loud paper

green scheme

I wrote up a brief piece on Eve Moser's  Seeding the City for I.D. magazine. It is only in the print edition, but I've put the full text below to spread the work on her project. Eve's looking for participants to grow a rooftop patch. No green thumb needed.

You can follow the greenroof takeover on the Seeding the City blog.

Green Scheme

A New York artist harnesses social networking to build roof gardens.

Eve Moser is launching a pyramid scheme. The Brooklyn artist is no Madoff, however— rather than padding her pockets, she’s trying to spread environmental awareness, one roof garden at a time. Participants in her new public art project, Seeding the City, get a homegrown 2-by-4-foot green-roof module installed on their rooftop, but only after they’ve convinced friends and neighbors to join. “It’s about connecting people with their landscape and with each other,” Moser explains.

She conceived Seeding the City in 2007 while working on High Water Line, a chalk boundary that ran through New York waterfront communities 10 feet above sea level to demonstrate the impact of rising oceans. The culturati cheered the project, but Moser wanted to reach the “ecologically repressed”—her term for poor urban communities living with a legacy of industrial pollution. So last summer she began teaching teens at the youth shelter Covenant House how to build the green-roof modules. Once installed, the modules are marked with a rooftop flag and street- level signage to generate interest and word-of-mouth buzz.

Moser is also mapping each location on the project’s website, then using an application that monitors urban heat-island effect to track how much heat the new vegetation is absorbing. Moser hopes that the site, which also hosts blogs, forums, and information on environmental remediation, will foster a community that can spread to other cities. “The challenge is to keep it lively and engaged so it doesn’t die on the vine."

still billboarding

Rebeca Mendez, There Is No There, 2009. Triptych. Each Panel: 20h x 13.3w. Archival Inkjet print, plexiglass and matte white silkscreen ink.

Billboards, the classic meditation of text in space. Pop art darling, Decon construct, and NIMBY troublemaker. The digital age vies for click-thrus and little miss billboard just asks for your ad here. Pretty please. COA's Eric Kahn sends over news of a new show at Koplin Del Rio, plaintively named, Memory of the L.A. Billboard: Telepolis in the Archetype.


Wes Jones, Billboard Series 2, graphite on paper, 12" x 24" (love the ghosting Chrysler)

The group show presents works by artists and architects showing works based on the "Los Angeles billboard imagery landscape." The media is certainly mixed: Folks like Kahn, Sandow Birk, Neil Denari, Wes Jones (soon to be an A Few Zines panelist), Rebeca Mendez, and Marcelo Spina, all take a parting shot at the advertising icon.

And while I'm telling an LA story, I totally forgot to blog about Tiny Houses in the LA Times. You can catch the slideshow here.

urban fabric

Funded by Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program, Kathryn Pannepacker’s Wall of Rugs No. 1 represents textile traditions from 42 countries and cultures. Her assistants on the project were Angela Crafton, Theodore Harris and Michael Schwartz. (Photo by Anna Wolf.)

I visited Philadelphia for the first time back in February. On assignment for American Craft magazine, I met with textile artist Kathryn Pannepacker. The day we drove around North Philly was frigid, but Kathryn is one of the warmest people I've had the pleasure of meeting. When we stopped to look at her mural pieces, she'd say hello to people who passed us on the street. Pannepacker's Wall of Rugs are woven into the community, illustrations of history, culture, and technique.

Here's a bit:

A loaded paintbrush in hand, the artist Kathryn Pannepacker crouches down and applies a black stroke to a steel panel. It’s a late afternoon in January, and it’s starting to snow. The welcoming glow of the Sunoco mini-mart and the car wash’s green neon signs cut through the gathering dusk. She finishes the touch-up on her Wall of Rugs #2 mural (Jordon now reads Jordan), rights her tall frame and surveys Philadelphia’s Broad and Lehigh Streets. Kitty-corner is the empty Botany 500 building, the apparel company’s brick edifice, a commemorative remnant of a once-booming garment district. Throughout the early part of the 20th century, Philadelphia was famous for its textiles—silk hosiery, men’s suits and wool carpets.

Pannepacker knows this intersection well. Over summer and fall she worked daily on the 115-foot-long mural—each of the 18 diamond plate steel panels, which separate the roadway from the train tracks, represents a textile from a different country. Her Wall of Rugs #1, located on two corners at the intersection of Girard and Belmont Avenues, was completed in 2005. Five hundred feet long, the seven-foot-high hand-painted mural ambitiously features over 40 countries. Both artworks were commissioned and funded by the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, an organization dedicated to making art accessible to a general public and the force behind the 2,800 murals that can be found dotting the city’s landscape.

