Christoph Gielen has a unique perspective—literally—on the sprawl that has taken over so much of the American built landscape since the 1960s. As someone who has spent a lot of time in helicopters, looking down on the eerily perfect geometries of the nation’s suburbs, the German artist knows just how artificial, and unsustainable, these communities really are. With his Arcadia series, a portion of which we’re featuring here, Gielen hopes to spur viewers to think about the consequences of what they’re seeing (and, perhaps, where they live). “With these pictures, I am interested in exploring the intersection of art and environmental politics,” Gielen says. “I hope to trigger a reevaluation of our built environment and the methods of its development, to ask: What can be considered a viable, ecologically sound growth process?” Click here to launch a slide show of Gielen’s photographs.

Photos: Bureau for Open Culture

Drivers delayed by the red light on the corner of East Long and North Washington Streets, in downtown Columbus, Ohio, may hear more than just the hum of idling vehicles. If they crack their windows this winter, they are likely to catch a disembodied voice emanating from a nearby parking lot. “Parking lots,” the voice asserts. “It’s what we are. We should preserve them. They’re cultural property.”

This suggestion arrives courtesy of Audible Dwelling, a temporary installation of two houses designed by Learning Site, a collective made up of Denmark’s Rikke Luther and Sweden’s Cecilia Wendt. The capsule-like structures act like an oversize stereo, amplifying a 15-minute-long narrative—written by the British theorist Jaime Stapleton and read by the Berlin-based artist Cassandra Troyan—loudly enough for anyone in about a three-block radius to catch an excerpt.

To understand why the artists would care to broadcast commentary on parking lots to idling commuters, it helps to have some background on the city’s recent history. Read more…

Back in 2005, we wrote about the artist Janet Echelman’s remarkable textile sculpture installed over a small traffic island in Porto, Portugal. Now we’ve received photos of two more public sculptures by Echelman that again create “wind choreography” through colorful netted forms suspended in the air. After the jump, slide shows of her new work for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games and a civic park in Phoenix, Arizona. Read more…

This morning I dropped by Pike Loop, a temporary installation in downtown Manhattan designed by the Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler and fabricated by a large industrial robot that goes by the name R-O-B. Unfortunately for a robot lover like me, R-O-B had decamped the site weeks earlier, after having carefully stacked and epoxy-glued more than 7,000 bricks into a looping wall that runs the length of a small pedestrian island on Pike Street near Chinatown. (Scroll down to watch a time-lapse video of R-O-B at work.)

The resulting installation is not something that’s likely to stop passersby in their tracks—it is, after all, a brown brick wall—but it’s an appealing piece of urban art nonetheless. For me, it was all about city textures: Peering through the gaps in the brickwork, you see passing traffic, chain-link fencing, the garish signs on the storefronts across the street. An otherwise drab corner of the city suddenly seems a bit more colorful and strange.

Pike Loop was realized thanks to Storefront for Art and Architecture and the New York City Department of Transportation’s Urban Art Program. “It’s our first time bringing robot art to the streets of New York, certainly,” the NYCDOT’s commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, told me in a recent phone call. “It’s cutting-edge innovation—and, you know, it’s a bit of a surprise. So it brings that element of play and liveliness to the streetscape.”

Here’s that time-lapse video: Read more…

Three years ago, the Denver Art Museum (DAM) expanded into a titanium-clad addition by Daniel Libeskind, which, typical of the architect, features a dramatic series of jagged outcroppings and angular interiors. The new building has quickly become a symbol of the Mile High City, but a number of critics have balked at its asymmetrical galleries, arguing that they are poor spaces in which to display art. Now the DAM is confronting those criticisms with an exhibition, opening tomorrow, titled Embrace! The show’s curator, Christoph Heinrich—who was recently named the museum’s new director—invited 17 artists from around the world to, yes, embrace the museum’s unique design and use the architecture itself as a canvas for their work. Here’s a look at what several of the artists came up with. Read more…

In aerial photos, the Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park—also known simply as “100 Acres”—looks like a remote swath of unspoiled nature, with a forest and wetlands surrounding a pristine lake. In reality, you’re looking at the newest addition to the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The IMA created the park out of an old gravel pit and construction yard—and, next June, 100 Acres will finally be complete with the installation of eight site-specific works by an impressive roster of international artists. Read more…

Photo: Jeff Caldwell

Within hours of arriving in Detroit, nearly $14,000 worth of computers, iPods, cameras, and art supplies went missing from the backseat of a car. The robbery was surprisingly quick, executed in the few minutes the vehicle was left unguarded on the street. The two victims knew better than to leave valuables in plain site, yet they hadn’t quite expected the crime. Neither had they backed up their hard drives properly, so the loss was more than just monetary.

Welcome to Detroit. Read more…

What’s with the recent proliferation of ice-cream trucks transformed into mobile art projects? In 2006 there was Karaoke Ice, a roving partymobile-cum-performance piece stocked with “tinklepop” standards and popsicles (co-created by former Metropolis art director Nancy Nowacek). Then, earlier this summer, we read about the Cloud Project, a retro dessert van modified  by a pair of Royal College of Art students to launch ice-cream flavored clouds out of a giant spray gun. Now we’ve received news of Mister Artsee (left), a vintage ice-cream truck that’s being equipped by Atelier DNA with a Swiss Army Knife–like assortment of extensions, including a stage, video projectors, and a podium, to bring contemporary art to off-the-beaten-path locations in New York. (It debuts September 10 at the Half Gallery.) And I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re missing a few examples. (Debra Solomon’s Lucky Mi Fortune Cooking truck, which we wrote about last April, doesn’t count because it’s a snack truck—no frozen treats.) Please leave your theories about this interesting and potentially delicious trend in the comments form below.

Even before the arrival of the New Museum’s latest installation, I was uncomfortable taking the stairs between their third and fourth floors. It’s a notoriously narrow space, measuring 50 feet long and only 4 feet wide. Sandwiched between tall walls on the museum’s north side, the stairwell has barely enough room for two people to squeeze past each other. And despite the efforts of SANAA’s Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa to open up the space with high ceilings and light, standing at the base of the stairs and gazing up its slender passage  induces mild panic in a claustrophobe like me.

Now the artist Rigo 23 has taken that constriction to a new level with a site-specific piece built into the stairwell, called The Deeper They Bury Me, The Louder My Voice Becomes. Those are the words of Herman Wallace, one of the three black men dubbed the Angola 3 who were imprisoned in late 1960s Louisiana, and whose nearly 30 years of solitary confinement and hunger strikes have fixed an unflattering spotlight on the American penal system. Read more…

The artist, architect, and Edible Estates author Fritz Haeg—whom we profiled in the magazine last year—sent out an e-mail yesterday inviting New Yorkers to make themselves at home in a new, 8,000-square-foot “Dome Colony” set up at the X Initiative gallery in Chelsea. According to Haeg, you can take over one of the four tents—they range from 10 to 18 feet in diameter, and the bigger ones can accommodate up to 30 people—for pretty much any (legal) activity you can imagine: “Set up a clubhouse, a headquarters, a home away from home, a temporary studio, a living room, a lounge, use it as a place to host friends, stage events, make work, rehearse, organize an on-going series of meetings, or regular gatherings, performances….” Find more details about the project, and instructions for how to reserve your slice of this squatters’ paradise, on Haeg’s Web site.