building a hero
This past weekend I was privileged to attend the AIA symposium on Le Corbusier in New York. The forum dovetailed with the opening of the Le Corbusier show starting up at MOMA and the opening of newly renovated rooms at the UN. This morning I got to tour some of the rooms and found them to be extremely thought-provoking. Assistant Secretary General Michael Adlerstein guided the tour and lovingly described a method of thinking about rooms that promotes the highest human ideals. In the Security Chamber the crescent moon table was not to be touched because the dialogue that the configuration garnered prevented a WWIII. The beautiful Finn Juhl designed Trustee Chamber has changed it’s function and configuration since colonial rule is no longer an issue. Illustrations where proximity and dialogue is necessary and design is a conduit for good.
hero building
This weekend I am on assignment as it were for the elegant and exhaustive MOMA exhibition Le Corbusier: The Atlas of Landscape.A 8:30 am preview by curator Jean Louis Cohen illustrated his strong thesis of landscape that drives through Le Corbusier’s work. By orchestrating a journey through Corbusier’s life, the body of work is far more accessible, I think, and I await the impact of the show in the design community. Particularly of interest are four installations of rooms that I expect will be a huge topic in the shelter magazine world, or at least I hope.
building architecture
From Tami
Checking out more fabulous exhibits around town in the Pacific Standard Time Presents Series. The Hammer just opened an exhibit on Quincy Jones…more hand hewn perspectives, colorful working drawings filled with notes and squiggly arrows and sketches.
All worthy of an art museum…
building decorative
Yes, I wish I could see this and yes I wish I was Rudolph Stingel. His amazing attempts to make space with material culture are inspiring and the questions; what does scale and repetition do to a space, an already epic space? Can someone help with whether it is printed or actually giant carpet? The textural quality would be important. It appears as though he has placed paintings on the dense walls in an effort to inverse the plain wall to art relationship. This is on view even after the Biennale is over through December at Palazzo Grassi.
building atmosphere
My admiration for the conceptual rigor of Marije Vogelzang is boundless. This newest project by her really gets me going. A beautiful meeting of Vogelzang’s Food Design movement mantra’s and current ideas floating about in the “history as public engagement” world. Vogelzang deftly designed a food and food preparation performance at the historic house, Huis Van Gijn in Dordrecht. The act illustrates (I think) the other power of food; the scent. By making a sourdough bread and letting the concoction rise and therefore making the house fragrant, the sourdough is a new actor in the historic house. This new type of historical imaginings will give visitors and an honest and visceral experience. Read Vogelzang’s rendition of the project.
“The project was assigned by The Association of the Museum of Dordrecht. (Vereniging Dordrechts Museum) and specially made for the former house of banker and collector Simon van Gijn.
I made a sourdough called Simon that grows and lives inside the beautiful old kitchen of the museum. As a sourdough feeds itself and ferments on the bacteria in the air, Simon is site specific and can only be made in the museum. In this way I sort of ‘catch’ the atmosphere of the collector’s house. Once a week the sourdough is being baked as a cake in a special copper baking pan I designed for it. When Simon is being baked the smell will spread trough the premises making the house, which is a silent witness of the past filled with lifeless artifacts, come to life again. The sourdough, which needs to be taken care of every day, is a living organism and will be shared amongst the visitors on order to take Simon home and take care of him. (Bare with me, just think of cake Herman)
The recipe of the final cake is based on the ingredients used by the mother of Simon van Gijn (around 1850)”
building by sound
From Benjamin
Just opened, and running through June 16th, artist Garson Yu’s new installation work The Interactive New York (T.I.N.Y.) is the first in a series of site-specific artworks to be located on Pier 57 in NYC this summer.
Yu is known mostly for his work as a title designer for TV & movies (responsible, with his LA-based firm Yu+Co for such varied openings as “Desperate Housewives“ and the recent “Life of Pi”). Appropriately, the work makes use of images – video projected onto the sides of shipping containers – that are controlled, interactively, by sound (and helped along by a couple of very powerful computer servers). By equipping each container with its own microphone, Yu invites the viewer to control portions of the projected video by changing the frequency or speed of sounds they bring. Depending on what the visitor does or says, the film might back-up or move forward; by sudden repeated enunciation, a laser beam might “shoot” a flying bird; the image of a girl’s lips can be distorted by the modulated pitch of a viewer’s voice.
As the images being projected were collected from around the City, and are controlled in uniquely changing ways by the New Yorkers visiting them, the resulting
collage promises to move – and be moved by – The Interactive New York. Open & ready daily 9am-7pm.
building structure
From Tami
Some years back I had the privilege of seeing a Edward Hopper retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago. I was floored by his colors – walking into a room of Hoppers takes your breath away..!! Now I see that the Whitney is showing an exhibit of his drawings. The “structure” that came before the color. What the curator calls the “connective tissue” between Hoppers “…fact” and his improvisations of riotous color.I’m there…this one I’m getting on a plane for…
