loud paper

traveling for tiny (or it's a small world, afterall)

In the early days of this blog I was obsessed with miniatures. One of my first posts linked to the tiny ceramic apartment buildings offered by the Bauhaus Center in Tel Aviv. Well, now after two twelve hour flights; a week-long press junket in Israel (a boondoggle, says a friend); and a visit to the opening of Calatrava's lovely, but not without a slew of issues, bridge in Jerusalem (pics); I have my very own wee White City replica. A model of the Bauhaus apartment building on Yehuda Halevi St. 58, scaled 1:270.

In 2003 UNESCO declared that the city of Tel Aviv a World Cultural Heritage site, owing to over 4,000 Bauhaus buildings which are spread over the city. Tel Aviv is a super-cosmopolitan and is quickly gentrifying. The same apartment buildings that spent the better part of the last century crumbling into themselves are now hot commodities. Changed development regulations encourages preservation by allowing additions and expansions. It is a weird trade-off and results are certainly mixed: some apartment buildings are beautifully restored, some still moldering, and others, with two or three new floor of construction resemble Bauhaus wedding cakes. Can I get a huppa?

For more of a taste of the variety Tel Aviv architecture, check out Open House Tel Aviv, architect Alon Bin Nun modeled the weekend event on the New York City shindig.

Doing the funky chicken:
On another note, can someone explain the chickens at PF1 (Public Farm 1)? Does poultry and dancing really mix anywhere except at weddings?

play time

Delve into the psyche of any architect of a certain age and you'll find a stash of LEGOs. The nubby, plastic modulars pack a default ironic punch. BIG’s take on the LEGO—“a homage to the Danish building industry” and commentary on prefab—is now on view at Storefront. Five housing project models fill the space, leaving not much room to maneuver. The twelve by twelve-foot, 250,000-piece LEGO model is pretty impressive and I am sure I am not the only person to find two, of the 1,000 LEGO people, engaged in a naughty activity. (I had to look. I grew up in the age of Slow House cross-sections and recto verso.)

Glowing like a shot out of Jacques Tati’s 1967 Play Time, the piece is described by the BIG team as: “…an elastic field of peaks and valleys. A thousand plateaus ascending and descending, separating and merging to form a fluid space of private and public plateaus. Combining the rigorous and the adventurous. The box and the blob.” Yeah. Those dirty Danes.

tiny bubbles

When I was up in Canada I didn’t get a chance to visit Montreal. Our little Subaru skirted around the civic center and got caught in some rush hour traffic. This gave me a chance to gaze longingly at the seemingly-abandoned biosphere, sitting as it does on a marshy area dotted with crusty 60s and 70s apartment buildings. (See drowning in culture for a hit of Safdie-esque détournement.) The Bucky dome, built originally for the 67 Expo, burned in 1976, but the bubble was restored in 1990 and now is home to, appropriately enough, an environmental museum.

Via Off the Fence, via Library and Archives, Canada.

I also missed an entry for my tiny file while zooming past the city. The a new photography show at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Naoya Hatakeyama: Scales features three series of images by the Japanese artist.

New York/Tobu World Square and New York/Window of the World depict scaled architecture models of New York City’s streets and skyscrapers. The photographs ape the high-contrast, modern tropes of photographers Berenice Abbott and Alfred Stieglitz, but also reveal the preciousness and artificiality of the models, and by extension, the fragile façade of the city.

New York/Window of the World
Naoya Hatakeyama
CCA collection

New York/Tobu World Square
Naoya Hatakeyama
CCA collection

fine focus

Fiction focus

As I sit here tapping away at my laptop in my favorite Brooklyn café, Outpost, a turntable is rotating Galaxie 500, sending Tugboat strains out over the speakers. The retro continues. Perhaps it is the right soundtrack to pair with Liset Castillo’s new show, Pain Is Universal But So Is Hope, now on view at the Black and White Gallery in Chelsea. The tenderhearted title could be a lyric. On Parking Lot, Dean Wareham achingly sings out:

