loud paper

pink and green

This weekend is the AIA Conference in Boston, exciting, no? No.

Sure, I'll roam the expo floor, but I am really going to Beantown for the new exhibition, Parti Wall, Hanging Green, at pinkcomma gallery. The show features some of my fave firms, young offices that I've been lucky enough to write about or work with over the last couple of years, including: Höweler + Yoon Architecture; MOS; over,under; Studio Luz Architects; and UNI. I love it when the world gets small.

Here's the info:

Ten emerging architecture and design firms collaborated to create a prototype green wall. The planted installation will be suspended from a blank brick surface on the newly converted loft building at 90 Wareham Street in Boston’s South End. The five-story-high structure will be visible from the entrance to the gallery, where the installation’s collaborative design process and works of individual firms will be on display. The ten firms—all of which were formed in the last six years—joined together to establish the Young Architects Boston Group in January. The group’s prototype green wall will illustrate how Boston’s scattered brick surfaces could become opportunities for zero footprint public art that improves the city visually and environmentally.

Friday, May 16, 2008
Viewing, 5:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.
After Party, 10:00 p.m. - midnight

pinkcomma gallery
81B Wareham Street, Boston, Massachusetts

house and home

Ben Grasso
Whatever Was Left of It, 2007
Oil on Canvas,
108" x 72"

Heads up! Supernatural is closing this weekend. The exhibition at Thierry Goldberg Projects features works by Martin Basher, Jane Benson and Ben Grasso. I am particularly struck by Grasso's explosive works. His oil paintings seem allegorical to what is going on in today's real estate market. Their vivid style also carries a windblown, Wizard of Oz quality—a tornado trope standing in for global warming?

Writes Goldberg:

The reality of the house, composed alongside its state of distress, provides an uncanny dialogue between conscious and subconscious appearance. It is the maintenance of façade that perpetuates suburban dreams, the modern American embodiment of hope and security, which Grasso repeatedly disrupts.

There is no place, no place like home.

Via Little Paper Airplanes.

Ben Grasso
Untitled (House), 2006
Oil on Canvas,
70" x 50"

gone fishing

Last week I watched a team of artisans paint fake moss on a fake Cyprus tree, which soaks in a fake swamp intended for very real alligators (including an albino one). I was on a building tour of the California Academy of Science in San Francisco, home of the Steinhart Aquarium. In addition to a research center, offices, exhibits, dioramas, and fish tanks, the building contains a spherical planetarium, the form mirrored by a four-story rainforest biosphere. Let’s not forget the three different interactive aquariums, holding up to 100,000 gallons of water each. On top, a green roof planted with native species molds itself over the whole kit and caboodle.

Renzo Piano is given due credit as architect, but the building is so complex even that term seems to be overreaching. So then, who to laud? Arup did a bang up job with the sustainability, MEP, and structural features.  Stantec Architecture (formerly Chong Partners Architecture) is the architect of record. Rana Creek Living Architecture consulted on the living roof. And there are exhibition designers Thinc and Cinnabar, aquarium experts PBS&J, and the dozens of people who hand-painted the tide pools…or the rollercoaster designer who was called in to craft the helix ramp in the rainforest.   

Consider the photo above: I took this shot from within a 9-inch-thick acrylic tunnel, looking through a 100,000-gallon tank (the flooded Amazon rainforest will eventually contain arapaima, giant catfish, vegetarian piranhas, and a giant anaconda) and into the curve of the glass biosphere. That dappled light is from the skylights punched in the living roof.

An interlocking network of designers, contractors, engineers, and artisans isn’t really unique (well, until you start adding scientists, biologists, and 38,000 animals), but maybe, just maybe, it chips away at the starchitect mantle.

accessories for modern living

This is not quite a typical loud paper post, since I don't think I've ever written about jewelry design and only snark about fashion, but I wanted to call two designers to the fore.

First up: Kiosk sends word that Salvor Projects is having a studio sale, beginning today. All I can say is that their mathy, semi-architectural patterns and textures are amazing. I hope I can crave out some time to make it to 28th Street.

Second: Mollie Dash. I met Mollie at the Brooklyn Flea, the new flea market near my house. (Disclosure: I asked her to create a piece for me as a birthday present to myself, it will be ready on Sunday, I can't wait.) Each of her pieces is handmade and original. She repurposes old costume jewelry, vintage beads, and chains into sophisticated designs that are modern, with a little tarnished glory.

Here's Mollie on what makes her work eco friendly:

I run my studio out of my home, where I practice daily conscientious decision making on the amount of waste I produce and how many resources I require to live. I discovered recently that environmentalism is not about doing everything perfectly; it's about doing what you can. How this translates into the products I make is that they're made by a person who strives to leave a small footprint on the earth.

In my work I use many discarded, thrifted, donated, and yard sale-derived materials. I prefer metal over plastic. I like to pick things up off the street. I use a minimum of new stones. I use cotton and linen cord, rather than leather. I make things last.

prairie style

Via.

The March 31 issue of the New Yorker features a droll short story by Jeffrey Eugenides. Set in Chicago, Great Experiment mixes doses of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America with a former-Baffler proofreader’s midlife crisis. Straight out of the gate it offers a blissfully succinct critique of green building:

The gray Gothic stone of the Tribune Tower, the black steel of the Mies building just next door—these weren’t the colors of the new Chicago. Developers were listening to Danish architects who were listening to nature, and so the latest condominium towers were going organic. They had light-green facades and undulating rooflines, like blades of grass bending in the wind.

