1. Farewell, Sugar Man Director It surprised no one when Malik Bendjelloul won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature at the 2013 Academy Awards. His film “Searching for Sugar Man” (which happened to be his directorial debut) won the hearts of fans the…
News: New York studio The Living has won this year’s MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program competition with plans to cultivate bio-bricks from corn stalks and mushrooms, and use them to build a tower in the courtyard of the New York gallery (+ slideshow).
The Living principal David Benjamin proposed a cluster of circular towers made entirely from natural materials for his entry to the Young Architects Program (YAP) contest, which each year invites emerging architects to propose a temporary structure that will host the summer events of the MoMA Ps1 gallery in Queens.
Named Hy-Fi, the structure will be constructed entirely from recyclable materials. The Living will collaborate with sustainable building firm Ecovative to grow the bricks that will form the base of the tower, using a combination of agricultural byproducts and mushroom mycelium – a kind of natural digestive glue.
The upper section of the structure will be made from reflective bricks produced using a specially developed mirror film. Initially these will be used as growing trays for the organic bricks, but will later be installed at the top of the tower to help to bounce light down inside.
Gaps in the brickwork will help to naturally ventilate interior spaces using the stack effect, drawing cool air in at the bottom and pushing hot air out at the top.
MoMA curator Pedro Gadanho said: “This year’s YAP winning project bears no small feat. It is the first sizeable structure to claim near-zero carbon emissions in its construction process and, beyond recycling, it presents itself as being 100 percent compostable.”
“Recurring to the latest developments in biotech, it reinvents the most basic component of architecture – the brick – as both a material of the future and a classic trigger for open-ended design possibilities,” he added.
Set to open in June, Hy-Fi will be accessible to MoMA Ps1 visitors during the 2014 Warm Up summer music series.
Here’s the full announcement from MoMA:
The Living selected as winner of the 2014 Young Architects Program at MoMA PS1 in New York
The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 announce The Living (David Benjamin) as the winner of the annual Young Architects Program (YAP) in New York. Now in its 15th edition, the Young Architects Program at MoMA and MoMA PS1 has been committed to offering emerging architectural talent the opportunity to design and present innovative projects, challenging each year’s winners to develop creative designs for a temporary, outdoor installation at MoMA PS1 that provides shade, seating, and water. The architects must also work within guidelines that address environmental issues, including sustainability and recycling. The Living, drawn from among five finalists, will design a temporary urban landscape for the 2014 Warm Up summer music series in MoMA PS1’s outdoor courtyard.
The winning project, Hy-Fi, opens at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City in late June. Using biological technologies combined with cutting-edge computation and engineering to create new building materials, The Living will use a new method of bio-design, resulting in a structure that is 100% organic material. The structure temporarily diverts the natural carbon cycle to produce a building that grows out of nothing but earth and returns to nothing but earth – with almost no waste, no energy needs, and no carbon emissions. This approach offers a new vision for society’s approach to physical objects and the built environment. It also offers a new definition of local materials, and a direct relationship to New York State agriculture and innovation culture, New York City artists and non-profits, and Queens community gardens.
Hy-Fi is a circular tower of organic and reflective bricks, which were designed to combine the unique properties of two new materials. The organic bricks are produced through an innovative combination of corn stalks (that otherwise have no value) and specially-developed living root structures, a process that was invented by Ecovative, an innovative company that The Living is collaborating with. The reflective bricks are produced through the custom-forming of a new daylighting mirror film invented by 3M. The reflective bricks are used as growing trays for the organic bricks, and then they are incorporated into the final construction before being shipped back to 3M for use in further research.
