January 2, 2012
I just pulled out some Future Systems books last night, and I'd forgotten how hard I'd fallen for them. And though I knew they were The Future at the time, it's still pretty awesome/eerie how much our 2006 ended...
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10:55 AM
December 22, 2011
You know what I never got around to doing in 2010? Finishing the catalogue of all the designs created for the Alcoa Forecast ad campaign in the late 1950s. That was the postwar, civilian/consumer-oriented, Glorious Aluminum Future PR campaign that...
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Posted by greg at
12:53 PM
Yes, I know I should be praising Norman Foster for his Dymaxion Car, which, of course. But instead, I will be grateful for the deftness of Lord Foster's humblebraggadocio in the essay he wrote for his wife's show/book in Madrid...
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Posted by greg at
10:04 AM
December 19, 2011
Let me tell you, spare, door-sized black & white prints in screen-like triptychs are not what I think of when I hear "Carlo Mollino" and "photography." [Google search possibly nsfw] But Becky Beasley's show "The Outside," at Francesca Minini...
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9:26 PM
December 14, 2011
I'm really bummed to have missed The Gifting of Bill Walton's Studio on December 4th, the extraordinary culmination of the ICA Philadelphia's memorial recreation/exhibit of the late local master's crowded workplace. As ICA blogger/curator Rachel Pastan tells it, the...
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Posted by greg at
10:32 PM
December 12, 2011
The new issue of Public Art Dialogue is out--as you know, right?--and it includes an article by Drake University art historian Maura Lyons that looks at how Disney, photography, and Ken Burns altered the Gettysburg National Military Park. In the...
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Posted by greg at
9:35 PM
December 8, 2011
A few months ago, I was asked to write something about Ray and Charles Eames by the folks at Humanities Magazine, published by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The NEH had provided some funding to Jason Cohn and...
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Posted by greg at
11:59 PM
Here's video of James Bridle giving a live, keynote speech version of his awesome tumblr, The New Aesthetic, at a web conference in Australia. Lots of good stuff, though not much that will be new to TNA followers. There are...
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Posted by greg at
10:43 PM
December 6, 2011
We took the family to Hillwood over the holidays. It's Marjorie Merriweather Post's house-turned-house museum, and it's kind of bizarre, frankly. Not seriously wack, but just a low-grade oddness which, who knows, maybe the passage of time and the accretion...
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Posted by greg at
11:17 PM
A little while ago, I got an email from LA-based artist Kim Schoenstadt, asking if it was alright to reference some photos I took a few years ago of unusually awesome modernist houses in Salt Lake City. She planned...
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Posted by greg at
9:53 PM
November 25, 2011
In what is probably the most ideologically analytical essay ever written about paperweights, curator Barbara Casavecchia notes that many of the 60 paperweights she selected from Enzo Mari's collection "are the product of a manual labor--serving as fragmented evidence of...
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Posted by greg at
6:16 AM
November 23, 2011
(K-2-28) This is the first of our United States, Department of Commerce, Trade Fair domes. It was erected in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1957. The U.S. Department of Commerce came to me in an emergency and with a very small...
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Posted by greg at
9:37 PM
November 22, 2011
Wait, the UC Davis Occupy protestors built a 30-foot geodesic dome for their general assembly? Of course they did. This is not a drill, people. Welcome to the Pepper Dome. [image via @amychamp] Previously: jackboot, Bean Boot...
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Posted by greg at
11:13 PM
November 17, 2011
I confess, I haven't checked out Utah's Dugway Proving Grounds since the Terraserver era. But I just checked them out again on Google Maps, and I've gotta say: China has taken the lead in the awesome, Earth Art-like, military industrial...
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Posted by greg at
10:28 PM
November 10, 2011
You'd think I'd learn the importance of clearing browser tabs by now. I've had this eBay listing open for a couple of weeks now, thinking I'd buy it. And then last night I decided to pull the trigger. And...
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Posted by greg at
9:32 PM
November 7, 2011
Sweet, near the end of World War I, Paris planned and began construction on a "Sham Paris," decoy trains, stations, avenues and factories, to confuse German aerial bombers. Above, a detail from the photo, "Luminous canvas on the ground...
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Posted by greg at
7:23 AM
October 31, 2011
I love a lot of Jason Rhoades' work, but only have a little. I wish I'd known about this sooner: Blue Room and Love Seat is an edition produced with 1301PE's Brian Butler in 1995, maybe when it was still...
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Posted by greg at
10:27 PM
October 20, 2011
I'm sure photomural historians out there are chuckling, wondering when I was finally going to catch up on this, but HOLY CRAP, PEOPLE! ANSEL ADAMS PHOTO MURALS! Alright, it's not quite so unknown. The Polaroid ransacking auction last year at...
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Posted by greg at
7:33 PM
October 13, 2011
Speaking of huge, impressive balls, Reuters reports that a Belgian firm called Barco is delivering its first order of eight, brand new, 360-degree flight simulators, each of which is a 3.4 meter-diameter cast acrylic sphere. The sphere is ringed...
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Posted by greg at
11:58 PM
Hoo man, David has an interview with Ball and Nogue about their High Desert Test Site project which is called Yucca Crater, and which appears to be an earthwork, but is man-made. It's a tricked out plywood recreational structure...
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Posted by greg at
10:28 PM
October 6, 2011
I'm bummed to miss it but "While You Wait," a group show organized by Brian Dupont in Extra Gallery, his Chelsea art firm's expropriated lobby is opening right now. [Spoiler alert on the venue's lobbyness? I can't quite tell,...
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Posted by greg at
5:51 PM
October 3, 2011
This interior shot of Fuller/Sadao's US Pavilion at Expo67 almost has it all: installation view of the giant paintings Lichtenstein, Newman, Warhol and Johns made for Alan Solomon's American Painting Now; plus a giant photomural of the moon, perfect...
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Posted by greg at
8:42 AM
I'll probably write some more about Andy Warhol's Shadows, but I want to find more details about its creation and Heiner Friedrich's involvement. In the mean time, though, I just came across a 1985 Richard Serra quote from the Pratt...
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Posted by greg at
7:18 AM
October 2, 2011
A finalist on a 2006 ABC reality series spent years inventing a car seat that would withstand the type of crash that killed his own infant son. Skyscraper evacuation technology experienced a surge of innovation in 2002. And six months...
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Posted by greg at
9:08 AM
September 30, 2011
Well, let's just get this out of the way: if you can only see one Warhol exhibition in Washington this year, see Shadows. The Warhol Headlines show is very slight. It's hard to call it a highlight, but a series...
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Posted by greg at
9:32 PM
September 27, 2011
Sometimes I really just am slow to put things together. I mean, I've written at length, ad nauseam, even, about the history of Mark Cross. Mondo-Blogo had a huge post months ago about what Superfreaks they are. There's the...
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Posted by greg at
10:58 AM
September 10, 2011
It was the other night, while Googling around for Tris Vonna-Michell info, that I found my way back to Carefully Aimed Darts, an awesome art-related weblog which went dormant about a year and a half ago. And I remembered...
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Posted by greg at
10:12 PM
September 6, 2011
So you should really read Daniel Kasman's review of the Venice debut of Mark Lewis's awesome-sounding short film, Black MIrror At The National Gallery, because Kasman is sensitive to both the tone and surprise/reveal of the film in a...
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Posted by greg at
12:58 PM
September 2, 2011
Between 1981 and 1985, Paul Tschinkel and Marc H. Miller produced 17 episodes of ART/newyork, a subscription-based video magazine about contemporary art for use, incredibly, in public schools and libraries. Their 1982 interview with Richard Serra, a Yale classmate of...
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Posted by greg at
1:30 PM
August 27, 2011
Whatever else it is, Hurricane Irene is the greatest thing to happen to plywood fetishists since the Puerto Rican Day parade. I love the sight of a freshly boarded up facade under any circumstances, the fiery, manufactured beauty of the...
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10:02 PM
August 26, 2011
People walking the city streets with made-on-the-spot chairs. First there was the Chaise Bordelaise. Then it was the Sedia Veneziana. And yet, though The Generator by Raumlabor has had two incarnations at Storefront for Art & Architecture this year,...
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Posted by greg at
11:21 PM
image: designboom Enzo Mari was brought in to design the exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, Vaudon-Vodun, African Voodoo Art from the Collection of Anne and Jacques Kerchache. It's simple and spectacular, and designboom has, as usual, rather comprehensive visual...
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Posted by greg at
12:10 PM
August 15, 2011
I'm not sure why I'm so fascinated with the Netherlands, or more precisely, why it's the source/site/subject of so much of my art/object/image/culture interest. Maybe it's because of New York, which has always felt to me of a piece with...
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1:15 PM
August 13, 2011
Wow. Nearly camouflaged.While each pool has a pumping system powerful enough to recycle 52,000 gallons of water per minute, it is the surface of the nearly 1,600 lineal ft of parapets that had to be robust enough to withstand rain,...
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10:43 PM
July 30, 2011
Robert Smithson, "Conversation in Salt Lake City," 1972:There's a word called entropy. These are kind of like entropic situations that hold themselves together. It's like the Spiral Jetty is physical enough to be able to withstand all these climate changes,...
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3:16 PM
July 29, 2011
In the early Cold War of the mid-1950s, the Soviet Union countered American condemnation of its repressive actions in East Germany and Hungary with criticism of the US's internal policies of segregation and racial discrimination. Planners of the US...
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12:19 AM
July 27, 2011
What's the opposite of writer's block, the thing where you have so much damn good stuff to write about, you're paralyzed into inaction? Because that's what I've got, and August vacation voids or not, I just can't help it;...
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10:33 PM
July 5, 2011
Japan still has a ton of the kind of awesome, ad hoc architecture that is just barely finding its way to 25th Street....
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7:40 AM
July 4, 2011
I have no willpower. I was going to hold off posting about this incredible project found on an incredible blog until I happily scored the book, but I couldn't wait. Now I can only hope that my post will...
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Posted by greg at
3:11 PM
June 20, 2011
After hipster bouncy castles and food truck happy hours, and shuffling like giddy commuters along a packed, 10-block-long sidewalk the size of a lesser tunnel passageway at Penn Station, I was forced the other night to contemplate the cheery,...
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8:06 AM
June 19, 2011
I've been moving art and life at our storage unit in Long Island City several times the last couple of weeks, and it's given me time to really look. Look across the water to the most spectacular structures built...
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Posted by greg at
11:13 PM
June 15, 2011
Well here's one Dutch immigrant detention center that's not invisible! Just the opposite. That's the Sportsdomes DJI up there, by architect Willem van der Sluis, featured in Wallpaper* Magazine in 2008, the same year the project won a Dutch...
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Posted by greg at
3:03 PM
As part of their project Caché-Exposé, investigating the Netherlands' largely invisible detention and deportation system, the Amsterdam art & design collaborative Foundland documented obscure, anonymous detention sites around the country. Then they used a highly official, public system to...
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9:36 AM
June 13, 2011
I love it when a plan comes together. Or at least when several subjects of interest converge unexpectedly. It seems the Dutch art world is about to be decimated by sudden and substantial government funding cuts and reorganizations. [for angry...
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1:04 PM
June 7, 2011
An aside from Dan Hill's extended examination of physical retail:a conversation earlier today, spiraling out of the fact that we have some Ikea furniture (a bed) in a shipping container somewhere, traveling from Australia to Finland, and the thought occurs...
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7:35 AM
June 6, 2011
Looking back at some of the other projects of FREE SOL LEWITT co-curator Daniel McClean, I have basically concluded that we have been walking in a weird parallel in the art world for ten-plus years, without ever actually meeting....
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Posted by greg at
8:48 PM
So everyone dutifully reproduced the press release about Craig Robins putting Buckminster Fuller's 24-foot version of the Fly's Eye Dome through a "historic restoration" by boat fabricator Goetz Composites, yet no one seems to have followed through with picture...
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Posted by greg at
10:41 AM
US Pavilion at Jeshyn Fair, 1956, photo by James Cudney In the Spring of 1956, as the Jeshyn Fair celebrating Afghan independence approached, and the Soviets were well along in constructing a massive pavilion, US diplomats in Kabul thought...
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7:33 AM
May 28, 2011
It may not be the absolute origin of my desire to live in a converted, modernist gas station, but AO Scott's recent reminiscence reminds me that the Esso station at the end of Jacques Demy's incomparable Les Parapluies de...