There had been a prairie here once. The condos told you so.

Just wait until he describes the interiors of the hip and aging. Spot on, Beck poster included. Also, check out Eugenides’ sweeping and perverse Middlesex—it is one of my all-time favorite reads.

just add a paper umbrella

Concoct a Singapore Sling and sit down at the keyboard; the urbanism magazine, MONU, is looking for submissions for its Exotic Urbanism issue. They posit “exotic” as the alternative to “authentic” or “native.” (I might add “local.”)

MONU#9 investigates what the term exotic actually means for our cities and how exotic urban elements appear, what they look like, and how they may influence our cities. In any case, exotic urban features appear more and more as an inexhaustible source for progressive urban design ideas. When the exotic influenced the appearance of the “Art Nouveau” at the end of the 19th century, it might today have the power to create an “Urban Nouveau”.

“Daring concepts, mind-stretching speculations, and ground-breaking new strategies” are due June 2008.

whether underground

Early on in Rob Walker’s upcoming book, Buying In: the Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, he discusses the “new consumer’s” slightly irrational obsession with authenticity. He writes:

While evoked constantly, the word is seldom defined. But one can presume that the authentic symbol is grounded in some kind of empirical, provable reality—that if you burrow down behind it, you will find exactly the things that the symbol purports to represent.

I was reading an advance copy of Rob’s book on the train up to Columbia on Monday night, so it was still resonating in my head as took my seat for Ant Farm: Radical Hardware, a panel discussion featuring Ant Farm members, Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier, and moderated by professors Felicity Scott and Mark Wasiuta. Ant Farm’s the kind of countercultural, prankster, media-savvy, architecturally off-the-wall group for whom I always have a soft spot. The sixties/seventies work is great, but also kind of awful: equal parts spectacle, pop, psychedelia, hi-tech, and Krazy Kat. A postcard of their piece, Media Burn (1975), where they drove a tricked-out Cadillac into a wall of burning TVs used to hang above my desk. If anyone was looking to latch onto something authentic, this was it.

Ant Farm’s been on the university circuit before, but what were these former radicals doing this time around in an academic institution, aside from helping Scott promote her new book on their work? Were they not there as authentic symbols of a history rapidly being embraced by architecture historians, even as they were brushed off when contemporary? Introducing the panel, Dean Mark Wigley, who likes to stir the pot a bit, remarked that Ant Farm’s appearance and exhibition at the Buell Center was not nostalgic, but all about the future.

And yes, in some ways it is. Scott and Wasiuta awkwardly attempted to mine the seventies oil crisis, environmental architecture, and communal living scene for its present day resonances, but seemed more comfortable in the past, focusing on the pre-Media Burn work. By contrast, Lord and Schreier, as working artists/architects fully versed in television and web 2.0, and with new installations in the works, made fluid leaps into today. Their easy demeanor was real, yet somehow dismissible (or dismissed) within the lecture auditorium context.

Lord summed it up best in a quip: “How to make subversion suitable for the institution? Add time.”

mouthy motor city

Quick props to my friend Kirsten Palm who's new book, The Straits, was just published by Palm Press. Kirsten is a Detroit native who now lives in San Francisco.The book is two narrative essays on her hometown.

The jacket copy reads:

In The Straits, Kristin Palm presents us with a portrait of the mythological city of Detroit. By tracing its construction and destruction, Palm invokes the glory and tragedy of America in the 20th century. Among Palm’s lyric narrative of the names and places, the ruins of Detroit represent promise and possibility as a model for urban landscapes.

I can't wait to get my hands on a copy.

parched

Ian Baguskas, Two Structures, Death Valley, California, 2007 30x38.3" C-print

Jen Bekman sends word that Sweet Water, an exhibition of new work by photographer Ian Baguskas, opens tomorrow evening at her Spring Street gallery. Baguskas's images are full of bleak, bleached out light and represent failed utopias in the landscape—moments where all the spry optimism of modern America just gives up the ghost. The photographs resonate with current economic fears, and realities—manifested in tent cities outside of LA (Thanks, Kazys). Our own contemporary aspirations gone tragically wrong.

From the press release:

Sweet Water presents us with striking images of vast land and open skies, lying in contrast to artificial, isolated structures, portraying a landscape fractured by modern aspirations’ collisions with the formidable, often unbeatable powers of nature. While journeying from one end of California to the other, Baguskas documented the remains of human attempts to transform untamable landscapes into personal utopias. The resulting images are at once archaeological, anthropological and aesthetically beautiful.

The show runs through April 26.

Rincon Artificial Island and Pipeline, Ventura, California, 2007 40x51" C-print


Luxury Homes, Provo, Utah, 2006. 30x38" Chromira C-print

grafting

Web meme as guerrilla marketing? PFSK recently posted a graph generated by a script that transforms HTML tags into lovely organic pattern: blue for links, violet for images, and orange for line breaks and block quotes.

Enter a site and let the graph grow. As it makes the rounds, pinged to and fro, the site spreads word of Salathe Marcel's art project 356specialdays.com. The concept is so sweet, it makes me feel cynical for calling attention to the self promotion.

365specialdays.com is a conceptual online and offline art project. If one day of the year is a special day for you, let me know and I will create a drawing of what made that day so special for you. You will then get the drawing by postal mail, and I will upload the drawing to this website (including your story - anonymously if you prefer). Over time, this website will be a collection of special days all over the world, and remind us just how special each and every day can be.