1318 Isabella Street, designed by Wright student John Van Bergen; Photo via Artinfo

Time was running out for Joseph Catrambone, real estate manager, architecture buff, and recent owner of a compact, abbreviated Prairie Style cottage designed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio in the 1920s. Catrambone purchased the Wilmette, Illinois-property, which had been previously threatened with demolition, for just $1–less than the can of Coke I’m drinking–but had only 2 weeks to set in motion his plans for dismantling and moving the structure to another site. Conclusion of Preface.

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All photos: Nash Baker/ Rice University Art Gallery

Writer Sanford Kwinter famously appropriated Conrad Waddington’s “Epigenetic Landscape” as a topological model with which to envision a new conception of formmaking, whereby matter is intrinsically latent with tendencies that “condition” its morphological evolution. Anticipating the formal free-for-all that would follow in the first decade of the new millennium, Kwinter warned against using the “form” of the epigenetic landscape (as drawn by Waddington or any other iteration) for analogical purposes, but I’m about to do just that. For his ”Reverse of Volume RG” installation, Japanese artist Yasuaki Onishi has suspended a mold of “nothing”, in reality, a plastic sheet held in place by strands of black hot glue string from the ceiling of the Rice Gallery in Houston. Whereas Onishi describes the piece as “casting the invisible”, the resultant form approximates the billowing and folding field of Waddington’s model.

Granted, the purposes of both are wildly divergent, they both are vehicles by which to visualize and harness the invisible, but very real forces that mold matter. Onishi’s piece is loosely prescriptive, involving the use and programming of parameters external to the material being acted upon–in this case, a tiered massing of cardboard boxes whose different heights shape the plastic sheet before being removed altogether. The “suspension system” of hot glue that holds the sculpture in place overlap and become attached to one another at midpoints, thus, destabilizing the plane and further warping it.

Visitors may walk around and pass underneath the sculpture to inspect the piece’s intricate topography of micro mountains, basins, and depressions. Crevices of shadow are intermixed with valleys of light to create a textured immersive environment, both contemplative and unnerving that, according to the exhibition’s curators, feels almost like entering an “inner sanctum or cave-like chamber.”

[via Rice Gallery]

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A bird’s eye view of Giza 3D; Image: Dassault Systemes

The 3D-revolution that has overcome the movie and video game industry in recent years has largely been underwhelming, little more than a distraction (and an expensive one at that) that rarely, if ever, lives up to the hype. Which isn’t to say 3D doesn’t have its purposes, of course, but that it should be applied to and integrated with forms of media becoming of it. I’m not sure if this is the ideal pairing, but the new and free 3D virtual tour of the Pyramids at Giza ranks somewhere high on the barometer of cool (or mine, at least).

Developed by researchers at Harvard and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Giza 3D gives users the ability to explore the Giza Plateau and descend into the depths of the pyramids to raid tombs and comb through artifacts. French visualization company  Dassault Systemes constructed the tour using Quicktime Virtual Reality to render 1,300 individual 360-degree panoramas and immersive approximations of the grounds and interiors, which have been detailed with digital facsimiles of wall reliefs, stone impressions, and rubble gathered from the 80,000+ items furnished by the Giza Archives Project, a co-sponsor of the interactive expedition. Each object and room is tagged with historical information, which forms the project’s educational component. Giza 3D director and Harvard Egyptologist Peter Der Manuelian has already integrated the tour into his courses, leading students up and down a roller coaster ride through chambers and shafts with the jostling of a joystick (you can direct the tour with a mouse at home). As he told Boston’s NPR news station, Manuelian hopes that the site will bring Egyptology to the masses. Let’s hope so!

