Posts Tagged ‘Architecture’
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012
Alain de Botton – A Temple for Atheists Image: Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgson
The writer, Alain De Botton, famous for his musings on Proust and the nature of happiness, has always had an interest in the way humans are impacted by architectural spaces. De Botton has explored transitional places and the way they affect human emotions – and he has lived in an airport continuously for a week for research on his book A Week At the Airport. But, for his latest project, De Botton has been inspired to create an edifice for atheists to counter the millions of monuments that exist for gods.
For the scores of glorious cathedrals and mosques built by architects there appears to be none that had been built for atheists. Places of worship have been built for Jesus, Mary and for the Buddha, but temples can also be built for love, friendship and calmness…
Alain de Botton – A Temple for Atheists Image: Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgson
De Botton intends to build his tower in London at a symbolic height that reflects a scale of 300 million years of life on earth. He explained in the Guardian, “Each centimeter of the tapering tower’s interior has been designed to represent a million years and a narrow band of gold will illustrate the relatively tiny amount of time humans have walked the planet.” De Botton’s idea is to encourage contemplation. He also added, “the exterior would be inscribed with a binary code denoting the human genome sequence.”
Read more on Alain De Botton’s temple
Tags: Alain De Botton, Architecture, Christopher Hitchens, Living Architecture, London, Peter Zumthor, Proust, Religion, Richard Dawkins, Sculpture
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Saturday, January 15th, 2011
By Kiša Lala
Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, Adams Theater, Detroit
Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre met online in 2002, drawn by their love of contemporary ruins. Meffre was only aged 15 when he met Marchand, and they began visiting ruins in the suburbs of Paris to capture the lost grandeur of old movie theaters and document architecture in decline. In the beginning they took images separately, but after investing in a large format 4×5, they began their collaboration. They spoke to me recently from Paris about their photographic project, “Detroit in Ruins,” published by Steidl in 2010.
Their visions of Detroit are the record of a fallen empire. What makes the duo’s work different from Robert Polidori’s photographs of post-deluge New Orleans and Chernobyl is that their focus is not a record of the aftermath of a natural disaster but of slow decay, caused by neglect. The photographs reveal the exotic in the ordinary and observe what is overlooked: dilapidated habitations, the hidden backs of dwellings, obsolete machinery, utilities in disrepair, the absurdity of once hi-tech systems, the extravagance of architecture devoid of function. The simple poignancy of a disused dentist’s chair seems to reflect on the collective failure of a civilization to rise. But Detroit is only one of many world cities, and these images are universal in their depiction of the fragility of human empire-building.
© Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, Detroit in Ruins, Ticket Lobby Michigan Central Station
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Tags: Architecture, Detroit, Detroit in Ruins, History, Kisa Lala, Los Angeles, new york, Paris, Photographs, Romain Meffre, Steidl, theater, Urban Development, Yves Marchand
Posted in Architecture, Art, Environment, Interview, Photography, Publishing | No Comments »
Friday, December 3rd, 2010
By Kiša Lala
Installation view of “Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision By Peter Greenaway” at Park Avenue Armory, on view from December 3, 2010, through January 6, 2011. Photo by James Ewing. Image Courtesy of Park Avenue Armory.
Installation view of “Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision By Peter Greenaway” at Park Avenue Armory, on view from December 3, 2010, through January 6, 2011. Photo by James Ewing. Image Courtesy of Park Avenue Armory.
Peter Greenaway’s sound and light dramatization of Leonardo da Vinci’s 1492 painting The Last Supper makes for a breathtaking exhibit inside the monumental interiors of the Park Avenue Armory in New York.
Greenaway’s films, (The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, The Pillow Book among many others) have often encouraged a dialogue between cinema and painting – with nearly two millennia of Western painting and only a century of cinema, Greenway’s work seeks to blend the vocabularies of the two traditions, “To use painting to fix and stabilize and limit and frame the image,” explains Greenaway, “…and to use cinema to make a painting move and change, have a temporal life and have a sound-track.”
