Art: The Latest Architecture and News

A photo posted by Kyle Krieger (@kylekriegerhair) on Sep 10, 2015 at 9:22am PDT

It has been a week since the conclusion of this year's Burning Man festival in Black Rock City, Nevada, and images of its most imaginative structures are still surfacing. Even Bjarke Ingels has published a few of his favorite findings from the week-long event. Read on to see of the best structures and installations found at Burning Man 2015.

Through her project "Cities and Memory - the Architecture and the City" Architect Marta Vilarinho de Freitas has created a set of illustrations that focus on architecture and the fantasy worlds it can create. The project arose from her thesis on “Communicating Art” at the Superior Artística School in Porto, and seeks to tell stories of the “cities and the life that inhabits in each of them.”

View more images and a text from the architect after the break. 

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Artist and architect Inés Esnal’s Prism installation uses colorful elastic rope to form triangular spaces that filter light into the lobby of a new residential building in New York.

The installation's vivid colors and optical illusions provide a bold contrast to the concrete walls.

View images and learn more about the project after the break. 

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An exploration of "post-war design for play," The Brutalist Playground by Assemble and artist Simon Terrill has opened to the public at RIBA's Architecture Gallery. The immersive installation draws on a number of historic London estates - Churchill Gardens, Pimlico; the Brunel Estate, Paddington and the Brownfield Estate in Poplar - where playgrounds were once made from concrete and cast into sculptural forms to offer children an abstract landscape for play. Now deemed unsafe, these playgrounds no longer exist. Thus, The Brutalist Playground was envisaged to explore play, "the Brutalist way."

Images of the complete installation, after the break.

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With a budget of less than $250,000, studioMET Architects was tasked with transforming a 4,000-square-foot parking garage with a leaky roof and no plumbing, gas or electricity, into a modern and open studio space for LEGO artist Sean Kenney.

Due to Kenney’s constantly changing scale of work, which can range from a life-sized sculpture to a celebrity portrait, the studio needed to have a flexible workspace. The result is a front area -- containing a desk, lounge and kitchenette -- that can be easily transformed into a loading dock. The workspace also includes a video/stop animation studio and woodshop as well as a storage room for sculptures. 

View photos of the studio space in Brooklyn after the break.

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Videos

From James Gulliver Hancock, author and illustrator of the All the Buildings in New York book and blog, comes All the Buildings in Sydney, a vibrant guide to Hancock's home town.

Packed full of idiosyncratically meticulous and colorful illustrations, the book provides a whimsical account of Sydney's architecture and history. From icons such as Utzon's Sydney Opera House to lesser known gems like Mark Foy's building opposite Hyde Park, to the terrace houses of inner city suburbs, All the Buildings in Sydney presents each building with care, detail, and an abundance of charm.

See more images from All the Buildings in Sydney, after the break…

Videos

These images by Swedish photographer, artist, and Photoshop genius Erik Johansson are anything but ordinary. What at first appears to be a room, house, or street quickly shifts into a mind-boggling optical illusion, using creative manipulations of perspective to keep the viewer perplexed. From cars driving on the underside of the freeway to people living on their ceilings, Johansson's strikingly convincing realizations of spatial impossibilities will have you second-guessing your surroundings.

More images and a "behind-the-scenes" video, after the break. 

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Winners have been announced for the 2014 Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI). The competition, this year sited in Copenhagen, calls on interdisciplinary teams to design large scale site-specific artworks that provide renewable electricity to the city at a utility-scale (equivalent to the demand of hundreds or even thousands of homes). Once constructed, these public infrastructure artworks have the potential to offset thousands of tons of CO2 and provide iconic amenities that will serve to educate and inspire the communities in which they are built.

Check out the winning energy-generating sculptures, after the break.

Japanese artist Katsumi Hayakawa's "Paperworks" exhibition explores the impression of architectural density through delicate three-dimensional installations. The intricate sculptures were all hand-crafted piece by piece out of paper and glue, creating an awe-inspiring assemblage of multi-layered urban conditions at different scales. For more information and images, keep reading after the break.

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Axel de Stampa has shared with us his awesome series of architecture gifs, Architecture Animée (Animated Architecture), which turn architecture from SANAA, Herzog and de Meuron, MAD Architects and more into amazing, zany gifs. See all nine after the break!

When you're surrounded by buildings on all sides, what do you see? In his SkyArt series, French artist Lamadieu Thomas gives us his answer. He takes claustrophobia-inducing photographs of urban landscapes through a fish-eye lens, framing the sky with rooftops and filling the negative space with playful illustrations. Thomas describes his whimsical approach to art as an attempt to show "what we can construct with a boundless imagination" and "a different perception of urban architecture and the everyday environment around us." To see more from the collection, continue after the break.

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