Today was the first of MoMA’s P.S.1 warm-up sessions for the summer. Work A.C’s winning entry, P.F.1 has, in a way, restored my faith in the competition. After a few years of The installation is in my view, one of the smartest and best ever to be assembled in the museum’s garden. Not only is it very current as an idea (urban farms), it is simple, utilizes common materials in a different way, it is cheaply made and absolutely cool. It was definitely refreshing to see.
We made it downtown to the Phillips de Pury & Company Gallery to take a look at Hani Rashid’s Atmospherics exhibition.
By far the best pieces were the the chandelier, the jewelry boxes and the RP’d vases. The smaller scale pieces just seem to have been figured out a bit better than the larger scale ones.
The New Yorker has an interesting article on Buckminster Fuller’s vision and (failed) projects, soon to be on display at The Whitney Museum of Art here in NYC. It poses the question of WHAT is it exactly that is relevant -yet so hard to pin down- of Fuller’s trajectory.
Today was the opening for Cooper Union’s end of year show. I got to walk around the architecture and art shows and saw a lot of beautiful models, some great drawings, and a few fun/smart pieces of art.
The one above was one of my favorites: a hand crank break dancer + MC Hammer zoetrope. Can’t beat it.
See images of some interesting projects on view after the jump.
The show at The Brooklyn Museum is absolutely amazing. The exhibit, which is separated in two floors, is very extensive and the quality of the paintings/sculptures/videos etc is just incredible.
As usual, I’ll rant about the museum’s ‘tight-assness’ about taking pictures inside -does Murukami care?…- these guys were truly gestapo style, yelling and running towards people with cameras to get them to stop. That’s what they’re being paid for I guess, but it’s an idiotic policy nonetheless. Makes me wonder if Gagosian has anything to do with it.
Don’t miss the transformer girl in the first level (hard to miss, it takes the main central space) , the short clips in the lower level (anyone knows the name of the little fella?) and the large canvas-tiny DOB blue painting.
View some lousy pics after the jump
Also, don’t miss this circus video of the opening from the NYT…
Gabe and I have been working on an animatic to enter the contest being held by Radiohead, for user created videos for one of their songs.
We’ll be posting the clip into the site for people to go check it out and vote. Here is one of the stills.
Paul Goldberger has written an interesting article / review in The New Yorker on Foster’s Terminal 5 at Heathrow, and how the idea of the airport was rethought for this specific project. Then, on Rogers’ Terminal 3 in Madrid and how, with smart strategies, the experience of the infinite corridor can be a pleasing one.
Last night, after an awesome lecture by Jose Oubrerie on the completion of The Church of Saint Pierre, the student work show GAUD++ curated by the independent study group opened in the first level gallery at Pratt.
From left to right:
Sean Dugan, Mike Szivos, Troy Zezula, Jason Mcgee, Andrew Seskunas and Robert Beach.
View some low quality pics after the jump, but check out better pics from the opening in their blog here.
Last Friday was the opening of United Bottle, a project by INSTANT ARCHITECTS, Dirk Hebel & Jörg Stollmann with Tobias Klauser at the Van Alen Institute. A very smart and interesting solution to the issue of waste.
Read about the project at the Van Alen’s site here.
SOFTlab’s Mike Szivos has been leading an independent study group at Pratt’s GAUD. The group ( Jason Mcgee, Troy Zezula, Robert Beach, Sean Duggan, Andrew Seskunas + Mike Szivos) are curating this semester’s show of work produced at the school. They’ve been working on a parametric system for the manufacturing of the system of podiums which will hold the models. There is a perspectival organizational logic to the grouping of the models. The boards have their own organizational principle based on 3 different parameters too.
The show opens on Thursday at Pratt.
Visit the independent study’s blog at Gaud++, where they’ve documented the entire process very methodically. Pretty fantastic, and quite an amount of work.
“Free to roam on green pastures for health, happiness and recreation, with perminant (permanent?) access to over 60 free on-site classes and activities, ranging from yoga to guitar lessons… Computer literate”
In their own words: “A response to the similarities between many office working conditions and battery farmed hens.”
Brilliant.
View more of Usdesignstudio here. Go to Free-range Workers
I just came across this project created at the Bezalel academy for arts and crafts, for the course “Food for Thought” in the jewelry department. This coffee grinder operates according to the users heart-beat rate and is intended as a critique to consumerism (isn’t consumerism linked directly to the fetishization of objects?). In their own words: “To use this object, you must caress it and hug it, much like as a baby is held, the user inevitably bonds with it, emotionally.”
Although the object is currently a one off, it could potentially become a mass produced product. Ultimately, it is a poetic approach to an everyday object/task, and makes us [re]think about the way we relate with objects. Whether I would want to bond with my coffee grinder or not, well, that’s a different story.
Visit Nastypixel to read more about the project. Check out some of their other projects while you’re there, pretty interesting stuff.
Just recently I came across Troika’s ‘Cloud’, an installation for British Airlines’ Terminal 5 in London’s Heathrow Airport . It uses a combination of digital input and analog double-sided disks (flip dots) to animate the skin of the sculpture. Absolutely fantastic.
SOFTlab has just been featured in the latest issue of Stiletto Magazine, a high end fashion / culture quarterly French magazine. We met Laurence Benaim, the founder and Director of the Publication / Chief Editor of Stiletto at our studio back in November 07.
I’ll translate the article later on and post it here.
I made it earlier today to the MoMA preview of Design and the Elastic Mind. I couldn’t really take enough time to look around, but it is definitely an impressive selection of interesting work..
I’ll post something more complete once I make it back to the museum and actually get to spend some time in the exhibition. But for now, here are some low quality phone pics for now.
I made it today to the Deitch Projects to see how the Sagmeister “banana wall text” was holding up. The show, although small, is pretty awesome. The banana wall text is gone, they’ve all ripened so all you’ll see an almost homogeneous color. The smell of the entire place reminds me of my house in Colombia: ripening bananas in the kitchen. It’s a nice cozy feeling.
His prints are fantastic -check out the small prints of salt-like text on the smaller room- and the interactive spider web.