The organic bricks are arranged at the bottom of the structure and the reflective bricks are arranged at the top to bounce light down on the towers and the ground. The structure inverts the logic of load-bearing brick construction and creates a gravity-defying effect – instead of being thick and dense at the bottom, it is thin and porous at the bottom. The structure is calibrated to create a cool micro-climate in the summer by drawing in cool air at the bottom and pushing out hot air at the top. The structure creates mesmerising light effects on its interior walls through reflected caustic patterns. Hy-Fi offers a familiar – yet completely new – structure in the context of the glass towers of the New York City skyline and the brick construction of the MoMA PS1 building. And overall, the structure offers shade, colour, light, views, and a future-oriented experience that is designed to be refreshing, thought-provoking, and full of wonder and optimism.
“This year’s YAP winning project bears no small feat. It is the first sizeable structure to claim near-zero carbon emissions in its construction process and, beyond recycling, it presents itself as being 100% compostable,” said Pedro Gadanho, Curator in MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design. “Recurring to the latest developments in biotech, it reinvents the most basic component of architecture – the brick – as both a material of the future and a classic trigger for open-ended design possibilities. At MoMA PS1, The Living’s project will be showcased as a sensuous, primeval background for the Warm-Up sessions; the ideas and research behind it, however, will live on to fulfil ever new uses and purposes.”
Klaus Biesenbach, MoMA PS1 Director and MoMA Chief Curator at Large, adds, “After dedicating the whole building and satellite programs of MoMA PS1 to ecological awareness and climate change last year with EXPO 1: New York, we continue in 2014 with Hy-Fi, a nearly zero carbon footprint construction by The Living.”
The other finalists for this year’s MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program were Collective-LOK (Jon Lott, William O’Brien Jr., and Michael Kubo), LAMAS (Wei-Han Vivian Lee and James Macgillivray), Pita + Bloom (Florencia Pita and Jackilin Hah Bloom), and Fake Industries Architectural Agonism (Cristina Goberna and Urtzi Grau). An exhibition of the five finalists’ proposed projects will be on view at MoMA over the summer, organized by Pedro Gadanho, Curator, with Leah Barreras, Department Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA.
The recent flurry of critical missives and tweets over MoMA’s decision to demolish the next-door American Folk Art Museum (AFAM), designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, has got me thinking about Harley Earl. The square-shouldered vice president and head of design at General Motors introduced stylised curves, chrome, and sex appeal into an industry driven by function. His most significant contribution to American culture, however, may be not the tail fin but planned obsolescence.
The idea that a manufacturer builds the death (by uselessness or tastelessness) into the birth of an object was once radical. It transferred the decision about when a product reaches the end of its life from the producer to the consumer. Could your sense of self-worth – your Cadillac, your iPhone – weather one more season before becoming démodé? Today, upgrading is a function of Moore’s law, the observation that technology gets exponentially smaller and more powerful every two years. It’s like breathing: one inhale, one exhale.
Architecture — or really I should say buildings, excusing for the moment the theoretical or speculative options — has largely been spared the frequency of model changes. This slower epochal cycle owes less to a belief in Vitruvius’ firmitas, utilitas, venustas than to the economic fact that buildings cost more than a Chevy. Then there’s the social contract that buildings, even not exactly great buildings, should stick around awhile.
Yet MoMA‘s decision to follow Diller Scofidio + Renfro‘s recommendation to start fresh on 53rd Street, just thirteen years after the AFAM‘s celebrated opening, leads us to reconsider architecture’s obsolescence. Perhaps we need to steel ourselves for more rapid architectural cycle. Harvey Earl introduced new auto body models every three to five years. Too slow. Our era trades on the pop-up, the art-fair tent and the pavilion. The breathless pace of the internet only underscores design as a temporary, consumable product to be traded over mobile devices. To know the American Folk Art Museum is to Instagram the American Folk Art Museum.
Yet in all this churning through history, we have to remind ourselves that Williams and Tsien’s museum is considered the first new significant piece of architecture built after 9/11. You could even say that its facade of alloyed bronze panels, pockmarked from pouring hot metal onto bare concrete in the casting process, represented New York City’s toughness, resiliency, and belief in art, folk art, and art of the people in the face of adversity.
