The World Monuments Fund calls for international awareness to the 2012 list of endangered monuments. The watch encompasses 67 threatened cultural-heritage sites worldwide. These influential landmarks include the iconic Manufacturers Trust Company Building in New York City designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center in Goshen, New York.
Continue reading after the break.
Production and design firm, The Department of the 4th Dimension (The D4D), created the world’s first pop-up scent museum for Sephora & Firmenich. The Sensorium: Lucid Dreams from the Sensory World is an interactive exhibition exploring the emotions and instincts behind scent.
For more information, continue reading after the break.
The space of sound created by Carlito Carvalhosa’s Sum of Days on exhibit at MoMA until November 14, 2011 is a sublime environment of billowing white fabric and the white noise of the atrium reflected upon itself. The psuedo-boundaries established by the translucent material that hang from the ceiling create a confined space of light and ambient sound – fleeting and ephemeral. Upon entering the exhibit, you pass an array of speakers affixed to the wall. They are emitting a low hum – the sound of voices and echoes that are distant, yet recognizable. It is unclear at first from where these sounds are originating, but behind the fabric bodies are drifting in and out of view. The curtains, which are constantly swaying, direct you in an ellipse to the center of the space where a single microphone hangs, picking up the noise within the exhibit and sending them to the dozens of speakers that hang at intervals inside the curtains, along the walls of the exhibit, and up through the galleries at the mezzanine levels that overlook the atrium.
We’ve been taking you through the two week installations at the BOFFO Building Fashion event, and this week marks the third installation by Patrik Ervell + Graham Hudson. It is quite remarkable to see the transformation that takes place at 57 Walker Street every few days (remember how last time, the fashion and architecture pair Irene Neuwirth + Marc Fornes / TheVeryMany resulted in a crazy atmosphere of organic metallic forms dancing across the room?). Now, visitors will experience a space with crumbling walls, rubble, scaffold and re-bar designed by Hudson in response to the Ervell’s design brand of innovative materials and unconventional application throughout his collections. “Overall, the environment that has been created where destruction —the decay and the beautiful—are transformed into art and design, both literally and figuratively,” explained BOFFO.
More about the designers and the installation after the break.
The MAS Summit for New York City, which occurs at 9:15am on October 14th, will bring together four icons of urban planning, design and architecture to explore today’s challenges and opportunities in creating a well-planned and well-designed city.
Delivering keynote speeches will be Amanda M. Burden, FAICP, an urban planner and civic activist, who serves as the New York City Planning Commissioner and Chair of the New York City Planning Commission, and Witold Rybczynski best-selling author, Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania and architecture critic at Slate. More information on the event after the break.
On October 18th, starting at 7pm, Storefront for Art and Architecture presents Kissing vs Komplex, a Productive Disagreement Series Event with Sylvia Lavin and Hal Foster on conversation about contemporary relations between art and architecture, and the forces that bring them together.
We introduced BOFFO’s fashion + architecture collaborative project, and began the week with the first installment by Nicola Formichetti + Gage/Clemenceau Architects. As each pair of fashion designer and architect shows their project for two short weeks, the second team of Irene Neuwrith and Marc Fornes is now in place. Neuwirth, a leading US jewelry designer, has transformed the 1800 sqf space at 57 Walker Street into a crazy biomorphic playground to display her designs with the hep of Marc Fornes, one of the leading figures in the development of computational protocols applied to the field of design and fabrication.
More about the temporary gallery after the break.
HAO (Holm Architecture Office), along with five other New York design offices, have been invited to participate in the re-design of the Coleman Oval Skate Park and the master planning of the Coleman Oval Park. The competition is sponsored by Architecture for Humanity.
The Coleman Oval Park, situated partly under the Manhattan Bridge, has long suffered from lack of exposure, little upkeep, and the “off the beaten path” factor. More images and architects’ description after the break.
The Architectural League of New York recently announced its Fall 2011 Lecture Series. Jeanne Gang, recently awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, will give the annual Ulrich Franzen Lecture on Architecture and the Environment, delivered by an international figure whose work has significant implications for understanding and reconceiving the relationship between architecture and the environment. Past Franzen lectures have been delivered by Renzo Piano, Shigeru Ban, and Werner Sobek.
