Hasta La Ideas

Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch’s immersive video installations captured in their first monograph

“A glorious mess;” “manic and often overwhelming;” a “tumult of video, furniture, music, extreme makeup and insistent jabberwocky”—reading reviews of Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin’s touring show “Any Ever” might make the printed page seem like an impossible format (if not totally antithetical) for showcasing their work. While there’s nothing quite like watching the spastic films unfold as you sit in a room decorated with the excesses of suburban culture, through a feat of design, the new book manages to capture the essence of the emerging art stars’ aesthetic.

Using a variety of layouts and experimenting with text, the experience of thumbing through the monograph’s pages evokes a similar sense of today’s information chaos, as equally fraught with aggressive optimism as with streaks of dark humor. Playing with fonts and punctuation makes the publication look more conversational, accomplishing the tricky feat of giving a sense of which imaginative character is saying what, and the characteristically Trecartin way in which they say it.

A heavy use of black backgrounds similarly evokes what it’s like to see the frenetic scenes unfold onscreen. As a supplement to seeing the show, the book nicely functions as if you’ve hit pause, recording some of the best dialog—”i totally cry’real tears, ijust haven’t Designed them YET:” and “Watching the Gift Economy tie Strings, 2my NECK!”—for those who didn’t take notes.

The clever design, coupled with commentary by some of Trecartin’s supporters (including Rhizome director Lauren Cornell and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s Jeffrey Deitch) as well as an interview with Cindy Sherman, helps position the young artist and his work at the forefront of the contemporary art scene—not that the upstart is having any trouble.

“Any Ever” opens at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris on 18 October 2011 and runs through 8 January 2011. If you can’t make it, Trecartin’s Vimeo page has Any Ever in its entirety, along with the genius piece that put him on the map, “A Family Finds Entertainment.”

Pick up Any Ever from Amazon or Rizzoli.

Installation image from the P.S.1 show by Matthew Septimus

Computer software generates endless possible architectural configurations from standardised components at an exhibition in Taipei designed by architects MVRDV.

The exhibition explores conceptual alternatives to the relentless construction of standard apartment blocks in East Asia.

Analytical research, models, animations, installations, a documentary and two software packages demonstrate the possibility to develop dense, vertical urban villages.

Visitors to the exhibition are able to design their own ‘vertical village’ using parametric computer software.

The concept was developed in collaboration with The Why Factory, a global think tank and research institute run by MVRDV and the Delft University of Technology.

Vertical Village is on show at the Chung Shan Creative Hub, Taipei from 8 October 2011 to 8 January 2012.

See all of our stories about MVRDV here.

Here are some more details from MVRDV:

Today MVRDV, The Why Factory and the JUT Foundation for Arts and Architecture opened the fourth edition of the exhibition series “Museum of Tomorrow” in Taipei. Under the title “The Vertical Village” the exhibition explores the rapid urban transformation in East Asia, the qualities of urban villages and the potential to realize this in a much denser, vertical way as a radical alternative to the identical block architecture with standard apartments and its consequences for the city. The exhibition consists of analytical research, a grid of models, various movies, a documentary and animations, two software packages and a 6 meter tall installation of a possible Vertical Village developed by MVRDV and The Why Factory. Visitors can design their ideal house and compose their own Vertical Village with parametric software. The exhibition is located in Chung Shan Creative Hub, Taipei and open from 8th of October to 8th of January 2012.

The pressure on the East Asian cities has lead to an increasing urbanization and densification during the last decades. It has made way for the construction of giant buildings, mostly towers, blocks and slabs. A ‘Block Attack’ that gradually replaces and scrapes away the more traditional low rise, small scale, often ‘lighter’ types of architecture and urbanism: the Hutong in Beijing, the small wooden houses in Tokyo, the villages in Singapore, the individual houses in Taipei and other East Asian cities. These urban villages form mostly intense and socially highly connected communities, with enormous individual identities and differentiations. One can speak of urban ecologies, communities that have evolved over the course of centuries. Their faceless replacements packed with identical apartment units offer a Western standard of living at an affordable price, but at the expense of differentiation, flexibility and individual expression.

