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As part of an International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples celebration in Mexico City on Sunday, Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum announced a major new addition to a space in the city’s historic Paseo de la Reforma recently vacated by a monument to its colonial past. Artist Pedro Reyes has now... View full entry
Budapest-based design studio Hello Wood has designed a new "Art Shield" pavilion that protects and highlights an iconic monument in the city. The temporary structure shields the Vörösmarty monument, which is located in a popular square that has recently undergone renovation. Image by... View full entry
An actor from Tamaulipas has created a project that would give the state’s capital, Ciudad Victoria, the world’s tallest statue of Jesus Christ.
Eduardo Verástegui Córdoba explained that the 77-meter-high statue and a complex to be built around it will be known as The Christ of Peace.
He said that the purpose of the project is to leave a legacy of peace for the state in which he was born.
— Mexico News Daily
Besides the enormous statue of Jesus Christ, the ambitious project is also expected to provide a large plaza for 10,000 people, a church of course, a convention center as well as facilities for retail, dining, hospitality, shopping, entertainment, transportation, and housing. Mexican actor Eduardo... View full entry
The new towering “Statue of Unity” in Kevadia, a tribute to Indian independence-era leader Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, at 597 feet is four times as tall as the Statue of Liberty. — Washington Post
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
“You can argue that any sculpture is art in some way, but it’s a loose argument,” Schoonmaker said Tuesday. “I don’t know that these statues are worthy of preservation as art objects so much as historical objects – made to preserve a lost cause, a lost war. They weren’t made with great artistic intent, but with political intent. And intent matters in this case.” — The New Observer
With the tragic events occurring in Charlottesville, much ink has been spilled over the topic of Confederate memorials: Should we keep them? Should we take them down? Is keeping them up a celebration of slavery and is taking them down erasing an important part of our past that we must face? With... View full entry
The first statue commemorating landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted will make its public debut in time for Earth Day at The North Carolina Arboretum in Asheville next Friday, April 22. One would assume that Olmsted already has statues of himself in public parks across the U.S., considering... View full entry
The largest remaining statue of Lenin in Ukraine was removed from its pedestal in Zaporizhia last week, the latest victim of the Ukrainian ban on Soviet symbols. But how do you go about “de-communising” an almost entirely Stalinist city? — calvertjournal.com
Related stories in the Archinect news:Owen Hatherley on Kiev's struggle with its Soviet architectural heritageOwen Hatherley on the mass housing history of Moscow’s suburbsMoscow skaters reclaiming hidden spaces on top of Soviet-era buildings View full entry
Just two days after images of a giant gold-colored statue of Mao in the bare fields of Henan Province spread across the Internet, the statue was gone — torn down apparently on the orders of embarrassed local officials. [...]
According to villagers and reports on online chat sites, the statue was the idea of a local businessman, Sun Qingxin ... “He is crazy about Mao,” said a villager who identified himself as Mr. Wang, a potato farmer. “His factory is full of Maos.”
— nytimes.com
More news from China:China to sustainably build 10 New York City's worth of space in the next decadeChina hopes to improve its cities with newly released urban planning visionChina relaxes restrictions on who gets perks of urban public servicesConstruction stalled on 'world's tallest building', so... View full entry
The question of the monuments’ removal comes after several US states...have withdrawn the Confederate flag, acknowledging it as a symbol of racial hate...The [statues] are on public land 'which means that African American tax money is being used to maintain them', [says Carol Bebelle, co-chair of the Mayor’s committee for racial reconciliation]. 'What does it mean to be a city that pays tribute to part of its history that was about oppressing the major portion of its population?' — The Art Newspaper
More on Archinect:That new Texas Confederate Memorial on Martin Luther King Jr. DriveDocumentary to Explore Racial Discrimination in Transportation PlanningBuilding the First Slavery Museum in America View full entry
We don’t even see his feet. He is embedded in the rock like something not yet fully born, suited and stern, rising from its roughly chiseled surface. His face is uncompromising, determined, his eyes fixed in the distance, not far from where Jefferson stands across the water. But kitsch here strains at the limits of resemblance: Is this the Dr. King of the “I Have a Dream” speech? Or the writer of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech? — nytimes.com
