January 13, 2012
As we have previously reported, KCET in Los Angeles has been up to some seriously awesome (as in serious subject matter AND ALSO awesome) stuff for their Departures series about L.A.’s Highland Park neighborhood.
They have struck again by imagining what a 1905 mixtape from that ‘hood would sound like. Can we get some Spanish and Native American folk song beats, por favor?
El Alisal (via KCET).
As it turns out, many of these turn-of-the-last-century jams would have been recorded at El Alisal, which was constructed between 1898-1910 by journalist and Native Americans rights advocate Charles Fletcher Lummis, who walked across the continent from the east coast (or Ohio, depending on who you ask) to Los Angeles, where he became the City Librarian. Adorable!
Today El Alisal is, quite fittingly, the headquarters of the Southern California Historical Society, which is open to the public on weekends. Fieldtrip!
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November 21, 2011
Conversations in Context, the ongoing series of Philip Johnson Glass House tours led by critics and theorists from the architecture world, could not be more precisely named. In a rare night tour last week, historian Barry Bergdoll (MoMA’s Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design) led the season’s final conversation on the property, emphasizing the architecture as result of conversation with other disciplines, with history, with the site, and of course, with the work of other architects.
Architects tend to present their work as isolated from context, contemporaries, and history. In contrast, Johnson described his work as unapologetically derivative. Borrowing both specific gestural elements and broader conceptual ideas from myriad projects, he pioneered the consolidation of diverse and contradictory sources, arriving at a richer, more complex and sometimes even humorous architecture. His acute self-awareness, along with an encyclopedic knowledge of design history, embed Johnson’s work with layer after layer of references, jokes, and commentary.
Keep reading.
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October 7, 2011
It’s October, and Open House New York is here again! Every year, OHNY organizes one jam-packed weekend dedicated to educating and inspiring the public firsthand with the marvels of local architecture, engineering, planning and design. This year, on October 16-17, the citywide cultural event is bringing another round of sites, talks and tours, opening the doors to hundreds of the most architecturally significant places and spaces across the five boroughs. This is your chance to explore and experience New York City’s built environment like never before. Click for a look at some of our picks for OHNY events!
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October 5, 2011
All images (c) Gregory Hurcomb.
A hushed, collective wow emanates from the clusters of visitors exiting from the elevator into the observation tower of the de Young museum. I can’t see anything wrong in their exclamations, nor the surrounding vista: three hundred and sixty degrees of San Francisco, from 144 feet up. If there’s a more picturesque city in this country, please let me know. It’s an 80° indian summer day, but up here, even fog would be picturesque.
From the observation deck you get all the San Francisco hits: Sutro tower (whether you like it or not, I quite like it), a three-pronged 981 foot transmission tower rising into the heavens. The Transamerica pyramid, far downtown. The rusty upper edges of the Golden Gate Bridge. Right below us, Renzo Piano’s Academy of Sciences building. We’re surrounded by Golden Gate Park, which is 20% larger than New York City’s Central Park (not that I’m measuring). An added bonus: The observation deck is free to the public, accessed along the side of the museum itself.
On the way to the elevator, there’s an amazing permanent installation of Ruth Asawa’s wire sculptures. If you don’t know her work, you should – breathtaking, scintillating, silent creatures on the brink of life:
Read on.
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September 28, 2011
If you’ve been reading my dispatches from Cersaie (here and here) this week, then you already know that it’s the biggest, most awesome ceramic tile show ever realized. I wanted to show you some of the show’s highlights that got me super-psyched about the latest in tile design! But first, the tile dancer! Courtesy of Antolini Tile, who apparently know what sells (which is, uh, ladies painted in snakeskin tile?).
Click through.
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September 27, 2011
Ah, Italy…
You know the cliches. Espresso, August off, the pasta, the rolling hills, the… modernist Finnish architecture!? Yes, Bologna has a few tricks up its sleeve. Though I was there for Cersaie, the huge tile show that brings together over a thousand exhibitors, I managed to slip away for a day to see the sites and investigate what this city had to offer – including one of Alvar Aalto’s masterworks. Read on!
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September 9, 2011
The Berkeley Art Museum, in all its raw concrete beautiful brutalismo. Designed by Mario Ciampi in the late 60’s, this was my first visit to this space, nestled in the hills of The University of California at Berkeley’s campus. The bunker lured me in through the pouring rain. I was pleasantly surprised by the jagged angularity and the off-kilter spiral ramps that wind up, up, up – in apparent homage to Wright’s Guggenheim.
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September 2, 2011
From Rafael de Cárdenas’ Love Me or Leave Me. Image (c) Barneys New York.
In the age of online shopping, window dressing is something of a lost art – one that Barney’s, the storied Manhattan clothier, is now set on reviving. Barneys commissioned a refreshingly exotic series of window displays this season, showcasing collaborations between personalities in fashion, artistry, architecture and design. The windows bring together such disparate names as designer and architect Rafael de Cárdenas, contemporary artist Joe Grillo, architects Lee Mindel and Peter Shelton, and interior designer Benjamin Noriega-Ortiz.
“Roomscapes of the Imagination: Barney’s New York Own ‘Designer Showcase’” was curated by Barneys New York Creative Director Dennis Freedman. In a recent interview, Freedman explains why he specifically sought out these designers, saying, “these are people who will be able to stretch the limits of what we might already see in the window. What I’m hoping to do in the future is have a dialogue between fashion and [other disciplines such as] art, design, music and architecture.”
What does it mean to rethink the storefront typology in 2011? Let’s take a look.
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September 1, 2011
Ishita Sharma is a Dallas-based artist and architect who runs Studio ISH. All photos are (c) Studio ISH.
As a Travelling Fellow in Tokyo (facilitated by the Dallas Center for Architecture) in 2010, I set out to understand the world’s largest megalopolis not just an aggregation of built form, but as an evolving culture that inhabits built form, embedded in urban context. My investigations yielded glimpses into the impacts of global assimilation on the ordinary, mundane spaces of habitation. The cyclical city never failed to surprise, and I relished the opportunity to examine not its ‘google‐able’ monuments, but the un‐documented, happenstance, very-much-alive city that is often lost to its flashier metropolitan counterparts.
These images show my walk through the city, chasing nostalgia as it fades through some of Tokyo’s fast evolving ku’s, or districts. Keep reading.
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