Sitting on a subway train and Watching all the people lose their senses

Hiding in a parking lot and
Watching all the people fall to pieces

I don't mind
I think it's fine

The spare words, capturing ephemeral moments with big meanings, are carved out of guitar fuzz. Replace “words” with “structures” and “guitar fuzz” with “sand” and you get a description of Castillo’s work. Her large-scale photographs depict miniature, crumbling utopias, not dystopias. In an artist statement on the Brooklyn Museum’s website, she says:

The notion of movement, with which the work plays, offers a reading of the historic relationship between nature and artifice. It's for this reason that it is not the object that becomes the work, but rather its representation, the photograph as a symbol of the documentation, which offers itself to the spectator as testimony of the utopia that in the end lives only as image, in the process of disappearing.

Before walking into the gallery, I expected diorama-type representation, sandbox-scaled images easily filed into my tiny collection, but the photographs are physically slick. Their size is demanding and I wouldn’t describe the sandcastle pastiche of iconic buildings as cute. The arcades at Carlo Fontana’s Piazza San Pietro collapse, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim caves under its own weight, Golden Arches tumble, and, as an observer, I am detached from the escalating chaos. But I don’t mind. I think its fine.

Pain is Universal but so is Hope (Light Blue), 2007
C-print on Aluminum
70" X 92"

Pain is Universal but so is Hope (Orange), 2007
C-print on Aluminum
70" X 92"

a return to tiny

How to compose 5,500 acres into 500 words? This is what I ask myself as I write up a short piece on Atlanta's BeltLine—a massively ambitious, urban design and transit rethink. Which is why I am indebted to Itinerant Urbanist Karrie Jacob for bringing a miniscule moment to my screen and adding to my tiny collection. At work on the artist’s monograph, she describes Gary Panter’s mini-buildings, posting:

Unlike Philip Johnson's Glass House, or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, the glass walls in Gary Panter's high-modernist masterpiece, the Meiji Almond House, are merely implied. Gary, who is well known as an underground cartoonist and painter has, for years, been building tiny houses and other sorts of structures, mostly from the scraps of packing material that tend to accumulate in his studio.

Pretty neat. I look forward to seeing more little structures in the forthcoming book. And now I need to return to the scale of regional infrastructure.

Farnsworth House meets flooded Fox River, more images in Steve's Basement.

micro-urbanism

More big and more tiny. I just received an email from the folks at Flux Factory in Long Island City. They are looking for artists to participate in their winter exhibition, New York, New York, New York, “an interactive, multimedia installation consisting of a large model of New York City inspired loosely by the Panorama at the Queens Museum.” Jonathan Safran Foer fans can start crafting The Sixth Borough.

Flux Factory is also up to some very secret stuff with The Believer Magazine. Sounds great, right?

And, a mini-search instantly uncovered a global collection of mini-cities. When I was 13, I visited the one of Old Jerusalem.

OPEN CALL: NYNYNY

New York, New York, New York
So nice we named it thrice.
December 14, 2007 through January 2008
Deadline: October 1st

This is an open call for artists working in all media to participate in Flux Factory’s Winter 2007 show, New York, New York, New York.

New York, New York, New York is an interactive, multimedia installation consisting of a large model of New York City inspired loosely by the Panorama at the Queens Museum. It will be located in five separate spaces (one in each borough). Instead of being an exact replica to scale of the city of New York, this project offers a mental map, a replica of an imaginary New York. The goal of the show is to explore the architectural and conceptual elements of everyday space. It is an investigation into the collective unconscious of the cultural capital of the planet.

Each artist will contribute a building, a landmark, a street, an avenue, a block, a park, a neighborhood, an expressway, a bridge, an island, an airport—one or several elements of the urban environment. All of these individual works will be combined to produce a cohesive yet chaotic installation, a multimedia, scale model version of the city.

We want artists not to think so much about New York as it actually is, but New York as a possible space. We encourage participants to explore the city's great myths and urban legends, grandiose unrealized projects, future visions from the past, as well as individual and personal experiences of the city.

Models will be installed on the gallery floor, keep in mind that each project needs to be integrated with the rest of the show. Think of your production as a single piece in a larger puzzle. Scales can vary between 1:200 and 1:2000.

