As many of you know, Chinese artist, dissident, funny guy Ai Weiwei is also a skilled architect. Aside from his famous collaboration with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron for the design of the Bird’s Nest at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games (and later, the 2012 Serpentine Pavilion), Ai has worked with Basel-based HHF Architects on a series of projects, including this country home in upstate New York. The Tsai Residence, and presumably its accompanying Y-shaped, corten-clad guesthouse, have been put up on the market. Interested? If you are, you have to be prepared to lay down some serious coinage. Continue.

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Building: Ancient Tree

Architect: Christ & Gantenbein AG

Location: Jinha, China

Why We Liked This:

Concrete trees? Yes, please! This pavilion in Jinhau—part of a park consisting of 17 different follies and curated by Ai Weiwei—abstracts the figure of a tree, translating the branches and flora into flat, curvilinear (“organic”) concrete panels. These panels spring from a concrete “trunk” and branch out radially in a circular form. They are spaced several feet apart so as to create pockets of space in which to take shelter or socialize. See more of this project in the Architizer database here.

You think you’ve got a better project? Submit it for an Architizer A+ Award!

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Bet you never thought Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei could dance! The 55-year-old artist has posted a rendition of South Korean rapper Psy’s “Gangnam Style” on Youtube, showing that he, too, is fan of the K-pop sensation. Of course, the controversial artist couldn’t help injecting his own bit of political commentary — the video shows Weiwei being handcuffed to a fellow dancer. Watch it below!

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Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei have released plans for their collaborative design for the 2012 Serpentine Pavilion. The project, which will be featured in the London 2012 Festival to close this summer’s Olympic Games, recreates the same creative  partnership that produced the Bird’s Nest for the Beijing Olympics four years ago. The team’s surprisingly offering is a conceptual archaeological excavation of the ground, which has seen the erection and dismantling of works by the luminaries such as Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, Oscar Niemeyer, and SANAA.

The structure will dig down five feet down into the site to reveal the “traces” left by pavilions past. In doing so, it will make physical, if only temporarily, the archive through which the previous 11  projects are collected and “preserved”. The fabricated landscape, which will be clad with cork (“a natural material with wonderful haptic and olfactory qualities with the versatility to be carved, cut, shaped and formed”), transforms the ghostly footprints of these predecessors into a veritable topography, marked by grooves, angled voids, and tiered, extruded surfaces to allow for seating. A thin, reflective roof coated in a film with water is suspended overhead 1.4 meters (4.5 feet) above the subterranean site, supported by 12 columns each of which has been shaped by the convergence of the “convoluted lines” that comprise the resultant “sewing pattern” form.

The pavilion will also collect London rainwater and funnel it into a waterhole, the deepest point of the “site”, to engage the “otherwise invisible aspect of reality in the park”– the water beneath the ground–and, thus, further accentuating the project’s time-capsule like quality. The methodology employed by the pseudo-archaeologists is reminiscent of Peter Eisenman and Jacques Derrida’s collaborative (and terrible) entry for the 1982 Parc de la Villette competition in Paris, which similarly constructs an affected “excavated” site of so-called traces and fragments to establish a history of place.

In a statement, the designers note how the pavilion’s form is “a serendipitous gift”, one that will offer a “perfect place to sit, stand, lie down or just look and be amazed.” Or even dance, it seems, as the floating roof can be drained to be used as an elevated platform for parties. The team hope that the project’s versatility and its programmatic variance will prove “the ideal environment for continuing to do what visitors have been doing in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilions over the past eleven years – and a discovery for the many new visitors anticipated for the London 2012 Olympic Games.”

[via Bustler]

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Ai Weiwei having a feast with Herzog & de Meuron

In London today, the Serpentine Gallery announced that Herzog & de Meuron and Chinese artist Ai Weiwei will reunite four years after designing Beijing National Stadium to design the 2012 Serpentine Pavilion. The annual commission has become a major event in the art and architecture community, with a short yet impressive heritage including designs by Oscar Niemeyer, Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, and Zaha Hadid.

The 2006 Serpentine Gallery designed by Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond

The decision to call upon the team behind the iconic Olympic Bird’s Nest is “tremendously exciting,” Julia Peyton-Jones, director of the Serpentine, tells the Guardian. “What is so fantastic,” she adds, “is that it is this extraordinary link of the two games, a Beijing-London axis… it is a continuation of a conversation that began in Beijing to great effect, and [Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron and Ai Weiwei] have conceived something really remarkable for our lawn.”

