Last month, Metropolis editor-in-chief Susan Szenasy noted the extraordinary attention that Auburn University’s legendary Rural Studio has received, including the PBS documentary, Citizen Architect. Now, Mix ‘n’ Match, a photography exhibition that opens this week in downtown New York, shows that inventive architecture was not all that came out of that intensely creative place.

At the same time that the PBS documentary was being made, photographer Cynthia Connolly was at the Rural Studio, processing her photographs in a dark room that she built for herself in a barn. 40 of those photographs will now be displayed at The Quality Mending Co., where they will be re-arranged by a new guest curator every two weeks, along with the other objects in the store. The images are of the natural landscape and built environment of the Alabama Black Belt – the context within which the Rural Studio was conceived.  Its founder Samuel Mockbee encouraged his students to “Proceed and Be Bold,” to go forth into the communities around the Studio, and build for them.  Connolly’s photographs of signs, buildings, barns and trees, are an intimate examination of precisely those communities, presented in an innovative and bold format that Mockbee might well have enjoyed, and showing us another side of that utopian architectural experiment.

More details of the exhibition on our online events listings.

Oil Field #13, Taft, California, Edward Burtynsky

In last week’s Q&A with Susan Szenasy, the organizers of the CoolClimate Art Contest spoke of the role of art in raising awareness about ecological issues. In a similar vein, Ecoaesthetic: The Tragedy of Beauty is an art exhibit that hopes to do for sustainability what war photography does for the cause of world peace: shock us into caring. On view at the Exit Art gallery, in New York, until August 25th, the exhibit brings together the work of nine photographers whose viewfinders have discovered the disturbing beauty of ecological disasters. The images are haunting in a way that is surprisingly reminiscent of pictures of children in war zones. There is the same sense of innocence lost, bringing on an urge to do something.

Ecoaesthetic is the first show organized as part of an art initiative called Social Environmental Aesthetics (SEA).  Conceived by artist Papo Colo, the SEA hopes to build a permanent archive of art that addresses social and environmental issues, and will organize related exhibitions, lectures, and public events at Exit Art gallery.

Here is a little taste of the images on view at Ecoaesthetic: Read more…

Ruediger Otte and Roman Lindebaum’s Greenwich Tea Time table. Image: courtesy the designers

The notion of a single designer creating an object that is finished when it rolls off the assembly line is as antiquated as Ford’s Model T. Increasingly, the decision-making power is being put in the hands of consumers, who are being asked to vote for potential product releases, customize their new purchases, and even design their own wares through open-source Web applications. It’s a broad-reaching and often grassroots movement in which individuals, from laymen to pros, are participating in the creation or modification of mass-produced objects, blurring the line between the role of designer and consumer. In his first curatorial effort, the industrial designer Yves Béhar—the founder of fuseproject, whose products include the $100 XO laptop, a jewel-like Bluetooth headset, and, most recently, hip glasses for needy Mexican children—explores these developments for an exhibition called TechnoCRAFT, opening at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for Contemporary Art on July 10. Recently, Behar spoke with me about this 21st-century arts-and-crafts movement and what it means for the future of design and the assembly line.

How do you define “techno-craft?”

It’s all these new ways in which people are bringing the notion of craft into design, the notion of self-made, self-crafted, self-developed products and software. The big phenomenon that the show is trying to explain and walk visitors through is this notion that while a lot of people said craft was disappearing, actually there’s a new type of craft, a new type of involvement of the human and the hand in the mass-production process. Read more…

A rendering from PALO Arquitectura Urbana’s proposal for La Boca, a working-class neighborhood in Buenos Aires

The Institute of Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) celebrates its 25th anniversary this year with an ambitious new exhibition at the Center for Architecture, in New York. A year in the making, Our Cities, Ourselves presents positive, sustainable urban visions for ten cities around the world. Developed in close collaboration with local architects and policy makers, the visions are the true successors-in-spirit of such urbanist dreams of yesteryear as Futurama, but with one big difference—the automobile is conspicuously absent. Read more…

In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.

Yolande Daniels’s Tea Cozy. All photos: Will Kirk

New York has P.S. 1’s courtyard installation; Baltimore has Sculpture at Evergreen. Every two years, the 26 acres surrounding the historic Evergreen Museum & Library transforms into a lab for artists. This year, equal presence was given to installations by architects, including New York’s Matter Practice and Yolande Daniels, the founding design principal of studio SUMO.

