From the Smart Cities, Healthy Cities Exhibition of sustainable Dutch design, Breathing Cloud by Dorette Sturm. Courtesy: Beijing Design Week

In addition to being the political hub of China, Beijng has long been a city on the global art and design map. More recently, its creative energies are drawing more attention. Arts enclaves like Factory 798 are no longer obscure, cheap-rent zones for bohemians, but home to design start-ups and mainstays on the tourist routes. Local artists, such as Ai Weiwei, draw global audiences and collectors. Chinese architects living elsewhere have been flocking back home because Chinese cities offer them opportunities to be bold and adventurous.

As the economy goes so, too, do arts and design. With an overall growth rate averaging 10% over the last ten years, China’s creative industries have also been gaining momentum, towed along in the wake of increasing economic strength. In other words, there has been enough macro-economic development to allow the creative sector to expand. Moreover, as wealth gets concentrated in cities like Beijing, more of it can get invested in design-related industries.

Beijing Design Week, recently wrapping up its second year, is the logical expression of this momentum. Under the direction of American curator-critic, Aric Chen, Design Week attempts to nudge Beijing’s creative energies into the global spotlight. But this effort is far bigger than a group of like-minded designers and artists getting together to promote their talents.

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Dubai Federal National Council building. Courtesy Ehrlich Architects

Steven Ehrlich was recently named this year’s recipient of the Maybeck Award for achievement in architecture. The award is given by the American Institute of Architects California Council for an outstanding body of work spanning ten years or more. It is sometimes mistakenly called a lifetime achievement award, but at 65, Ehrich is still a ways off from this—still a burgeoning youth in architectural years.

Refining the refined. 1939 Schindler house, updated 2011. Photo, Grant Mudford

When I think of his body of work what comes to mind are the different moves—the small moves and the big moves. Read more…

© Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz / David Chipperfield Architects,
Photo: Jörg von Bruchhausen

On June 20, British architect Sir David Chipperfield took center stage at a ceremony in Barcelona to officially receive the much-coveted European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award. Aside from having the longest name imaginable—henceforth shortened by this author to “Mies Prize”—it is also regarded as Europe’s most prestigious architecture honor.

Sir David has been having a good time of it these past two years. He was knighted in 2010 and was the recipient of this year’s RIBA Royal Gold Medal. He has been winning so much that people mistakenly assume he has also won a Pritzker Prize. To set the record straight, no, he has not. Not yet, anyway. There is always the possibility of a Chipperfield trifecta next year.

Why all the acclaim? What is so special about Sir David’s architecture? Read more…

courtesy Blue Ventures

Buckminster Fuller was an architect, but in the truest sense of the title, he was a problem-solver who viewed complexity with the eyes of a scientist. Upon his death in 1983, his family established the Buckminster Fuller Institute to carry on his legacy of visionary innovation through holistic, interdisciplinary, systems thinking to tackle large-scale problems that affect humanity. In his own words, “to make the world work for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or disadvantage of anyone.”

To help implement such lofty idealism the Brooklyn-based institute has sought to aid organizations and programs by awarding an annual prize of $100,000 through their eponymous Buckminster Fuller Challenge. In a recent Wall Street Journal article (“Changing the World One Space at a Time”, June 11, 2011) Elizabeth Thompson, the institute’s executive director, stated, “We require the people who submit their ideas to make a compelling case as to why the problem space they are particularly focused on is a key leverage point to turning the whole ship of state around.” She further elaborated how the institute does not prescriptively set the agenda for each prize. They leave it to those who enter to make the case for why their proposals deserve support.

courtesy Blue Ventures

In keeping with the institute’s mission, on June 10^th, this year’s prize was awarded to Blue Ventures, a London-based environmental organization led by founder and research director, Alasdair Harris, PhD. The focus of the organization is helping fishing communities located in sensitive coastal ecosystems, primarily in Madagascar, deal with dwindling natural resources. Read more…

Photo courtesy 18% Grey for TEDx Karachi

At this year’s TED Conference in Long Beach, California, one of the highlights was a skinny, sunglass-donning Frenchman who goes by the moniker, JR. Being the recipient of the TED Prize is clearly an awkward and unexpected occurrence in the life of a street artist trying to protect his anonymity—he is now struggling to negotiate semi-anonymity in a line of work that depends on remaining in the shadows. Not an easy thing to achieve when trying to launch a global art movement. Or is it?