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Posted by greg at
10:03 PM
May 24, 2011
O wow. Olafur Eliasson's Your Rainbow Panorama opens Thursday on the roof of ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark. It's a 360-degree glass promenade which paints the cityscape with every color of the spectrum. Too bad the promenade roof's not...
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9:55 PM
May 20, 2011
Andy helpfully pointed out this mirrored glass ball, which I'd missed in the catalogue for Phillips' upcoming design auction. Everyone knows the Bauhaus was a huge party school. And during the Winter 1929 semester, Oskar Schlemmer had put an...
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Posted by greg at
2:53 PM
May 13, 2011
Believe me, I know how this looks. But also this. Balloons and the Grand Palais go way back: And anyway also this, Leviathan has a groin vault: and is the venue for a concert performance by minimalist composer and...
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Posted by greg at
9:35 AM
May 11, 2011
Hm, OK. I think we're in the clear here, satelloon-wise. It is true that Anish Kapoor's Leviathan is inflated, and 35 meters tall. But when you enter the Grand Palais to see Leviathan, you enter Leviathan itself. It's a space,...
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7:17 AM
May 7, 2011
In 1997 or so, the Junior Associates at MoMA organized a day of studio visits in Williamsburg. Worried about where to eat, we packed our own food, sandwiches from a fellow board member's startup, Cosi. We ate lunch on Meg...
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Posted by greg at
8:18 AM
May 2, 2011
I'm getting pretty comfortable with my love affair/obsession with the US Pavilion at the Expo 67 in Montreal. I mean, it's got Buckminster Fuller; Alan Solomon curating gigantic paintings; photomurals; and satelloons, what's not to love, right? So seeing...
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Posted by greg at
9:11 PM
April 27, 2011
In 1989, a group of veteran activists organized the Berkeley Art Project to create a monument marking the 25th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. Mark Brest van Kempen's conceptual proposal won the elaborate national competition and dialogue. It is...
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Posted by greg at
9:23 PM
April 25, 2011
Good grief. When McDonald's in the Louvre made a giant photomural wallpaper from a Jake Dobkin photo of REVS & COST tags, which was included in a Hugo Martinez book, did they bother to ask either REVS or COST...
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Posted by greg at
11:05 AM
April 19, 2011
I've been meaning to post more about this for months, but now I'm glad I waited. In January curator/writer Pablo Leon de la Barra posted Google Street View photos of the Hotel Palenque on his blog, Centre For The...
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Posted by greg at
9:01 PM
April 18, 2011
And speaking of Richard Serra. I can't figure out how James Meyer's 2004 Artforum essay on the problematics of size in contemporary sculpture got by me until now. It ends too soon, but it's pretty great. Beginning with the overwhelming...
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Posted by greg at
10:22 PM
April 17, 2011
So Dan Hill's posted another of his typically incisive analysis of an urban situation. This time it's his extended and engrossing account of visiting Linked Hybrid, the massive urban development in Beijing, designed by Steven Holl Architects, which was...
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9:43 AM
April 7, 2011
You know, every once in a while, I think that it's crazy to be considering satelloons as art instead of what they really were--aestheticized objects designed to be seen and exhibited. And then I'll catch a glimpse of Expo...
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9:52 PM
April 5, 2011
I'm trying to remember what made me think of this. I'm coming up blank. In 1995, Geert van de Camp, Andre Dekker and Ruud Reutelingsperger decided to work together to create space which facilitated longer-term contemplation. They called their...
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Posted by greg at
11:15 PM
April 3, 2011
When Kurt Schwitters died in 1948, his lawyer inherited the art the artist had held onto. After his death in 1956, it was dispersed. Sidney Janis bought this 1922 Kurt Schwitters Merz collage, titled er, and then promptly sold...
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Posted by greg at
7:42 AM
April 1, 2011
So I'm slowly making my way through the 35-page press release [!! those were the days, right?] for MoMA's 1968-9 exhibition, "The Machine As Seen At The End Of The Mechanical Age," which included a long-lost, recently stumbled-upon in a...
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Posted by greg at
9:02 PM
March 31, 2011
Ah, the memories. It was A year ago today that I began searching for a Richard Neutra house that was supposedly built in Utah, a hunting lodge commissioned by a Neutra client in Los Angeles, but which had never been...
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12:21 PM
March 3, 2011
So I'm searching through the New York Times archive, trying different combinations of keywords to find references to photomurals at the Museum of Modern Art, and I find this intriguing 1934 headline:TWO FORSAKE ART TO FOUND A PARTY; Museum Modernists...
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Posted by greg at
10:42 PM
March 2, 2011
Frieze's 20-year retrospective of itself continues apace, and wow, it's like running into an old flame on a train platform. I hadn't thought about Daniel Birnbaum's 1996 essay, "IKEA at the End of Metaphysics" in years, but wow, it's just...
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Posted by greg at
8:57 PM
February 26, 2011
Looking through the installation photos for Road To Victory, Edward Steichen's 1942 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, I find myself asking two things: Who took these photos, and how did they make them? [Of course, my real...
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Posted by greg at
12:21 AM
February 24, 2011
So in my ersatz zigzagging through the history of photomurals, I kind of skipped from Edward Steichen's landmark Family of Man exhibition in 1955, where Paul Rudolph deployed enlarged photo prints for content and experience, as well as architectural...
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Posted by greg at
10:56 PM
February 20, 2011
In 1909, balloonist/photographers André Schelcher and Albert Omer-Décugis took this picture from about 50m above the top of the Eiffel Tower. It is one of 40 images they published that year in a book titled, Paris vu en ballon...
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Posted by greg at
1:47 PM
It's hard enough for me to wrap my head around the fact that Gerhard Richter and Isa Genzken were married for 13 years. Now I find out they made a subway station together. A subway station about their relationship. In...
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Posted by greg at
11:14 AM
February 11, 2011
I'd say, "Adieu" or "Au revoir," but Janette Laverrière was as fierce an atheist as she was a communist, designer, and artist. So I'll just say I'm slow and sad to learn that Laverrière died last month at the age...
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Posted by greg at
11:45 PM
February 8, 2011
While poking around online about Tate Modern's version of the Gabriel Orozco retrospective, I found this rather incredible letter from 2009, written, apparently by Orozco himself, to his dealer Jose Kuri. The letter is an ostensibily-but-not-really private round in an...
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1:57 PM
February 6, 2011
Sometimes I can't tell when something is obvious, or when it's just obvious to me. But whichever this was, the idea came to me as soon as I figured out that the unidentified guy who was photographed at least...
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2:57 PM
January 28, 2011
Maybe it was me looking for Tacita Dean's Sound Mirrors that brought me there, but David Williams' 2009 post at Skywritings about Dean, Derek Jarman, Dungeness, gardens, Tehching Hsieh is pretty wonderful:Everything here has been found, salvaged, re-cycled from...
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4:46 PM
January 27, 2011
In reviewing Johan Grimonperez' 1997 film, Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y., which was exhibited at Deitch, Ronald Jones underscores artists' failure to, well, to matter very much in contemporary culture. And he reminded me of this, which I had completely forgotten:Paul Goldberger's...
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Posted by greg at
12:43 AM
January 19, 2011
I tried searching the 150,000 million images in the ETH Bibliothek photo archive, too, but I sure didn't come up with one of these: One thing's for sure, though: if I were ever to show some videos on little screens,...
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8:53 PM
January 17, 2011
Huh, so I'm poking around online for info on the Saarinens' unrealized design for a Smithsonian Gallery of Art [above is a SI photo of the model, built in 1939 by Ray and Charles Eames, of all people, perched...
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Posted by greg at
11:23 PM
You know what, it's been too long since we had a good, old-fashioned photomuralin' around these parts. And one that combines a bit of Google Maps-ready, roof-as-facade architecture? And camo? Even better. I only go to the Museum of the...
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Posted by greg at
10:03 PM
January 14, 2011
This just in from the greg.org Department of Stunningly Beautiful Digitized Maps of The Netherlands: Bibliodyssey has some highlights from the National Library of the Netherlands' fresh upload one of the rarest and most beautiful atlases in history, mid-17th century...
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Posted by greg at
6:46 PM
January 11, 2011
Via one of my Senior Street View Scouts John comes this eerie shot from Simple Ranger's Street View essay of Macau. [Here's the live link.] Seriously, is that building real? Even if I wander over to look at it...
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Posted by greg at
9:40 PM
January 2, 2011
A dismal, depressing subject can be made enjoyable by great writing. And the spirits can be lifted by an awesome photo at the end. These are my takeaways from Richard Hendy's travel/history/economics/politics/apocalyptic decline essay on Amakusa, a hardscrabble group...
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1:33 PM
December 28, 2010
See, this is what I'm talking about. And by see, I mean look. Last Spring, while trying to save Richard Neutra's Gettysburg Cyclorama building from destruction by the Park Service and misguided preservationists, I backed into the idea of...
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Posted by greg at
4:02 PM
December 20, 2010
So much to blog, so little time. I may have to institute a new practice of dumping my interesting-looking browser tabs if I don't write about or use them within a month, or blogging about them. For example, ever since...
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Posted by greg at
10:10 AM
December 17, 2010
I didn't realize how closely the Modern's 1932 Murals and Photomurals exhibition and the anti-communist controversy it provoked dovetailed with the far better known confrontation over Diego Rivera's rejected and destroyed commission at Rockefeller Center. Rivera had a hugely...
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Posted by greg at
2:22 PM
December 15, 2010
I've been deep in the commercial letterpress lately, and neglecting my Ant Farm. Fortunately, Mondo Blogo is there to bring me back in line, with this awesome poster the Farmers made for 20:20 Vision, their show at CAMH. 20:20...
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Posted by greg at
8:38 PM
December 14, 2010
New York, montage photomural, Berenice Abbott, all images via moma's 1932 catalogue I've been meaning to post this for a couple of months, but with museum censorship battles and political mural controversies in the news, what better time, right?...
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Posted by greg at
9:45 PM
December 12, 2010
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts has a sweet Struth photo of the Cologne Cathedral, and somehow, Gerhard Richter's pixel-style stained glass window is not the most awesome thing about it. Also, is that a mop on that ledge in...
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Posted by greg at
2:47 PM
December 9, 2010
Does an Anglo calling The Hague "Den Haag" sound as obnoxious as one calling Florence "Firenze" or Milan "Milano"? This is not a rhetorical question. I really need to know. Celestial Vault in 1996, James Turrell, image via: stroom.nl...
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Posted by greg at
1:08 PM
November 30, 2010
I've got a lot of browser tabs to clear before I head to Miami. Am I not listening or looking in the right place, or is there really not enough discussion about MoCA's exhibition of drawings by the composer/architect/polymath Iannis...
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Posted by greg at
10:34 AM
November 27, 2010
At least now we know what NY Times museum building critic Nicolai Ourossoff has been up to lately. Just as I am thinking I need to add Saadiyat Island and the names of the grand new patrons of the...
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Posted by greg at
11:48 AM
November 9, 2010
Looking at objects and vintage photos in isolation, it blows my mind that Enzo Mari is somehow not a famous, formative artist, but only [sic] a designer. How did that happen? Did he make all his work in secret? Did...
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Posted by greg at
9:22 AM
November 8, 2010
When we last considered the techno-militartistic merits of pre-WWII era sound location devices, I wondered where to start. And now I know: the Netherlands. I'm not sure why, but it was acoustic locator-palooza over there. On the wall of the...
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Posted by greg at
8:42 PM
The last time we were in Holland for a Museum Night, it was in Rotterdam, and it was an infuriating mess. All the museums in the city stay open until 2AM and program special activities and events. In 2005,...
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Posted by greg at
11:25 AM
November 3, 2010
I'm thinking I might have to change the name of this blog to Holy Smokes, but holy smokes, did the past ever look more futuristic than it did in the pages of LIFE Magazine, November 11th, 1957? That's where I...
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Posted by greg at
9:39 PM
I couldn't really articulate it at the time, but the overwhelming absence of modernist architecture was an integral part of growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina. The country roads were widened, and winding capillaries and cul de sacs were cut...
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Posted by greg at
9:50 AM
November 1, 2010
I'm feeling more serious about turning Richard Neutra's Cyclorama building at Gettysburg into an educational monument to the wounded and a wheelchair-accessible battlefield observation platform. War becomes history, reduced to its most basic contours, a date, a bodycount, and a...
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Posted by greg at
7:45 AM
October 27, 2010
Though I had considered entering, and I'd sampled a few of the 125 videos on the shortlist, I had planned to not write about the YouTube Play Biennial at the Guggenheim. But then reps from a couple of the...