North Philly is a gritty neighborhood, and a cold winter day amplifies a certain desolation. But beyond the debris and weathered buildings there’s life and a diverse culture. Pannepacker’s mural is not an urban ills cleanup campaign. Local stories are woven into the Wall of Rugs project. A Sunoco employee brought Pannepacker a photograph of an embroidered fabric from his native Bangladesh. Adam Alli, a West African artist who works long hours at the car wash, keeps an eye on the mural, and suggested Niger’s black-and-tan printed patterns. Designs from Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Mongolia show up in Wall of Rugs #2, each linked to a person who stopped to talk to Pannepacker about her work. Used as floor or wall coverings, rugs have historically marked out space, both domestic and spiritual—nomadic tents lined with kilim carpets or cathedrals hung with tapestries. In Pannepacker’s hands, a global collection of rugs makes a windswept thoroughfare feel more like home.

Keep reading.

my own private utopia

Untitled, a proposal for a personal Utopia
350 x 350 x 300 cm
Wood, oil on panel
ISCP, New York, USA

Dutch artist Alon Levin's latest exhibition Postponed Modernism is on view at KLEMM'S, Berlin. The gallery describes his wooden structures as: 

Philosophical, economical, and social theories of progress and growth, organizing principles, and ideas of modernist utopias are some of the recurring themes in his work. Levin examines the images, metaphors, and symbols that represent these concepts, and explores the contradictions and failings of their systems. The work can be seen as a narration about the buildup, breakdown, and possibly the reinvention of meaning itself.

As dystopian rhetoric makes me contemplate hoarding, Levin's Untitled, a proposal for a personal Utopia uses lumber and icons to frame up a private haven.

Things to Come and the Man with the Cigar, 2006
Wood, paint, tracks, model train
600 x 210 x 220 cm
Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Open Ateliers 2006, Amsterdam, NL

Video here.

architecting

Via NYTimes.

Sobering up from inaugural festivities, it is time to face the work and responsibilities outlined by President Obama. One such task is to support the arts. All arts not just architecture and design. And so, I implore you to go see the theater piece Architecting now at Performance Space 122 as part of the Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival. It has architect in the title, so it is not that hard to make the leap.

Architecting, developed by TEAM (Theatre of the Emerging American Moment, a theater company dedicated to dissecting and celebrating the experience of living in America today), is set in a post-Katrina bar and tells the story of a young architect brought to New Orleans after the death of her architect father to complete a speculative housing development in the colonade and clapboard tradition. What she finds is Margaret Mitchell and FEMA trailers and what unspools in the bar is a story of race, land, and struggle in the South. The narrative bobs and weaves through time in monologue, dance, and video—a cultural mash up of place and identity. Not to mention a critque of well-meaning, but misguided architectural folly.

The run at PS122 has been extended until February 15. Go.

Also, check out Mark Bradford's Ark on Flickr, built for the Prospect 1 exhibition in New Orleans this past December.

refining the language of sprawl

Last night I attended a lecture at the Metropolitan Exchange, hosted by CUP. Novelist and editor Matthew Stadler spoke on "Where We Live Now." It is a book, the translation of a text by German urbanist Thomas Sieverts and additional readings by  Rem Koolhaas, Aaron Betsky, Saskia Sassen, but it is also a comment on the contemporary condition, the  Zwischenstadt, or "in-between landscape." Those places that are not country or city, but specific moments in the generic sprawl. Here, Matthew argues, is a space rich in its own kind of logic and tradition. To just dismiss it is sprawl is to ignore what Sieverts says is the condition of 80 percent of the populated globe.

To illustrate his talk, Matthew brought up the work of Shawn Records, a Portland-based photographer, who's images of Beaverton, OR capture the mixed messages in our cities, suburbs, and countryside.

Both Matthew and Shawn are part of the bigger project, suddenly.org, which creates events, books, artworks, and ideas about the shape of cities.

interiority complex

Dan Friedman's apartment from Dan Friedman: Radical Modernism.

2THEWALLS is brilliant. I have no way else to describe my new BFF website. Art, check. Interiors, check. Annoying background, check. Fabulously off-kilter taste issues, uh huh.

 

mad and matter

Sunday evening, a week later than when I wanted to write, and I am sitting here trying to wring meaning from the fact that Matters of Sensation, the new architecture show at Artists Space curated by Georgina Huljich and Marcelo Spina, opened the same week as Allied Works Architecture Brad Cloepfil’s Museum of Arts and Design. I think there might be something to say about craft and the continued return to materiality, but I am not sure I am ready to make that leap.

