After mounting a 65-foot Erector Set skyscraper at Rockefeller Center in 2008, and then placing a diverse collection of vintage streetlights like lit columns at a main entry to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), artist Chris Burden astounds us again. LACMA presents Chris Burden’s Metropolis II.

1100 miniature cars race along 18 lanes of traffic around 25 buildings. Given the miniature scale, they speed the equivalent of about 230 miles per hour. 13 trains mosey along through this mini-city as well.

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Newport Beach, California, Sunday, October 16, 2011—Around 200 Southern Californians enjoyed an extremely rare opportunity today, to enter the avant-garde Rudolf Schindler Lovell Beach House (1926). The MAK Center for Art and Architecture sold $80 and $100 tickets to raise money for its operations—based in Schindler’s own “King’s Road” house in L.A.

Some walked past unaware

With other things to do.

Others had waited many years

Just to sneak a view.

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The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) continues to sprawl. This week America’s most eclectic and oddest collection of art museum buildings opened a rather elegant new pavilion. The Italian architect Renzo Piano designed it and it holds about an acre of art. LACMA asked Piano to give its campus a more unified sense of place, but when his first work opened on the grounds, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum opened in 2008, many people were less than thrilled.  This new, large, one-story, $54 million dollar Lynda and Stewart Resnick Pavilion, complements BCAM; its angled white fins on the roof diffuse sunlight and direct it through skylights into the spacious pavilion, to wash over a grey concrete floor. Renzo Piano spoke (on several occasions) with Edward Lifson; the following is edited from those conversations.

Edward Lifson: Michael Govan, the Director and CEO of LACMA, says there’s something “emotionally charged” about one-room buildings: when we walk into them, we feel oriented and we feel the great breadth of their space. He mentions the Pantheon, the Hagia Sophia, and Ronchamp—and says that’s what he wanted here. Do you see it like that? Why are you laughing, Renzo?

Renzo Piano: Oh, Michael! I like him because he is a visionary person. Yes, he wanted the purity of no stairs, no escalator, just space and light for art. I think that this building in reality is, well, it’s what he wanted: a tool, a tool to show art. Mainly visual art, but it’s a flexible space with a capacity to transform. You can play music in here, you can have dance or theater, or film. It’s what he needed in LACMA—this flexibility. To be able to show the treasures of the collection, but at the same time to explore other worlds. For example, before this officially opened, they placed a Walter De Maria in here, by itself (“The 2000 Sculpture,” 1992). It is so large, it’s rarely shown, because it’s difficult to find a place for it. I must say, it looked beautiful. Read more…

Photos: Edward Lifson

Great world’s fairs traditionally leave one main, indelible image in the public’s consciousness.  In 1893, Chicago gave us civic monuments around a reflecting pool, out of which sprang the golden statue of the Republic. The Eiffel Tower soared above the 1899 Paris fair; it was the tallest man-made structure at the time. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome at Montreal’s Expo ‘67 enveloped a brave new world. This year, Shanghai presents the biggest World Expo ever, with more than 200 pavilions. But the most unforgettable building is not the largest. (That would be the red inverted pyramid representing China. It’s grand and imperial, but retreaded modernism without great detail.) The most indelible experience of architecture at this fair is at one of the smallest pavilions—the one from the United Kingdom, designed by London’s Heatherwick Studio.

After walking great distances in the dreadful heat and humidity of the Shanghai summer; after being bombarded with flashing lights and LED monitors and music and hundreds of thousands of people from all over China waiting three, four, up to nine hours to visit the most popular pavilions; just when you’re so beat you think you cannot absorb another thing—there it is. The sculptural structure is like a giant sea urchin, or a porcupine, or a squashed exploding star. Its protruding rods seem to carry energy from inside this alien thing. Other pavilions claim to take visitors into the future, but this one actually delivers. Or is this crazy moon-crawler taking us back to a primordial past?

Recently, I spoke to Thomas Heatherwick about his design, his message to the Chinese people, and the purpose of world’s fairs in the 21st century.

Tell me about the project brief—what did the British government want from its pavilion?

