In 1859, game hunter, sheep farmer, and horse trainer Thomas Austin released twenty-four wild rabbits on his estate in Western Australia. In ten years, those rabbits had become several million, denuding a landscape that had never before faced the scourge of such determined herbivores. The Royal Commission formed to deal with “The Rabbit Question” came up with a solution called the No.1 Rabbit Proof Fence—2,023 miles of barbed wire right across Australia, sealing off the rabbit-infested western coast, and requiring constant patrolling. Over a century later, seeing a small portion of that fence replicated this month in Lisbon for the exhibition Utilitas Interrupta: An Infrastructural Index of Unfulfilled Ambitions, makes the urgent efforts of an entire continent seem pitifully ludicrous.

Read more…

By co-opting a time zone as its title, the multi-venued, collective event called Pacific Standard Time demonstrates its dynamic breadth and depth. Beginning with the post-war year 1945, it encompasses exhibits that span 35 years to 1980. The shows, exhibits, and events explore not simply art, but politics and social movements as expressed by activists, artists, community leaders, filmmakers, and musicians from different social, economic, and racial groups. The events are sited all over Southern California, from the  Watts Tower Arts Center in Downtown Los Angeles to San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art, East to San Gabriel Valley’ Pomona College’s Museum of Art and North to San Fernando Valley’s Cal State Northridge Art Galleries. The venues range from museums, art and film galleries to street festivals and music theatres.

The Lifted X (1965) image via pacificstandardtime.org

Yet viewing this merely as a series of aesthetic exhibitions trivializes its import and impact. Between 1945-1980, Los Angeles was the site for some of the most powerful, controversial, and historically significant social and political movements in the country, movements that reverberated far beyond its borders. Pacific Standard Time maps those dynamic political, social, and artistic expressions. From Black Power rallies and crackdowns by the police, to protests on Free Speech, nuclear power, and the rights of locally-born colored men and women, Los Angeles has been a location of profound change. Many of these exhibits document the movements that wrought those changes.

Read more…

When picturing Phillip Johnson’s Glass House, what comes to mind is the skeletal and translucent structure sitting among 47-acres of lush Connecticut landscape. The subtle color of the modernist building is so seamlessly integrated into nature that it recedes to the background and often goes unnoticed. This design decision was the work of master architectural colorists, Donald Kaufman and Taffy Dahl, who rendered the site-specific color palettes for Johnson’s architecture when it was built in 1949.

Hailing from a background in creating ceramics and paintings, Kaufman and Dahl work as a team, providing logical coloring as “frosting on the cake” to architectural masterpieces. In this film released by The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the two colorists are invited to share their experience of the Glass House, on-site with the public:

Read more…

Nineteen Rooms for September 11, by Jill Magi; part of InSite: Art+Communication

In our September issue, we closely consider the task of memorializing both Ground Zero, and the events of September 11, 2001. Philip Nobel wonders if the official memorial at ground zero sufficiently addresses the memory of the event, while a photo essay documents the DIY and ad hoc monuments around the city—raw expressions of New York’s grief.  But for the tenth anniversary of the attacks, institutions and individuals are finding their own ways to explore and come to terms with the memory of the traumatic event:

Ten Years After 9/11: Remembrance and Reconciliation Through Poetry, by Poets House; part of InSite: Art+Communication

InSite: Art+Commemoration
Through October 11, New York
The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council invited artistic and community response to a decade of recovery and change in Lower Manhattan. You can find their listing of performances, poetry, and ideas on their web site, which also acts as a repository of some of the artistic works. Read more…

Strangely enough, television has long remained the last frontier for design. Books, magazines, web sites, radio podcasts, and even films abound, but if you wanted to watch popular design-themed programming on TV, you were probably stuck with home makeovers. But design author and trendspotter Lisa Roberts has changed all that with “My Design Life.”

Read more…

On the one hand, New Urbanists say that cities should have minimal impact on their natural surroundings, while on the other hand world-class designs are defined by unconventional schemes that strive to minimize the use of non-renewables.  It seems, then, the twenty-first century building is a machine designed to rationalize its inputs while maintaining high function. But the agreement between the two groups ends there.

Should all architectural projects resort to minimalism out of ecological necessity? Or should those who create them strive for ever-inventive ways to trounce gravity? And if the interests of global commerce command the latter course, do these questions even matter?