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Posted by greg at
9:55 PM
October 24, 2010
Last May, while solving the problem of Gettysburg and reuniting the opposing forces of History--Civil War battlefield aficionados seeking to "restore" the "hallowed ground" of Cemetery Ridge and the modernists and historical preservationists who wish to stop them from demolishing...
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Posted by greg at
9:27 PM
October 19, 2010
Worlds Fairs turned out to be the perfect venue for photomurals--they were catchy, usually didactic, packed a visual punch, and got the point across to the shuffling masses. And at least in the 1930s, they looked like the future....
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Posted by greg at
11:16 AM
October 18, 2010
image: vintage silver gelatin print, signed, Ezra Stoller, 1939, via morehousegallery Do turning back another chapter or two in the history of enlarged pictures, photomurals, and photomontages, where do they turn up the most [besides/before the Museum of Modern...
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Posted by greg at
10:36 PM
I'm on a bit of a photomural binge at the moment. In email, Dr. Olivier Lugon, he of the awesome article about Stephen Shore's Signs of Life photomurals, points out two things about Edward Steichen [and, let's give the man...
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Posted by greg at
11:20 AM
October 16, 2010
So yes, I've got a million other things to do, but thanks to this Mies thing being auctioned, and Michael Lobel's article on the the photography and scale--and by implication, photography and painting, pace Chevrier's forme tableau--I'm become slightly...
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Posted by greg at
8:29 PM
October 13, 2010
The other weekend, I pigeonholed former Washington Post art critic Paul Richard after his talk, titled "What I Saw," at the National Gallery of Art. I said that I'd been interested to hear his take on public art over his...
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Posted by greg at
12:55 PM
October 5, 2010
It's hard to explain how irrationally exuberant I am over the discovery of New World Stoneworks, which, well:If you have ever walked along a rocky coastline or riverbed, you've seen how nature can sculpt stone with flowing water to expose...
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Posted by greg at
7:56 AM
I've never done an actual, in-depth search for any, but I've always wondered what became of the giant photomurals architect Paul Rudolph used for the exhibition design of Edward Steichen's landmark 1955 MoMA show, Family of Man. [vintage scan...
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Posted by greg at
12:03 AM
September 28, 2010
This is so awesome, a dome home that doesn't leak:Lot: 207 R. Buckminster Fuller Geodesic Home model Pease Woodworking Company USA, c. 1960 mixed media 13 dia x 7 h inches Pease Woodworking Company was licensed by Fuller to...
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Posted by greg at
9:33 PM
September 20, 2010
A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from Hal Laessig, a Newark architect, developer, and artist who was a graduate student of Daniel Libeskind's at Cranbrook, and who came back to build three fantastical, fantasy machines for LIbeskind's...
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Posted by greg at
7:41 PM
September 18, 2010
God bless the Internet and all who surf upon her. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what I thought was an esoteric topic, even for greg.org: the fantastical lost machines from "Three Lessons of Architecture," Daniel Libeskind's exhibition...
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Posted by greg at
9:08 PM
September 12, 2010
Good grief, it was only a couple of hours ago, and I can't even remember what took me to this three-year-old link roundup on BLDGBLOG that mentions hail cannons. I mean, hail cannon. Turns out they still make'em, they just...
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Posted by greg at
10:05 PM
September 11, 2010
Christopher Knight took the occasion of an Alberto Burri retrospective in Santa Monica to tweet about Cretto, the artist's absolutely incredible 20-acre memorial/earthwork, in which the earthquake ruins of the Sicilian town of Gibellina were encased in a grid...
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Posted by greg at
2:20 PM
"My cover would go right here." [image via] Just like the Wallace Sayre quip about academic politics being so vicious because the stakes are so low, maybe the hubris and self-regard are so extraordinary because it's the Venice Architecture...
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Posted by greg at
11:05 AM
September 6, 2010
So there I am, just driving to the Berkshires for an interview, minding my own business, when suddenly I come around the bend into Springfield, MA, and there's Charles Gwathmey throwing a 100-foot silver sphere in my face! And...
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Posted by greg at
8:17 PM
September 3, 2010
via la_biennale So Venice is not a total bust. Raumlaborberlin have installed their 2006 mobile inflatospace sculpture, „Das Küchenmonument," in the Giardini. And next to it is The Generator, an on-site workshop for knocking together "sedia veneziana," which are...
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Posted by greg at
7:32 AM
September 2, 2010
via tsaaby Yeah, so I'd been poking around flickr for a while, looking to see how MOS's project for the US Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale turned out. Because well, because. via Erika-Milite And hmm. What is it...
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Posted by greg at
11:23 PM
August 28, 2010
In the 1980s Daniel Libeskind was an increasingly prominent architectural theorist who--I was about to say "who had nevertheless not actually ever built anything," but the whole thing that's turning my head upside down is that he did, in...
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Posted by greg at
1:57 PM
August 24, 2010
And in other Venice Biennale of Architecture exhibition news: cityLAB, Dana Cuff and Roger Sherman's architecture think tank at UCLA, is also in the US Pavilion show, Workshopping. One of the projects they're apparently showing is called Duck &...
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Posted by greg at
2:22 PM
MOS, of the PS1's woolly mammoth carcass MOSes, is one of seven architecture firms and collaboratives included in "Workshopping: an American Model for Architectural Practice," at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The exhibit is curated by Michael Rooks of the...
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Posted by greg at
1:38 PM
August 21, 2010
I know that what's really needed around here is a redesign, and probably the addition of a few thousand tags. But right now that's an 8th burner project, and I've only got a 4-burner stove. But in the mean time,...
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Posted by greg at
2:43 PM
August 20, 2010
This has been sitting on my desktop since last month, when Google Maps announced the addition of 45-degree Aerial View imagery for new locations, including Dortmund, Germany. So I clicked over to Dortmund, and zoomed in there to the central...
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Posted by greg at
1:47 PM
August 13, 2010
In anticipation of Creative Time Summit II--it's October 9-10, just a few weeks away!--I've been watching some of the talks from last fall's Summit, organized by Nato Thompson held at the NY Public Library. [For an overview, check out Frieze's...
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Posted by greg at
12:18 AM
August 12, 2010
I love Eliot Noyes as much for his own designs as for his role as catalyst, instigator and patron for some of the greatest modernist objects and buildings of the postwar era. And yet somehow I hadn't made the...
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Posted by greg at
10:35 AM
August 11, 2010
I've been trying for months to figure out the designer of what I think is one of the slickest phone booths around, the Deutschen Bundespost Typ TelH78 Telefonzelle. You know it when you see it. It's bright yellow, a fiberglass...
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Posted by greg at
11:18 PM
August 9, 2010
In addition to being the subject of his film and photographic work, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's Light Space Modulator modulated light and space as a sculptural installation, and it served as a Light Prop for an Electric Stage. But in 1930, the...
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Posted by greg at
11:15 PM
July 21, 2010
Holy smokes, people, just watch how these things turn out. In April, I spotted this photo at MoMA; it was in the second floor hallway just past the cafe, with no caption, and a date: 1970. I spent a...
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Posted by greg at
12:09 AM
July 14, 2010
View Larger Map Like leisure boats, beach houses in Emerald Isle, NC, where our family has gone for many years, are often given names. It appears that the practice tracks somewhat the expansion of the beach cottage rental directory business....
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Posted by greg at
11:07 PM
July 11, 2010
Len Lye called his kinetic artworks Tangible Motion Sculptures, or just Tangibles, because they made visible motion and other phenomena, like the wind. In 1960, he and his wife Ann, along with some other friends, headed over to huge...
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Posted by greg at
2:41 PM
July 5, 2010
Photomultiplier Tubes, or PMT, are vacuum tubes used to detect electromagnetic energy. In 1979, Hamamatsu Photonics began development of the world's largest PMT, 25 inches across, which would be used in the Kamiokande proton decay detector being constructed by the...
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Posted by greg at
2:15 PM
July 3, 2010
In 2008, I discovered this drawing of A. James Speyer's Sunstein House, a 1940 modernist pavilion in the Adirondacks made of tree trunks and local stone, in an architecture guidebook published by The Museum of Modern Art. Even though...
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Posted by greg at
1:32 PM
June 28, 2010
See, now here is another reason I've gotten so backed up: I was overwhelmed by the awesomeness of this. It's currently freaking me out how much is turning on the Osaka 70 World Expo. It's as if there's a...
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Posted by greg at
11:21 PM
June 22, 2010
Looks like I picked the wrong end of North Carolina. While I was bumming around the Outer Banks, Mondo Blogo was surely doing The Lord's Work in the mountains. Black Mountain College, to be precise, or what's left of...
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Posted by greg at
8:10 PM
June 4, 2010
Bell Labs' Billy Kluver guided Andy Warhol to the Mylar balloons the artist used for Silver Clouds, his 1966 installation at Leo Castelli Gallery. And at Ferus Gallery. And at the Cincinnati Arts Center. At the time, Bell Labs...
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Posted by greg at
11:33 AM
May 30, 2010
Took me a couple of months, but I finally figured out which, out-of-place alien Washington embassy in the short-lived, suspiciously-generous-aliens-move-into-Earth TV series Anish Kapoor's wacked out Orbit Tower reminded me of: the one in Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict....
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Posted by greg at
7:03 AM
May 29, 2010
I've got browser tabs full of sweet, sweet updates and extensions to some earlier posts. I'll start with Tomasons. Tomasons [also Thomassons], but really, トマソン, are the inadvertent, useless architectural leftovers, vestiges of a city's churned and rebuilt history. They...
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Posted by greg at
11:46 AM
May 23, 2010
So weird/awesome. A steel panel, prefab, moderne house designed by William Van Alen, and built on top of a craggy boulder at 107th & Riverside, in 1937, seven years after completing his somewhat higher profile project in Midtown, the Chrysler...
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7:41 AM
May 20, 2010
My buddy John Powers has been working on this insane project forlikeever: an artists commentary track--with pictures!--that runs alongside Star Wars IV. Tonight he's presenting it at Philoctetes, and discussing it along with Colby Chamberlain and Luke duBois, who's made...
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Posted by greg at
6:24 AM
May 19, 2010
Holy smokes, this is so incredible. Vincent Ocasla beat (sic) Sim City by spending three years designing and building Magnasanti, a six million person city that runs flawlessly (sic, again, obv) for 50,000 years. The YouTube video is ominously awesome....
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Posted by greg at
10:37 AM
May 17, 2010
December 1942, the US is at war, and everyone is tinkering in his basement, doing his part to protect the civilian and industrial landscape against the latest technological threat: aerial photo reconnaissance. From a lengthy, fascinating article in Popular Mechanics:But...
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8:02 AM
May 16, 2010
I saw a citation in a footnote somewhere, but in the three weeks it took for the Design Review: Industrial Design 23rd Annual, 1977, to arrive, I'd completely forgotten why I'd ordered it. No matter, this insane image of...
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Posted by greg at
4:12 PM
May 12, 2010
I saw the mention while searching for something else, shocked that I'd never heard of it: "Beckstrand Lodge, UT, 1950" A quick search, and there's no information, no photos, no documentation, no nothing. Some fruitless Google Map surveying, then some...
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Posted by greg at
9:44 PM
May 7, 2010
The Park Service's stated goal for Gettysburg is the "rehabilitation" of the battlefield to its 1863 condition by removing modern structures like Richard Neutra's Cyclorama Center [designed, it should have been noted a long time ago, with Robert Alexander]...
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7:36 AM
May 4, 2010
So a quick recap: the National Park Service is determined to demolish the Richard Neutra's Cyclorama Center, built at the Gettysburg National Military Park in 1961. It was designed to house Paul Philippoteaux's massive panoramic painting, made in 1884,...
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Posted by greg at
10:30 PM
May 3, 2010
The significance of the battle at Gettysburg was seized upon almost immediately, both for the vast scale of the casualties, but also because of the strategic and symbolic importance in the North of repelling the Confederate incursion. Dealing with...
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Posted by greg at
8:03 AM
May 2, 2010
We just got back from a weekend trip to Gettysburg, PA, and I was not quite prepared to be so fascinated by it. Gettysburg the town was attacked the Confederate Army in the Civil War partly because of its...
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Posted by greg at
9:37 PM
April 27, 2010
Alright, all y'all who didn't tell me about Otto Piene's classic of the books-written-in-longhand era, More Sky: what else have you been hiding?Otto Piene literally opens up new horizons here in both art and art education. His book is a...
