February 2012

Gilded

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Early evening Mid-city.

I’m driving westward down 3rd. Street. Not avenue. An ambitious, if under represented, Los Angeles artery. Beginning a few blocks away from Occupy LA, 3^rd Street runs boldly for several miles from Downtown to Beverly Hills, an offshoot of the tight grid established in the late 1800s. Then it stops short. Dying out with a whimper at Alpine Drive. Representing the industrialist pragmatism of 19^th century urban planning, the route never makes it past the historically green lawns of the Los Angeles Country Club—the club, in its 1911 location, is a pastoral parable in aspirational living. Ronald Regan was a member. Read More …

February 2, 2012

Merce Cunningham

The Legacy Plan

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Art, Articles

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On the last night in December, on the last day of the 2011, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company performed for the last time. The avant-garde choreographer passed away in 2009 and the Park Avenue Armory Events, as the piece was called, was an immersive celebration of his legacy, embodying Cunningham’s experiments in chance procedures and collaborative work. (He famously partnered with John Cage nearly 50 years, who, according to company lore, was not only the music advisor, but in the early years, the bus driver.) Read More …

January 11, 2012

Carlos Bunga

At the Hammer Museum

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Art, Articles, Carlos Bunga

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In late November, Barcelona-based Portuguese artist Carlos Bunga took over the lobby of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, installing an architecturally scaled artwork made out of his signature materials: cardboard, packing tape and paint. The site-specific sculpture, which fills two walls adjacent to the museum’s semi-monumental staircase, is enigmatically entitled Landscape (2011) and is part of Hammer Projects: Carlos Bunga, a show that includes not only the installation but also a selection of Bunga’s drawings, paintings, sculptures, and videos dating from 2002 to 2008. The title conforms to a naming conceit reserved for visual artists and poets. Everyday vocabulary is held up for more specific inquiry. Language vagaries are turned over and over for multiple readings. Read More …

November 29, 2011

California Design, 1930–1965

Living in a Modern Way

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Architecture, Articles, Charles and Ray Eames, Craig Hodgetts, Design, Greta Magnusson Grossman, Ming Fung

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“California design is not a superimposed style, but an answer to present conditions….It has developed out of our own preferences for living in a modern way,” explained architect and designer Greta Magnusson Grossman in 1951. Casually, she captured the essence of midcentury West Coast design—a movement built on climatic, economic, and technological responses to Los Angeles combined with a non-doctrinaire embrace of modernism. It’s her quote that opens California Design, 1930–1965: “Living in a Modern Way,” the latest exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Read More …

September-October 2011

Street Art in Verona

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Art, Articles

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Based, in Bologna, Italy, Blu creates politically charged murals, borrowing visual inspiration from the Surrealists. Using house paint and rollers to draw human figures, Blu often comments on the exploitation of natural resources. Graffiti artists have long used video to document their ephemeral work, but Blu’s videos thoroughly reinvent the practice. In his digital stop-motion films, he animates his figures frame by frame, and the drawings appear to come to life as Blu paints out each old image and creates a new one.

September-October 2011

Swoon in New Orleans

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Art, Articles, Swoon

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Swoon’s artwork stand out in a street art world that’s oft populated with brash, pop art figures. Where some of her guerrilla colleagues fill walls with Andre the Giants, cartoon characters, and Andy Warhol wannabes, she creates life-sized paper cut outs of everyday people, realistic rendered in black and white. With her bike nearly for a quick getaway, she wheat pastes these enigmatic souls—women, children, mermaids—at eye level where they interact with people who happen by. Born in Daytona Beach, Florida and trained in fine-arts at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, Swoon’s illustrations and hand-cut paperwork draw on formal and folk traditions—German Expressionist and Japanese wood block printmaking, Mexican papel picado, and Wayang Kulit, the shadow puppets from Central Java. Read More …

September 12, 2011

The Interventionist’s Toolkit (Part 3)

Our Cities, Ourselves

Places Journal

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Articles, Bottom-Up, DIY Urbanism, Guerrila, Marcus Westbury, Marjetica Potrc, Renew Newcastle, Tactical, Urbanism