Is there an alternative to this process? Can one imagine a new model for the development of East Asian cities? Can these areas be densified in such a way that the qualities of the traditional village are preserved? The exhibition offers an alternative, a contemporary Vertical Village – a three-dimensional community that brings personal freedom, diversity, flexibility and neighbourhood life back into East Asian – and maybe even Western – cities.

In the fourth edition of the Museum of Tomorrow, MVRDV and The Why Factory analyse, explore and deepen this vision, with the help of the Berlage Institute and many other contributors. The exhibition located in Chung Shan Creative Hub, Taipei, features a 6 meter tall installation and a variety of analytical models and research elements. Visitors will be able to design their ideal house with an interactive platform, “The House Maker”, and develop their Vertical Village with parametric software – a Grasshopper scripted Rhinoceros model, developed by MVRDV and The Why Factory.

JUT Foundation for Arts and Architecture publishes the Chinese edition of ‘the Vertical Village catalogue. NAi Publishers is publisher of the English language version which will be published January 16th 2012. The 528 page volume contains the ample research made comprehensible with countless colour illustrations. It features detailed case studies for Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, Djakarta, Seoul and Bangkok, interviews with among others Winy Maas, Alfredo Brillemburg and Hubert Klumpner, Lieven De Cauter, Peter Trummer and families living in Taipei.

The exhibition and publication has been made possible with the generous support of JUT Foundation for Arts and Architecture, Delft University of Technology, The Why Foundation and the Netherlands Architecture Funds.

MVRDV develops its work in a conceptual way, the changing condition is visualised and discussed through designs, sometimes literally through the design and construction of a diagram. The office continues to pursue its fascination and methodical research on density using a method of shaping space through complex amounts of data that accompany contemporary building and design processes.

MVRDV first published a cross section of these study results in FARMAX (1998), followed by a.o. MetaCity/Datatown (1999), Costa Iberica (2000), Regionmaker (2002), 5 Minutes City (2003), KM3 (2005), and more recently Spacefighter (2007) and Skycar City (2007). MVRDV deals with global ecological issues in large scale studies such as Pig City as well as in small pragmatic solutions for devastated areas of New Orleans.

Current projects include various housing projects in the Netherlands, Spain, China, France, the United Kingdom, USA, India, Korea and other countries, a bank headquarter in Oslo, Norway, a public library for Spijkenisse , Netherlands, a central market hall for Rotterdam, a culture plaza in Nanjing, China, large scale urban plans include a plan for an eco-city in Logroño, Spain, an urban vision for the doubling in size of Almere, Netherlands and Grand Paris, the vision of a post-Kyoto Greater Paris region.

The work of MVRDV is exhibited and published world wide and receives international awards. The 60 architects, designers and staff members conceive projects in a multi-disciplinary collaborative design process and apply highest technological and sustainable standards.

Together with Delft University of Technology MVRDV runs The Why Factory, an independent think tank and research institute providing argument for architecture and urbanism by envisioning the city of the future.

MVRDV was set up in Rotterdam (the Netherlands) in 1993 by Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries. MVRDV engages globally in providing solutions to contemporary architectural and urban issues. A research based and highly collaborative design method engages experts from all fields, clients and stakeholders in the creative process. The results are exemplary and outspoken buildings, urban plans, studies and objects, which enable our cities and landscapes to develop towards a better future.

Early projects such as the headquarters for the Dutch Public Broadcaster VPRO and housing for elderly WoZoCo in Amsterdam lead to international acclaim.