In his 14 December 2001 review, New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp lauded the building, writing:
“We can stop waiting for state officials to produce plans for redeveloping the city’s financial district. The rebuilding of New York has already begun. The new American Folk Art Museum in Midtown, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, is a bighearted building. And its heart is in the right time as well as the right place. The design delves deeply into the meaning of continuity: the regeneration of streets and cities; the persistence and mingling of multiple memories in the changing polyglot metropolis; and the capacity of art to transcend cultural categories even as it helps define them.”
In retrospect, Muschamp’s effusive wordsmithing borders on hyperbole. Yet in focussing on the cultural context in which the building was born, it captures much of what is missing from current discussion (which tends to be markedly concentrated on functionality and new square footage). If we practice the rules of obsolescence, the death of this signature piece of architecture was designed in at the beginning.
As much as I would want to praise the American Folk Art Museum for pointing a way forward out of that dark time, the structure is no phoenix. From the beginning it was anachronistic. This is its downfall.
Although completed in the new millennium, it is an artefact from the 1990s, or to crib from Portlandia, an artefact from the 1890s. Muschamp’s title suggests as much: Fireside Intimacy for Folk Art Museum. “Our builders have largely dedicated themselves to turning back the clock,” he writes of Williams and Tsien’s obsessive attention to materiality.
The museum is a little too West Coast for midtown – too much like somethign from the Southern California Institute of Architecture, before computation took command. Its design values everything the current art and real estate markets reject: hominess, idiosyncrasy, craft. By contrast, Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s scheme emphasises visibility and publicness. The same could be said for an Apple store.
A message from MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry posted on the museum’s website touts that the new design will “transform the current lobby and ground-floor areas into an expansive public gathering space.” Indeed, the much talked-about Art Bay, the 15,500-square-foot, double-height hall in the scheme, walks a fine line between public space and gallery. Fronted with a retractable glass wall and designed for flexibility, the Art Bay is so perfectly attuned to the performance zeitgeist, that it makes Marina Abramović want to twerk.
When the plans to demolish AFAM first surfaced in the spring of 2013 and the efficacy of its galleries to support MoMA collections came into question, I rebutted the suggestion that the cramped layout was flawed, suggesting instead that we see it within the legacy of the house museum, akin to Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, where the architect spent his later years arranging and rearranging his antiquities. Or even a sibling of 101 Spring Street, Donald Judd’s SoHo studio and residence now preserved as an artefact of contemporary art history and an exemplary piece of cast iron architecture. Fiscally rescued from obsolescence, these are zombie edifices: institutions frozen in time and largely immune from market ebbs and flows.
The sad fate of the American Folk Art Museum comes on the heels of a rough year. Cries of #saveprentice, although loud in the Twittersphere, ultimately fell on deaf ears so Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospital (1970) in Chicago fell to the wreaking crews this past autumn. Richard Neutra’s Cyclorama Building (1962) in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, was also deemed defunct and unfashionable. Michael Graves’ Portland Building (1982) might be next, given reports of the cost to maintain the postmodern icon.
Past preservation movements grew out of grassroots efforts such as the Miami Design Preservation League, which formed in 1976 to save what would become the city’s Art Deco district, or the Los Angeles Conservancy, galvanising two years later to save the Los Angeles Central Library. Is the future of preservation advocacy or apathy?
The Tumblr #FolkMoMA, initiated and curated by Ana María León and Quilian Riano, dragged the fate of AFAM – a pre-internet building – into the age of social media. The hashtag set the stage for a robust dialogue on the subject and a much-needed commons for debate, but failed to save architecture from capital forces.
In weighing in to protest or eulogise the passing of the American Folk Art Museum, perhaps what we mourn is not the building per se, but a lingering sentimental belief that architecture is an exception to the rules of obsolescence. This building strived to represent so many intimacies, but ultimately its finely crafted meaning was deemed disposable.