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House NA by Sou Fujimoto; All photos: Iwan Baan

Of all contemporary Japanese architects, Sou Fujimoto’s star perhaps shines brightest, with work that is consistently intelligent, challenging, and different–the latter being the most salient of distinctions in a relatively homogeneous architectural culture like Japan’s. In the last decade, Fujimoto’s projects have demonstrated an aesthetic diversity and a propensity for experimentation, manifested by works as programmatically divergent and spatially innovative as the Musashino Art University library, House N, and the ‘21st Century Oasis“. What does seem to unify Fujimoto’s architecture is the blatant disregard, even intolerance, of any structural expression, such as the monumental or exhibitionist manner employed by the Brutalists, Zoom, and High-Tech architects of the last century. Instead, the projects approach a structural ambiguity that is at once architecturally present and nonpresent, a spatial condition which finds its apotheosis in Fujimoto’s House NA–arguably the architect’s finest work–both a highly compact housing model and a dazzling sectional study of Rudolphian excess. Continue.

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All images: Francois Guillot/Getty

For the 2012 annual Monumenta artist Daniel Buren has suspended a vast “melancholy lake” of color-filtered parasols above the floor of Paris’s Grand Palais. Following Anish Kapoor “seminal” ‘Leviathan’ from last year, which situated a monstrous, blood-stained womb-cum-zeppelin that dazzled with its indignant scale, consuming the Palais’ floor area without doing much else, Buren’s installation attempts to reconcile the human scale with the cavernous environs into which it has been inserted.

Entitled “Excentrique(s)”, Buren’s work functions as a continuous canopy of Twister-colored circular pavilions that covers the space’s 13,500 square meter-wide ground floor. The resultant supra-structure is calibrated to the minimum height required for the standard Paris apartment, forming a low-lying plenum that drowns visitors, as the Guardian notes, in dampened color and light-laced shadow. Standing beneath this vaguely psychedelic forest, the century-old vaulted glass ceiling of the Grand Palais becomes tinged with a day-glo melancholy, not quite as “dirty and sad” as Walter Benjamin described, but more muted and jaded. The day after disco.

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Italian manufacturer GD Cucine has designed kitchens for more than half a century. The brand has become synonymous with intelligently designed fixtures that retain a sense of elegance, and their success in the US market recently spurred them to build a massive 2-story showroom in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.

So it was only natural for the brand to branch out: this week, they’re launching their first bath series in the US. Dogi is a set of fixtures and accessories designed by Enzo Berti, an Italian designer who crafts sculptural pieces with an understated modern edge. Click through.

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GKD Mediamesh installed at The Port Authority Bus Terminal

The media billboard first found its way into architecture to augment and compensate for what a building is most inherently lacking in: legibility and movement.  The building as signage, whereby an architectural composition projects a coded message of sorts, rapidly gave way to the building as ad space for signage, armed  with new and ever expanding powers of representation (namely, visuals and sound) that can easily transmit to spectators the virtues of any message (or product).  Yet, the physical armature that supports LED billboards has changed little, remaining bulky and so large that it easily consume the architecture (and its  inhabitants) behind it.

GKD Mediamesh solves these problems by presenting a more flexible, porous solution. Designed to be both durable and adaptable, the Mediamesh is embedded with weather-proof LED lights that are alternately woven with thin structural bars, reducing the ubiquitous opaque billboard wall to a thin curtain through which light may pass unhindered. The Mediamesh is specifically tailored to each project, making the system incredibly versatile. Let’s have a look at some of the coolest, shall we?

Atelier a Torcé

GKD Mediamesh

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It was with “hack, burn, and ruin” that Saruman (and his minions) laid siege to the Shire, ransacking its hobbitholes and torching its grassy hills. Upon returning from their victorious quest, Frodo and the hobbits would find their homeland blemished and broken by the ravages of war and industry. Hobbiton lay in ruin, as it does today.

Granted, the lolling hills of Alexander Farm on the North Island in Matamata, New Zealand remain impossibly green, with not so much as a telephone cable in sight to spoil the lush antediluvian landscape. The hobbit holes, however, lay vacant, if not in a decrepit state, and are now the haunts of sheep grazing nearby.

