Whoever is curating LEGO’s Architecture series has our approval. The legendary toymaker has already pixelized some fantastic, if obvious, buildings, from the Villa Savoye to the Farnsworth House and, of course, Fallingwater. Now, LEGO has announced the next classic to be immortalized in the plastic colored bricks. Frank Lloyd Wright’s tragically demolished Imperial Hotel will be the first of the LEGO “Architect” sets to be released in 2013, setting the bar high for the coming toy year. Continue.

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Dacha’s Origami, an all-white summer house outside Russia, includes everything, from a teeter-totter to a sunken bathing area. Well, almost everything. It appears to have no windows or doors. The home was designed by Peter Kostelov as part of the Russian TV program Dachniy Otvet, in which clients and designers meet only once to exchange ideas. Kostelov’s clients wanted a structure that could accommodate their active lifestyles, giving the architect only one real limitation: no basketball courts! Read more.

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Surprise! LEGO has unveiled the next in their highly bloggable Architecture toy series, Le Corbusier’s definitive modernist house and monument, the Villa Savoye. The set will make its debut in stores and online on Sept. 1, where it will retail for a steep $69.99. From the looks of it, the model is a fairly faithful copy of the canonical design, though it’s unclear whether the interiors will be articulated, via bumpy recreations of the original spiral staircase and ceremonial ramp that figured greatly in Le Corbusier’s promenade architecturale. The roof pavilions are there, appropriately curvilinear, and the ribbon windows accurately proportioned. The real test is whether or not the U-shaped driveway can accommodate a turning LEGO toy car (aha!). With the release of the LEGO Villa Savoye, Corbu will finally join the ranks of Mies and Wright, each of whom have long been honored with sets–three in Wright’s case–of their own.

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Image courtesy of the Autumn/Winter 2012 collection, Alfred Dunhill LTD.

Rising in prominence over the past decade, the Tanzania-born David Adjaye, who moved to Britain as a child, is known for designing such works as the Nobel Peace Centre (2005) in Oslo and The National Museum of African American History and Culture, slated in open in 2015 in Washington, D.C. That’s just the start of it: He exhibited at the 2005 Venice Biennale in collaboration with artist Olafur Eliasson, was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize for his work on the Whitechapel Idea Store in 2006, and received the title of OBE (Order of the British Empire) from the Queen in 2007 for his service to British architecture. Moreover, he’s held a visiting professor post at both Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Did we mention that David Adjaye also happens to be a stylishly handsome chap with an accent that is completely swoon-worthy?  Clearly we aren’t the only ones who feel this way, as Adjaye’s latest endeavor has him venturing into the world of fashion modeling. He’s one of the faces of the 2012 autumn/winter collection for the upmarket men’s apparel company, Alfred Dunhill. Read More.

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“Type City by Hong Seon Jang; All photos: David B. Smith Gallery

Describing the (explicitly Western) architectural production of the last five hundred years, Mario Carpo writes how this output of forms, spaces, and bodies of knowledge was resolutely and irreversibly conditioned by the “Gutenberg Galaxy”, that is, the invention of the printing press and the index of mechanical matrices it inhered. The resultant “typographic architecture”, the buildings and urban forms that we live with to this day, corresponds in content to a print culture that is rapidly passing into extinction, threatening to bring down with it the Western architectural cannon it has sustained for so long a time. According to Carpo’s premonitory argument, this eventuality will cause a social rift so decisive to assure the virtual destruction of these building traditions, despite the desperate attempts of preservationists and reformists alike.

The invocation of Carpo’s work is to contextualize this installation by Korean artist Hong Seon Jang, who has fashioned an entire micro metropolis out of decommissioned movable type. Where the aforementioned argument logically relates the disappearance of familiar Western architectural forms with the removal of its substructure, Jang’s “Type City” does the opposite. Using lead type salvaged from an antiquated technology–an old printing press–the artist builds an entirely new, if not spatially novel urban network of towers, housing, and infrastructure. Jang’s choice of material is anything but unintentional, loaded with historical and material implications that speak to our collective nascent post-print mentality that promises to reenvision our homes, landscapes, and cities.

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Historian Peter Blake referred to the furniture projects of modern architects–the “master builders” as well as their noble subjects–as excellent “guinea pigs” on which to test the same functional, aesthetic, and technical concepts that would inform the design of a building (a chair-to-skyscraper in Blake’s example), only “without going to any great [fiscal] expense.” Blake’s keen pragmatism outlines a heuristic practice of architecture, in which inchoate spatial thinking and sensitivity are honed through all manner of engagement or experimentation with the material world and from which can be extrapolated the concentrated “interaction” of these diverse, but very real factors. Where the modernists’ bent steel chairs and modular tables would prove analogical models to their innovative architectural systems, Atelier Takagi’s Range Life series reverses this relationship, literally condensing architecture into functional pieces of furniture.