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Posted by greg at
4:35 PM
April 23, 2010
I cannot go to Oregon for the weekend, but I would pay cash money right here and now to watch a livestream of the Judd Conference, the Univerity of Oregon's day-long exploration of Donald Judd's fabrication methods. The official title...
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Posted by greg at
9:37 AM
April 20, 2010
While researching the National Gallery of Art's Barkley L. Hendricks paintings, which were purchased by J. Carter Brown with money from Michael Whitney Straight, I came across one of the crazier space-meets-art moments in the history of exhibition design: Art...
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Posted by greg at
7:06 AM
April 16, 2010
They're both under-known, and so they probably deserve their own posts, but the uncanny similarity of these two Alcoa Forecast program designs requires me to put them together. Greta Magnusson Grossman was a Los Angeles-based Swedish industrial designer. According to...
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Posted by greg at
8:45 PM
I've been digging back through the New Yorker magazine archive, looking for ads from Alcoa's Forecast Collection campaign. That's the one, if you will remember, for which Ray and Charles Eames created the Solar Do-Nothing Machine [which has since...
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Posted by greg at
12:04 PM
April 9, 2010
Making no small plans, the very first issue of Aspen contained a little booklet titled, "Configurations of the New World,", papers, speeches, essays, discussions on the future [of cities, mostly] from 13 of the whitest guys they could find, as...
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Posted by greg at
1:34 PM
April 8, 2010
5. That plant. 4. That Girard-lookin' wall hanging. 3. Those Piet Hein Eek-lookin' sofas. 2. The Courier-lookin' typeface on those teasers. 1. A tie between Curries & Smog. via LA Modern, which will be auctioning this and other vintage...
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Posted by greg at
11:25 PM
April 3, 2010
I was reading Calvin Tomkins' 1963 New Yorker profile of abstract sculptor Richard Lippold, who was a favorite of the International Style and High Modernist architecture crowd. Depending on your mood, Lippold's giant, intricate, and ambitious metal & wire works...
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Posted by greg at
9:23 AM
March 25, 2010
Domes, inflatables, World Expos, Buckminster Fuller, every once in a while around here, it feels like I'm just blogging about whatever artist Steve Roden blogged about three years ago. The Antioch Bubble is one of those times. [Though, to...
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Posted by greg at
5:07 PM
March 10, 2010
In 1956, USIA exhibitions director Jack Masey had a problem: the Soviets and the Red Chinese and their big pavilions usually had a lock on the International Trade Fair in Kabul [that's the capital of Afghanistan, you know]. The US...
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Posted by greg at
1:50 PM
March 9, 2010
The story smells a little planted, but as long as a couple of these awesome Razzle Dazzle, Dakis Razzin,' New Museum critiquin' posters find their way into a mailing tube and land on my doorstep, I will definitely play along:...
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Posted by greg at
2:02 PM
March 6, 2010
I just bought this incredible poster at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, designed by Mies van der Rohe, in DC. It's for "Hier ist die Future," an exhibition held last year at the library by British artist...
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Posted by greg at
2:25 PM
March 4, 2010
A lot of people are excited about the takedown of Nicolai Ouroussoff in Design Observer this week. And I can see their quaint, anti-starchitect point. But for me, Ouroussoff's biggest crime only became clear this afternoon. That's when I...
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Posted by greg at
8:38 PM
March 2, 2010
Apparently, in the 1890s, the Swedish modernist playwright August Strindberg went through a period of intense imagemaking. He created paintings and photographs [hold that thought] that sound and look decades ahead of their time using chance and natural/chemical processes...
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Posted by greg at
10:55 AM
February 24, 2010
For all my talk lately about satelloons, Olafur's stayed very politely quiet about his own giant, swinging aluminum balls. Maybe because he only has one? Seriously, though, I hope it's an edition. Your Imploded View is a 51-inch diameter, 660-lb...
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Posted by greg at
10:20 PM
February 18, 2010
For their "Art of Two Germanys" show in 2008, LACMA recreated part of a 1966 gallery installation by Gerhard Richter called Volker Bradke, which was designed to mimic or reference the postwar German bourgeoisie's penchant for ticky tacky floral wallpaper....
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1:05 PM
February 14, 2010
In this difficult real estate environment, close followers of the used modernist Skyway market will note have reason to be optimistic. Even as asking prices have dropped nearly 40% in the last year,--from $79,500,to around $49,500--they are still way...
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9:42 AM
January 30, 2010
The nightly LED show on the facade of the new Motor City Casino in Detroit [via sweet juniper] Multiverse a now-permanent installation by Leo Villareal at the National Gallery of Art: I think it's clear that when it comes to...
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8:46 AM
January 29, 2010
Ten years, people. That's how long it took me to spot this. Ten. Years. What can I say, I got no excuse. I let you down. Olafur Eliasson, Double Sunset, 1999 [olafureliasson.net] While I'm on the topic, my friend...
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Posted by greg at
8:01 AM
January 27, 2010
The BBC has nice footage of the mockup for Michael Arad's World Trade Center Memorial waterfalls, which was constructed in Brooklyn last week. My impression: unexpectedly Olafur-esque. Also, the [engineer?] guy saying it is to be an "Eternal Waterfall"...
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Posted by greg at
10:36 AM
January 26, 2010
This is really a beauty of a Zaha Hadid takedown of her firm's riverfront museum in Glasgow--and so much more. I came for the roof-as-nth-facade condemnation:And this futility just deepens... the building is an example of 'Google Earth Urbanism'....
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Posted by greg at
8:31 PM
January 18, 2010
I've been telling people in person all about Lucy Raven's multimedia tour of Daybreak, Utah since it came out last fall; it's way past time that I mention it here. Daybreak is a massive real estate development strategy disguised...
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9:02 AM
January 12, 2010
I've had a research question simmering on the back burner for a while, trying to figure out what the history of modernism and contemporary art have been in Washington DC. Partly, it was the dearth of good modernist architecture that...
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4:41 PM
December 17, 2009
At the 1931 Beaux Arts Ball, more than a dozen New York architects came dressed as their buildings: [l to r] A. Stewart Walker [Fuller Building], Leonard Schultze [Waldorf-Astoria], Ely Jaques Kahn [Squibb Building], William Van Alen [Chrysler Building,...
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7:48 AM
December 15, 2009
Sweet. The Hirshhorn Museum is floating the idea to turn its central plaza into a 4-story event space by filling it with a giant temporary balloon pavilion by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The $5 million pavilion would be put...
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7:47 AM
December 14, 2009
Robin Pogrebin reports on all the museums waking up with a financial and strategic hangover after a decade of Bilbao Effect-ed building. It's good, obvious-and-not-just-in-hindsight stuff. I seem to recall during the midst of the boom, the American Cinematheque in...
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Posted by greg at
10:47 AM
December 6, 2009
I love it when several plans come together. Apparently, not all the Dutch Google Maps landscapes camo'd out by the Military Intelligence Department are actually sensitive sites. And some sites will toggle in and out of camouflage without warning...
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Posted by greg at
7:03 PM
November 20, 2009
Wow, who tore up Theodore Dalrymple's urban fabric and replaced it with a tower in a garden? If there were no conservative polemic blogs for cranky, reactionary modernism haters, I'm sure the Manhattan Institute would've invented them. Oy. The Architect...
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Posted by greg at
9:03 PM
Pentagram has nice coverage of Abbott Miller's work for the crisp signage and graphics systems at Thom Mayne's spectacular new building for the Cooper Union. Which looks, in some of its particulars, quite like Roni Horn sculptures. I look...
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Posted by greg at
6:10 PM
November 16, 2009
Spectacularious music video for "Style," a song from Shankar's Sivaji: The Boss [2007], the most expensive and highest grossing Indian film in history. It was shot on location in Spain, and stars Rajnikanth [b. 1950], the superstar of Tamil...
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Posted by greg at
9:32 AM
November 6, 2009
You never know what'll turn up. In the same sale as that Sheeler study is this 1965 geometric abstract painting by Dean Fleming, one of the pioneers of SoHo. In 1962, Fleming founded the Park Place Gallery, an artist...
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Posted by greg at
8:37 PM
October 29, 2009
At the press preview of the New Museum's Urs Fischer show yesterday, curator Massimiliano Gioni said that Fischer "treats reality as if it were software," an assessment I suspect is designed to be tweeted more than analyzed. Gioni and...
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Posted by greg at
8:08 AM
October 27, 2009
From the Other Things I Didn't Know About What Goes Inside Geodesic Dome Pavilions Department: Christine Macy and Sarah Bonnemaison devote a chapter in their 2003 book, Architecture and nature: creating the American landscape to geodesic domes, including this description...
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Posted by greg at
11:16 PM
How to account for my dogged fascination with the temporary/permanent, futuristic/historic paradoxes of Expo art and architecture? Buckminster Fuller's 20-story Biosphere was far and away his greatest single success and the hit of the most successful modernist world's fair,...
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Posted by greg at
12:17 PM
October 23, 2009
Hilary Harris's 1975 Organism feels like a missing link in the chain of film portraits of New York City as a pulsing, living thing. Like Whitman, whose "Leaves of Grass" provided the text for their1921 film Manhatta Paul Strand and...
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Posted by greg at
9:21 AM
October 11, 2009
So I decided to make the Dutch landscape paintings I wanted to see made from those incredible security-obscured Dutch Google Maps I found a couple of weeks ago. I'll print the images out and paint over them. Since they...
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Posted by greg at
9:39 PM
September 30, 2009
BeDazzled was an exhibition organized by the appropriately named RISD librarian Claudia Covert of the library's collection of WWI Dazzle Camouflage patterns and photographs from the US Shipping Board:Maurice L. Freedman donated the plans and photos in the collection...
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Posted by greg at
8:15 AM
Last year Jeff Koons covered Dakis Joannou's angular yacht Guilty [designed by Ivana Porfiri] with a pattern inspired by WWI naval camouflague. The technique, known in the US as Razzle Dazzle and in the UK as just Dazzle Painting,...
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Posted by greg at
7:15 AM
September 28, 2009
A Google Street View image of a French radar-jamming installation obscured by order of the Ministry of Defense or an overpainted photograph by Gerhard Richter? You decide....
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Posted by greg at
9:22 PM
September 27, 2009
NL Architects thinks it might make a good Herzog & deMeuron project, but I think Google Maps' security pixelization of the Dutch Royal House's Noordeinde Palace in Den Haag would make an absolutely fantastic series of landscape paintings. Where...
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Posted by greg at
8:18 PM
September 22, 2009
Last month, when I tried to identify this kind of awesomely simple house at Black Mountain College [from a photo in UConn's Charles Olson Collection], the best I could do was a guess, that it was A. Lawrence Kocher's...
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Posted by greg at
12:50 PM
September 14, 2009
It's got shiny spheres, and science re-creations, and DC artists and quotes from curator and museum director friends. But it's been a few weeks now, and the only thing I can say about Blake Gopnik's mind-numbing/blowing article on Jim Sanborn...
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Posted by greg at
1:58 PM
September 13, 2009
Just like how, once you've learned it, you start hearing a word all the time, now I see satelloons everywhere. Including at the Buckminster Fuller retrospective last year at the Whitney [which went on to Chicago this summer.] Buckminster...
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Posted by greg at
9:09 PM
September 11, 2009
I've steered way clear of architect's Michael Jackson Monument Competition because--hello, in what universe does that decision actually require any explanation? Because. Anyway, after seeing the winners, I just have to raise a single, ungloved--and as yet unmittened, hold...
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Posted by greg at
10:37 AM
September 9, 2009
House exterior (test) Malibu, CA Kitchen Malibu, CA Ian James is a recent CalArts graduate. He posted a series of images--photos--of Lens color cast correction on his blog. which are kind of fantastic:Lens Color Cast is an dilemma specific...
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Posted by greg at
11:21 PM
September 6, 2009
While we contemplate the Colombian Heart Attack that has befallen Washington DC, it might be worthwhile to remember the good old days, such as they were, when the National Mall was the site of ambitious public art projects. Projects...
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Posted by greg at
1:48 PM
September 1, 2009
Maybe it's a matter of missing the reportorial bowl, but Paris's experiments with anti-public urination architectural technology are more interesting than the Wall Street Journal makes them out to be. First off, the utter untimeliness of the story. Paris's...
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Posted by greg at
7:42 PM
August 31, 2009
Classic. Throw it on the compost pile; it is done. Burning Man's official delusional complicity in its own cynical corporate exploitation is now complete. This year, the Man has been set atop a pyre [above] made of 2x4s swirled...
