November 2010
26 posts
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I’ve become addicted to the predictable but pleasing cop procedural “Detroit 1-8-7,” which is filmed on location, and mesmerized by scenes of this devastated city.
One shakedown was staged in this parking lot, constructed in 1976 within the shell of an old, abandoned theater. It’s dreamy and sad.
(Michigan Theater, Detroit, by Rapp & Rapp. Photograph by Sean...
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Someone recently suggested to me that one of the best things to see in Philadelphia was the “Rocky Steps.” These are the steps in front of the city’s fine art museum that Sylvester Stallone runs up during the movie.
You have to wonder why, in a city with works by Frank Furness, William Lescaze, and Louis Kahn, the steps are such an important monument.
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Given our nostalgia for “Mad Men”-era Manhattan, it’s surprising that the people at Chock Full O’Nuts, who just opened a new, revival location on West 23rd Street, didn’t try to recreate the sleepy, inward, atmosphere of that classic city diner.
The coffee at the new Chock isn’t bad, and the donuts are great, but the interior, with it’s blank walls, and...
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A very fine $20K house prototype, from “Small Scale, Big Change” at MoMA.
from Planet-mag.com
($20K House VIII. Newbern, Alabama. 2009. By Rural Studio, Auburn University. Image: Timothy Hursley.)
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An essay in the Op Ed section of Tuesday’s paper celebrates the funky, functioning chaos of Penn Station, without any regard for the gorgeous, old demolished building. Could there have been a way to have both?
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Nowadays there’s a citywide contempt for new hi-rise/mixed-use/condo buildings, perhaps because so many of the existing ones remain half-occupied. Nonetheless I’m thrilled about Frank Gehry’s new tower under construction at Beekman Place. It won’t replace the still-startling absence of the Twin Towers, but it will bring a much-needed super-tall figure to the landscape...
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The skyscraper has lost much of its allure, so much so that’s it’s easy to forget how odd super-tall buildings are, and how remarkable the landscape of midtown Manhattan really is.
An exhibit of vintage aerial photographs of New York City at the Keith de Lellis Gallery recaptures that glamor. Some of the older shots feel blurry and cramped, as if the conventions of photography...
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Say what you will about the tacky/porno subject matter of John Currin’s work, he knows how to paint. His new canvases at the Gagosian are rendered with impressive skill. The soft, luminous surfaces have a sensuality that transcends the imagery.
We could have predicted a great deal of it: voluptuous maidens with cascading curls and cockeyed smiles, pictured singly and in groups. But...
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Not since the 1960’s, when Americans were lounging around in Verner Panton chairs and Marimekko dresses, has the voice of designers in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden been so prominent internationally.
An exhibit at Scandinavia House in New York, “Nordic Models + Common Ground: Art and Design Unfolded,” presents a small, intriguing selection of these artworks and design...
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There was such a fuss about adding a fourth tower to I M Pei’s three existing, landmarked Silver Towers at NYU that the plan was abandoned. They’re considered modern masterpieces now, but when they were built in 1966 they stirred up the same kind of resentment that glass condo buildings stir up now.
In the 1970 Brian De Palma movie “Hi, Mom!” Robert De Niro plays an...
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I watched Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” last night for the first time since I moved to New York over ten years ago. The opening, a montage of shadowy, black-and-white views of the city, is lovely, but this shot of the Guggenheim made me gasp.
It’s shockingly simple and conveys so much: the slight slope of the ramp as you’re walking it, the relaxed voyeurism of the...
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“If the inauguration of the Guggenheim Museum in New York was a formative moment in art museum starchitecture, then the 1997 Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Bilbao was its apotheosis.”
from ArtWrit.com
(Sketch of the Guggenheim Bilbao, Frank Gehry.)
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Friday night on a panel about housing for the homeless two architects, Michael Maltzan and Jonathan Kirschenfeld, presented two very different approaches.
Jonathan Kirschenfeld, who works in New York, approaches city agencies and non profits to find suitable plots of land and secure funds to develop them. The shelters he’s completed are simply, pragmatically conceived and finished in...
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Lee Friedlander’s new photos confound the notion that an artist’s later work is diluted and less passionate than his earlier work. The dozens of photos in “America by Car,” crammed into the small mezzanine galleries of the Whitney, are bristling with visual energy.
Taken over the past twelve years during road trips, they document views from the front seat of the...
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I first saw Damien Hirst’s cabinets ten years ago, in London, at Barmacy on a Friday night. They were the perfect, kitschy and ridiculous background to the happy energy in the lounge.
Seeing them again, this time at L&M Gallery on East 78th Street, they seemed awfully sinister. The cabinets are constructed with unnerving precision, and the generically-labeled medicines and supplies...
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This Thursday artist Mary Ellen Carroll lifted and turned an unoccupied house in the Houston subdivision of Sharpstown 180 degrees. The artist explained that the work, “Protoype 180,” was a commentary on the lack of a land use policy in the city, and on the fading glamor of this community.
Like many suburban communities Sharpstown was laid out in a way that’s purely...
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Last night at a SoHo showroom Kansas-based architect Dan Rockhill spoke about his work. He has two professional lives, one at an eponymous firm and another with the non-profit Studio 804. His role at Studio 804 is a lot like the late Samuel Mockbee’s at Rural Studio. Each semester he leads University of Kansas architecture students to design and construct a local building.
...
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Sometimes I think IKEA is the end of Scandinavian Design. If you visit the store you’ll find a number of incredibly beautiful things that were inspired by high-design (and higher-priced) Scandinavian Design originals, which make me less inclined to think about the originals anymore.
Then I walked into the Marimekko store on Madison Avenue and was jolted out of my apathy. Their textiles,...
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At a time when our culture seems to have become largely secular, how can a religious building still be regarded with talismanic powers?
(Chapel, Valleaceron, Spain, 2001. By Sancho Madridejos Architecture Office, from Closer to God, Copyright Gestalten 2010.)
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True confession: While I’ve walked by SOM’s legendary, landmarked Manufacturer’s Hanover Trust building on Fifth Avenue and Forty-third Street countless times, I never noticed sculptor Henry Bertoia’s custom-designed screen inside, whose recent removal has caused controversy.
While the building’s exterior has been landmarked its interior hasn’t, so...
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Aricoco’s amazing garments (they were on display at the New York Studio Gallery) are made from fabric scraps, vinyl, latex, buttons, and newspaper, stitched together by hand. Each one is formless when unoccupied but takes shape when someone puts it on.
These pieces reminded me of crinolines, latch hook rugs, chairs by the Campana brothers, and the way homeless people sometimes dress in...
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Most publicity about the powerful Paul Thek retrospective at the Whitney has focused on the “meat” pieces, tabletop assemblages that incorporate exquisitely rendered wax models of chunks of human and animal flesh.
Thek moved on from those works to more performance-oriented pieces, for which he crafted special props that fall somewhere between costume, furniture and sculpture. Made...
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There’s Zaha, and Denise, and Liz, and the lady from SANAA …
According to the AIA just over 13% of architects in America are women.
Now there’s a call for submissions for a group exhibit at Woodbury University in Los Angeles that will “consider the contributions and visibility of today’s practicing female architects.” Part of me can’t believe that...
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Last month at the Guggenheim Peter Eisenman, our most celebrated architectural theorist, said, “Architecture changes nothing.”
Then last night, at the Center for Architecture, Paul Goldberger, our most well-known architectural writer, said “Architecture makes life better.”
I believe both of them.
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