Sculpture at Evergreen’s curators—the University of Maryland architecture professor Ronit Eisenbach and the artist and curator Jennie Fleming—directed the ten individuals and teams to develop work responding to the site, a Gilded Age house with Italianate gardens owned by Johns Hopkins University. For architects, this kind of impermanent installation can become an extension of the studio, offering an opportunity to play with materials and processes in a fast and temporary setting. “It allows them to experiment,” Eisenbach says, “and take what they learned back to their practice.” Read more…

We first wrote about the Helsinki-based design firm Company back in 2008, shortly after its founders, Johan Olin and Aamu Song, debuted their Top Secrets of Finland collection. The idea there was to commission traditional Finnish manufacturers to produce small runs of everyday products unique to the region. Now Company has expanded the line for the exhibition Secrets of Central Finland, on display at the Craft Museum of Finland until September 5. Check out more images of Olin and Song’s latest Finnish design finds after the jump. Read more…

Today was the first day of Figment NYC, a weekend-long festival on Governors Island with a focus on interactive, participatory art. Along with dozens of ephemeral artworks, the event is hosting a few semi-permanent installations, including a mini-golf course, a sculpture garden, and the winner of this year’s City of Dreams Pavilion Competition. The latter is a low-tech structure made of plastic milk cartons sandwiched between a CNC-milled plywood skeleton, with a lush interior lining of of Liriope plants. Called the Living Pavilion, it’s the work of the New York architects Behrang Behin and Ann Ha (although they’re quick to point out that the project was realized thanks to the help of about 70 volunteers, most of them students or underemployed architects.) As for the idea to put the greenery inside the structure, rather than on the roof, Behin says it was “an old architect’s trick—take what you have and turn it upside down.” Or inside out, as the case may be. The Living Pavilion will be on display on New York’s Governor’s Island until October 3; click here for the ferry schedule.

.

The National Design Triennial is a mammoth show, with more than 134 projects from 44 countries trying to answer that most existential of all design questions, “Why Design Now?” Making sense of it all can be a little daunting; luckily for us, the reviews have started coming in. Here’s our shortlist of the most thought-provoking write-ups so far:
—

The Way We Design Now
“One always hears talk about the need to not reinvent the wheel; well, the design community — some of it, anyway — has realized the need to stop reinventing the chair.” Alison Arieff, writing for her Opinionator blog at the Times, is clearly relieved. She is glad that people are finally asking “If not objects, what?” and moving away from plastics and the cult of star designers.

—

“Dazzled by some of the answers, dazed by others.”
Dominique Browning at Design Observer finds the show a little confusing: “This is too much ground to cover; apples and oranges are mixed up along the way, so that the viewer is befuddled.” The catalog is helpful, and the show is “beautifully presented.” Her key grouse? Some of the solutions lack the urgency of the Triennial’s question. “At times I didn’t feel the curators were taking their own intentions seriously enough.”

— Read more…

Design was in the air this month, and we took in great heaving gasps of it as we ran from one event to another (and from one blog to another). New work was released, exhibitions were exhibited, and awards were awarded. For those who feel like the month passed them by, here’s our shortlist from May’s cornucopia of design news:

—

A Pavilion Fiasco at the World Expo

What could possibly go wrong with an event that combines Shanghai and showiness? The pavilions. The U.S. pavilion has been called “a sorry spectacle,” and don’t even get us started on the terrifying animated baby mannequin in front of the Spanish pavilion. The only point of agreement, it seems, was the general nostalgia for the great Expo designers of yore.

—

Honored by the AIA

Early this month, the American Institute of Architects announced the 2010 AIA/HUD Secretary’s Awards and the 2010 AIA Housing Awards. But the ones to really look out for are the seven young firms that won the New Practices New York awards: EASTON+COMBS, Archipelagos, Leong Leong, Manifold SOFTlab, SO-IL, and Tacklebox. Their prize-winning work will be on view at New York’s Center for Architecture from July 15.

—

The Pritzker Ceremony and the RIBA Awards

A galaxy of starchitects and other glitterati descended on New York’s Ellis Island for the Pritzker Prize ceremony, where the Japanese firm SANAA received architecture’s biggest prize. Meanwhile, 101 buildings received the architectural excellence award of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).

—

Frank Gehry Stirs Up a LEED Controversy

Frank Gehry’s cavalier comments on the LEED ratings system raised a few hackles. While the focus of the discussion shifted from Gehry to the legitimacy of the ratings themselves, New York’s Bank of America tower was awarded LEED Platinum, making it the greenest skyscraper in town.

Read more…

Sunday night saw a cluster of parties in the Meatpacking District, including the opening of Dune’s Enamored exhibition, with new designs by Harry Allen, Karim Rashid, Claesson Koivisto Rune, and others.

Richard Shemtov is Dune’s president and one of its designers—he created the new Deluxe lounge and sofa. The design was inspired, in part, by Japanese anime, but Shemtov said that the result is also “American in a way—very fat and bulbous.” Read more…