The Why Factory is a global think-tank and research institute, run by MVRDV and Delft University of Technology and led by professor Winy Maas. The Why Factory’s Future Cities research program explores possibilities for the development of our cities by focussing on the production of models and visualizations for cities of the future. The results of this research programme are being presented in a series of books – the Future Cities Series – published in association with NAI Publishers in Rotterdam, edited by Jennifer Sigler, and designed by Bas de Wolff of Thonik / Beng! in Amsterdam. The Vertical Village is the fourth publication in this series after Visionary Cities (2009), The Green Dream (2010) and The Why Factor(y) & The Future City (2010).

The JUT Foundation for Arts and Architecture was formed in 2007. Its intent is to use diverse architectural, artistic and cultural perspectives to create better living spaces. Its outreach extends from small minority areas to larger communal ones, for the purpose of establishing ideal built environments.

By using knowledge and resources from the field of architecture, and integrating multifaceted views from architects, designers, artists and cultural workers, the foundation is devoted to raising awareness about the concerns and developments of city environments, and to the empowerment of the artistic and creative industries. Events such as exhibitions, competitions, seminars and publications build vivid relationships between art and city dwellers, provoking ideas on living aesthetics and nourishing local art and culture. Through architecture-based projects, JUT has created a stage for artistic movements.

Since its founding, the JUT Foundation has organized activities such the ‘Museum of Tomorrow’ exhibition series and international architecture forums and lectures. In 2009, the foundation began to display animations, movies and installations, in order to seek new perspectives on architecture in Taiwan (Alternative Architecture). The year 2010 marked the launch of ‘Project Urbancore’, a project that places art in unused spaces, providing local artistic perspectives and a source of energy for urban regeneration.

The Museum of Tomorrow project began in 2007 as an engagement with unused land or buildings that lay idle, at a time of transition from old to new. What will be the most ideal plot in the future? The JUT Foundation sees the ‘Museum of Tomorrow’ as a stage to practice ideas for future city aesthetics. The concept ‘nomad museum’ reflects the rapidly changing character of the city, using the city as its stage. Observations and interpretations are given by experts from different fields – from art and architecture to design – to help city dwellers understand different contexts, and to extend the spirit of place.

The ‘Museum of Tomorrow’ has an inherent difference from traditional museums and art museums. It is a ‘formless’ stage that uses no fixed time, location or definition. Performance activities with different scales and themes happen in every corner of the city, bringing about interpretation between people and environment, new and old, tradition and future, private and public. The museum has various kinds of exhibitions in accordance with nomad sites in the city, with organic performances of architecture, art and culture, combining the virtual and the tangible, the active and the static, the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional. The Museum of Tomorrow creates a variety of possible impulses that allow us to imagine tomorrow today. Beyond these variations, the museum aims to create the purest spirit for our time. There is always a better tomorrow.

See also:

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The Why Factory by MVRDV and Richard Hutten	ROCKmagneten by MVRDV and COBE	China Hills by MVRDV

Dezeen Screen: in the first of a series of movies filmed by Dezeen at the opening of OMA/Progress at the Barbican in London earlier this week, OMA co-founder Rem Koolhaas gives us a private tour of the show. Watch the movie »

An exhibition documenting the working processes of international architecture practice OMA opens at the Barbican Art Gallery in London tomorrow. 

Photograph by Jim Gourley, courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

OMA/Progress presents a diverse collection of over 450 items from the practice’s archive including sketches, documents, photographs, models and material samples.

The exhibition is guest curated by Brussels-based collective Rotor, who wanted to represent OMA’s intense productivity with a dense mixture of objects and documents.

Image copyright OMA, courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

Models of familiar buildings such as the CCTV headquarters in Beijing are accompanied by sketches and transcripts relating to unfinished projects.

At the entrance to the show is a free public gallery containing an index of all of OMA’s projects, videos of lectures by the firm’s partners dating from the 1970s to the present and a shop.

Prada Transformer/OMA image copyright OMA, courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

The main space presents OMA and their current projects. A large projection scrolls constantly through every image saved on OMA’s server at a rate of 20 images per second, taking 48 hours to reach the end of the loop of almost 3.5 million pictures.