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Posted by greg at
11:05 PM
greg.org reader Kara C. just sent along this new photo of A. Lawrence Rocher & Albert Frey's Aluminaire House, a fantastic early prefab design--and Frey's first building in the US--which is currently parked on the Islip, LI campus of...
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Posted by greg at
9:30 PM
August 7, 2009
Haha, It only took ten days the first time. When Wallace K Harrison reassembled Kocher and Frey's Aluminaire House on his property in Huntington, LI, after buying it for $1000 and taking it apart in a matter of hours, it...
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Posted by greg at
11:08 AM
So sweet. Check out this awesome aluminum-clad house, which curator/architectural historian Erik Neil spotted yesterday on the campus of the NY Institute of Technology: I looked it up on the Internet, and found this post, which I wrote last weekend....
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Posted by greg at
8:43 AM
August 6, 2009
LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne delivered a mordantly hilarious stream of live Twitter updates from a Sci-Arc panel discussion last night. I'll be damned if I can comment on it, and I'm not sure I can even link to...
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Posted by greg at
8:16 PM
August 3, 2009
The funny thing is, I think my problem is I couldn't have made something like this up:Hi Greg, Here's a trend and story idea for the growing number of architecture company cars piling up from economic downsizing: The majority of...
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Posted by greg at
12:59 PM
August 2, 2009
I stumbled across Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey's Aluminaire House last night while trying to figure out who built this house at Black Mountain College. It's from the Charles Olson Research Collection at UConn, and was posted at An...
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Posted by greg at
3:47 PM
August 1, 2009
Let me get this straight: the first modernist prefab in the US; one of two US houses included in Phillip Johnson's 1932 International Style exhibition at MoMA [the other: Neutra's Lovell House]; built in 10 days from off-the-shelf industrial...
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Posted by greg at
10:33 PM
July 29, 2009
Estuaire is the three-time biennale in beta for the Nantes region. This year, the second incarnation includes I.C.I., Instant Carnet Island, a habitable, riverfront collection of micro-architecture which is for rent--EUR10/person/night, bring your sleeping bag--and for sale. Several of...
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Posted by greg at
8:00 AM
July 16, 2009
Like everyone else, I see modern architecture--the whole modern world, or at least the West Coast of it--in glorious black and white, thanks to Julius Shulman. Just as Hugh Ferris's smoky charcoal skyscraper renderings defined Gotham a generation earlier, Shulman's...
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Posted by greg at
10:57 PM
Herbert Muschamp in a giant weather balloon movie in Monaco WHAT?This is something we did in Monaco where we put Herbert Muschamp's text, "Bubbles in the Wine," to film. It was my job to go out and find these...
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Posted by greg at
7:15 AM
June 28, 2009
Josh Foer is on fire, and I'm like a moth to the flame. Foer's guestblogging at BoingBoing, and is just lobbing up one crazy-awesome megasphere after another. It was his charticle in Cabinet a while back about the history...
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Posted by greg at
9:56 PM
June 24, 2009
VOISIN STANDARD TYPE BIPLANE (1909), originally uploaded by public.resource.org. The Grand Palais was already the best of the three venues in the world capable of accommodating my Satelloon project--a re-creation of NASA's Project Echo (1960), the 100-ft metallic spherical...
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Posted by greg at
12:11 AM
June 21, 2009
Downtown Megastructures, originally uploaded by sokaris73. I can't find any details online about this "Downtown Megastructures" image by Klaus Pinter and his colleagues in the Austrian architecture collaborative Haus-Rucker beyond what sokaris73 put in the flickr caption: it dates...
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Posted by greg at
10:01 PM
June 16, 2009
Bwahaha, if ever there were an architect whose work looked like it was all churned out of an idea factory from weary bins full of identical parts, it's Daniel Libeskind. And sure enough, just in time for the prefab...
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Posted by greg at
3:42 PM
June 15, 2009
Christopher Hawthorne writes about the latest trend in prefabricated modernist architecture: going out of business. Michelle Kaufmann, Marmol Radziner, Empyrean... Apparently, when you design houses for a perennially small niche, build them at a cost premium, and no bank will...
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Posted by greg at
12:01 AM
June 9, 2009
Aviary, originally uploaded by AmosTheWonderPig. There's not much of it, and it has some rather determined enemies, so when modernism happens or survives in Washington DC, it feels like somewhere between a happy accident and a miracle. Or maybe...
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Posted by greg at
12:22 AM
May 31, 2009
In 1972, the Austrian architecture collective Haus-Rucker installed Oasis Nr 7 at Documenta 5. A steel pipe structure was cantilevered out the window of the Friedericianum, and a platform, two palm trees, and a hammock were installed. The entire...
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Posted by greg at
11:46 PM
May 27, 2009
image via flickr by RobieRob Composer Brian Eno is projecting some of the 77 million iterations of his 77 Million Paintings series onto the Sydney Opera House as part of the Luminous Festival. The Festival, which Eno is also...
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Posted by greg at
9:33 PM
May 26, 2009
OK, why did no one tell me when I posted about A. James Speyer's awesome-but-maybe-never-realized Miesian Adirondack cabin that the Chicago architect was responsible for the most important Glass Box-in-a-Forest of the entire 1980s? Of course, I'm talking about...
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Posted by greg at
10:53 PM
May 19, 2009
Bring your architect! Uh, on second thought, you'd probably be better off bringing your boatwright. Wright20 is auctioning off one of Finnish architect Matti Suuronen's 1968 Futuro Houses on June 2. After creating the first fiberglass and polyurethane modular...
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Posted by greg at
11:34 PM
May 16, 2009
Hans Ulrich Obrist - Yes, I see here - there's a vehicle, a truck, in the picture. Enzo Mari - The editor [of Bompiani] had a problem, and we're speaking about the fifties, in that he needed to transport...
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Posted by greg at
12:26 PM
May 14, 2009
Frederic Remington, Ceremony of the Fastest Horse, c. 1900 [art institute of chicago] Look, I'm as surprised as you are that I was stoked to see a Frederick Remington painting, but here we are. As a card-carrying East Coast...
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Posted by greg at
8:52 PM
May 3, 2009
Hello, Earth to Le Corbusier archive! Corbusier conceived Poeme electronique for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Expo in Brussels. It was an 8-minute immersive light, film and sound experience which told mankind's long, hard slog towards peace. Don't...
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Posted by greg at
10:45 PM
April 14, 2009
On one block of West Robinson Rd West Robinwood Rd in Detroit, all but five of the houses are abandoned. Jim Griffioen took photos of both sides of the street. His massive, stitched together photos are on Sweet Juniper...
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Posted by greg at
11:20 PM
April 12, 2009
Dan has been my main source of Postopolis! LA coverage this year. Design theorist Benjamin Bratton wrapped up the event's discussion with an interesting, twisted bow of a speech. He talked about "Post," but in the sense of Post-/Pre-, not...
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Posted by greg at
9:27 AM
March 22, 2009
The report this weekend--from Apartment Therapy--about Apartment Therapy getting a takedown notice from the NY Times legal department for unauthorized use of the Times' IP reminds me of the Apartment Therapy story from June 2004 about Apartment Therapy getting an...
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Posted by greg at
9:48 PM
March 3, 2009
Another thing that caught me off guard looking through piles of photos from the Civilian Conservation Corps, was the camps. My interest in the CCC didn't come from the New Depression unfolding around us, but from learning over Christmas...
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Posted by greg at
10:27 AM
March 2, 2009
Over the holidays, I taped an interview with my great uncle Wayne. He is my paternal grandfather Champ's older brother. [Yes, I did ask him about my grandfather's name. His recollection was that my great grandfather Chester Jehiel Allen hated...
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Posted by greg at
3:29 PM
February 20, 2009
So naturally, I was intrigued by the folks in Festus, Missouri, who are forced, by their inability to refinance the note on Caveland, the 15,000-sf sandstone cave they spent five years and all their money and time transforming from...
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Posted by greg at
10:07 AM
February 15, 2009
In 1967 Henry Geldzahler, while lecturing the Women's Group at the Grand Rapids Art Museum, suggested to Mrs LeVant Mulnix III that the city might do well to install a public sculpture on the plaza in front of city...
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Posted by greg at
11:20 PM
February 13, 2009
Tyler Green Twittered the following from the ICA Philadelphia panel discussion on the 20th anniversary of the Mapplethorpe NEA implosion:[Rob] Storr coins 'misconceptual' art: artists who shortcut to the now via conceptual art without understanding history of conceptualism.tight, tasty, and...
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Posted by greg at
6:08 PM
February 12, 2009
The Las Vegas Sun reports [via tmn] that because of faulty rebar--and, maybe just a little bit, because the real estate and financial markets collapsed--MGM Grand is lopping off the top half of Norman Foster's still-under-construction skyscraper at CityCenter on...
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Posted by greg at
11:12 AM
February 9, 2009
Sparks from Lantern Festival fireworks apparently lit construction debris on the roof of Rem Koolhaas' Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Beijing a few hours ago, and the whole thing went up in flames. The hotel is part of Koolhaas' CCTV...
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Posted by greg at
12:06 PM
February 6, 2009
David Galbraith's title is [un?]fortunately not a joke. McMansions are Built With Paper and Staples...
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Posted by greg at
12:55 AM
February 4, 2009
There's nothing specific on the horizon, but the way things are going, what with all the domes and mirrored domes and Buckminster Fuller and movies and all around here... I mean, you never really know--and by you, I obviously...
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Posted by greg at
11:19 PM
Well that didn't take long. From the always awesome Wooster Collective comes word of a new work by the underground artist JR, Projet Women of Kibera, part of his ongoing 28 millimetres series he has been working on since...
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Posted by greg at
9:20 AM
February 2, 2009
The first place I remember hearing the idea of the roof as a "fifth facade" was Peter Eisenman talking about his Columbus Convention Center, from 1989, but completed in 1993. With an awkward, constrained site sandwiched between downtown and...
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Posted by greg at
9:04 AM
The whole thing about the only human construct you can see from space is the Great Wall of China will be amusing to people growing up in the Google Maps era, where you can't hide anything from the satellite's...
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Posted by greg at
6:08 AM
January 29, 2009
Mies gas station, originally uploaded by zadcat. Alright, I know where I'm going to put my decommissioned Skyway: right next to my decommissioned Mies van der Rohe Esso Station. Mies' office designed three apartment buildings on l'Ile des Soeurs...
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Posted by greg at
10:24 PM
January 22, 2009
Ho-ly smokes. The Minneapolis architecture firm City Desk Studio just put a skyway up for sale on craigslist. A freakin' skyway. It's a steel girder and glass box, 20 x 83 feet, and 14 tall, designed by architect Ed...
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Posted by greg at
2:14 PM
January 11, 2009
I'd had the idea all worked out, and the script outline--or a draft of it, anyway--all ready for a couple of years, but my paternal grandfather Champ passed away before I was able to make the original documentary about him...
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Posted by greg at
9:29 PM
January 3, 2009
Muji has teamed up with real estate developer Mitsubishi Chiso [Mitsubishi Estate] to create Muji Village, a three-building condominium complex in Chiba Prefecture, the New Jersey of Tokyo. Or maybe it's the Westchester of Tokyo, and Saitama's New Jersey,...
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Posted by greg at
10:28 PM
While New Yorkers still can't believe they finally have three Muji stores, Japan last year got its third model of Muji House. Last spring, the company introduced Ki no Ie 3-kai-date, a vertically oriented, 3-story variation of their 2-story...
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Posted by greg at
8:51 PM
December 19, 2008
Spanish artist I've never heard of #48 Miguel Barcelo got the commission to paint the domed ceiling of the UN Palace of Nations' Human Rights and Alliance of Civilizations chamber in Geneva. Eyeteeth has some photos; Designboom has some background...
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Posted by greg at
12:12 AM
December 10, 2008
I liked Stephen Bayley's takedown of New Urbanist prig Duane Urbany in the Guardian last weekend, partly for its awful description of Poundbury, a traditionalist-veneered village [sic] in Dorset that's beloved of Prince Charles:To visit Poundbury is to be delivered...
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Posted by greg at
8:57 AM
December 5, 2008
From Unbeige:Box Top is no mere pop-up shop; it's a four-day retail experience. Open through Saturday in Miami's Design District (4141 NE 2nd Ave.), the ephemeral emporium is the collaborative effort of I.D. Magazine, Areaware (our favorite purveyor of extraordinary...
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Posted by greg at
9:09 AM
December 3, 2008
Wait, The Empire was the US and the Rebellion was the North Vietnamese, but Lucas only put them in space after Hollywood suits wouldn't let him make Apocalypse Now? And the grunge was a simultaneous obeisance and refutation of...