Fingers may point at the ethics of Diller Scofidio + Renfo’s decision to take on the project or wag fingers at MoMA’s expansionist vision, but the lesson here cuts deeper into our psyche. Architecture, as written in long form, exceeds our own life spans and operates in a time frame of historical continuity. Architecture writ short reminds us of our own mortality, coloured by mercurial taste.
The decision follows a six-month study that investigated options for its retention. “The plans approved today are the result of a recommendation from the architects after a diligent and thoughtful six-month study and design process that explored all options for the site,” said Lowry.
“The analysis that we undertook was lengthy and rigorous, and ultimately led us to the determination that creating a new building on the site of the former American Folk Art Museum is the only way to achieve a fully integrated campus.”
Williams and Tsien have described the move as “a missed opportunity to find new life and purpose for a building that is meaningful to so many”.
“The Folk Art building was designed to respond to the fabric of the neighbourhood and create a building that felt both appropriate and yet also extraordinary,” they said.
“Demolishing this human-scaled, uniquely crafted building is a loss to the city of New York in terms of respecting the size, diversity and texture of buildings in a midtown neighbourhood that is at risk of becoming increasingly homogenised.”
American Folk Art Museum building – photograph by Dan Nguyen
The bronze-clad museum first opened its doors in 2001 to exhibit a collection of paintings, sculptures and crafts by self-taught and outsider artists, but relocated to a smaller site on Lincoln Square, further north in Manhattan, after the building was sold to MoMA in 2011 to pay off a $32 million loan.
However, Williams and Tsien believe the building already holds a “powerful architectural legacy”.
“The inability to experience the building firsthand and to appreciate its meaning from an historical perspective will be profoundly felt,” they said.
Diller Scofidio + Renfro‘s expansion will add approximately 3700 square metres (40,000 square feet) of new galleries and public spaces to the museum.
It will extend across two sites west of the museum’s midtown Manhattan building, including both the folk art museum site at 45 West 53rd Street and three floors of a new residential tower underway next door, allowing the existing lobby and ground-floor areas to be transformed into a large public space.
Scroll down for the full statement from Glenn D. Lowry:
Message from Glenn D. Lowry Director, The Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art’s Board of Trustees today approved initial details of a major building project that will expand the Museum’s public spaces and galleries to provide greater public accessibility and allow the Museum to reconceive the presentation of its collection and exhibitions. Working with Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the renowned interdisciplinary studio based in New York City, the Museum has developed a plan to integrate its current building with two sites to the west of the Museum’s midtown Manhattan campus into which it will expand: three floors of a residential tower being developed by Hines, at 53 West 53rd Street; and the site of the former American Folk Art Museum, at 45 West 53rd Street. The plans include new gallery space on three floors within the tower, and a new building on the site of the former museum.
The plans approved today are the result of a recommendation from the architects after a diligent and thoughtful six-month study and design process that explored all options for the site. The analysis that we undertook was lengthy and rigorous, and ultimately led us to the determination that creating a new building on the site of the former American Folk Art Museum is the only way to achieve a fully integrated campus.
As a major component of the Museum’s desire for greater public access and a more welcoming street presence, the preliminary concepts approved today will transform the current lobby and ground-floor areas into an expansive public gathering space, open to the public and spanning the entire street level of the Museum, including The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. In advance of these plans, the Museum will increase free public access to the Sculpture Garden later this year.
The extension of MoMA’s galleries to the west on its second, fourth, and fifth floors will add a variety of spaces and allow the Museum to present an integrated display of its collection across all disciplines—photography, architecture, design, film, media, prints, drawings, performance, painting, and sculpture. These carefully choreographed sequences will highlight the creative frictions and influences that spring from seeing these mediums together.