Two current exhibits in New York showcase competing answers. The free, experimental public space that is the Guggenheim Lab on Manhattan’s Lower East Side (open through October 16th) personifies a democratic, minimalist approach.  Supertall! at the New York Skyscraper Museum (running through next January) posits that natural boundaries exist to be crushed.

Read more…

As the white winter sun poured into Gaspar Saldanha’s cloud-level window in Manhattan, the grandson of Paulo Werneck, artist and artisan of mosaic to Brazil’s most iconic architecture, the younger designer told the story of his famous relative. As he talked, I was soon diving like a Minoan mosaic swimmer into a warm azure and royal blue Paradise.

Paulo Werneck, the man credited with inventing Brazil’s Modernist mosaic aesthetic and re-introducing the art to his country, brought lightness and spatiality to architecture, as did Oscar Niemeyer who often collaborated with him. The two notably introduced playful and bright expressions into crowded, industrial urban environments, inventing new definitions for public buildings unseen before.  Werneck’s aesthetic was informed by both nature and technology: undulating underwater and air currents and clouds like you’d see in “The Jetsons” intersect the modern geometric art influences of Calder. Like Corbusier, Werneck was a painter first and so the language of impressionists, the pointillism of Seurat, the lyricism of Picasso, the pastels of Puvis de Chavannes, and the magic of Dubuffet were all channeled with a heavy dose of Brazil’s unique flavor to help define the country’s modernist movement from the 1940’s through the 1960’s. But the artistic sensibility of Latin  American  social movements are at play here too.

Unfortunately for most of us, the South American mosaic tradition of the Mayans and Pre-Columbian Aztec masks are excluded from our visual memory of mosaic. We see the 4,000 year history of the medium as a time-lapse mosaic of Euro-centric images, patterns and scenes from Egypt, Byzantium, Greece, Roman, Renaissance cathedrals, Islam and more recently from Gaudi to outsider artists, Raymond Eduardo and America’s Isaiah Zagar. Werneck’s revival of this tradition and the current revival of interest his work, may well help us to flesh out that history. Read more…

Le Corbusier designed a chaise longue, Mies van der Rohe had his Barcelona chair, and a bench by Frank Gehry was auctioned at an estimated $150,000 last year at Sotheby’s. Starchitects don’t just design buildings, and Zaha Hadid is no exception. An exhibition of her product designs, Zaha Hadid: Form in Motion, will open at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) on September 17th.

Lacoste Shoes in leather and rubber, designed in 2008 by Zaha Hadid.

Hadid is no stranger to solo exhibitions—two very large ones were mounted at New York’s Guggenheim museum and London’s Design Museum in 2006 and 2007 respectively. And some of the objects on display at the PMA have been part of those exhibitions—Hadid’s Mesa Table, an organic branched table designed for Vitra in 2007 was displayed at the Design Museum show. But this will probably be the first exhibition to solely focus on her product design work, and as such is an unusual recognition for a major architect.

Read more…

The exciting and educational exhibit, New Practices Sao Paulo, on view at the Center for Architecture, sheds light on the rising new wave of architects building the new Brazil, more specifically its sprawling urban epicenter Sao Paulo. The talented group includes Metro Arquitetos Associados, 23sul, ARKIZ, PAX.ARQ, Yuri Vital Architect, Vazio S.A Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Triptyque Arquitetura.

New Practices Sao Paulo is part of a biennial juried portfolio competition and exhibit organized by New Practices Committee of the AIA New York Chapter to promote new and emerging young architectural firms both in the US and abroad. Denise Hochbaum, Brazilian born member of the New Practices committee, was the liaison to Sao Paulo for the New Practices exchange.

A thread among the projects is a certain connection to some of the ideas that made Brazilian architecture so relevant in the past, like the design sensibility that makes seductive use of light, shape and space, and the inviting relationship of inside and out. Read more…

German Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, March 22, 1944
Pavel Petrovich Sokolov-Skalya
Multicolor brush stencil on newsprint (pieced), laid down on tan Korean lining paper,
1872 x 845 mm (click on images to enlarge).

While here in the United States, the Bureau of Graphics at the Office of War Information was cranking out World War II posters by the hundreds of thousands, its Soviet counterpart took a far more artisanal approach. The exhibition Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941-1945, on view at the Art Institute of Chicago from July 31, will present 157 posters created by the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) during World War II. All of these posters are between five and ten feet tall, and each of them was painstakingly painted by hand!

Read more…