August 29, 2024

A Place In The Sun

In the Eastern Coachella Valley, where shade is a luxury, the nonprofit Kounkuey Design Initiative focuses on empowering the residents through design.

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Chelina Odbert, Christian Rodriguez Ceja, Design, Kounkuey Design Initiative, Urbanism

It’s a blustery, early spring day in the Eastern Coachella Valley, or ECV. The basin is tinted green and purple by wildflowers and grasses encouraged by a surprisingly heavy rainy season, a departure from its usual brown. Wild yellow mustard pokes through the asphalt road edge, and palm trees stand shoulder to shoulder in orderly military rows. These shaggy, shady oases are date orchards, managed by commercial growers that have been in the valley for generations. Since 2011, the nonprofit Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI) has worked in this landscape, painstakingly building relationships with community members and leadership as well as county and state politicians to address the need for public space. KDI’s approach is remarkable because it values residents over a finished product. Throughout the process, residents find the confidence to speak out on their own behalf, and the design team listens.

July 10, 2023

Lenny Steinberg invites us to her Los Angeles home

Inside the Venice Beach home of designer Lenny Steinberg, who takes inspiration from movement and music, and guides us through her treasures

Wallpaper

TAGS

A Quincy Jones, Annie Chu, Architecture, Articles, Chu Gooding Architects, Design, Frank Gehry, Frank Stella, Lenny Steinberg, Links Design, Pierre Chareau, Sarah Binder

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Out of the windows of Lenny Steinberg’s Venice Beach living room, there are a few hundred metres of sand, a line of white surf, then the grey-blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean. It’s a remarkable, pinch-me view, the kind most folks only see from the nearby boardwalk at Muscle Beach, where tourists and roller skaters glide through a perfume of cannabis dispensaries and fish taco stands.

The LA-based designer’s home is just a few doors down from Frank Gehry’s Norton House, a mid-1980s landmark that mimics a lifeguard tower. She and her husband, Bob, a prominent lawyer, moved here in the 1990s, transforming a 1960s post-and-beam duplex into a minimalist roost that now houses an archive and showroom of five decades of her work, alongside her art and object collection. Each piece – from the Lucite high heels on a table by the front door to the Frank Stella print in the main bedroom – reflects, in short, the fruits of a highly creative life.

May 8, 2023

Slow Roll

Michael Maltzan Architecture wraps two decades of remaking the Hammer Museum

The Architect's Newspaper

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Bruce Mau, Michael Maltzan, Michael Maltzan Architecture

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Much has been said about how we live in a time of acceleration. We strive for fast and interconnected. And yet, a considerable body of discourse takes the counter position, arguing for rest, care, and immobility. In her 2019 book How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell urges us to turn away from the churn, writing, “Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.”

Architecture, too, is caught in the thrall. Although buildings take time, we’re junkies for novelty. Museumbuildings are particular eye candy. Supposed freedoms of art and culture push desires for formal inventiveness. But what would it mean to construct a museum in slow motion?

April 1-July 23, 2023

Seeking Zohn

MAK Center for Art and Architecture

TAGS

Alejandro Olavarri, Alejandro Zohn, Architecture, Exhibitions, Fabien Cappello, Lake Verea, Lorena Canales, Onnis Luque, Sonia Madrigal, Tony Macarena, Zara Pfeifer

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Seeking Zohn presents works by Mexican-Austrian architect and engineer Alejandro Zohn (1930-2000) through contemporary photography and design. The exhibition takes as subject Zohn’s robust civic and commercial architecture built in Guadalajara from the 1950s to the 1990s, with an interest in how the city’s social, cultural, and material histories are interwoven with his structures.

Commissioned photography and video by artists Adam Wiseman, Lake Verea, Onnis Luque, Sonia Madrigal, and Zara Pfeifer veer from the documentary conceit of architectural photography toward the subjective. This work is decidedly interpretive, seeking out the many narratives contained within parks, markets, collective housing, malls, and bureaucratic buildings. Zohn, a Jewish emigree who fled Vienna during World War II at the age of 8, dedicated his career to creating a modern Guadalajara. Through these photographs—acts of investigation and translation—we find glimpses of his utopian desire amidst the chaos, beauty, and violence of everyday life. Read More …

March 31, 2022

SPRAWL SESSION 3: HOUSE AS CRISIS

SCI-Arc

TAGS

Architecture, Art, Design, Events

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This event is co-organized by Gavin Kroeber & Mimi Zeiger and presented in partnership with SCI-Arc.

The discussion will feature a remarkable group of architects, designers, and planners, including Keller Easterling, Patty Heyda, James Rojas, M. Casey Rehm, and Andrew Zago, along with artists Mary Ellen Carroll and Tim Portlock, journalist Gustavo Arellano.

2020-2021

Exhibit Columbus: New Middles

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

Exhibit Columbus

TAGS

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

TAGS

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

TAGS

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

TAGS

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

TAGS

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.