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We’re used to images of nature reclaiming abandoned buildings – but artists Filthy Luker and Pedro Estrellas have put a playful twist on this concept. They’ve erected a giant sea monster that appears to burst through an abandoned warehouse in Philadelphia’s Navy Yard. — The Spaces
The relationship between public sculpture and architecture has been the subject of sharp criticism among architects. James Wines of SITE famously referred to most of what the sculptures typically installed in building plazas as "plop art," suggesting that they rarely contribute to the architecture... View full entry
Thomas Heatherwick’s 150-foot-tall, honeycomb-shaped climbable public art installation at Hudson Yards is set to open for public climbing in March along with the complex’s Shops and Restaurants on March 15. Known for some time as “The Vessel,” the bronzed steel and concrete structure has no official title as of yet. — 6sqft
Thomas Heatherwick's highly anticipated bronzed steel and concrete structure will have its public debut on March 15th. Having been in the headlines for the past few months the project's most recent update lies in what the structure will be officially named. According to a source from 6sqft, the... View full entry
If you've been itching to climb that new Thomas Heatherwick-designed 'Vessel' staircase sculpture at the Hudson Yards development in New York City, you'll have to exercise patience first until the $150 million attraction officially opens to the public in spring 2019. To manage the anticipated... View full entry
JCDecaux has taken the wraps off a unique piece of out-of-home inventory in London designed by Zaha Hadid Design.
The agency briefed the agency to redefine 'the design language of billboards'. It ditched the conventional shapes and frames that have steered the industry to date. Dubbed 'The Kensington', and located on the road from London to Heathrow, the structure takes the shape of a curved double-ribbon.
— thedrum.com
Zaha Hadid Architects has created a new design for street advertising with JCDecaux Group, a multinational corporation known for its bus-stop advertising systems and billboards. Creating a sculptural advertising approach, the firm's design reinvents the classic billboard into public art. Brands... View full entry
Mixed media artist Michael Velliquette has been making imaginary architecture models. A prolific artist who favors paper as his medium, his latest is a series of carefully detailed installations. Using hand-cut paper shapes, Velliquette assembles countless pieces of paper into complex forms he... View full entry
Selfridges department store in London has teamed up with Yorkshire Sculpture park on a new contemporary sculpture initiative. New works will be unveiled every six months on a marble and steel monolith designed by the UK architect David Chipperfield as part of his commission to create Selfridges’ new accessories hall. The joint project, known as the Art Block, has been dubbed Selfridges’ version of the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. — The Art Newspaper
Gates just opened at the 2018 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, and for the next two weekends, droves of festival goers will flock to the small town of Indio, California to see their favorite bands, performers (Beyoncé, anyone?)—and a host of large-scale art installations by emerging... View full entry
And now he’s going to float a 150-tonne sculpture on a lake on London.
Is it an allegory of the west’s oil dependency, an indictment of how we’re polluting the planet, or both? Christo shakes his locks and smiles. “I have no reason to justify myself as an artist. I cannot explain my art. Everything I do professionally is irrational and useless.” This, he thinks, is exactly as it should be. “I make things that have no function – except maybe to make pleasure.”
— The Guardian
Artist Christo chats about his new Mastaba sculpture coming to London this summer: a giant trapezoidal prism of 7,506 stacked steel barrels to float on the Serpentine Lake. It will be his first large artwork in Britain. Christo, The Mastaba (Project for London, Hyde Park, Serpentine Lake), Collage... View full entry
Just a few more days until the anticipated 2018 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival swings its doors open, and huge crowds, that have made the pilgrimage to this Southern California desert valley, get to enjoy the season's hippest music as well as various large-scale art installations by... View full entry
Envisioned to reach a height of 100 feet, the piece, titled “Bust of a Woman,” was approved to tower over the campus of the University of South Florida (USF), with its single cutout eye gazing blankly at its surroundings. The project — which also involved construction of a new art center — had an estimated cost of $10 million, however, and university officials ended up killing it due to lack of funding. Picasso passed away in 1973, and his angular, hard-edged figure never came to fruition. — hyperallergic.com
Originally designed for a museum in Sweden, Picasso's "Bust of a Woman" was donated to USF in 1971 and would have been the tallest concrete sculpture in the world at that time. Visualization of Paul Rudolph’s building with Picasso’s sculpture. Image: USF Special Collection Library.He agreed... View full entry
Heatherwick Studio employs architects, but Heatherwick is not an architect. His work could be described as a celebration of never having absorbed, in a formal architectural education, dogma about designing things to be flush and taut. “There’s a Harry Potter-esque, Victorian quirkiness in the work,” Ingels said. “An element of steampunk, almost.” — The New Yorker
In his long read for The New Yorker, Ian Parker tells the story of New York's (potential) new Eiffel Tower, the Vessel at Hudson Yards, and profiles the British designer behind this and many other ambitious structures, Thomas Heatherwick. View full entry
Only a dream can kill a dream. — Egg Shen
Developed with some of the minds behind One Night Stand LA, DOPIUM.LA aimed to preserve the original beauty of Chinatown, while showing its inspirational influence on an emerging community of creatives in Los Angeles. For one night, a group of artist, architects and atmospheric maestros turned... View full entry
After the Louvre demurred, an art installation many consider to be sexually explicit will instead be displayed outside the Pompidou Center in Paris. — The New York Times
The Louvre might not want it, but the Pompidou will take it! The 40-foot-tall, semi-building, semi-sculpture, "Domestikator," by the Dutch art and design collective Atelier Van Lieshout, was intended to be shown in the Tuileries Gardens, next to the Louvre. But the Museum cancelled the project... View full entry
Officials at the Louvre have been accused of censorship after withdrawing a work from its Tuileries Gardens in Paris for being sexually explicit. The work by the Dutch art and design collective Atelier Van Lieshout, entitled the Domestikator, was due to go on show later this month as part of the Hors les Murs public art programme organised by representatives of the Fiac contemporary art fair (19-22 October). — The Art Newspaper
The Art Newspaper explains: "[...] the erotic nature of the large-scale architectural structure, the outline of which depicts a couple having sex, prompted the Louvre’s decision to bar the work from the gardens which are overseen by the museum." Louvre director Jean-Luc Martinez tried to defend... View full entry
The French artist Xavier Veilhan has created sculptures of the architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers that will be permanently installed next month in Place Edmond Michelet outside the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The pair designed the distinctive museum, which opened in 1977. — The Art Newspaper
Don't miss our 2015-podcast interview with Xavier Veilhan for Archinect Sessions. We talked with the Paris-based artist and his Los Angeles-collaborator, François Perrin, about their series of interventions into some of the world's most famous modernist landmarks and the resulting book... View full entry