The sets were constructed in 1999 when Peter Jackson began shooting the first footage for The Lord of The Rings films. Some thirty-seven hobbit homes constructed from untreated timber, plywood, and polystyrene were grafted onto the hillside, which was also planted with Barberry hedges and numerous varieties of trees and flora. Additional structures such as the Green Dragon were covered with roofs of thatch sourced from around the farm. The tree atop Bag End was removed from a nearby site, its contents parceled and numbered then surgically reassembled piecemeal on the set and embellished with artificial leaves imported from Taiwan. A team of 400 people, including members of the New Zealand Army, worked for nine months to cultivate the pristine grounds.

The sets lay dormant before being rebuilt for the filming of The Hobbit, the first part of which will arrive in theaters in December. The site is now maintained as a permanent exhibit as a testament to the mark that the films have left on New Zealand.

All photos via Amusing Planet

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Photo: Matthew Neiderhauser

Before he was sacked as Chongqing’s party secretary in March, Bo Xilai was in the midst of an ambitious urban development program, part of his heavy-handed attempt to transform the southwestern municipality into a model region in China. Despite allegations that he was corrupt and that his wife was involved in the murder of a British businessman, the disgraced former leader is still regarded fondly by some Chinese for his uncompromising crackdowns on organized crime, generous public spending, and championing of neo-Maoist values.

Tackling Chongqing’s urban development with his signature fervor and single-mindedness, Bo carried out aggressive construction and environmental projects. As one of his “Five Chongqings,” a set of programs intended to improve residents’ lives, Bo notably spent over $7 billion to turn the municipality – a heavily industrialized, mountainous region comprised of over 30,000 square miles and around 30 million people – into a “green Chongqing.” This included spending $1.5 billion in 2010 alone on the mass planting of exotic ginkgo trees, as Bo preferred them over native species (many of which were cut down to make way for the new trees); a large number did not survive the transplant because of the unsuitably hot, humid climate of their new home. Continue.

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Plans for Marina Abramović’s OMA-designed Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art (MAI) were revealed yesterday at the Marina Abramović Breakfast, hosted at MoMA PS1. Since then, it’s been all things Marina on the internets, with every architecture and design blog commenting on the peculiar spaces and bizarro programs that will fill out the center, to be located in an abandoned 20,000 square foot theater in Hudson, New York. When the project was announced last winter, as much chatter was devoted to the artist’s surprising partnership with Rem Koolhaas’ OMA (the smiling couple, seen here) as was to Abramović’s fanciful  talk about hour-long performance pieces to be held within the new facilities.

Under the direction of OMA-partner Shohei Shigematsu, the project has since developed into an intricate interior scheme with plans to insert a new programmatic box containing the central performance space, with room for 650 attendees–each of which, according to Abramović, will have to don whit lab coats and sign a contract to ensure they remain on the premises and observant for no less than 6 hours.

Tucked discreetly behind the theater’s brick exterior and an erstwhile colonnaded entry, the volume will be encircled by a series of rooms of various functions. There will be a library and classrooms, but, more spectacularly, a levitation room, a digital temple, a crystal room, a quartz resting room, and, perhaps most useful, a sleep chamber. Cue laughter.

All of these room are to be visually connected to the central stage, so as to promote diversionary relief from the possibly “quite boring”–in Shigematsu’s own words–performances. Shigematsu compared the venue’s spatial dynamic to that of a baseball stadium, wherein the main spectacle is a stuffy, if precise affair, too long and too far at a remove to sustain prolonged engagement: “What’s interesting is that it’s so long that you can watch the game while you’re doing something else.”

OMA  will also design the venue’s lighting and furniture, the latter being tooled and fitted with wheels so that reclining visitors can be rolled  from one room to another and up/down the spiral lamp that  will connect the educational facilities to the rooftop cafe. Abramović hopes to open MAI by 2012, but  first has to raise the $15 million to fund construction. Let the art/fundraising parties begin!

All images: OMA

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