The expansion will add approximately 40,000 square feet of new galleries and public areas, providing 30% more space for visitors to view the collection and special exhibitions. The additional space will allow the Museum to show transformative acquisitions that have added new dimensions and voices to its holdings, drawing from entire collections of contemporary drawings, Fluxus, and Conceptual art; the archives of Frank Lloyd Wright; and major recent acquisitions by such artists as Marcel Broodthaers, Lygia Clark, Steve McQueen, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Mira Schendel, Richard Serra, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Cy Twombly, among many others.
Our vision for MoMA’s next phase will be completed over the coming years, and I look forward to updating you on our progress.
Photography isn’t a practice that’s conducive to duos; in fact, from a more general perspective, most contemporary visual artists are solitary figures. Thus, the story of duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin is a slightly peculiar…
Designing Modern Women 1890–1990 showcases objects drawn entirely from MoMA‘s own collection and highlights women’s role as designers, patrons, muses and educators.
Table with Wheels (model 2652) by Gae Aulenti, 1980. Image is copyright Sergio Asti.
Pieces on show include a newly conserved kitchen designed by Charlotte Perriand with Le Corbusier in 1952 for the Unité d’Habitation housing project in Marseille.
Queen Anne Side Chair by Robert Venturi with Denise Scott Brown, 1983
There’s also work by Irish Modernist designer Eileen Gray, German Bauhaus designer Marianne Brandt and Italian architect Gae Aulenti.
Flatware by Karin Schou Andersen, 1979
Famous design couples are highlighted too, with work by Ray Eames and her husband Charles, and Denise Scott Brown with Robert Venturi.
Adjustable table by Eileen Gray, 1927
The exhibition continues in the Architecture and Design Gallery of the museum until 1 October 2014.
Screen by Eileen Gray, 1922
Here’s some more information from MoMA:
Modern design of the 20th century was profoundly shaped and enhanced by the creativity of women—as muses of modernity and shapers of new ways of living, and as designers, patrons, performers and educators.
Lounge Chair by Grete Jalk 1963
This installation, drawn entirely from MoMA’s collection, celebrates the diversity and vitality of individual artists’ engagement in the modern world, from Loïe Fuller’s pulsating turn-of-the-century performances to April Greiman’s 1980s computer-generated graphics, at the vanguard of early digital design. Highlights include the first display of a newly conserved kitchen by Charlotte Perriand with Le Corbusier (1952) from the Unité d’Habitation housing project, furniture and designs by Lilly Reich, Eileen Gray, Eva Zeisel, Ray Eames, Lella Vignelli, and Denise Scott Brown; textiles by Anni Albers and Eszter Haraszty; ceramics by Lucy Rie; a display of 1960s psychedelic concert posters by graphic designer Bonnie Maclean, and a never-before-seen selection of posters and graphic material from the punk era.
Exposição da Agricultura Paulista (Exhibition on agriculture in the state of São Paulo) by Lina Bo Bardi, 1951
The gallery’s ‘graphics corner’ first explores the changing role and visual imagery of The New Woman through a selection of posters created between 1890 and 1938; in April 2014 the focus will shift to Women at War, an examination of the iconography and varied roles of women in times of conflict, commemorating the centennial of the outbreak of World War I.
Die Praktische Küche (The practical kitchen) by Helene Haasbauer-Wallrath, 1930
Organized by Juliet Kinchin, Curator, and Luke Baker, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design
Architecture and Design Collection Exhibitions are made possible by Hyundai Card.
Additional support for Designing Modern Women, 1890–1990 is provided by The Modern Women’s Fund.
Ithaca design studio CODA has installed a wall that squirts water and is clad with skateboard offcuts in the courtyard of MoMA PS1 in New York.
Party Wall was the winning entry of this year’s Young Architects Program, an annual contest organised by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for a temporary installation offering seating, shade and water during the outdoor events of the MoMA PS1 contemporary art gallery.
CODA‘s installation is a steel-framed structure that functions as a giant aqueduct. Water travels alongs the top of the wall and is forced by a pressure tank to form a fountain, feeding a misting station and a series of paddling pools.
