The form of Duck-and-Cover produces the big box logo from a Google-Earth point of view, and a verdant garden at street-level, image courtesy RSAUD

Starting this Sunday, August 29, when the Venice Biennale opens (and runs through November 21), there will be a lot of chatter about what feeds architecture and design thinking in 2010. Here, we’re kicking off the discussion with a look behind the scenes at the U.S. Pavilion. Its curators, Jonathan D. Solomon and Michael Rooks named their show Workshopping: An American Model of Architectural Practice. The title, they say, is meant to evoke our “can-do mentality”. Solomon, acting head of the department of architecture at the University of Hong Kong, for instance, starts his catalog essay by recalling the work of engineers who figured out how to save the Apollo 13 mission, urging architects to act as “initiators” who collaborate with other professionals to create a “charged atmosphere of solution-finding”. Could this be Horatio Alger meets Bob the Builder? No, it’s more like a call to action to solve some fierce, global problems: flooding, sprawl, lack of housing, poor access to fresh food and clean air. I spoke to Solomon and Rooks, who is Wieland Family curator of modern and contemporary art at Atlanta’s High Museum, just as they were about to fly to Venice to mount the show. Read more…

Last month, the Queens contemporary-art mecca P.S.1 announced the winner of its annual Young Architects Program, which chooses an emerging firm to remake the museum’s courtyard through a temporary installation-cum-party space. This year’s selection, Pole Dance, combines a circus aesthetic with a hint of existential vertigo. The structure consists of 100 pivoting fiberglass rods bolted to the ground and connected by bungee cords to a net suspended overhead. Visitors—quickly transformed into participants—move a set of multicolored balls that fill the net, setting the whole structure in motion. It is the creation of Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (SO-IL), a Brooklyn firm founded by Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu in 2007. Earlier this week, Idenburg spoke to me about the P.S.1 installation, architectural cynicism, and striking the perfect balance between whimsy and anxiety.

Why did your proposal take the form it did? What does it mean?

We take interest in the effects and workings of the immaterial systems we have created to organize our world, especially in relation to the way we organize our physical surroundings. We think people’s care and attention towards our physical environment could be reinvigorated by taking some of the qualities of the virtual into the architectural project. The idea of the structure as an “interface” —elasticity, instability, and connectivity—were ideas we tried to incorporate.

This sounds very serious. At the same time, it is an installation for a few months that needs to accommodate parties. We wanted it to be a really fun place, precisely through this interactivity. We are interested in creating spaces, not objects. We wanted it to be a total dynamic environment. Read more…

Images: courtesy WORK Architecture Company

With its startling lack of parks, community gardens, or farmers’ markets, the Gravesend neighborhood of southern Brooklyn is currently one of the least green sections of New York’s most populous borough. That is set to change this fall, however, when a neighborhood public school—P.S. 216—launches the first East Coast incarnation of the Edible Schoolyard, a program developed in 1995 by Alice Waters and the Chez Panisse Foundation to teach schoolchildren about food, farming, and nutrition. For the new venture, Manhattan’s WORK Architecture Company designed a solar-powered farm—complete with classrooms, a pizza oven, and a chicken coop—scheduled to be built over the summer on what is now a parking lot beside the school. The firm’s founders, Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, have previous experience with urban gardens: in 2008, they created Public Farm 1 (P.F.1), an undulating cardboard bridge filled with vegetables and herbs, for the annual MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program. Recently, I talked to Andraos and Wood about the Edible Schoolyard and their longstanding fascination with the intersection of architecture and farming.

Why was P.S. 216 chosen to host the Edible Schoolyard?

Dan Wood: John Lyons, president of production at Focus Features, is on the Chez Panisse Foundation board. He was in New York City’s Principal for a Day program and the last school he went to was P.S. 216. He became a huge fan of the school and its principal. The school is amazing. In a district where one hundred percent of the students are eligible for the free-lunch program, she is running an amazing school: they have art classes, healthy snacks, a new library. It’s a real neighborhood with a mix of different students from many parts of the world.

Amale Andraos: The idea, as well, is that we will, hopefully, be able to expand the Edible Schoolyard to all five boroughs. So everybody felt this was a great school to test the first prototype.

DW: And the school has a huge parking lot! Read more…