Dec 15, 2021

Exhibit Columbus 2021

New Middles

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Exhibit Columbus is a two-year exploration of architecture, art, design, and community that activates the design legacy of Columbus, Indiana. It is a feature program of Landmark Columbus Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to caring for, celebrating, and advancing the cultural heritage of Columbus.

For the Fall 2021 Exhibition, co-curators Iker Gil and Mimi Zeiger invited exhibition participants to create site-specific, future-oriented installations, which responded to the theme: New Middles: From Main Street to Megalopolis, What is the Future of the Middle City?

2020-2021

Exhibit Columbus: New Middles

From Main Street to Megalopolis, What is the Future of the Middle City?

Exhibit Columbus

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Architecture, David Schalliol, Dream the Combine, Exhibitions, Iker Gil, Jeremiah Chiu, Natalie Yates, Sam Jacob Studio, Virginia Hanusik, Ang Li, Derek Hoeferlin, Ecosistema Urbano, Future Firm, Jei Jeeyea Kim, Joyce Hwang, Olalekan Jeyifous

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For the Fall 2021 Exhibition, co-curators Iker Gil and Mimi Zeiger have invited exhibition participants to create site-specific, future-oriented installations, which will be developed over the coming year in response to the theme: New Middles:From Main Street to Megalopolis, What is the Future of the Middle City?

This 2020–2021 cycle of programming explores the future of the center of the United States and the regions connected by the Mississippi Watershed. New Middles speculates on the heartland, an ecology stretching beyond political borders—from North to South—from the Canadian Border to the Gulf, and from East to West—from Appalachia to the plains. Embracing a long timeline of cities past, present, and future, New Middles builds upon Columbus’ legacy as a laboratory for design as civic investment. In a moment when we most need reflection, creativity, and innovation to envision new ways of being, New Middlesconsiders Columbus a place to destabilize assumptions, and imagine new architectures and landscapes as a way to positively move our cities forward.

June 4, 2021

Próxima salida: un oasis obstinado

Travesías

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Architecture, Art, Articles, Ed Ruscha, Julius Shulman, Seward Johnson, Trina Turk

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La carretera que conduce a Palm Springs es una salida polvorienta y complicada de la autopista transcontinental 10. Un ejército de gigantescas turbinas eólicas a ambos lados de la State Route 111 en California domina el paisaje desértico, con sus hélices cosechando diligentemente energía para la red eléctrica. La grava y la arena hacen remolinos sobre el asfalto de la carretera que rodea la base desmoronada del monte San Jacinto. Ésta es la puerta de entrada (nada prometedora) al valle Coachella y su afamado centro turístico, y, como la señalización de la carretera anuncia, a “otras ciudades del desierto” con nombres que evocan al místico y árido Oeste: Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Indian Wells, Bombay Beach.

June 2021

Past and Future Monuments

L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui

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Architecture, Art, Articles, Black Lives Matter, Camae Ayewa, Dell Upton, Donald Trump, Eto Otitigbe, Höweler + Yoon, Mabel O Wilson, Monument Lab, Rasheedah Phillips, Urbanism

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It was a summer of outrage and pain. The weeks after the murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin and the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and too many other Black men and women, was a moment in the United States when veil that hung over the racism and white supremacy was ripped open and all the grief and anger tumbled out into the streets in mass protest. A history of oppression and a present heavy with generational burdens of inequity was laid bare. For Black and Indigenous, Latinx and Asian Americans, this is lived experience. For many white Americans, it was mirror held up to a country that is a democracy only to some.

May 31, 2021

The New Curator: Exhibiting Architecture and Design

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Architecture, Books, Design, Fleur Watson

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The New Curator: Exhibiting Architecture and Design examines the challenges inherent in exhibiting design ideas. Traditionally, exhibitions of architecture and design have predominantly focused on displaying finished outcomes or communicating a work through representation.

In this ground-breaking new book, Fleur Watson unveils the emergence of the ‘new curator’. Instead of exhibiting finished works or artefacts, the rise of ‘performative curation’ provides a space where experimental methods for encountering design ideas are being tested. Here, the role of the curator is not that of ‘custodian’ or ‘expert’ but with the intent to create a shared space of encounter with audiences.

March 1, 2021

“It’s time to abolish the architecture critic”

Dezeen

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Ada Louise Huxtable, Alexandra Lange, Architecture, Articles, Blair Kamin, Christopher Hawthorne, Inga Saffron, James Kilgore, Nicolai Ouroussof, Paul Gapp, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Zach Mortice

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On 8 January, just days after insurrectionists stormed the Capitol, architecture critic Blair Kamin announced on Twitter that after nearly three decades he would step down from his role at the Chicago Tribune. Some, whose minds were previously reeling from the events in Washington, suddenly had a new fixation: who would replace him?

