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Banksy had just put the finishing touches on his latest artwork on an abandoned farmhouse in in Kent, England, when shortly after completion, a construction crew demolished the building. Entitled Morning is Broken, the work featured a silhouetted cat and a boy with arms outstretched opening two dilapidated sheets of iron, which were shaped like curtains. — Hypebeast
News of the demolition spread across media channels and social platforms like Instagram and Twitter. A report from The Guardian explained that the site, owned by Kitewood, was "earmarked for dozens of new homes" as demolition on the site began on Tuesday, March 14. When workers began demolishing... View full entry
In 2010, while in town for the Los Angeles premiere of his documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” the British street artist Banksy left a gift for fans: a mural of a girl on a swing, dangling beneath the five-foot red “A” of the word “PARKING” on a gritty downtown lot.
Now that girl — as well as the historic building in the downtown fashion district that serves as her canvas — is for sale to the highest bidder.
— The New York Times
The historic 26,000-square-foot Downtown Los Angeles building was purchased for $4 million three years prior to the popular documentary's premiere and underwent a $1.8 million renovation before its then-owners filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April this year. Related on Archinect: Recent Banksy... View full entry
MVRDV founding partner Winy Maas and Theobert van Boven of Van Boven Architecten are leading the transformation of their old high school Gymnasium Beekvliet in the Dutch village of Sint-Michielsgestel. The main element of this design by the two alumni is a colorful, flowing addition... View full entry
Arts University Bournemouth (AUB) in the United Kingdom is celebrating the opening of a new creative facility designed by Sir Peter Cook. The Innovation Studio is the second building on AUB’s campus designed by Cook, after his undulating Drawing Studio was opened in 2016 by Zaha Hadid. Cook... View full entry
LAA Office, a Columbus, Indiana-based multi-disciplinary design studio, has unveiled its transformation of a street in downtown Columbus into a new arts district. Called 6th Street Arts Alley, the project was realized in collaboration with the Columbus Area Arts Council. This project aimed to both... View full entry
“The mural had fallen into disrepair, its imagery so faded from the sun that some shapes were barely recognizable. On a trip to L.A. in 2017 to restore one of his murals, Davis visited Watts Towers and noted what terrible shape the work was in. It gnawed at him, how fragile the mural was, slowly and quietly deteriorating in plain sight.” — The Los Angeles Times
The mural-lined Watts Towers campus is currently at the end of a three-year conservation effort being overseen by LACMA. The largest is artist Alonzo Davis’ tribute to acclaimed visual artist and former Watts Towers Arts Center director John Outterbridge, who died last year. Davis, who... View full entry
New Orleans-based firm EskewDumezRipple has collaborated with Philadelphia-based artist Phillip Adams to produce a vivid and detailed lenticular mural for their project in Salt Lake City, Utah. Adams hand-painted the piece across the facade of EskewDumezRipple’s Mya Living project, a new... View full entry
The legal battle over the Picasso-Nesjar murals removed by the Norwegian government from the Y Block administrative building in Oslo earlier this week is escalating. The Fishermen hung on the brutalist façade while The Seagull was located in the lobby of the building, which was designed by the Norwegian architect Erling Viksjø in 1969. — The Art Newspaper
Norway's controversial decision to demolish the 1960s Y-block building that was damaged by a car bomb explosion in the July 22, 2011 terrorist attack — and with it, to remove two murals created by Pablo Picasso and Carl Nesjar specifically for this building — has been generating a... View full entry
Today's featured virtual event happenings, from Archinect's Virtual Event Guide, address issues from resiliency, mass timber, community engagement, residential design, art, public art, urban design, Palm Springs modernism and bamboo. Are you hosting a virtual lecture? Presentation?... View full entry
Following the now famous Black Lives Matter street mural in Washington D.C., activists later painted one in Oakland, California. This urban activism has garnered the attention of another city as well, Berkeley, who plans to paint a new street mural on Martin Luther King Jr. Way, in front of Old... View full entry
According to the team's Kickstarter page, Scribit is a write-and-erase robot that allows you to draw any content sourced from the web—and update it in real time. See the video below for some words from Italian architect Carlo Ratti, the inventor of the new technology: View full entry
While technological sleights of hand grow more and more sophisticated, it is important to remember that sometimes paint, pencil, and sunlight are all that is needed to create transformative works of art. A good example of the latter approach comes from Italian artist Peeta, a Venice-based... View full entry
The housing crisis in large cities, especially in Los Angeles, has been an ongoing issue. Currently, Los Angeles County is home to the second largest population of settled homelessness in the U.S. Local government and organizations aim to create solutions in order to combat the issue with a little... View full entry
A colourful mural of a 35m-tall tree in Mexico City is one of three environmentally friendly new public works made using Airlite paint, which purifies polluted air in a process similar to photosynthesis.
[...] the mural aims to increase oxygen levels in one of the western hemisphere’s most polluted cities, where ozone concentration levels remain high despite government regulations on fuel and cars.
— The Art Newspaper
Image courtesy of Boa Mistura."Airlite paint chemically reacts with pollutants in the air, turning them into inert compounds," reports The Art Newspaper. "The roughly 1,000 sq. m mural should neutralise the same amount of pollution created by around 60,000 vehicles a year."The artists responsible... View full entry
A series of apartment buildings in Moscow have been covered with iconic Japanese artwork. Part of the Etalon City apartment complex, the architects had the 6 towers placed along the highway painted with a replica of The Great Wave off Kanagawa—Katsushika Hokusai’s famed woodblock... View full entry