We were very conscious of the context in which it was going to sit—the world’s largest-ever Expo. But the brief from the government asked for a building that showed that the U.K. is a good place to live and work, has good governance, and is multicultural and diverse and sustainable. So you’re going slightly numb reading that brief, because you know that that’s exactly the same brief that every other designer of every other pavilion has been given. And the British government added,  ‘And get voted one of the top ten pavilions!’ We felt that if we just did a cheesy advert for Britain, with clichés, we would not achieve that goal. The only way we would be noticed is by being slightly oblique. Read more…

Kuma in Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall, on the IIT campus in Chicago. Photo: Edward Lifson

The 2010 Pritzker Architecture Prize was recently given to the Japanese duo who lead the firm SANAA. People in the know can think of several other Japanese architects who also deserve the prize. One who is not as well known in the United States is Kengo Kuma. Born in 1954, Kuma leads a Tokyo-based firm that has completed dozens of projects, including the Hiroshige Museum of Art, in Japan; the Great (Bamboo) Wall house, in Beijing; and the Opposite House hotel, also in Beijing. His feet are in traditional Japanese architecture with his mind looking through the 21st century.

Last week Kuma visited the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), in Chicago, to show his current work, which includes a concert hall in Besançon, France, and a contemporary art center in Marseilles. He’s also redeveloping the Gustave Eiffel–designed train station in Budapest and working in Naples and Granada. In the United States, his only commission is a house in Connecticut, but Kuma is on the shortlist for a medical center at Columbia University, in New York. At home he is updating a Kabuki theater and Tokyo’s central post office.

Kuma is known for exploring new materials and, at IIT, he showed images of his experiments with concrete embedded with glass fiber optics, walls of plastic filled with water, and plastic teahouses that inflate—“Ready to go in ten minutes, like ramen noodles!” he said. During his recent visit to Chicago, Kuma spoke with me in Mies van der Rohe’s IIT masterpiece, Crown Hall.

Many economists say that the twenty-first century will belong to Asia. How might that influence world architecture?

Bruno Taut said that Western architecture is about shape and form and Asian architecture is about relationships. The last two thousand years were driven by European cultures. I expect we’ll find new paradigms of space. Probably it will be very enjoyable! [Laughs] Chinese history is of cultural exchanges with their neighbors. This can happen again in the twenty-first century. China may be the center of the world, and they may fight with other cultures, but they will also collaborate with other cultures. That tension can move the world in interesting new directions. This will change architecture. Read more…

Balkany in front of a Gropius-designed power plant on the Reese hospital campus. Photo: Edward Lifson

When Chicago recently dreamt of hosting the 2016 Olympics, its bid included the demolition of an unused hospital complex to make way for an Olympic Village. Then a young architect in town named Grahm Balkany sounded alarm bells that some of the buildings, the planning, and other aspects were the work of the pioneer of modern architecture and creator of the Bauhaus—Walter Gropius! Once Chicago lost the Olympics to Rio you’d think the city would have called off the bulldozers, right?  Alas, if you think that, obviously you don’t know “The Chicago Way.”

During our recent conversation, Balkany looked battle-weary, as if he fears that if he ever got a good night’s sleep, he’d wake up to find the Gropius buildings gone. It often takes a transplant to show locals what they’ve got. Balkany moved from Denver to Chicago in 1998. “Specifically for the architecture,” he says. “I saw a beautiful Gothic Revival limestone field house, and learned Chicago was about to tear it down! I thought, man, you don’t have buildings like this where I’m from and here they toss them out like rubbish.” He wrote letters to newspapers, and helped establish Preservation Chicago to advocate. Three years ago Balkany brought to light drawings, letters, and blueprints that seem to show that Walter Gropius and his firm, the Architects’ Collaborative, were heavily involved in designing at least eight buildings, plus the master and site plans and the landscaping of the 37-acre Michael Reese Hospital complex on the near south side by Lake Michigan. Balkany founded the Gropius in Chicago Coalition to try to save it all. The city of Chicago, which now owns it, has other ideas.

Did you celebrate when Chicago lost the bid for the 2016 Olympics?

We would never celebrate anything that is a loss for Chicago. But I admit a part of us rejoiced. Only that part that sees this as an opportunity to revisit the premature decision to demolish Michael Reese Hospital. Read more…