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Tags: Architecture, Armory, Italy, Kisa Lala, Last Supper, Leonardo Da Vinici, Milan, new york, Nightwatch, Park Avenue Armory, Peter Greenaway, Raphael, Rembrandt, The Draughtsman’s Contract, Veronese, Wedding at Cana
Posted in Architecture, Art, Design, Film, Photography | No Comments »
Friday, October 22nd, 2010
Vincent Callebaut Lilypad, A Floating Ecopolis for Climate Refugees, 2008 Digital rendering, dimensions variable © Vincent Callebaut Architectures
Ant Farm's 1969 work, 50×50′ Pillow for the Whole Earth Catalog led to the commission to build the medical tent at Altamont.
By Kiša Lala
The new independent film Space Land and Time: Underground Adventures with Ant Farm, directed by Laura Harrison and Elizabeth Federici is a biography of the renegade architecture outfit Ant Farm that operated in the 60s and 70s counter-culture movement and pioneered the use of many architectural design devices, technologically ahead of their times.
In Europe there were other radical /guerilla architecture organizations around like Archigrams (UK) and SuperStudio (Italy) whose theoretical inventions were then put to practice by AntFarm in the USA. Their subversive, alternative ideas fertilized the possibility of overturning old-habits. As an ‘underground’ collective, Ant Farm, funded most of their own projects and focused on urban designs that were temporary, nomadic and malleable – opposite of the dominant style. They were also exponents of Buckminster Fuller’s assault against the right angles of traditional architecture.
Richard Buckminster Fuller, Shoji Sadao Dome over Manhattan, ca. 1960 Silver gelatine print, 34.9 x 46.7 cm Courtesy: The Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller
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Tags: Ant Farm, Archigrams, Architecture, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Diller Scofidio, Elizabeth Federici, Guerilla, Hirshhorn Museum, inflatables, Kisa Lala, Laura Harrison, Marc Newson, new york, Nomad, SuperStudio, Vincent Callebaut, Water Cube, zaha hadid
Posted in Architecture, Design, Environment | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010
By Kiša Lala
Still from Kaspar Astrup Schröder’s documentary My Playground
The city is fenced in by walls, carved up by streets, railings and barricades. Paths guide people through the city and prevent them spilling into places outside them. Free-runners transgress spaces off-limits, ascend the sides of dwellings, jump gaps between them. Walls, hurdles, ramparts do not stop them from going through them. Through their bodies the city is made transparent, its skeleton exposed.
Still from Kaspar Astrup Schröder’s documentary My Playground
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Tags: Architecture, copenhagen, Design, Freerunners, Kisa Lala, Parkour, robert proch, Shanghai
Posted in Architecture, Art, Design, Film, Performance | No Comments »
Monday, June 7th, 2010
Photo: Roy Zipstein for SPREAD|Artculture magazine
Avid football fans around the world eagerly await the opening of the FIFA World Cup on June 11th, 2010, less than three days away. South Africa plays the host country of the 19th World Cup tournament, having beaten nations such as Morocco and Egypt in the bidding process. Five new stadiums were built to accommodate the 32 teams that will compete. Of the five new stadiums, the Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban has the largest capacity at 70,000 spectators.
Roy Zipstein traveled to the port city to capture the magnitude of the multi-use stadium. The soaring arch runs 350m long and and 106m high above the pitch. Symbolically, the arch represents a divided nation becoming united. The design was also inspired by the South African flag. Construction began in 2007 and was completed November, 2009, lead by the consulting German architectural firm von Gerkan, Marg and Partners (gmp). The Ibhola Lethu Consortium (ILC) was responsible for the design and project management of the stadium. Schlaic, Bergermann und Partner (sbp) served as conceptual structural engineers. 32 South African architectural firms were also enlisted.
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Tags: Architecture, durban, football, gmp, moses mabhida stadium, soccer, south africa, stadium, von gerkan marg and partners, world cup
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Friday, October 9th, 2009
By JRS
China Prophecy: Shanghai explores 21st-century skyscraper city of Shanghai and is the third in a cycle of three related exhibitions entitled FUTURE CITY: 20 | 21 that juxtaposes a retrospective of American visions of the skyscraper city of the future from the early 20th century with an exploration of Chinese cities today, pursuing the parallel conditions of rapid modernization and urbanization. The second exhibition of the cycle, Vertical Cities, focused on Hong Kong and New York. (more…)
Tags: Architecture, China, new york, Shanghai, Skyscraper Museum of New York
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