Ai Weiwei is perhaps most recognized these days not for his work but for his flighty rapport with the Chinese government. Last April, the outspoken artist was arrested and held without charge by authorities for almost three months, allegedly for breaching tax laws. As the Guardian reports, Ai has been working with the Swiss architects over Skype, and whether or not he will be able to leave China by the time the pavilion is up in June remains to be seen.

Currently, the team has revealed a few details concerning their plan for the 12^th Serpentine Pavilion, including a low platform roof (barely 5 feet off the ground), 12 symbolic columns, and a means to collect rainwater and reflect the sky. In a joint statement, Herzog, de Meuron and Ai promised the pavilion would be “the perfect place to sit, stand, lie down, or just look and be amazed.”

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Photo by flickr user Gheedon

Yesterday, Newsweek published a despairing essay by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, just over two months since his release from detention, in which he sums up his frustrations with the current Chinese seat of power at Beijing, calling China’s capital “a nightmare.” In the essay, Ai relates the ethically dubious nature of the powers at be with the metonymous oppressiveness of the city’s spaces and corridors–and the psychological torment yielded therein. Click for more.

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Art / Architecture at the Kunsthaus in Bregenz, Austria is a solo show exhibiting the architectural work of Ai Weiwei. As is well known, the artist/designer stumbled upon architecture in earnest after designing and building his Beijing home and studios in a record 60 days. He has since been involved in 60 architectural projects, including, most famously, his role as artistic consultant to Herzog & de Meuron and the design for the Beijing National Stadium (aka the Bird’s Nest) which pre-dates his built work, his collaborations with lesser known firms such as HHF Architects, and his masterplans and curatorial work for the ORDOS 100 project and the Jinhua Architecture Park. Working models, drawings, photographs, and video documentation of these projects and more are distributed across three stories of Peter Zumthor’s celebrated building, culminating at the top with the abstract sculpture Moon Chest (2008). Read more.

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Architizer alumnus Kelsey Keith covered the Barbizon Hotel, now up for landmark status, over at Curbed. The hotel was once a fancy dormitory for wealthy New York career girls, whose worried parents installed them in the pink-marbles girl palace. Also, Sylvia Plath wrote about it. [via Curbed]

A report on the nearly-complete 9/11 memorial, which will open on the 10th anniversary of the attacks this September, details the design process and contentious history fo the project. [via Gotham Gazette]

With tomorrow’s release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows: Part 2, Potter Mania has officially taken hold. You saw how we’ve been under its spell of late. But this is OOC: a huge crop circle/maze bearing a double portrait of the Boy-Who-Lived. [via Gizmodo]

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has accepted a position at Berlin University of the Arts. When he’ll be able to make the trip there is uncertain. The artist is currently barred from international travel and faces$2 million suit in tax fines, though he’s recently been granted a hearing to dispute the claims. [via UnBiege]

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Photo: Courtesy of Three Shadows Photography Art Centre and Chambers Fine Arts.

The Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei was released from a secret prison last week, after being held for eighty-one days. Since his arrest in April, the artist’s story has been circulated all around the western world, so it is widely known that Ai lived in New York for nearly a decade. A new exhibition at the Asia Society Museum is showing 227 of the nearly 10,000 photos taken by Ai from 1983-1993 which document his time spent trying to break into the New York art scene.

Ai’s photos depict a different New York, one pulsating with the turbulent activism of the period, when AIDS swept through the city and individual freedoms were being tested. Most shocking are his photos of riots, especially the conflict between police and civilians escalating in what has been called the Battle of Tompkins Square Park, which in their gritty aggressiveness resemble the ’68 riots or, more recently, those sparked in Parisian suburbs in 2005.

Click through for more on Ai Weiwei’s New York photographs.

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Chenggong, one of China’s many ghost cities. All images from Google Earth.

China is experiencing the most massive urbanization in the history of the world, what, with a projected railroad spanning the entire country, 20 new cities in as many years, a new skyscraper every five days for the next three years, 64 million homes built annually, the world’s largest radio signal collector—just to list a few statistics. The more China builds, the higher its GDP. And continue building it will.

Click through for more, including new images of China’s Ghost Cities.

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