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Posted by greg at
12:15 AM
November 28, 2008
Have you seen me? I'm fascinated by this house, though I can't figure out if it ever even existed. It's a "mountain week-end house" in the Adirondacks made with "tree trunk posts, slab sides, native stone, and 75% of walls...
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Posted by greg at
9:39 PM
October 25, 2008
Spectacular. ITV took an underground tour of Paris with l'UX and the folks from Untergunther. They started in the sewer, went deeper into the quarries that provided the stones from which medieval Paris was built, and ended up--well, I'll...
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Posted by greg at
11:05 AM
October 24, 2008
Housing Slump Begins to Hurt Classic Modernist Architecture [unbeige on a story in the la times] Frankly, I thought the biggest threat to classic modernist architecture was the teardown-happy building boom....
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Posted by greg at
7:34 PM
October 7, 2008
Two essays, each interesting and thoughtful on its own, crossed my desk this morning. I think they're inter-related. First from the always spatially aware Geoff Managh on the seemingly irrational landscapes of presidential campaigning:...President Bush had stopped off this morning...
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Posted by greg at
1:00 PM
August 19, 2008
From Paul Goldberger's review of 2 Columbus Circle, which began as Edward Durrell Stone's Gallery of Modern Art and has ended up--for now, anyway--as Brad Cloepfil's Museum of American--wait, what did the Craft Museum change its name to at the...
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Posted by greg at
9:25 PM
August 18, 2008
Here's a picture of what turns out to be the finishing tower at the Bosbaan in Amsterdamse Bos. It was demolished when the Bosbaan was widened to meet international rowing competition requirements. I can't tell, though, if this was...
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Posted by greg at
6:11 PM
August 17, 2008
Bosbaan met opzichtershuisje (gesloopt), originally uploaded by nickelvd. The Bosbaan, or Woods Course, is the oldest manmade rowing lake in the world. It was built in the Amsterdamse Bos in 1936, and it was expanded in 1954. Which gives...
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Posted by greg at
5:16 PM
caravans, originally uploaded by Elmer Kroese. Awesome, just awesome. Catherina Scholten's set design for a 2005 production of Chekhov's "Ivanov" at the outdoor theater in the Amsterdamse Bos [Woods] is just awesome. Shipping containers topped with mobile homes and...
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Posted by greg at
4:55 PM
August 12, 2008
More 1970's video awesomeness from Anton Perich's YouTube channel: this time it's John Chamberlain with a flensing knife in The Dakota. The site is a smallish, park-facing room in writer John Hersey's Dakota apartment. Much of the space is...
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Posted by greg at
1:19 PM
August 2, 2008
SLC Mies, originally uploaded by gregorg. I almost never associate Utah with great--or even good--architecture, and certainly not with modernism. Even though I've been head over heels for this eye-popping, uncompromisingly International Style house on Salt Lake City's east...
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Posted by greg at
2:11 AM
July 15, 2008
buckminster fuller sculpture at La Guardia Place, originally uploaded by yuko 'n sherlock. The Center for Architecture, Max Protetch and the Buckminster Fuller Institute have teamed up to exhibit two of the original Fly's Eye domes, the last dome...
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Posted by greg at
1:52 AM
July 12, 2008
It's been a low-intensity pleasure watching the pre-fab houses being constructed and installed for MoMA's upcoming Home Delivery exhibition. For a variety of reasons, none of which involve seeing it completed in person, mind you, I like Kieran Timberlake's...
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Posted by greg at
9:04 PM
June 17, 2008
Though I've never built a domehome or anything, I've been as much of an armchair fan of Buckminster Fuller as anyone. I mean, come on, man! DOMES! But it also bugs that most of the discussion of Fuller today is...
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Posted by greg at
2:54 PM
May 29, 2008
The $19 million deal for Neutra's Kaufmann House in Palm Springs has been canceled by the sellers for breach of terms. The Rockefeller Guest House was a New York anomaly. The Farnsworth House was bought by the architecture collector. The....
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Posted by greg at
12:13 AM
April 28, 2008
I finally pulled some pictures off my camera from last summer. That's when I noticed this little bungalow--with a sweet, vertical addition--just off the mainstreet in Morehead City, NC. There are a couple more shots on flickr....
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Posted by greg at
12:07 AM
April 26, 2008
Well, he and his studio do. Spatial Vibration documents a series of collaboration/experiments concerning the relationship of sound and space. Several of the experiments are on view in a show of the same name, "Spatial Vibration, String-Based Instrument, Study...
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Posted by greg at
1:08 AM
April 8, 2008
If you had to name one American, for instance, who clubbed together with a couple of friends in 1965 and spent more than three weeks building a futuristic seven-foot vertical city out of Lego, you might not immediately think of...
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Posted by greg at
5:55 PM
April 6, 2008
Choire's interview with Elizabeth Berkley reminded me of some unfinished Showgirls business here on greg.org. Back in 2002, right after Beyer Blinder Belle released the first, banal master plans for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site, a...
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Posted by greg at
8:31 PM
March 19, 2008
So after the Whitney opens its downtown branch, it'll sell its Marcel Breuer building on Madison? That's the way I read the blueprints being unfurled in the NY Times the last couple of months. Buried in a late December...
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Posted by greg at
8:46 AM
March 17, 2008
Holy smokes. On Archinect, Orhan has launched into a free-ranging, fantastical, and ill-informed lamentation over the impending doom that the callous, uncaring, neglectful architectural aficionado community is somehow foisting on the Neutra VDL Research House in Silverlake:I wouldn’t elaborate...
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Posted by greg at
9:12 PM
March 11, 2008
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Géode, originally uploaded by zyber. But darned if it isn't pretty damn close. La Géode...
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Posted by greg at
9:33 AM
March 5, 2008
So I'm staring at these Solar Balloons by Coolearth Technology, caught like a deer in some headlights [actually, with this pair, maybe it's "caught like a spring breaker in some headlights, but whatever], and I can't figure them out....
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Posted by greg at
2:17 PM
February 27, 2008
After riding the It's a Small World ride half a dozen times on my first trip to Disneyland, I sent off for information on how to become an Imagineer. I was seven. Yet somehow it's taken me until this week...
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Posted by greg at
11:53 PM
Now I've been a fan of Joep van Lieshout's work for a long time, even if a lot of it's too irreverent or too bombastically oversexualized to evangelize about regularly. ["You see, mom, he builds these room-sized uteruses with built-in...
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Posted by greg at
10:31 PM
February 16, 2008
Here's a description of the American Pavilion at the Osaka '70 Expo from an online exhibit at Columbia called, "Housing The Spectacle: The Emergence of America's Domed Stadiums":Trying to best R. Buckminister Fuller's Geodesic Dome built for the U.S....
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Posted by greg at
11:06 AM
February 15, 2008
Of course, I'd only need to recreate The Pepsi Pavilion from Osaka 70 if it didn't exist anymore. Does it? No. As relations between Pepsi and Billy Kluver, the engineer founder of E.A.T., deteriorated over issues of budget and esoteric...
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Posted by greg at
5:38 PM
Let's get one thing out of the way first: I'm a Diet Coke guy. The very fact that The Pepsi Generation existed in 1970 should blow a hole in their brand's supposed youthy credibility big enough to drive a 90-foot...
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Posted by greg at
3:53 PM
February 4, 2008
純粋階段, originally uploaded by nor1. Atelier Bow Wow is my favorite Japanese architecture firm. Rather than by building or proposing some kind of Roarkian vision, they first made a name for themselves [besides the catchy name they made for...
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Posted by greg at
4:49 PM
January 28, 2008
At the risk of devolving into an Olafur fanboi site, I'll mention that I was flipping through Take Your Time, the photodocumentary magazine published by the studio in November. Turns out there are multiple shots of the making of...
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Posted by greg at
6:52 PM
January 26, 2008
He's a tough guy and a really wonderful architect whose work has sent me on more than one pilgrimage in my life. But even so, I can't help but feel a little sorry for Tadao Ando. The most dazzling,...
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Posted by greg at
2:48 PM
January 17, 2008
As they say in the bayou, when it comes to preserving our modernist architectural heritage, you can't trust a hillbilly as far as you can throw him. The Union Tank Car Dome, the first industrial-scale geodesic dome, built by Buckminster...
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Posted by greg at
8:46 AM
November 28, 2007
Buckminster Fuller wha? It was the photo caption in the photo spread of the Foreign Office Architects country house project in the November 2007 World of Interiors on the coffee table. I snapped a quick phonecam photo, thinking I'd look...
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Posted by greg at
1:27 PM
November 23, 2007
Hello, what?? from Page Six via Gawker, we learn that Norman Mailer "built a 15,000- piece "City of the Future" with two pals in his Brooklyn apartment - but where it will go next, nobody knows." The obvious answer is...
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Posted by greg at
10:41 AM
November 15, 2007
I guess when you're a hammer, everything looks like MoMA. It's "Subverting The Dominant Installation" Week at Modern Art Notes, where Tyler is taking inordinate pleasure in shadow boxing with an opponent who retired long ago: Alfred Barr's rickety, linear...
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Posted by greg at
1:13 PM
October 25, 2007
Modular, prefab, minimalist, outdoor space, nice matte finish, shipping containers... Just slap a couple of solar panels on the roof and get a book stylist in there to add a Moholy-Nagy monograph to the coffee table, I think we...
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Posted by greg at
2:44 PM
October 24, 2007
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } se/sthlm/swedish shell/04, originally uploaded by Hagen Stier. where we'll live in this unused 1954 Shell...
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Posted by greg at
10:23 AM
October 8, 2007
Yes, I do have a ton of other things I should be doing, but I can't seem to get Project Echo out of my head. I really want to see this, 100+ foot spherical satellite balloon, "the most beautiful...
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Posted by greg at
11:21 AM
September 7, 2007
For some reason, I was thinking of totally livable, modernist gas stations yesterday [actually, it was because I heard fellow prefab gas station fan Mister Hoopty on the radio] and so I started digging, trying to find out more...
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Posted by greg at
2:03 PM
August 21, 2007
This is what I get for not going to the Serpentine Summer Party this year...Publisher of a new magazine that melds artistic and architectural experimentation, Eliasson is currently involved in numerous architectural projects such as the Icelandic National Concert...
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Posted by greg at
11:33 PM
August 18, 2007
"the relentless glossiness of contemporary visualisation makes us wonder whether there is an 'uncanny valley' for buildings" - things magazine on architecture and gaming engines I would ascribe the uneasiness to the different purposes and agendas of architects, developers (real...
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Posted by greg at
8:30 AM
July 31, 2007
In less than thirty seconds, I could rattle off a dozen people in the real estate business, and another easy dozen in the video and film business, and a dozen in the finance business, who have incredibly, admirably, even enviably...
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Posted by greg at
9:50 PM
July 19, 2007
No way, how much do I love MVRDV? The Rotterdam architecture firm just won the competition to build an extension to the city's Museum Boijmans van Beuningen that will house some public space, but also storerooms and archives for...
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Posted by greg at
11:12 AM
July 7, 2007
Walter Murch writing on BLDGBLOG:Sometime after the success of his film Blow-Up (1966), the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni visited Manhattan, thinking of setting his next project in New York. Confused and overwhelmed by the city's visual foreignness, he decided to...
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Posted by greg at
1:44 AM
June 29, 2007
There's an excellent, loong interview on Archinect with Kenneth Goldsmith, the artist, poet, dj, theory karaokeist [?], professor, and web developer behind the incomparable UbuWeb. Ubu began with just texts, and as collections and formats and partners came their way,...
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Posted by greg at
11:33 PM
June 26, 2007
So if you're going to see the Richard Serra exhibition at MoMA--and you should, it's really quite spectacular--you should see it when the museum is closed, because then you have the whole place to yourself. A friend John and...
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Posted by greg at
10:49 PM
June 1, 2007
Missing Postopolis, the architecture and urban situational blogfest at Storefront For Art & Architecture, has been one of my big regrets for being out of the city this week. Fortunately, I've been following along on City of Sound's excellent liveblog...
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Posted by greg at
11:27 PM
May 21, 2007
So a couple of weeks ago, Sir Norman Foster and his firm announced the creation of Masdar, a 6 million sqm square, solar-powered development in Abu Dhabi that will be "the world’s first zero-carbon and zero-waste city." Now Rem...