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This spring I presented The Interventionist’s Toolkit at a symposium hosted by the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning. The Right to the City, which featured an exhibition along with the symposium, brought together architects, artists, historians, theorists and journalists; organized by architect Lee Stickells and artist Zanny Begg, the program took geographer David Harvey’s 2008 essay “The Right to the City” — with its evocation of Henri Lefebvre’s influential 1968 book — as its critical springboard. As Harvey wrote: “The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.” [1]

In recent years this argument has become a rallying cry for activists who oppose the neoliberal politics and policies of the contemporary city. There’s a romantic appeal, maybe even a sense of imminent empowerment, in the prospect of remaking our cities and thus ourselves — a notion that if we change our environments we will change our lives, or vice versa. But ever since the symposium, I’ve been wondering about how we might evaluate the results of those freedoms. How to rate the diverse architectural actions and urban interventions that seek to remake the city? Do knitted cozies for stop signs or street furniture made from discarded pallets rank higher or lower than municipal cultural events? How do we measure the impacts of ambiguously defined and informal activities that are not only creative and civic but also — lest we forget Harvey’s ourselves — emotionally charged?

What Happens When

a post-bust pop-up restaurant

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Architecture, Articles, Elle Kunnos de Voss, John Fraser, Pop-up

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There’s nothing that so thoroughly represents the sweet spot between culture and consumption in our current zeitgeist than the pop-up. Cheap, flexible, and low-risk, it’s the go-to model for galleries, shops (both entrepreneurial DIY and haute retail brands), and restaurants. Pop-ups mushroom in New York, London, and Berlin, even as economic bubbles burst. When retail vacancy rates hit soaring heights in 2009, the pop-up went from being a strategic action practiced by arts groups to a global phenomenon embraced by entrepreneurial types and corporate brands alike. Arts organization No Longer Empty may install contemporary art exhibitions in vacated storefronts, but their pop-up mission was dwarfed in scale last holiday season when Toys R Us opened 600 temporary 2,500 square foot stores across the country—a total of 1.5 million square feet of provisional real estate. Read More …

Summer 2011

Interview with Michael Graves

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Architecture, Articles, Michael Graves

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21st century advances in engineering and technology have lead to the creation of the most fascinating design and architectural projects ever imagined. However, in this desire for progress, we often forget about the psychological and even architectural barriers that some humans face when considering living and working in these amazing spaces. For some people, these barriers are true obstacles, for others they become an enticing challenge to better this world of modern design to ensure that all can access and take equal enjoyment of it. The development of projects that fully consider accessibility from the initial concept stages is an important and major concern for many architects. Most important today is establishing an open communication regarding these issues and their vital importance. We bring you an interview between two prominent experts of architecture who explore the issues and advantages of pushing professionals to think in a more holistic approach to universal access.

Here, Mimi Zeiger, professor, author, founder of loud paper currently, freelance writer and contributing editor to Architect magazine, talks to Michael Graves, globally renowned architect, and household name through his designs for Target stores. Michael, after suffering a health incident that paralyzed him from the waist down, utilized his disability as a vantage point from which to create more accessible architecture and product design. Drawing from his personal experience, Mr. Graves advocates greater access to spaces and products for all humans in a relatable and functional manner that never loses the joyful touch of great design. Read More …

June 6, 2011

City Sickness

Pedro Reyes' Sanatorium

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Art, Articles, Pedro Reyes, Urbanism

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Sanatorium, the inaugural exhibition in the Guggenheim museum’s Stillspotting NYC series of off-site programs, opened in downtown Brooklyn just steps from the intense bustle and hawking of street vendors and discount retailers on Fulton Street Mall and a few blocks from the Brooklyn House of Detention. Created by Pedro Reyes and housed in an unrented space in the Metrotech Center provided by Forest City Ratner, Sanatorium is a “temporary clinic” designed to treat urban ills. It offers a number of therapeutic balms for the anxiety and depression caused city living. Read More …