The cladding is made from interlocking wooden panels, recognisable as the offcuts from a skateboard manufacturer. There are also 120 removable elements that can function as benches or tables.
Water-filled plastic pillows are suspended inside the structure and help weight it down. At night, these inflatable elements are illuminated and glow through the gaps in the facade.
Party Wall will remain in place until the end of August and will be used during the annual Warm Up event – a showcase of experimental music and sound.
The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 Present Party Wall by CODA, winner of the 2013 Young Architects Program, at MoMA PS1 in New York
The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 announce the opening of Party Wall, the CODA (Caroline O’Donnell, Ithaca, NY)–designed winner of the annual Young Architects Program (YAP) in New York. Now in its 14th edition, the Young Architects Program at MoMA and MoMA PS1 is committed to offering emerging architectural talent the opportunity to design and present innovative projects, challenging each year’s winners to develop creative designs for a temporary, outdoor installation at MoMA PS1 that provides shade, seating, and water. The architects must also work within guidelines that address environmental issues, including sustainability and recycling. CODA, drawn from among five finalists, designed a temporary urban landscape for the 2013 Warm Up summer music series in MoMA PS1’s outdoor courtyard.
Party Wall is a pavilion and flexible experimental space that uses its large-scale, linear form to provide shade for the Warm Up crowds, in addition to other functions.
The porous facade is affixed to a tall self-supporting steel frame that is balanced in place with large fabric containers filled with water, and clad with a screen of interlocking wooden elements comprised of donated from Comet, an Ithaca-based manufacturer of eco-friendly skateboards.
The lower portion of the Party Wall’s facade is capable of shedding its “exterior,” as 120 panels can be detached from the structure and used as benches and communal tables during Warm Up and other diverse events and programs such as lectures, classes, performances, and film screenings.
A shallow stage of reclaimed wood weaves around Party Wall’s base to create a series of micro-stages for performances of varying types and scales. At various locations under the structure, pools of water serve as refreshing cooling stations that can also be covered to provide additional staging space or a shaded area from the direct sunlight.
Party Wall’s steel-angle structure is ballasted by water-filled “pillows” made of polyester base fabric that will be lit at night to produce a luminous effect. Party Wall acts as an aqueduct by carrying a stream of water along the top of the structure. The water is projected from the structure, via a pressure-tank, into a fountain that feeds a misting station and a series of pools.
“CODA’s proposal was selected because of its clever identification and use of locally available resources—the waste products of skateboard-making—to make an impactful and poetic architectural statement within MoMA PS1’s courtyard,” said Pedro Gadanho, Curator in MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design. “Party Wall arches over the various available spaces, activating them for different purposes, while making evident that even the most unexpected materials can always be reinvented to originate architectural form and its ability to communicate with the public.”
“CODA developed an outstanding, iconic design that will support the many social functions of our large-scale group exhibition EXPO 1: New York, while creating a unique and stunning object for our outdoor galleries,” added Klaus Biesenbach, Director of MoMA PS1 and Chief Curator at Large at MoMA.
The other finalists for this year’s MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program were Leong Architects (New York, NY, Dominic Leong, Chris Leong); Moorhead & Moorhead (New York, NY, Granger Moorhead, Robert Moorehead); TempAgency (Charlottesville, VA, and Brooklyn, NY, Leena Cho, Rychlee Espinosa, Matthew Jull, Seth McDowell); and French 2D (Boston, MA, and Syracuse, NY, Anda French, Jenny French).
A retrospective on the life and work of Le Corbusier opens today at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. This selection of drawings and paintings by the architect documents the various stages of his career, as presented in the exhibition.
Blue mountains, 1910
The first of five sections in Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes is entitled From the Jura Mountains to the Wide World and covers the early years of the architect’s life.