The League’s Current Work series annually presents prominent architects and designers, who help to shape current architectural discourse with their work and ideas. This year’s series includes Michael Van Valkenburgh, designer of the recently opened Brooklyn Bridge Park; Francine Houben of the Dutch firm Mecanoo; Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto, the recent winners of the major international competition to design the Kaohsiung Port Terminal; Michael Maltzan of Los Angeles; and Bernard Khoury of Beirut. More information on the lecture series after the break.
WTC: Street Installation and Exhibition is a 4×28 foot montage comprised of closeups of the facades of the former Twin Towers- located on East 4th Street between the Bowery and Second Avenue. There will also be nine accompanying prints exhibited in the FAB Cafe across the street.
Though primarily known as Wiliamsburg’s only first-run movie house, this project is in actuality an expansive 23,000 square foot mixed-use building with three floors of residential apartments above the cinemas, bar, café commercial kitchen housed in the retrofitted brick warehouse below. All of the apartments have access to outdoor space in the form of private roof decks at the penthouse level and shared courtyard access for the floors below. Caliper Studio designed all phases of the project from the earliest design studies through the construction process. More images and architects’ description after the break.
NEW YORK–Although the American Folk Art Museum has avoided dissolution thanks to a cash infusion from trustees and the Ford Foundation, the institution’s ongoing financial troubles raise difficult questions about the relationship between signature architecture and cultural capital.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute recently announced the speakers for their fall 2011 lecture series which kicked off on September 7th with Joel Sanders and ends with Stephan Kieran on November 30th. Admission to all lectures is free and will begin at 6pm. The location is in the EMPAC / The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media + Performing Arts Center. More information on the events after the break.
This weekend, we had the opportunity to attend the Open Studio event at MoMA’s PS1. As we mentioned earlier, this project posed the daunting question of how to re-think, re-organize and re-energize the concept of an American suburb in the wake of the foreclosure crisis. As MoMA’s Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, Barry Bergdoll explains, “Projects will aim to challenge cultural assumptions concerning home ownership and associated settlement patterns, such as suburban sprawl, and assist the public in contemplating a potentially different future for housing and cities. The workshop and exhibition are premised on reframing the current crisis as an opportunity, an approach that is in keeping with the fundamental American ethos where challenging circumstances engender innovation and out-of-the-box thinking. It is our hope that new paradigms of architecture and regional and transportation planning become the silver lining in the crisis of home ownership.” The five multidisciplinary teams chose five different American suburbs to explore, and this Saturday, we jumped from Oregon to Florida, to Illinois, to California and New Jersey, to observe their five quite different solutions.
Check out our preview of the teams’ work-in-progress projects which will be exhibited at the MoMA this February.
Storefront for Art and Architecture is pleased to present Manifesto Series 06: Finding Formless curated by Julian Rose and Garrett Ricciardi on Friday, September 23rd, 2011 from 6:30 to 9pm.
Impulses toward the formless, alternately understood as struggles to escape form as a manifestation of various norms and constraints, are as old as architecture itself. But the formless is also increasingly in the air today, whether explicitly as in discussions of the “formless” quality of the city, or implicitly in talk of atmospheric buildings, randomized structures, and the dematerialization (or increased mediation) of architecture. No doubt part of its appeal lies in the fact that the formless is frequently found at the intersections between architecture and other fields, those intriguing moments when architecture unravels and can perhaps be woven into other practices, from art to ecology or engineering. Nevertheless, the formless has not yet been theorized rigorously in architecture. More information on the event after the break.
Gowanus Lowline Competition: Connections will be exhibiting winning entries from the Open Ideas Competition on Thursday, September 15th, 6:00 – 9:00 pm at the SET Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Check out the winners here: Gowanus Lowline Competition Winners. The competition was framed with the goal of inspiring projects that questions and confronted urban development in postindustrial sites. The open-ended program asked for a “pedestrian-oriented architecture” that engaged the canal and the watershed, long neglected as an industrial and manufacturing zone. This competition is a first of a series that focuses on the connections in and around the canal. As it is right now, the Gowanus Canal is just out of reach, and with its levels of contamination – which the EPA is begining to address – it may be for the best.
Studio Mode/modeLab is pleased to announce the next installment of the coLab workshop series: Hybrid Prototypes. As a follow-up workshop to the coLab workshop held in January 2011, Hybrid Prototypes is a two-day intensive design and prototyping workshop to be held in New York City during the weekend of September 24-25, 2011.
