Hasta La Ideas

Since we seem to be on a woes-of-architecture kick this morning, let’s just keep going. So, the question to kick this post off is: if you have a major complaint several years after a company has decided to split up and change its name, who exactly are you supposed to sue? Such is the question being asked by the Polk County Board of Supervisors in Des Moines, Iowa, who have decided to file suit against mega-firm HOK Sport over issues it’s had with “breach of contract and alleged design problems” with the Iowa Events Center it designed for the county. The only trick is that HOK Sport doesn’t exist anymore. It spun off from its parent company, HOK, just over two years ago, renaming itself Populous in the process. But it was originally hired by Polk County when it was still a part of HOK. We believe that the county is likely going after Populous, as we’re assuming that all liability went with the company as it split off from its original parent, but it’s a little difficult tricky to tell, as Archinect points out here. Regardless of who they’re after, the county wants $5 million to fix the problems with the building, which was completed in 2005.

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Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art‘s Art in the Streets exhibition was finally announced late last month and is set to open this weekend, but that isn’t to say the heat on museum director Jeffrey Deitch has faded. You’ll perhaps recall the last few months of various forms of fallout following Deitch’s decision to immediately paint over a mural by street artist Blu that the museum itself had commission but found too controversial for their tastes once it was nearly finished. Murals popped up depicting director-as-dictator and a handful of protests made the news, among other incidents of people socially expressing their distaste for Deitch’s move. Now we have a favorite from the movement against the decision, the recently launched “Red Sticker Campaign” by Nick Douglas and his MOCA-latte group. How it works: write in to the site, or check in soon at local stores who will be carrying them, and you’ll receive a batch of stickers that read “APPROVED” or “DISAPPROVED.” When you see a piece of street art that needs judgment, you can act like your very own LA MoCA director by deciding the merits of the work and stickering as you see fit. After you’ve made your decision, snap a photo and send it in to the site for their gallery (you might enjoy seeing that Mr. Brainwash seems not to be receiving much approval). It’s a terrific response to the Deitch debacle and we wish the project all the best. Here’s a bit from their excellent manifesto (because every worthwhile organization should have one):

Street art is a populist form of art. It is free. It is in the public space. MOCA is a publicly owned museum. Curating art holds a public trust. Culture is sifted, ranked, established, and rejected on behalf of the community by its curators. I’d like to ask, why not make this process a referendum? Let’s all vote for ourselves! There is so much art in the streets, I propose that we give Deitch a hand by personally curating the street art of Los Angeles on our own. Maybe he’ll even be interested to know how we vote. It’s our art, the public’s art that he is ensconcing into the history of art, it’s our museum he’s revitalizing, …or not.

Just a thought: how soon do you think these will start appearing in the exhibition itself? We give it two hours.

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Another year and more bridge-related headaches for Santiago Calatrava, a man who seems perpetually plagued by the things. The architect initially started having trouble with the Trinity River project in Dallas two years ago, when budget considerations were a major sticking point and the Army Corp of Engineers thought his plans might be unsafe in a 100-year flood. Within a few months, despite some grumbling in the local papers, the project to build two new bridges had been approved and construction began on the first. Now it’s looking like it will both start and stop there. City officials have announced that they don’t have enough money to pay for Calatrava’s second bridge, as they’re already having to tighten the purse strings on the first one. So the plan now is to just go with a standard, utilitarian model instead of “a fancy bridge.” However, the City Manager told the press that “she would ask Calatrava to design a bicycle and pedestrian element for the scaled-down I-30 bridge that could revive some of the ‘signature’ appearance elements,” a process that would involve paying the architect roughly $8 million for this “additional design work.” Not much of a consolation prize for seeing a whole bridge canceled, but we’re guessing that $8 million makes it a bit easier to cope.

Of course, that news out of Dallas couldn’t have come at worse, bridge-related time, as it was nearly simultaneously announced that Calatrava’s Peace Bridge in Calgary has been delayed for the third time. That project had been much debated over the years by locals, ranging from anger over the expense to, more recently, the aforementioned series of delays. You might recall that the architect himself even responded to the criticism back in November, saying no one should blame him, as it was all in contractors’ hands now. The contractors, in turn, claimed that the architect and his staff were demanding too many changes throughout the process, which was slowing everything up. This latest delay was apparently caused by “inadequate welds” that will need to be redone. Everyone quoted in this Calgary Herald story seem tired of taking lumps and ready to be finished with it. The only trick now is finishing. This latest delay has pushed it back to fall, but leaving the possibility open that it might stretch still further, into 2012.

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Where can you attend a conference keynoted by architect Rem Koolhaas, sample locally brewed kombucha under a colorful canopy, take a flashlight tour of metal plates engraved by Italian masters, see Chinatown by bike, check out a new mural by Mary Heilmann, and leave with a rooftop garden ready for planting? The Festival of Ideas for the New City, a collaborative initiative announced today by the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the hundreds of downtown New York organizations that have signed on to participate.

“Three years ago, when we moved to the Bowery, we witnessed a dramatic transformation of this neighborhood,” said New Museum director Lisa Phillips at a press briefing held this morning at the institution’s SANAA-designed home (which somehow manages to look even cooler beneath a steady drizzle). Conversations between Museum staffers and neighboring organizations including the Architectural League, the Cooper Union, the Drawing Center, and Storefront for Art and Architecture soon developed into the two-year planning process for a festival that would, according to Phillips, “harness the power of the creative community to reimagine the city.”

Artists, writers, architects, engineers, designers, urban farmers, and the public are invited to take part in the free festival, which will run from May 4 through May 8 in locations around downtown Manhattan. Things kick off with a three-day slate of symposia, lectures, and workshops exploring “big ideas that change the course of a city.” In addition to Koolhaas, the organizers have secured computer scientist Jaron Lanier and Antanas Mockus, a former mayor of Bogotá, Columbia, to give keynote addresses. Other panelists include architect Elizabeth Diller, Urban Genome Project founder Pedro Reyes, and Pennsylvania politician John Fetterman, who was recently dubbed “Mayor of Rust” by The New York Times Magazine. “Interestingly enough, he’ll be driving here, which I think is kind of great,” said New Museum curator Richard Flood at today’s press briefing.
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It’s been six years since the world’s loneliest Prada shop opened up in Marfa, Texas (or should we say “closed” since the doors are always locked?). The project, which was assembled by the German artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, has been the subject of a number of reports of vandalism over the years, including the one that took places just a few days after it “opened,” when someone yanked the doors off and stole all the prop merchandise. While nothing so dramatic as that has happened since, and its windows have been replaced with “panes of three-eighths-inch-thick bullet-resistant polycarbonate,” along with video surveillance, it’s regularly been the target of spray paint, rifle and shotgun blasts, and seemingly all other forms of vandalism. After all these years of having to make costly repairs, the artists aren’t sure if they’ll be able to keep up with the expense on a project that was originally intended to naturally “disintegrate over time,” not at the hands of gun-wielding locals. For the immediate future, assuming they can raise enough money, they’ll keep it going, but it does sound a bit like the Marfa Prada may not be long for this world.

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