Please send us a CV as well as a less than one page descriptive text and a couple of visuals. Please include specific dimensions and materials. Documentation of past relevant work will also be accepted. Also (and importantly), please be very specific about the location of your piece: specify the Borough and the exact neighborhood you want to work on.

Email all proposals to Jean@fluxfactory.org or mail (with S.A.S.E) to
Attn: NY-NY-NY
Flux Factory
38-38 43rd Street,
LIC, NY 11101 USA

and another tiny thing

The tastemakers over at Moss also have an eye for the miniature. Today, their Daily New feed features Constantin and Laurene Leon Boym’s Buildings of Disaster: Neverland Ranch. They describe the series:

Souvenirs of human tragedy, even violent events, are a part of our object-history. Each year hoards of people visit the battlefield of Gettysburg, as well as the site of the car crash which killed Diana, Princess of Wales. Perhaps we embrace horror so that we may contain it, even feel some sense of control over it.

The bonded nickel piece was designed in 1998 and I remember seeing the series when it came out. I was charmed by the postmodern urge to recontextualize calamity into pop culture consumables. (A limited edition, they sell for $110.00). Viewed through the inescapable lens of 9/11 and Middle Eastern crisis, there’s something so innocent about this piece. Ostensibly the “disaster” is Michael Jackson’s downward spiral, the police raid, baby on balcony, et al. But to pluck a contemporary example from the headlines: Is it possible to imagine a palm-sized Red Mosque? Would it give me a sense of control over the viral expansion of religious and cultural conflicts globally? No, but boy it would be a handy hunk of metal to chuck at the TV.

tiny

Yesterday was about tiny things. The morning began with a post from Apartment Therapy about ceramic miniatures of International Style buildings in Tel Aviv for sale at Matter's new Manhattan location. The wee edifices are souvenirs from the gift shop of the Bauhaus Center Tel Aviv.

Pictured above is the 1:1000 scaled Tel Aviv-Yafo City Hall built in 1966 by Menachem Cohen and Yaski-Alexandroni Architects. The awkward delicateness of the figurine hides a few facts about the real building. As to be expected, it is a contentious site ripe with political implications:

The City Hall's plaza, Rabin Square (formerly known as Malckey Israel Square), is the largest plaza in Tel Aviv and the city's main square for large rallies, demonstrations and open-fairs.

The late Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's Prime Minister, was assassinated by an extremist at the end of a Peace Rally in this building's parking lot, on the evening of November 4th, 1995. The large squre in front of the City Hall is now named after him.

During the 2006 local parliament elections, held on March 28th, the building's main facade was turned into the country's largest screen, showing the elections edition of the Israeli Channel 10 news.

At thirty bucks apiece, why not bring home a slightly more ironic than heroric piece of Israeli history?

The second small item comes from Kazys at varnelis.net. His post on Slinkachu's Little People - A Tiny Street Art Project strikes a bit of a doleful tone, but perhaps it is just existential.

Left out in the streets of London, these people are, quite literally doomed, unless brought home by a caring stranger. But this isn't a project about alienation to me as much as about self-sacrifice. The sacrifice these little people make leads me to think of our own desire to lose ourselves in the world

Kazys asks "What drives us to lose ourselves in a larger whole?" I wonder if it isn't my utterly romantic side that wants to answer that it isn't about getting lost, but getting found—about trying to connect to the fray of network culture in tiny ways.

when softly attacks

Time Out arrived in my mailbox this afternoon just as I was reading the online review of Introductions, artist Bryan Jackson's New York debut show on view at the Alexander Gray Gallery in Chelsea. The exhibiton features Jack's piece, Softly, in video, photographs, and models. It is, as the review says "...a metafiction that is both preposterously campy and strangely affecting."

All the sets were handmade to the scale of the actors—Bratz dolls with big, beautiful eyes and mouthwatering lips. The Los Angeles bedroom, shown above, is based on Jack's own. The minute details are wonderful: NASA Scudelia Electro posters, Eames chair, Ikea shelving. The recreation of his own stuff is more an intimate self-portrait than a film set.