The first in the series of “architecture-bites” features an extensive palette of materials, from Corian surfaces and blackened steel trusses to an American ash “floor” balanced on miniature I-beams. A small concrete column  holds up the glass tabletop, while simultaneously forming the flow of the “interior” space, in which books, knickknacks, and other objects can be stored. According to Atelier Takagi, the miniature structures are “monumental when viewed from a child’s vantage point and fond memories of playing under coffee tables.”

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“Construction Overhead” by Sorensen Grundy Milliners

“Why has not man a microscopic eye?” asked Alexander Pope, who eulogized that, despite advances in microscopes and lenses, we were no closer to “comprehend the  heaven.” Yet, equipped with such integrated faculties (as we arguably now are) would we possess the wherewithal to perceive the vibrant infinite life Jonathan Swift so vividly conceptualized and envisioned in Gulliver’s Travels or would we use them, as Schopenhauer suggested,  as self-aggrandizing tools with which to sidestep the comic smallness of existence? This all has only tangential relevance with “Construction Overhead” by Sorensen Grundy Milliners, yet it’s literally with microscopic eyes that lilliputian workers construct one of the shop’s specialty hats.

“Construction Overhead” imagines an impossible scenario, lifted from the colorful pages of The Borrowers or Swift’s Travels, wherein Big-endians and little-endians co-exist in space, alike in every detail save for the discrepancy of scale. Workers, “transferred from the railway”, have been commissioned with the task of building a bespoke hat of “buckram, blocing wire and 100% worsted wool” directly on the head of the client. Rendered at 1:87 scale, the team of hard-helmeted workers erect lattices and structural bracing on the giant’s shoulder, independently scaling the half-finished top hat and going about their respective tasks. The whole scene, with bits of scaffolding framing the model’s expressive visage, recalls Raoul Hausmann’s Dada cyborg, yet with more whimsy and warmth. As Sara Grundy, one of the makers behind the project tells MyModernMet, “Because it’s such hard work and takes such a long time [to fabricate a hat by hand] we have often daydreamed about having the help of a miniature workforce or leaving something half finished that get’s magically completed overnight.”

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Image via Wired.

Earlier in the month, Hyperallergic sat down with MoMA chief curator and P.S.1 director Klaus Biesenbach to discuss an upcoming MoMA show that has already inspired a rich byproduct of Internet memes: the Kraftwerk retrospective. The German electronic music luminaries plans to put on eight consecutive live performances—a Hannukah in April, if you will—and tickets were difficult to come by, to say the least. When Hyperallergic’s Hrag Vartanian asked why Kraftwerk, Biesenbach praised the band’s comprehensive vision: “Normally there is a musician who asked a set designer to do the sets, programmers create robots, then the stage…but they do everything…Their work is about mobility and how our lives have been changed through technology.”

Though it’s hard to pinpoint the next Kraftwerk, if there can ever be such a thing in the contemporary music scene, indie rock band Of Montreal has been taking cues from the ‘total work of art’ approach. According to Wired, the band is designing and choreographing its live performances with the aid of tech tools like Google SketchUp and Kinect. Each live performance of their upcoming tour will be enhanced with psychedelic visual elements composed of 300 images created by frontman Kevin Barnes, his wife Nina Barnes, and his brother David Barnes.

The Barnes turned to their production designer Nick Gould to use Xbox 360’s Kinect attachment to translate movements on stage into corresponding visual projections. Gould also quickly mastered Google’s amateur 3D-modeling software SketchUp to make quick models of the sets, enabling him to whip up suitable designs for each new stage on tour and show them off by twittering his fingers on his iPad. Pleased with the results, Kevin told Wired, “I feel very proud to be part of this Herculean art organism every night on tour.”

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When we wrote this past November about the opening of the Toyo Ito Architecture Museum (TIMA), we noted how the Steel Hut’s formal language–mainly comprised of faceted polyhedra–”has its roots in the geometric cosmology of Buckminster Fuller’s space frames and dymaxion maps, Louis Kahn’s City Tower proposal, Moshe Safdie’s post-collegiate megastructural projects, not to mention Ito’s own early work.” Now, you can grasp the geometry’s intricate folds yourself with this paper model! All you’ll need are an X-Acto knife, a bit of glue, and a little patience to recreate Ito’s retro-futuristic museum. Use it to brighten up your dingy office desk, launch an illustrious origami career, or relieve you of your impulse to get your M. Arch. Really, it’s a whole lot cheaper.

The Toyo Ito Architecture Museum; Photo: Iwan Baan

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Upon inspection, Bulgarian artist Plamen Ignatov’s 16-year long opus in the making, a giant scale model of the Rila Monastery faithfully rendered in matchsticks, appears the perfect act of futile heroism–to borrow a phrase from artist Barnett Newman, who himself applied the assessment to the life and work of Arshile Gorky. The world has significantly changed since Ignatov began his work, but his dedication has remained steadfast, unmoved by the forces of expediency, customization, and digitalia which shape cultural production today. Click through for more photos!

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