Un Embrasement (a blaze)
Born in 1887 under the name Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, he learnt to draw by exploring the landscape surrounding his home in Switzerland.
Parthenon, Athens, 1911, perspective of the colonnade and the landscape
Towards the end of this time he visited cities across Europe, including Vienna, Athens, Paris and Berlin.
La Cheminée (the fireplace), 1918
Section two, The Conquest of Paris, shows works completed after the architect settled in Paris, when he adopted the pseudonym Le Corbusier and launched avant-garde art journal L’Esprit nouveau (The new spirit) with friends.
Above: Palace of the League of Nations, Geneva, 1927 Top image: Voisin Plan for Paris, 1925, axonometric with Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin gates
In 1922 he opened an architecture studio with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret (1896–1967), developing various theoretical schemes and constructing villas for the Paris elite.
Music pavilion for Villa Church, Ville d’Avray, 1927-29
The third section of the exhibition is Responding to Landscape, from Africa to the Americas, and follows a decade where Le Corbusier began to work on projects outside France and Switzerland.
Urban plan for Rio de Janeiro, 1929
In 1929 he developed plans for Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Montevideo, as well as a masterplan for the transformation of Algiers.
Plan Obus, Algiers, 1932, version A, general plan
Chandigarh, a New Urban Landscape for India is the next stage in the story and traces the architect’s commission to design a new city for India.
Plan for Buenos Aires, 1929, profile view from the Rio de la Plata
Many of the bird’s-eye-view drawings made for the proposals for Chandigarh derived from sketches made while he was travelling between Europe and India.
Capitol Complex, Chandigarh, 1951-65
The final section of the exhibition is Toward the Mediterranean, or the Eternal Return and displays projects from the last fifteen years of Le Corbusier’s life.
Governor’s Palace, Chandigarh, 1951-65
During this period he completed some of his most famous buildings, from the Unités d’Habitations in Marseille to the Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut and the Convent of Sainte-Marie de La Tourette.
Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, 1950-55
The exhibition is open at MoMA until 23 September and is curated by architect and historian Jean-Louis Cohen. It will later travel to the Fundació “la Caixa” museums in Madrid and Barcelona in 2014.
Le Corbusier said that he preferred drawing to talking, on the grounds that the former is “faster and leaves less room for lies.” And so we silently sketched a “vehement silhouette” of MoMA beside a pair of round eyeglasses and handed it to writer Nancy Lazarus, who knew immediately what to do. Here’s her take on the museum’s highly anticipated Corbu-fest.
So much for Swiss diplomacy and neutrality: Le Corbusier, a prolific artist and architect, was politically active and often provoked and antagonized those closest to him in the art world, according to Jean-Louis Cohen, professor in the history of architecture at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.
Cohen spoke at the press preview for “Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes,” which opens Saturday at the Museum of Modern Art. He organized the exhibition and served as guest curator, working with Barry Bergdoll, MoMA’s chief curator of architecture and design. The comprehensive display of 320 objects draws on MoMA’s own collection and extensive loans from the Paris-based Le Corbusier Foundation, culminating a longstanding but rocky relationship with the artist.
The career of Le Corbusier (a Frenchman born in Switzerland as Charles-Edouard Jenneret) spanned six decades. The scope of his life’s work leaves the public both impressed and overwhelmed: he was involved in 400 architectural projects, completed 75 buildings, and published nearly 40 books. A small group of his buildings is now being considered for inclusion on the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites. continued…
Covered in henna-colored scribbles, Vitamin D2 is the unassuming sequel to Phaidon’s extensive 2005 tome Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing. Like its predecessor, Vitamin D2 explores the contemporary world of art’s most fundamental, but sometimes overlooked tool, the pencil. Approaching its subject…
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
So much for Swiss diplomacy and neutrality: Le Corbusier, a prolific artist and architect, was politically active and often provoked and antagonized those closest to him in the art world, according to Jean-Louis Cohen, professor in the history of architecture at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.