Kamin refrained from playing favourites, preferring to honour his Pulitzer-winning predecessor Paul Gapp, who served as the paper’s architecture critic for 18 years. In that vacuum, speculation erupted in tweets and on backchannels. Names were floated then caught in what seemed like a vortex but was really just an eddy compared to national events.

February 26, 2021

Can Manuals and Toolkits Help Us Design a Safer Present or Future?

Nearly a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, architecture and design firms across the country have shared numerous toolkits and manuals, but will they help build a future rooted in equity?

Metropolis

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Architecture, Articles, David J. Lewis, Design, Isometric Studio, MASS Design Group, Studio O+A, Waqas Jawaid

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On a weekday in early December, the United States surpassed 3,000 daily deaths from COVID-19 the same week that vaccines began distribution in the United Kingdom. In the afternoon, I masked up to go to the pharmacy, stood on a patch of gummy duct tape demarcating a nominal six feet between me and the next customer on the linoleum floor, and picked up my prescription through a hole in a scuffed acrylic barrier. The new normal, as they say. Banal aesthetics just one step up from ad hoc.

Nearly a year into the pandemic, most of us have become armchair epidemiologists who can weigh the risks of dentist visits and outdoor brunches. Months ago, in the late spring and summer when it was thought that the worst might be behind us, many architects and designers took it upon themselves to produce tool kits and manuals analyzing scientific research and medical guidelines, and visualizing that material in the design of safety protocols for workplaces, schools, streets, housing, and museums. London architecture firm IF_DO even went so far as to create PDF manuals for safer food banks, youth clubs, community centers, and libraries—typologies that have received far less attention than nursing homes and restaurants.

January 19, 2021

On Futures: Maite Borjabad López-Pastor and Emmet Byrne

SCI-Arc Channel

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Architecture, Art, Articles, Design, Maite Borjabad López-Pastor

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Emmet Byrne, Design Director and Associate Curator of Design, Walker Art Center and Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, Neville Bryan Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, are two of the team curators behind the exhibition Designs for Different Futures. Organized by the Walker Art Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago, Designs for Different Futures brings together some 80 dynamic works that address the challenges and opportunities that humans may encounter in the years, decades, and centuries ahead. Among the questions raised by the designers in the show: What role can technology play in augmenting or replacing a broad range of human activities? How can we negotiate privacy in a world in which the sharing and use of personal information has blurred traditional boundaries? How might we use design to help heal or transform ourselves, bodily and psychologically? Ultimately, the exhibition asks: Who shapes future?

January 2021

Experimental Jetset – Superstructures

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Architecture, Art, Books, Dirk van den Heuvel, Experimental Jetset, Leontine Coelewij, Linda van Deursen

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Superstructures (Notes on Experimental Jetset / Volume 2) is an inquiry into the role of the city as an infrastructure for language (and simultaneously, into the role of language as an infrastructure for the city), as seen through the lens of four historical movements: Constructivism, the Situationist International, Provo, and the Post-Punk explosion. Based on a research project (and accompanying exhibition) by Experimental Jetset, the publication features footnotes written by Vasyl Cherepanyn, Leontine Coelewij, Linda van Deursen, Experimental Jetset, Owen Hatherley, Brad Haylock, Dirk van den Heuvel, Lieven Lahaye, Samata Masato, Tom McDonough, Kateryna Mishchenko, Other Forms, Mark Owens, Megan Patty, Adam Pendleton, Simon Reynolds, Ian F. Svenonius, McKenzie Wark, Lori Waxman, and Mimi Zeiger. The 420-page paperback comes with a 24-page zine, zooming in on the design typology of the original exhibition.

October 26, 2020

How 53 artists redesigned the toilet paper holder. Selfie stick, anyone?

Los Angeles Times

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A.H.O.F., Art, Articles, Benjamin Critton, Black Lives Matter, Carlos Little, Design, Lland, Nifemi Marcus-Bello, Theo Martins, Wrk–Shp

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Last spring, as stay-at-home orders set in and consumers cleared out store shelves, we learned something that we probably knew all along: You don’t think about toilet paper until you are desperate.

And if the lowly roll is overlooked, the design of the toilet paper holder is even less considered — until now. The Echo Park gallery Marta is presenting “Under/Over,” an exhibition of more than 50 toilet paper holders by an international lineup of artists and designers.