February 8, 2013
Zagreb Free-Zone, 1991. © Estate of Lebbeus Woods
It’s a sad coincidence that a new show devoted to Lebbeus Woods will open at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art so soon after the architect’s death last fall. “He was working with us on the exhibition before he passed away in October,” recalls Joseph Becker, assistant curator of architecture and design at the museum. Yet the show’s strange timing somehow befits an architect who so often took disaster and destruction as an entry point.
“Lebbeus Woods, Architect,” which opens February 16 and runs through June 2, gathers 175 pieces from the past 35 years. The mostly small works on paper track Woods’s evolution from drawing fictional cities (like his “Centricity” series from the 1980s) to imagining politically free zones in divided Berlin or war-torn Zagreb. His later abstractions, from the late ’90s and 2000s, refocus on the concept of space itself. “For Woods it seems that the real basis of architecture is the idea of the question,” says Becker, who co-curated the show with Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, acting department head and assistant curator of architecture and design. “What if we lived by a different set of rules, ones that didn’t have, for example, governing agencies that dictate how buildings could stand up or not, or even gravity and physical limitations that dictate the specific kind of architecture we must live with?” Read more.
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January 4, 2013
D’ville 001 (2012)
Do you often find yourself in buildings that, well, make too much sense? The Belgian photographer Filip Dujardin has long been tantalizing us with his digital composites of fanciful houses with multiplying roofs, illogical cantilevers, castles consisting only of walls, and geometric prisons of stone with no visible way in or out. Often set in romantic landscapes loaded with old-world texture, Dujardin’s impossible architecture is at once pastoral and panic-inducing, like a fairy-tale world designed by a slightly malicious Escher.
On February 7, San Francisco’s Highlight Gallery will kick off its solo exhibition of Dujardin’s photos. Here’s a preview of the works in the show, which will be open through March 29. Check them out!
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June 22, 2012
Deck Two’s Global City is a towering mural that, as its name suggests, aims to encompass the world, or at least, its architecture. The work, entirely hand drawn and spanning full height studio walls and kitchen cabinets, collects architectural (and infrastructural) landmarks from around the globe and sets them in a vaguely urban configuration. The Eiffel Tower is a stone’s throw away from both Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia and the Empire State Building, while the Taj Mahal and the Colosseum occupy prime riverside real estate. In the distance stand a dense group of mostly contemporary Asian skyscrapers, with the Shanghai World Financial Center and the Oriental Pearl Tower to the south (left), the Jin Mao Tower and Tokyo Tower to the north (right). Industrial frigates pass under the Brooklyn and Tower bridges, abutting large winding, high-way bearing infrastructures.
The mural bears some conceptual resemblance to OMA’s “skyscraper city” in the UAE, which similarly amasses a (desert) metropolis entirely composed of the last decade’s worth of skyscraper designs, both unbuilt and built alike, and in so doing, illustrates the fatuous and doomed “race to the top” and the very ugly, even destructive, work it engenders. Deck Two’s city isn’t as pointedly critical, nor is it supposed to be. It’s more a fun formal exercise, something to liven up a depressing office kitchen and offer a visual respite from the backlit laptop screen.
Global City making of from Thomas Dartigues on Vimeo.
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