The Hefner/Beuys House by Jimenez Lai is a cartoonish architectural installation that extends its story into the realm of performance art. Citing two predecessors of performance artists, Joseph Beuys and Hugh Hefner, this project also asks - who is the real extrovert between the two? Hefner may be the obvious answer, but Beuys relocated himself out of his context to a stage-like environment whereas Hefner simply stayed in his mansion. — kickstarter.com
Help support Archinect-fave Jimenez Lai fund his latest Super Furniture project! Check out Archinect's latest curatorial pick at Kickstarter. To view all of our selections visit Kickstarter.com/Archinect. View full entry
The house is the world’s first temple to “Acid Modernism,” the aesthetic the California-born Aitken conceived for himself and Gemma Ponsa, his companion of the last six years. “The goal was to create a warm, organic modernism that’s also perceptual and hallucinatory,” he said of the design. “We thought that would be a wonderful environment to live in.” — nytimes.com
The giant mall you see in the photos here didn’t die. It has never lived, having been nothing but empty since it opened seven years ago. According to its Wikipedia entry, it has an astounding 2,350 available retail spaces, only 47 of which are occupied.
Meet the world’s largest shopping mall, the New South China Mall in Dongguan, China. It is twice as big as the huge Mall of America outside Minneapolis.
— thinkprogress.org
Platescrapers navigates itinerant fare, comestible politics, and gastro-ritual to purvey stories about social issues and exaggerated realities; each story illustrates food as a monument to galvanize the public. — SOILED
SOILED is an architectural periodical based in Chicago. It investigates latent issues in the built environment and the politics of space. SOILED's latest issue, entitled Platescrapers, is out! With three issues to date, SOILED is available in both a print edition and a free downloadable PDF... View full entry
Being a successful collector or dealer does not qualify one to make substantial decisions towards our collective cultural patrimony. — art&education
art&education publishes an excellent paper by Nizan Shaked. As the title suggests, it discusses and exposes the forces and conditions behind this billion dollar industry that created by power brokers and billionaire businessman and their art advisers, museum directors and... View full entry
Released on Sunday by the Center for an Urban Future — a think tank focused on New York City — “Designing New York’s Future” cites that New York City graduates twice as many students in design and architecture as any other city in the country. While extolling the schools’ strengths, the report also advocates for more business coursework in curricula... — thirteen.org
Emily Bills, director of the Julius Shulman Institute at Woodbury University and co-curator of the exhibit, said the goal was to show how Guerrero, built a career in parallel to photographers such as Shulman but with less fame. — L.A. Times
Los Angeles Times interviews Curator / Historian Emily Bills on photographer Pedro E. Guerrero, who is known as Frank Lloyd Wright's photographer. Exhibition and the talk by the artist are not to be missed. The exhibit runs April 5 to 25 at Woodbury University Hollywood Gallery... View full entry
The Great Lakes Century is a pro bono initiative of SOM's City Design Practice.
We found dozens of important efforts to clean and protect the Lakes and the St. Lawrence, but no comprehensive vision for their entire ecosystem. So we did what we do: took a comprehensive look at the natural setting, how unenlightened human hands had messed it up, and then created a set of strategic principles – to begin a broad-based, bi-national dialogue (which we had never done before).
— thegreatlakescenturyblog.som.com
Grand plans for Seattle Center evoke hovering "Jelly Beans," "dematerialized urbanism," and "catalyzing atmospheres." That's just what Seattle needs: more gobbledygook. — crosscut.com
Knute Berger, of Seattle-based Crosscut, opines on the long-pondered use of "gobbledygook" in archispeak, in reference to the architect's project descriptions from the recently announced results in the Urban Intervention Design Ideas Competition. View full entry
An intern-rights movement is afoot, sparking class-action suits against Hearst and Fox Searchlight; rumors of new rules at Condé Nast; a Times “Ethicist” column (headline: “The Internship Rip-Off”); and a book (Intern Nation) decrying many of the unpaid jobs as boondoggles. Amid the uprising, our interns surveyed 100 other New York interns about the apprentice’s life. — nymag.com
A fairly informal poll was conducted by NY Mag near the campuses of NYU, Columbia, and FIT in NYC. While the results are not that surprising, some are worth noting: 72% report getting paid nothing 4% report getting paid over minimum wage 41% indicate that they would like to continue working for... View full entry
Drive-ins symbolize the romance of the open road, of Hollywood movies, and for many, memories of romance itself. I’ve been making photographs of drive-in theaters for more than a decade now. Every theater is unique, but there are repeating visual themes like the giant white rectangle of the screen, that relate to and resonate with the enormously varied American landscape. — kickstarter.com
Help support Carl Weese photo-document the iconic drive-in movie theaters before they are wiped off the American landscape. Check out Archinect's latest curatorial pick at Kickstarter. To view all of our selections visit Kickstarter.com/Archinect. View full entry
With Nuit Blanche New York absorbed — even if temporarily — into the rebranding of the Lower East Side, it's instructive to recall an earlier era and another light projection. I'm thinking of the November 1984 projection by artist Krzysztof Wodiczko of Ronald Reagan’s hand onto the elevation of the AT&T Long Lines Building just before the election that made Reagan a two-term president. This past November Wodiczko's act of spectacle and protest would inspire Occupy Wall Street's "Bat Signal." — Places Journal
In the latest installment of her ongoing series on Places, Mimi Zeiger surveys some of the events and exhibitions organized in New York City last year and inspired by Occupy Wall Street. Along the way she analyzes the unfolding dynamic between the grassroots tactics of activist artists and... View full entry
In this image, vegetation is displayed in red, and flooded areas are black and dark blue. Brighter blue shows sediment-laden water, and gray areas are houses, buildings and roads. The image covers an area of 35.2 by 66.3 miles (56.7 by 106.9 kilometers) and is located at 14.5 degrees north latitude, 100.5 degrees east longitude. — http://www.jpl.nasa.gov
Detached from the content depicted, the full-resolution image itself is too amazing to not circulate... View full entry
What About ideal cities, and counter revolutionary master plans? Avant-Garde The avant-garde is a paradoxical state. In order to exist, it relies on its incongruous condition of being both fundamentally contemporary and ahead of its time. A conceptual palimpsest, the avant-garde requires writing... View full entry
For all its Brutalist charm and rigid adherence to the now-outmoded ‘streets in the sky’ concept, Robin Hood Gardens was an easy target for those who call architects hypocrites eager to champion crumbling estates they wouldn’t dare live in themselves. Many of the current residents can’t wait to be rid of it: a consultation in 2008 found that over 75% supported its demolition. — londonist.com
