Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

Richly-colored canvases line the walls of architect Victor Lundy’s hangar-like studio in Houston, Texas. Some 50 feet wide and 65 feet long, there is ample room to make art and houses his de facto archive. Shelved are battlefield sketchbooks from his WWII service as are numerous magazine clippings featuring the architect’s designs. Over his career Lundy’s designed churches and embassies, houses and, even, inflatable structures. Practicing since the early 1950s, he still picks up the occasional house commission and paints daily. At 85, he has a restless creativity. “These days I am thinking a lot and I am on a verge of a breakthrough,” Lundy says over the phone. “I want to invent something, but it is hard. Every time I paint, the rectangle is a limiting thing. Being an architect, everything I paint is seems less important than the space I make.” The architect’s vision is grander than the canvas. It always has been. Read More …

“I was never an architect’s architect. I’m too impatient. I just can’t wait around for years for a building to get built,” says New Orleans sculptor Laurel Porcari. Her preferred medium, kiln-formed glass, is hot, heavy, and dirty, but immediate—a far cry from CAD drawings. Nevertheless, her pieces, cast so that the material flows and warps to take on textures or resemble landscapes, capture an architect’s sensibility. After receiving her Master of Science in architecture. from Columbia in 1993, Porcari headed for Australia, where she taught design in both Perth and Melbourne. She was also working in plastic, hand-printing abstract maps on acrylic sheets to create art installations. Returning to the States, she landed in New Orleans to study in the urban design Ph.D. program at Tulane University.*

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“I was never an architect’s architect. I’m too impatient. I just can’t wait around for years for a building to get built,” says New Orleans sculptor Laurel Porcari. Her preferred medium, kiln-formed glass, is hot, heavy, and dirty, but immediate—a far cry from CAD drawings. Nevertheless, her pieces, cast so that the material flows and warps to take on textures or resemble landscapes, capture an architect’s sensibility. After receiving her Master of Science in architecture. from Columbia in 1993, Porcari headed for Australia, where she taught design in both Perth and Melbourne. She was also working in plastic, hand-printing abstract maps on acrylic sheets to create art installations. Returning to the States, she landed in New Orleans to study in the urban design Ph.D. program at Tulane University.*

Read More …