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Posted by greg at
1:37 PM
May 19, 2007
As part of Rotterdam 2007 - City of Architecture, the city commemorated the 15-minute-long German bombing on May 14, 1940 that destroyed the city center, precipitated the Dutch surrender in WWII--and ultimately provided the occasion for all that new...
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Posted by greg at
11:11 AM
May 10, 2007
Ay caramba, I haven't even clicked through the article yet, and already my head is going to explode:Aspiring To The Throne A growing number of small stores are challenging Murray Moss’s supremacy as the arbiter of design in America.If the...
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Posted by greg at
7:23 AM
May 3, 2007
We finally made it to the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco last weekend. I'll see a Sheeler show any time, any place, but except for a nice population of Diebenkorns and the well-stocked Oceanic galleries--oh, and Gerhard Richter's disorienting photomural...
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Posted by greg at
8:55 AM
April 20, 2007
Uh, they both announced giant Frank Gehry showpieces that never made it past the drawing board because there was never any actual money behind them? Here's a FOXnews Utah [redundant, I know] report on the 85-acre multi-use development announced...
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Posted by greg at
2:45 PM
First off, what is up with the Seventies? Those folks was funny. This 1972 documentary about what a lovable failure of a city Los Angeles is stars pioneering urban planning theorist Reyner Banham, who fairly bumbles through hippie dippy,...
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Posted by greg at
8:16 AM
April 17, 2007
Richard Neutra's office building in Silver Lake is for sale. It's about 4900sf, plus two apartments in back, with some Neutra built-ins and fixtures. No price is mentioned, but the broker does helpfully provide a ceiling:RECENT SALES OF IMPORTANT...
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Posted by greg at
8:40 PM
April 14, 2007
I'll come clean. We've started contemplating a dip of the toe into the real real estate market in Washington, DC. There's precious little to choose from, though. DC's longstanding status as an officetown means there are almost no industrial...
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Posted by greg at
4:08 PM
Holy smokes, I'm in like. Geoff sat down with editor/polymath Walter Murch for BLDGBLOG to discuss, of all things, the music of spheres. At least obliquely. I'd say they were Renaissance men, but as their discussion shows, the Renaissance was...
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Posted by greg at
10:34 AM
April 7, 2007
In 1994, Philippe Starck designed mailorder plans for a Timber House for the French department store 3 Suisses. It was sold as a numbered edition for 4900FF, or around $1,000. Last year, a copy of the kit--a wooden box...
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Posted by greg at
6:30 PM
March 22, 2007
Verner Panton chairs in prison? Custom ply built-ins? I mean, day-um. Josef Hohensinn's Loeben Justice Center is like Richard Meier's Perry & Charles Street towers, only warmer inside, with some Dominique Perraultian Bibliotheque National wooden touches. 29 photos here...
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Posted by greg at
12:25 AM
March 14, 2007
One of my big regrets was not urban scavenging the old Bendel's when I had the chance. My office used to be above the store during the gutjob renovation that followed the store's purchase by Columbus-based The Limited. See, a...
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Posted by greg at
4:55 PM
March 5, 2007
No sooner did Chanel let slip how they spent a whole extra million dollars to finish the sides of their narrow tower on 57th Street in granite to match the street facade, than rival LVMH announced they were building...
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Posted by greg at
10:54 AM
February 18, 2007
WPS1 has posted the audio for MoMA's recent symposium, "The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts." Listening to a panel discussion with no access to the visuals can be a tough sell, but the two talks...
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Posted by greg at
10:32 PM
February 4, 2007
Don't get me wrong, I love me some yurts. But like the equally lovable geodesic dome, something always seems lost in between ideal sustainable concept and hippie-dippy, style-free, domestic execution. Finally, though, someone's made a yurt for the Wallpaper...
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Posted by greg at
7:21 PM
January 25, 2007
When I was a freshman at BYU, I had a hopeless crush on a girl from Hawaii. She was really nice to me, and we eventually became friends. But I never had a chance because, unlike her boyfriend at...
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Posted by greg at
5:50 PM
January 23, 2007
Philip Nobel encapsulates my hate-to-love/hate relationship with Rem Koolhaas and his work in this greatly entertaining Metropolis Mag column, "I ♥ IIT… But I Still Don’t Like Rem". [1] Rem may have changed my thinking about China with a late...
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Posted by greg at
10:38 AM
October 24, 2006
Damn, I just hate when that happens. I hate when some sick poseur geezer company who makes SUV's for orthodontists or whatever totally rips off and corrupts the free, utopian, non-commercial, creative spirit of youth--of the future, even. As...
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Posted by greg at
1:39 PM
October 15, 2006
image: Interieur 06 on halleluja's flickr stream Recently returned from abroad and holding court at Interieur 06, a trade show, HSH Arne XV, Emperor of Black Rock City and King of The Uchronians received HM Paola Queen of The Belgians....
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Posted by greg at
4:50 PM
October 9, 2006
Curator Nancy Spector described Robert Smithson's Hotel Palenque, which the Guggenheim acquired in 1999 from the artist's estate [controlled by his widow Nancy Holt and represented by James Cohan Gallery] this way:Hotel Palenque perfectly embodies the artist's notion of...
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Posted by greg at
4:45 PM
September 29, 2006
When I grow up--scratch that, IF I were to ever grow up enough, I wish I could write with half the force of Ada Louise Huxtable.Given the notoriety of the site, a passionately observant and deeply involved public, and the...
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Posted by greg at
12:03 AM
September 21, 2006
It is really hard, apparently, to come away in a good mood when you're a freelancer charged with writing about starchitects' hyper-deluxe modernist loft developments where the price per square foot is more than your fee. In Vanity Fair, AA...
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Posted by greg at
9:35 PM
September 19, 2006
The Venice Biennale of Architecture may have been a critical bust--both the Times' and the Guardian's people panned it, complaining that it's a book in exhibition format, or text and videos but no architecture--but I have to say, it...
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Posted by greg at
9:49 PM
September 16, 2006
I know a lot of you have been asking yourselves, "Hey, what's been going on with Greg and the Belgian Waffle?" No? Too bad. Cuz I'll tell you. The Burning Man curator known as LadyBee and I have been going...
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Posted by greg at
3:51 PM
September 13, 2006
In a previous post, I characterized the Belgian designers behind Uchronia, a giant pavilion at Burning Man constructed by an army of their firms' employees and others of new wood and then burned to the ground, as "self-aggrandizing eco-idiots."...
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Posted by greg at
10:15 PM
September 4, 2006
A swoopy playground for hipsters built by an army of volunteers in an arid, rocky landscape? Alas, it appears they haven't heard of reclaimed lumber in Belgium. Uchronia, by Jan Kriekels and Arne Quinze at this year's Burning Man...
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Posted by greg at
12:21 AM
September 3, 2006
At Adam Greenfield of v-2.org and elsewhere will be giving a talk I'd go to just for the title alone, even if it weren't about rethinking the superheroes of 20th century urbanism: "Killing The Fathers, or: If You See Jane...
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Posted by greg at
8:51 PM
August 30, 2006
Fortunately, Tropolism is on the job. MetLife puts 80 Manhattan acres and 110 buildings up for sale, hinting $5 billion. [nyt]...
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Posted by greg at
1:47 PM
August 16, 2006
For a couple of months now, I've been really pre-occupied by this discussion of the color white and its association with modernism. It's between Olafur Eliasson, curator Daniel Birnbaum, and Mark Wigley, the dean of Columbia's architecture school and...
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Posted by greg at
11:13 AM
August 2, 2006
Much like the 24-hour interview-a-thon itself, Claire Bishop's report from the Serpentine Pavilion starts out hilariously--my original title for this post was to be "LOLOLOL"--and ends with unexpected substance and insight. Whether her declaration is the first, I don't care,...
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Posted by greg at
6:06 PM
July 25, 2006
Somewhere else, I saw someone licking the feet of the real estate developers who licensed Jade Jagger's name for their galley kitchens. But it wasn't on Tropolism. No, that's where I saw the suh-weet Taiwanese pod living architecture, inexplicably abandoned....
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Posted by greg at
11:03 PM
July 1, 2006
especially when I read something like this--and to be honest, I haven't even finished it yet: Design. Architecture. Football. [cityofsound.com via bldgblog]...
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Posted by greg at
12:30 AM
June 30, 2006
From Hennessy & Papanek's classic 1973 hippie DIY book, Nomadic Furniture comes the "Resource Tower":It organizes living space in a radically different way. Usually we put bookcases and storage walls all over the room's walls. We suggest [as shown in...
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Posted by greg at
2:15 PM
May 13, 2006
Supposedly reluctant starchitect Rem Koolhaas talked with the NYT's Robin Pogrebin about the mutiny in his firm, OMA's NY office, which is headed by supposedly reluctant starchitect-in-training Josh Prince-Ramus. Since the completion of the office's Seattle Library in 2004, PR...
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Posted by greg at
10:16 AM
May 1, 2006
I still can't tell if I was the only one kind of weirded out by the sudden and overwhelming outpouring of nostalgic loss and ruminating over the death of Jane Jacobs. Archinect, Tropolism, Curbed, Kottke, even the Home of the...
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Posted by greg at
12:20 PM
March 18, 2006
In 2004, Kyohei Sakaguchi published 0 Yen Houses, a book of photographs of street people architecture in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya. A burgeoning urban street population, mostly men in their 50's and 60's, is one consequence of the Japanese...
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Posted by greg at
2:18 AM
March 11, 2006
The 71-year-old scion of a real estate family, Mori inaugurated his latest city, Omotesando Hills, in one of Tokyo's most fashionable neighborhoods last month. There, well-heeled residents can now live just above some of the priciest retail shops on Earth,...
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Posted by greg at
10:09 AM
February 24, 2006
If he didn't exist, Rem Koolhaas would have to invent him. Of course, then he'd be included in the Whitney Biennial. Business Week has an interview with Rem's Mini-me, Josh Prince-Ramus, the Gen X starchitect-in-training running OMA's New York office....
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Posted by greg at
7:09 AM
January 27, 2006
Here's a picture of the interior courtyard of Tadao Ando's Omotesando Hills, which opens in a few weeks. Like everything else on Omotesando these days, the facade is a frosty glass scrim. [image: Harajuku-ss via jeansnow.net] previously: Tokyo snapshots...
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Posted by greg at
11:01 AM
January 23, 2006
On Saturday, the Rem Koolhaas Prada store in SoHo was either engulfed in flames, soaked in water and smoke, or both. The ostentatiously exposed drywall was Prada green and imported, if not actually manufactured to spec. [What's the stock color...
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Posted by greg at
2:44 AM
January 9, 2006
A tabloid summary of Herbert Muschamp's long essay on 2 Columbus Circle: back in the day AbEx: straight Historicism, Pop: gay Museum of Modern Art: straight Gallery of Modern Art [aka 2 Columbus]: gay But didn't AbEx evangelizer Frank O'Hara...
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Posted by greg at
12:34 PM
October 5, 2005
Modernist architect Gordon Bunshaft's widow willed his exquisite travertine-clad Georgica Pond home--his only domestic design-- and their carefully installed collection of modern art to MoMA when he died in 1994. MoMA sold it to Martha Stewart in 1994 without any...
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Posted by greg at
2:15 AM
October 2, 2005
The awesome and ingenious Tokyo architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow (the Japanese translation, Atelier Wan, sounds nicely like "1," too) is keeping a blog of the combination house/studio they're building for themselves in Naka Meguro, a central, dense, and expensive section...
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Posted by greg at
1:44 AM
September 27, 2005
Although the pictures are nice, too. Turn-ons: urbanism, Meier's third condo tower, Gluckman Mayner's One Kenmare, long walks on sensitively adapted elevated railroad track parks, Gordon Matta-Clark exhibitions. Turn-offs: Freedom Center squabbles, deceptively meaningless master plans, Gwathmey's Sculpture for Living....
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Posted by greg at
12:32 PM
August 31, 2005
1ST TIME ON MKT!! Gdn! + outdr spc, [several, actually]Estate Cond. Nds TLC. EUR2.5M obo. Principals only. EXPO-Tower - Pavillon der Niederlande [ebay.de, via archinect]...
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Posted by greg at
2:20 AM
August 23, 2005
Metropolis Magazine's short interview with Rick Smith is so dense with fascinating information, I'd have to excerpt the whole thing, so just got read it now. He talks about convincing Frank Gehry to buy CATIA, the aerospace industry CAD/CAM software...