How, then, could this secretive (sort of) street artist maintain his identity (and credibility) and fulfill the very public mandate of the TED Prize, which calls for nothing short of  changing the world?  To pull this off seems worthy of a prize in itself.  The “wish”, the project he calls Inside Out, would have to become something larger than the artist himself, something others could own and enact on their own terms. The answer, as JR told me one morning in the corner of a gallery, was to become, as he calls it, “the printer”. Genius. Read more…

Julius Shulman knew everybody. That’s how he worked. He moved through the city not merely photographing, but orchestrating and choreographing images that helped define what it meant to be modern and in Los Angeles through the buoyant optimism of the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s. He kept it up until his death in 2009.

In the new book Julius Shulman Los Angeles: The Birth of a Modern Metropolis, authors Sam Lubell, West Coast editor for the Architect’s Newspaper, and Douglas Woods have assembled a collection of Shulman’s rarely seen works that document the burgeoning city as it became a metropolis. In fact, because of Shulman’s willingness to shoot anything and accept any photographic challenge, this collection constitutes a definitive sweep through the visual history of Los Angeles. Read more…

Eduardo Souta de Mora. Photo: Francisco Nogueira

At the youthful age of 58, Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura has won architecture’s most prestigious award, the Pritzker Prize (regarded as architecture’s Nobel Prize). He now enters the ranks of an elite lineage of architects who have been honored with the Prize since its inception in 1979. One of Mr. Souto de Moura’s early mentors, Alvaro Siza, also from Portugal, won the prize in 1992. It would appear the young protégé studied well.

Museu Paula Rego, Casa das Histórias, Cascais, Portugal. Photo: FG + SG/Fernando Guerra.

In architecture, lineage like this is significant because so much of the discipline is passed down through mentoring. To make a crass reference to popular culture, architects are perhaps like Jedi knights: trained in the ways of the “force” by their “masters”. So, one lesson to take away from this is that a good master can make a difference. But this is only part of the picture. Souto de Moura worked in Siza’s office for a mere four years, from 1975 to 1979. Since 1980 he has had his own office in his hometown of Porto, where most of his projects have been built. Read more…

Los Angeles radio host Frances Anderton is the voice of architecture and design. In fact, through her radio show on KCRW, DnA: Design and Architecture, she has become the voice of design for the city.

Architecture is one of those disciplines that has no shortage of voices. There are the architects themselves with their theoretical tomes and public explanations of their buildings. There are the critics who ideally position the buildings in larger frameworks—or sometimes simply bash them to rubble in print. Then there is that other beast, the Internet, the living, talking membrane that has evolved into an audience talking to itself about all things architectural.

But amidst all the chatter, Frances stands out for her incisive weaving of social, political and cultural issues that pertain to architecture. Through her very convincing and authoritative British accent, she reminds us why architecture and design matter in our daily lives. Her show brings what often seems like the background of our lives squarely into the foreground.

Guy Horton: As far as I know, you are the only one out there doing a show on architecture and design. How did you develop the show? Read more…

[Army Pants]

My first trip to China was in 1988. Ironically, this was the same year sweeping land reforms were instituted by the government. It was very simple, really. It was like a massive stimulus package. Though, at the time, the full ramifications of these policies were not completely understood.

Basically, the laws governing land management were altered. All land was (and still is) state-owned. There is no private property in China. 1949 erased the concept from history. Under the policy changes, which also coincided with other dramatic economic reforms, land use rights could be traded on a quasi-private real-estate market.

In the eighties, one thing I had in common with China was a complete lack of interest in Architecture. Shocking, I know. Architecture was simply the background, the environmental equivalent to muzak. I was conscious of it, but in a more detached, impersonal way, and without the need to exercise any architectural power over my surroundings. Another shocking thing about that time:  I didn’t have the need to filter everything trough the narrative of Architecture.

My own experience thus oddly parallels China’s recent growth and engagement with Architecture: though neither of us thought much about it in the past, it has now become something that defines us. Read more…

The Broad Art Foundation with its parametric concrete “veil”.  Courtesy Diller Scofidio + Renfro

“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”
 — Oscar Wilde

I’m drawn to John Berger’s essay “Why Look at Animals” for many reasons but primarily because it takes something obvious and turns it inside-out to reveal dimensions that were completely unexpected. The way he describes our cultural and personal engagement with animals got me thinking about how we look at architecture and why we look at it. What are we trying to see there? And is there a there there?

Architecture, like animals, multiplies through imagery and narrative to occupy a position in culture that makes it over-exposed. What Berger is talking about is how the proliferation of animal imagery actually indicates the dwindling of humanity’s engagement with real animals.

Interestingly enough, the flood of animal images corresponds to the development of the modern zoo. This is also when stuffed animals for children came into vogue and through further implication, Disney. I am going somewhere with this.

No surprise, that Berger posited we are looking at ourselves when we look at animals and that what we see in animals reveals much about how we view ourselves as a species and as individuals. Read more…