Photograph copyright Rotor, courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

Upstairs, exhibits are grouped according to themes such as movement or colour and material, while one room is completely covered in waste paper that Rotor collected from OMA’s offices.

Photograph copyright Rotor, courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

The sculpture gallery features a 1:1 plan of the firm’s most recent project, Maggie’s Gartnavel Centre for cancer care in Glasgow, which opened this week – see our story here.

Image copyright Rotor, courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

The exhibition runs from 6 October until 19 February 2012. See all of our stories about OMA here and some initial photos of the exhibition in our Facebook album.

Photograph copyright Rotor, courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

Here is some more information from the Barbican:

OMA / Progress
6 Oct 2011 – 19 Feb 2012
Barbican Art Gallery, London

Supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and The Netherlands Architecture Fund and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Additional support provided by The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture and the Flemish Representation in the UK.Media Partner: Icon Magazine

‘Every architect carries the utopian gene.’
Rem Koolhaas

Photograph copyright OMA, courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

This autumn Barbican Art Gallery is transformed by a major exhibition on OMA, co-founded by Rem Koolhaas in 1975, one of the most influential architecture practices working today. Known for their daring ideas, extraordinary buildings and obsession with the rapid pulse of modern life, OMA play an active role in the architectural, engineering and cultural ideas that are shaping our world.

OMA/Progress is the first major presentation of OMA’s work in the UK and is guest curated and designed by the Brussels-based collective Rotor, who were responsible for the much praised Belgian Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale. With unprecedented access to OMA’s archives and daily practice, Rotor has created a revealing portrait of OMA. They have selected and presented a wide range of materials, relics, documentation, imagery and models, yielding fresh perspectives on OMA’s built and unbuilt projects and conceptual work. The result is an exhibition that invites the visitor to discover first hand the breadth and depth of OMA’s output. Rotor comments: ‘ This exhibition gives an outsider view on the inside of a particular architecture office. OMA/Progress is a portrait that consists mostly of found materials, materials that exist for reasons other than this exhibition. It shows architecture as a practice, a messy process that changes with every good project .’

Photograph copyright Philippe Ruault, courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

Delving into the inner workings of OMA’s intense productivity, OMA/Progress features diverse projects and a range of unexpected objects, photographs, films and findings from behind-the-scenes at OMA. The exhibition, designed re-using the build and scenography of the previous installation, is in three parts; the public zone, which includes a browsable index of all OMA’s projects, videos of lectures given by OMA partners from the 1970s to now and an OMA shop including seminal books and an exclusive collection of prints. Three lower-level gallery spaces introduce OMA and their current preoccupations, including a raw sequence of every single image from OMA’s server – almost 3.5 million – that runs on a 48-hour loop. The upper level is dedicated to a collection of around 450 items that illustrate the history and current practice of OMA, ranging from the iconic – such as models of the Maison à Bordeaux and the CCTV headquarters in Beijng – and never-before-seen artefacts including unpublished manuscripts of a never completed book on Lagos, Nigeria, and the ‘secret room’, a space completely covered in the waste paper collected by Rotor from the OMA offices over a month-long period.

Photograph copyright Rotor, courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

Further highlights include insights into recent projects such as Cornell University’s Milstein Hall and the CCTV headquarters in Beijing; recent competition entries like the Broad Art Museum in Los Angeles; and those that are on-hold indefinitely, like the Dubai Renaissance tower. The array of objects take in Koolhaas’s hand-written faxes; a guide for cutting the form of the CCTV building from a block of foam in four easy steps; samples of the skin of the Prada Transformer Pavilion (Seoul 2009); the personal travertine collection of OMA Partner Ellen van Loon; and paintings reproduced in fabric for a wall covering from Rothschild Bank HQ. Displayed on their own or in series, the exhibits tell revealing and often surprising stories about OMA’s unprecedented and intuitive ways of working.

