfrin presents an architecture virtually unique in Venice. Its double-height hall is of typical Palladian design and its facade, without ornament, make this building the prototype of the Neoclassical style that is rarely found elsewhere in Venice.”

Related on Archi...

Herzog & de Meuron's 56 Leonard is finally getting its Anish Kapoor sculpture installed

2019-11-06T14:29:00-05:00

Alexico Group, the development firm behind Tribeca’s 60-storey “Jenga Tower”, a Herzog & de Meuron-designed residential high-rise at 56 Leonard Street, announced that it will start installing a public sculpture by Anish Kapoor commissioned specifically for the building in the second week of November.

Kapoor's shiny 56 Leonard bladder — resembling a smaller, squashed version of his Chicago "The Bean" landmark — made quite a splash in early renderings for the Jenga-like Manhattan condo tower in 2008, but overcoming various fabrication obstacles has not been easy and thus pushed back the final completion date of the development's original vision.

"In order to make the Leonard Street sculpture installation more
expeditious, and to save costs, it was decided to build the precision
components such that they could be tightly fit together, with the seams
thereby becoming nearly invisible hair line cracks," the sculpture's fabricators, Performance Structures, Inc, explained in a statement published by Tribeca Citizen.

"Another significant difference between the Leonard Street sculpture and Cloud Gate is the suspension system. [...] The Leonard Street sculpture has a different support mechanism. Instead of a single large support frame, each slice has its individual su...

Anish Kapoor reaches settlement with NRA over usage of his iconic Cloud Gate sculpture

2018-12-10T14:21:00-05:00

British artist Anish Kapoor has reached a settlement with the NRA for using his reflective Bean sculpture in one of their promotional videos. The ad, titled The Violence of Laws, had used images of modern architectural landmarks, such a Gehry's Disney Concert Hall, Piano's New York Times building, and Kapoor's Cloud Gate, as stand-ins of liberal elitism.

In March, Kapoor condemned the non-profit which advocates for gun rights for their use of the image, and filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in the US District Court in Illinois later that summer. Reached out-of-court, the current settlement has the NRA agreeing to remove the image from their video. Further, Kapoor has asked the US gun lobby to donate $1 million to charities working with victims of gun violence such as Every Town for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Actions for Gun Sense in America.

In a press statement released through Lisson Gallery, who represents the artist, Kapoor declared triumph over the NRA. "This is a victory...

Anish Kapoor sues the NRA for using image of Cloud Gate in a 2017 ad

2018-06-20T14:32:00-04:00

In a new statement, Kapoor claimed that it was the “solidarity and support” of the public that encouraged him to take action against the NRA, and urged everyone “to stand up to the dark and aggressive forces in society that seek, out of fear and hatred, to lead us backward into a primitive, paranoid, and defensive worldview.”

After denouncing the National Rifle Association in an open letter this past March, artist Anish Kapoor filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the group on June 19 for the unauthorized use of an image of his famous “Cloud Gate” sculpture in this 2017 ad titled “The Clenched Fist of Truth”. Kapoor filed the complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston gets its own giant bean sculpture by Anish Kapoor

2018-03-27T20:04:00-04:00

Looks like Houston has a giant, shiny bean-shaped sculpture of its own now. Completing its two-day installation today, “Cloud Column” by Anish Kapoor — the same artist who created Chicago's infamous “Cloud Gate” — is the first of two sculptures on the Brown Foundation, Inc. Plaza at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's upcoming Glassell School of Art. The school and plaza, making up phase one of the museum's expansion, are scheduled to open May 20.

View south of the Glassell School and Brown Foundation, Inc. Plaza. Courtesy Deborah Nevins & Associates / Nevins & Benito Landscape Architecture.

Conceived by Kapoor in the late 1990s and realized in 2006, Cloud Column is made of hand-worked stainless steel. Working for at least five hours early Monday morning, crews used a 650-ton crane to hoist up the 21,000-pound oblong sculpture (attached to a 6,000-pound crate) into its exact positioning on the plaza. After the sculpture was set in place, a member from Kapoor's London installation tea...

Remembering the Holocaust via Anish Kapoor and Zaha Hadid Architects' Memorial

2017-04-13T12:58:00-04:00

In a week in which the White House Press Secretary stated that Hitler never gassed his own people, it's worth taking a moment to remember the Holocaust. In the U.K., the United Kingdom Holocaust Memorial Foundation and the British Government have enlisted some of the top design firms in the world, including Anish Kapoor and Zaha Hadid Architects, to design a Holocaust Memorial. Kapoor and ZHA's proposal, which places a purposefully awkwardly-sited bronze-cast meteorite partially below ground, is simultaneously disturbing and contemplative.

As the architects explain in their statement, "Meteorites, mountains and stones are often at the centre of places of reflection, especially in the Jewish tradition. They call on the vastness of nature to be a witness to our humanity. A memorial to the Holocaust must be contemplative and silent, such that it evokes our empathy. It must be a promise to future generations that this terrible chapter in human history can never occur again."

In the video ...