For one thing, the MAD building, which has been skewered in the press, just isn’t that good. Sure, Cloepfil’s slots make for nice views of the city from within the gallery, but all the rejiggering of the core and revamping of Edward Durell Stone’s loopy, lollypop façade doesn’t make up for the fact that the floorplates are too small for galleries. The failure of Huntington Hartford’s old Gallery of Modern Art still haunts the place. The tight gallery layout, especially in the permanent collection rooms, brings the viewer uncomfortably close to a lot of Chuhuly glass, Memphis-style functional sculpture from a decade or two ago, fiber arts, and a Frank Gehry gestural thing. It is the kind of art that perhaps only a craft artist could love.

A DIY knitter of scarves and the occasional obscene cozy, I wanted to like museum and its collection. (The special, one floor exhibition, Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary, a showcase of fifty-four artists who repurpose and transform mass-produced objects into works of art, is pretty groovy. Imagine a chandelier constructed from vintage eyewear, each myopic lens twinkling.) I could appreciate the technique, of the architecture and the art on view, but had to navigate around certain issues involving taste.

And maybe it is here that I can come back to Matters of Sensation. The show features fourteen architecture practices—davidclovers with C.E.B. Reas, Emergent, Gage/Clemenceau Architects, Gnuform, Hirsuta, Höweler+Yoon Architecture, IwamotoScott Architecture, mod, MOS, murmur, Ruy Klein, Sotamaa, SU11, Xefirotarch—all young, all experimental. The goal of the show was to transform the understanding of these firms’ digital allegiances from the virtual to the material.

From the press release:

Whereas architects’ use of computers first affected shape and structure, the participants in this exhibition address the way materials are not just about construction choices but also a means of creating diverse sensations in a space, focusing on the effects produced by the materials’ textures and surfaces.

Matters of Sensation, like MAD, is a lot about appreciating technique, and then being compelled to an artwork based on taste. I really loved MOS’ Desert Island No. 2 (silicone rubber mats) simply for the fantasy of walking barefoot through the sea anemone–like surface. Other laser-cut or CNC milled pieces seemed lickable, while other folded, kinetic, twisted works (from IwamotoScott Architecture and Howeler + Yoon/MY Studio) were beautiful in their organic repetitions.

And because I liked certain works, regardless of their architectural intent, I just might let the press release seduce a little more:

Unaligned in their interests and bored by old debates, the group of young architects featured in Matters of Sensation produce work that attempts to answer no questions, solve no problems, and broach no oppositions. It is, rather, about a fascination with architectural forms that induce sensation—about fantasy, intimacy, and sci-fi, and, above all, about experiencing pleasure.

plate tectonics

A little late to the party, I finally checked my design sponge RSS feed and found Andrew Wagner guest blogging. Andrew's editor-in-chief of the brilliantly relaunched American Craft magazine (where, very excitingly, I recently had a cover story).

Years ago, back when he was editing at either Limn or the early Dwell days, Andrew introduced me to his friend Jed Morfit. Jed's illustrations were then, and are now, spare, but psychologically haunting, with a good dose of wit. Taken with his work, I asked Jed to contribute to loud paper, which he did, and design a tee shirt (see above). And then over the years we lost touch. So, it was really great to see Andrew link to new work by Jed in Décor/Decorum at Philadelphia's Center for Emerging Visual Artists. The reliefs on dinner plates are wonderfully refined and twisted.

"New Temptations", 2008, Plaster plates, mixed media, Dimensions Variable

"New Temptations" (detail), 2008, Plaster plates, mixed media, Dimensions variable


"The Price Of Doing Business"(detail), 2008, Plaster mounted on wall, Dimensions variable

art and fly

San Francisco-based artists Jennifer Starkweather and Amanda Hughen are working on a new collaborative project and they are soliciting volunteer photographers. The pair recently created their Market Street series, which was installed on kiosks along the SF thoroughfare. The pieces tracked Bay Area infrastructure data, such as trees, bike racks, commuters, in gouache and ink.

The current project focuses on transportation patterns at six specific airports around the country. The resulting prints will be part of an exhibition at Electric Works in San Francisco this winter.

If you are traveling to Miami, Chicago: O'Hare, Oakland, New York: JFK, or LAX airports this summer, they would love you to snap a photo of a parking garage or parking garage signage from each of these airports.

Pretty simple and, given the richness of the prints in their last project, it will surely pay off in good art.

Amanda writes:

We don't need a GOOD photo, we just need some basic information about parking garage colors in these airports (which is surprisingly difficult to obtain online or through airport public relations departments). It would involve only one simple photo of a parking garage color, whatever is most convenient for the traveler. Of course, if you are up for the challenge, the more information we can get the better. The photos can be digital, print, or even cell phone.

To volunteer, contact Amanda via her website.