Photograph copyright Rotor, courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

Triggered by OMA’s preoccupation with architectural preservation, the west entrance of Barbican Art Gallery is opened up for the first time in the building’s history, making the exhibition spaces directly accessible from the Highwalks of the surrounding Barbican Estate. With the existing entrance also in use, visitors are able to freely walk through and occupy the space in the way originally intended by Barbican architects, Chamberlin, Powell & Bon.

Installed on the Barbican’s Sculpture Court, the exhibition also includes a 1:1 footprint of OMA’s design for the Maggie’s Centre in Glasgow, allowing visitors the opportunity to walk over, through and around the plan to investigate and imagine the building themselves.

Photograph copyright Rotor, courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

A programme of live events will tackle the question of progress in architecture and society and illuminate the work of OMA. The headline event, OMA: Show & Tell on Tuesday 25 October in Barbican Theatre brings together all seven partners from OMA for the first time in public, to examine and debate the nature of society, progress and the built environment across the world today.

The Office for Metropolitan Architecture, OMA, currently comprises seven partners and a staff of around 280 architects, designers and researchers working in offices in Rotterdam, New York, Beijing and Hong Kong. OMA/Progress coincides with a focus on the UK by OMA as it completes its first two buildings here: Maggie’s Centre in Gartnavel, Glasgow and the Rothschild Bank HQ overlooking the Bank of England in the City of London.

OMA

OMA is a leading international partnership practicing architecture, urbanism, and cultural analysis. Through AMO, its research and design studio, the practice works in areas beyond architecture that today have an increasing influence on architecture itself: media, politics, renewable energy, technology, publishing and fashion. OMA is led by seven partners – Rem Koolhaas, Ellen van Loon, Reinier de Graaf, Shohei Shigematsu, Iyad Alsaka, David Gianotten and Managing Partner, Victor van der Chijs. The work of OMA’s partners and Rem Koolhaas has received several awards, including the Pritzker Prize for architecture in 2000 and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale. This is the first major exhibition on OMA following Content at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin in 2003.

ROTOR

Curators of the acclaimed Belgian Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, Rotor is a collective based in Brussels. Founded in 2005, Rotor is a collective of people sharing a common interest in the material flows in industry and construction. On a practical level, Rotor handles the conception and realization of design and architectural projects. On a theoretical level, Rotor develops critical positions on design, material resources, and waste through research, exhibitions, writings and conferences.

BARBICAN ART GALLERY

One of the leading art spaces in the UK, Barbican Art Gallery presents the best of international visual art with a dynamic mix of art, architecture, design, fashion and photography. From acclaimed architects to Turner prize-winning artists, the Gallery exhibits innovators of the 20th and 21st centuries: key players who have shaped developments and stimulated change. Based within an iconic London landmark of considerable architectural interest and importance, Barbican Art Gallery has an international reputation for delivering agenda-setting architectural exhibitions designed to challenge assumptions and encourage debate. Previous architectural exhibitions include Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture 1956 – 2006 (2006); Alvar Aalto: Through the Eyes of Shigeru Ban, (2007) and Le Corbusier – The Art of Architecture (2009).Architecture as Air, a new installation by Japanese architect Junya Ishigami is on show in The Curve until 16 October 2011.

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Parc des Exposition by OMA	Maggie’s Centre Gartnavel by OMA	China Central Television Headquarters by OMA

Every year it seems that the directors of major art museums in the two cities playing against each other in the Super Bowl have made good-natured wagers against one another based on the outcome of the game. We always write about them because they’re fun and it’s nice to see a museum be something other than stiff and somber for a change. However, we rarely hear any follow up on those wagers, finding out if the losing team’s hometown art museum really does lend one of their pieces to the winner. Well now we finally have an answer. The AP reports that the Milwaukee Art Museum will soon be receiving Renoir‘s “Bathers with Crab” from the Carnegie Museum of Art, loaned after the Packers beat the Steelers this past February. The painting will appear as part of the museum’s Impressionism: Masterworks on Paper, an exhibition set to open on October 14th that will run through early January.

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