"The most useless totem pole of mayoral hubris": Oliver Wainwright rides the ArcelorMittal Orbit

2016-06-23T18:06:00-04:00

Never has an attraction promised so much yet delivered so little. It was the roller coaster without a ride, the helter skelter without a slide, a £20m mountain of steel leering above London’s lean Olympic stadium as a mocking monument to the vanity of the city’s former mayor, Boris Johnson, and its funder, the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal [...] As Guy de Maupassant said of the Eiffel Tower, being inside the Orbit is the best place to be – because it’s the only place you don’t have to look at it

Ouch.

Yet, it's not all bad: "...when you’re hurtling down through the structure’s contorted loops on the new corkscrew slide that opens this weekend, all this can be momentarily forgiven," opines Wainwright.

In related news:

Carsten Höller to unveil his ArcelorMittal Orbit slide in June

2016-04-27T17:49:00-04:00

Höller wanted to show that you don’t necessarily get to know a sculpture better by literally travelling through it; that once inside it begins to look like something else entirely... The Slide, a permanent fixture at London’s Olympic Park, will give people a full 40 seconds to experience this and decide for themselves as they make their way down the 178m chute at an estimated 15mph.

Prepare to soon spot the blackest of black materials in architecture

2016-03-08T13:56:00-05:00

The British company developing the uses of a super black, light absorbent material called Vantablack S-VIS is working with leading architects as well as the British artist Anish Kapoor. The founder and chief technology officer of Surrey NanoSystems, Ben Jensen, says that the company is working with “some large and well respected global architects,” and that the coating is already available for “suitable applications”. He declined to name the architects involved “due to prior agreements”.

Artist Carsten Höller to wrap world's longest tunnel slide around the ArcelorMittal Orbit Tower in London

2015-08-03T15:03:00-04:00

This week, the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London announced that “the world’s longest and tallest tunnel slide” will wrap around Anish Kapoor’s “ArcelorMittal Orbit.” When the sculpture went up in 2009 after winning a design challenge, it proceeded to receive mostly scathing reviews — and a spot on the shortlist of the 2012 Carbuncle Cup [...]. Today, Kapoor revealed that the slide is actually a work of art, designed by none other than Carsten Höller at Kapoor’s own invitation.

In other artsy-slide-related news on Archinect:

London Crystal Palace shortlist boasts six of the UK’s top architects

2014-02-26T20:27:00-05:00

London's iconic Crystal Palace just moved one step closer to its magnificent resurrection with the announcement of six shortlisted design teams, all vying to rebuild The Crystal Palace and the surrounding public park as a major landmark.

The list of selected architects to move on to the next competition stage reads like a who's who in British architecture:

David Chipperfield Architects
Grimshaw
Haworth Tompkins Architects
Marks Barfield Architects
Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners
Zaha Hadid Architects with Anish Kapoor

The world's first inflatable concert hall arrives in Japan's disaster-hit north eastern coast

2013-09-25T12:08:00-04:00

A giant purple structure believed to be the world's first inflatable concert hall is to open on Japan's disaster-hit north eastern coast. British sculptor Anish Kapoor and Japanese architect Arata Isozaki created the unusual Ark Nova, a balloon made of a coated polyester material that has been erected at a park in the town of Matsushima. The structure, which organisers say is a world's first, measures about 18m and 35m wide when fully inflated with room for about 500 guests.

Spirit of Space presents "Art in the City", a short film honoring Chicago's public art

2013-08-21T20:26:00-04:00

The success of a public work of art is measured not merely by aesthetics, but rather, by its magnetic qualities that inspire interaction. The art is a reflection of the City, the art becomes a part of the City, the art is instrumental in making the City.

Acting as poetic translators between cities and their citizens, the creative agency Spirit of Space uses digital media to showcase humanity's built environment, consequently enhancing the citizen's self-awareness and appreciation of architectural space. Their film for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, entitled Art in the City, visits a selection of public art installations in Chicago, presenting the structures within an engaged society, with quotations from their creators superimposed on the footage.

Art in the City's perspective contextualizes the art as truly part of its city, rather than tightly framing it as an isolated portrait. While not an explicit critique of the public art, the film and featured quotations are bold strokes, meant to inspire dialogue and enthused interaction, but not push a specific argument. In line with Spirit of Space's agenda, the film provokes questions of public art's purpose, civic relationship, and whether it "succeeds". Inherent to these questions ...

BBC on the ArcelorMittal Orbit

2012-06-14T19:03:00-04:00

In this one-off special the Culture Show goes behind-the-scenes to follow it from commission to completion, and discovers just how difficult it is to build a tower for the 21st century.

Ricardo Legorreta Honored with 2011 Praemium Imperiale Prize

2011-07-11T14:50:41-04:00

Today, the names of the new Praemium Imperiale Laureates were announced in London, Berlin, Paris, Rome, New York and Tokyo. The 5 recipients in their respective fields are Ricardo Legorreta (Architecture, Mexico), Anish Kapoor (Sculpture, UK), Bill Viola (Painting, USA), Seiji Ozawa (Music, Japan), and Judi Dench (Theater/Film, UK).

Anish Kapoor dedicates Leviathan sculpture to Ai Weiwei

2011-05-10T22:53:03-04:00

The sculptor called for a worldwide day of action where museums and galleries close for one day in sympathy for the plight of his fellow artist. "Why not?" he asked. Ai, whose sunflower seeds work in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall closed at the weekend, has been missing for about a month, in the hands of the Chinese authorities. He had not been heard from, nor charged with any offence.