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Posted by greg at
1:59 AM
August 18, 2005
This new building is across the street from my in-law's apt. in Tokyo, in the Minami Azabu neighborhood about 5-min. walk from Roppongi Hills. It just went up a few months ago, and the evening I went over to examine...
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Posted by greg at
7:09 AM
August 10, 2005
Near where we've been staying in Tokyo is this striking building, which I had to check out. The screen-like facade turns out to be cinder block-colored bricks set on end in a blackened steel frame. A meter back is...
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Posted by greg at
10:44 AM
August 4, 2005
This is the Tadao Ando building complex that the ego-mad developer Mori Minoru is finishing on Omotesando, what was once the heart of alternative cultural Tokyo. With a slew of LVMH brand glass curtained flagships all around it, it should...
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Posted by greg at
3:18 AM
July 22, 2005
A report from the Herzog & deMeuron-designed Prada store in Tokyo's Minami Aoyama neighborhood. I have some good news and some bad news. First the bad news. It was reported earlier that the store smelled like feet cat urine. It...
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Posted by greg at
8:52 AM
May 14, 2005
Michael Bierut's excellent post on design bullshit has gotten a lot of attention. He starts by quoting the artist/gardner Robert Irwin, who hilariously calls bullshit on the man who would be king Of the Getty hill, architect Richard Meier, in...
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Posted by greg at
5:30 AM
May 9, 2005
Lockhart Steele, of the real estate blogging empire Steeles, has put architects in their place: The Gutter, a new sub-blog of Curbed. "Ill-mannered commentary on the architectural arts" [gutter.curbed.com]...
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Posted by greg at
2:25 AM
April 23, 2005
According to the Curbed Theory of NY Media Darling Architects, full-force Calatrava-hatin' should've kicked in in January. But here it is April, and there's a snuggly celebration in the Times by Robin Pogrebin, and it's got subtexts packed so tight,...
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Posted by greg at
8:02 AM
April 18, 2005
So the Walker Art Center reopened last week in Minneapolis, and the reviews I've seen are great. Did you know they had what amounts to a production blog for the completion of the new Herzog & deMeuron addition? Titled "New...
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Posted by greg at
9:29 AM
March 24, 2005
"Ms. Luce gave the design team at Nissan a steel wall to hide works in progress." And then Mr Serra gave Ms. Luce and the design team at Nissan a good legal shellacking. Architecture and Carchitecture [nyt] * I...
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Posted by greg at
8:53 AM
March 2, 2005
Since it was opened, the polished stainless steel roof on Frank Gehry's Disney Concert Hall in LA has been throwing off so much glare, people are getting baked alive in the neighboring condominiums. And on the street, fuggedaboutit. They're frying...
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Posted by greg at
1:59 AM
January 30, 2005
Philip Johnson called himself a whore, partly to diffuse critics who didn't like his constantly changing style or his intense curiousity in pursuit of new architectural ideas. Apparently, though, it didn't save him from an eviscerating obituary in the Guardian...
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Posted by greg at
2:55 AM
January 18, 2005
Check out Michael Bierut's appreciation of the bracing architecture environment photographs of Robert Polidori. Polidori's are not photos for architects, who want their buildings to look their renderings--pristine and perfect, unsullied by unpredictable humanity and the less-pedigreed landscape surrounding them....
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Posted by greg at
10:24 AM
January 13, 2005
Archinect's empire just keeps expanding. They just launched their Winter/Monsoon 2005 Collection of limited edition T-shirts. This one's designed by Christian Unverzagt of the Detroit-based M1/DTW. Also available: M/F robots made from old cathedral floor plans and a trippy...
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Posted by greg at
8:42 AM
December 29, 2004
KINKS: The way-finding isn't working. By the second or third day, we had to put up signs to help people. The bathrooms needed signs coming out, instead of being flat on the wall. The library's organization makes complete sense...
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Posted by greg at
12:57 PM
December 15, 2004
But we yearn for more than a cloakroom and gift shop in the cavernous entrance; the atrium cries for the really big gesture -- even Barnett Newman's "Broken Obelisk" becomes a decorous gesture that ceases to alarm. This requires a...
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Posted by greg at
11:58 AM
November 22, 2004
Here we are, the week before Thanksgiving, stuffed and groggy from consuming so much MoMA-related press, which we probably have to regurgitate on Thursday for our out-of-town relatives. Then comes this new angle for the MoMA-weary: Turns out Yoshio Taniguchi's...
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Posted by greg at
1:07 AM
November 17, 2004
Jonathan Glancey gives an invigorating description of Sir Norman Foster & Co's Grand Viaduc du Millau, an awesome bridge on the A25 running from Paris to the Cote d'Azur. Come fly with me [Guardian UK]...
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Posted by greg at
2:26 AM
November 4, 2004
After the stunning success of Team America World Police [Hey, turns out they got the US political climate right after all...], puppet projects are breaking out all over. At Harvard's Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, the artist Pierre Huyghe is...
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Posted by greg at
9:54 AM
October 27, 2004
1. Barney's, men's side, main floor Coming down the escalator into the underwear/robe department, there's an unbearable funk that's been there since the store opened ten years ago. Drives me crazy. 2. Prada Store, Aoyama, Tokyo [see left] Leave it...
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Posted by greg at
4:37 AM
October 19, 2004
Archinect has an interview with Nathalie de Vries (the DV in MVRDV), where she talks about the firm's origins and work approach, and about their upcoming building/mountain for London's Serpentine Gallery. Very cool. MVRDV.nl previous MVRDV posts...
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Posted by greg at
1:09 AM
September 18, 2004
China's building boom may throw up a Rem Koolhaas now and then, but most of the time, it just looks like it's throwing up. Now, bad Chinese architecture has a home, BadJianZhu. Paul Wingfield, co-founder of the site, promises buildings...
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Posted by greg at
4:36 AM
August 17, 2004
[via archinect] Mies van der Rohe gives a rare interview to BBC Radio. (They've gotten even rarer since he died; this one's from 1959.)...
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Posted by greg at
2:12 AM
July 29, 2004
At least that's how I read this anecdote on Defective Yeti. By the way, the Tall Buildings show at MoMA looks great. Excruciatingly sexy models, tons of other information and context. You could spend 10 minutes or half the day....
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Posted by greg at
1:22 AM
July 16, 2004
A correction: Reading Herbert Muschamp's review of MoMA's "Tall Buildings" show, which includes the United Architects proposal for the WTC site. [The 'Dream Team' proposal is in there, too, but I've said all I'll say about that.] Coming after...
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Posted by greg at
7:27 AM
July 15, 2004
[via archinect] On a day when the Times praises his shoplifter-friendly, open-air Prada store on Rodeo (a feature the real customers, who valet park in back, will never see),The Project for Public Spaces pokes a sharp stick in Rem Koolhaas's...
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Posted by greg at
7:17 AM
July 2, 2004
Christopher Hawthorne nails this weekend's Pataki Day Celebration, aka the groundbreaking for the Freedom Tower.This is what it has come to at Ground Zero: A premature, election-year press conference held on Independence Day to celebrate the start of construction on...
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Posted by greg at
9:59 AM
June 25, 2004
Curbed has a warning for NYC apartment hunters: "Fear The Lamp." Apparently, ARCO lamps--designed by the late Achille Castiglioni--are turning up in real estate listings with alarming frequency. [One possible reason: they're freakin' heavy. I had a chance to get...
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Posted by greg at
4:48 AM
June 16, 2004
If you're in London this Father's Day: The artists Elmgreen & Dragset have put together a short program (49') of film and video works which "examine architecture's complicit role in defining our enactment of psychological states." It will be shown...
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Posted by greg at
8:25 AM
June 11, 2004
There are published stories, and unpublished ones. I hear that Muschamp is moving to the Travel Section. Which makes sense to me. His last real architecture review has me planning a road trip to Seattle. Check out these excellent photos...
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Posted by greg at
8:53 AM
May 24, 2004
It's Real Estate Monday in the blogosphere. The LES's resident WASP, Lockhart Steele puts to rest all those inappropriate discussions about who owns the New York real estate industry with the launch of his new weblog, Curbed. It's the Fleshbot...
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Posted by greg at
2:22 AM
May 15, 2004
But not how you think. I was really getting into my Muschamp- and Koolhaas-weary groove. So when Herbert opened his review of Rem's new Seattle Central Library, with this sentence, I was working up my jaded, righteous indignation: "In...
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Posted by greg at
11:24 AM
May 5, 2004
The Times' Sarah Boxer walks through Taniguchi & Associates' soon-to-be-completed MoMA with Glenn Lowry. The early word is, it's straight. "...two huge windows, nearly floor to ceiling, face each other at opposite ends of the Sculpture Garden. Both are topped...
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Posted by greg at
9:17 AM
April 30, 2004
Even with all their vaunted number-crunching abilities, it seems no one at MIT can say exactly how much Simmons Hall, their new Steven Holl-designed, sponge-inspired, suicidal plunge-preventing dorm actually cost. Can't? Or won't? Metropolis reports a dispute--and a possible lawsuit...
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Posted by greg at
1:09 AM
April 13, 2004
Still damp from that Prada encounter Sunday, Herbert Muschamp barely has time to come up for air before resuming the position he knows so well: kissing Diller & Scofidio's ass. Is this really fit to print? 13Musc gets worked up...
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Posted by greg at
9:52 AM
March 25, 2004
Lightningfield snaps some fine pictures from his visit to the MusÈe des Egouts de Paris, the Paris Sewer Museum, which highlights some of the lesser known achievements of a few centuries of l'etat. Very Foucault's Pendulum....
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Posted by greg at
8:18 AM
March 4, 2004
! Herbert Muschamp calls it a "stairway to heaven penthouse paradise," which is odd, since it looks more like a zipper than a staircase. The zipper on the fly of lower Manhattan. ["Chicka-boom!" indeed, Herbert.] What is it? It's Santiago...
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Posted by greg at
12:26 PM
February 9, 2004
If you need me, I'll be at the Time Warner Mall, getting in line for the escalator to Whole Foods, where I'll be bellying up to New York's only Jamba Juice. "Whata Juice?" you say? Soon enough, you will be...
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Posted by greg at
12:39 PM
November 7, 2003
Continuing in my apparent "interesting, but what does it mean for The Matrix?" vein, here's a quote from Herbert Muschamp's TMI review of the Men in Skirts exhibit at the Met's Costume Institute: I knew the Wachowski Brothers had lost...
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Posted by greg at
3:12 AM
May 10, 2003
It took police more than seven hours to shoot and capture the gunman who opened fire in the newly opened Peter B. Lewis Building for Case Western's business school. It was "almost a cat and mouse game," said Cleveland...
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Posted by greg at
10:22 AM
February 26, 2003
It's architectural reality TV, with so many last-minute campaigns, twists and turns, you'd think Fox was running it, not the Port Authority. The final two bachelors, er architect groups in the design "competition" for the WTC site have been workin'...
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Posted by greg at
11:36 AM
February 11, 2003
Team THINK's winning WTC design: lattice towers with a, um, museum? embedded in it image: rvapc.com Goin' to hear THINK architect/model Rafael Vinoly at Urban Center tonight (as suggested by Gawker)? Ask him if the reason he was a...
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Posted by greg at
1:41 AM
February 5, 2003
What I hope doesn't carry through from the plans the LMDC selected from Daniel Libeskind and THINK Team: Needlessly symbolic height (1,776 feet) Why not two 911' high towers? Duh, because. Single high-profile elements that completely draw attention away from...
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Posted by greg at
1:41 AM
January 28, 2003
Herbert Muschamp, the Professor Emile Flostre of architectural empathicalism, gives his blessing to the THINK team's proposal to build a World Cultural Center at the former WTC site. There are several things to like about the proposal, not the least...
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Posted by greg at
7:32 AM
October 23, 2002
Rem Koolhaas's Projects for Prada, Part 1, underneath a table-like sculpture by Wade Guyton From the NY Post: Firefighters had to rescue shoppers from a stuck elevator in the super-trendy Prada store in SoHo the other day. A mother...
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Posted by greg at
7:53 AM
October 22, 2002
Took a whirlwind trip to the Yale School of Architecture to see an exhibition (mostly) of the theoretical works of the Rotterdam architecture firm, MVRDV. Ivory tower academics? Nope. They actually build. A lot. And Yale dean Robert Stern rightly...
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Posted by greg at
7:22 AM
July 1, 2002
Usually, when you get googled for "I went to high school with Ben Affleck" or "red vines and hidden meaning," you're left to wonder who the hell that was, and what's going on in those folks' heads? So imagine...
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Posted by greg at
2:36 AM
