Unveiled> BIG Joins the Supertall Ranks in China with Rockefeller Center-Inspired Tower
Many details of BIG's supertall tower in Tianjin are still shrouded in mystery. (Courtesy BIG)
Bjarke Ingels, architect of mountains, now has set his eyes on Everest. The New York and Copenhagen-based architect’s firm BIG has been tapped by the Rockefellers to design one of the world’s tallest buildings at 1,929 feet for a new commercial development in Tianjin, China, a city of nearly 13 million people. Ingels revealed a cryptic, fog-shrouded rendering of the tower on his web site—indicative of the scarcity of detail yet released on the tower—but this being the information age, AN found more information and views of the tower on a clear day.
Wendy Arrives in Queens
Wendy scales a wall in the MoMA PS1 courtyard. (Branden Klayko/AN)
Last night, crowds of young architecture types filled the courtyard at MoMA PS1 in Queens to meet Wendy, this year’s Young Architects Program winner by HWKN. Visible from the nearby elevated subway station and from the streets around MoMA PS1, Wendy is comprised of pollution-fighting fabric spikes set in a grid of scaffolding intersecting the concrete courtyard walls. Yesterday’s crowds were given special access to the interior of the installation, revealing a complex structure of poles, fans, and misters that will cool visitors this summer.
MoMA PS1 will host its annual Warm Up music series in the courtyard beginning on July 7, showcasing “the best in experimental live music, sound, performance, and DJs.” Wendy will officially open to the public on July 1. Meanwhile, at a taxi garage across the street, small fragments of last year’s installation by Interboro called Holding Pattern are still in use on the sidewalk.
On View> Artists X Architects through July 31
(Kristina Cambell)
Artists X Architects
Joe’s Restaurant
1023 Abbot Kinney Boulevard, Venice
Through July 31
As technology progresses and information expands, the line between art and architecture blurs. LA journalist Tibby Rothman knew this well when she put together the new exhibition Artists X Architects, presented by arts group V-SCAPE at Joe’s Restaurant in Venice. The event paired 11 local architects with 11 local artists. The conceit was simple: the designers met and selected existing work that revealed the similarities in their approaches. The result is more powerful than you might think, exposing two professions that have a lot to learn from each other. Some similarities are uncanny, revealing the fields’ parallels in research, material, form, and feeling. Kulapat Yantrasast’s building blocks for a bridge over the LA River, embedded with debris (including scrunched underwear), evoke the raw loneliness of Laddie John Dill’s excavated carvings out of textured stone. A resin-coated block of soda cans made for a Santa Monica housing project by architect Lawrence Scarpa was accompanied by a woven artwork (above) of soda cans by Alexis Smith. Smith’s artwork looks like mosaic tile while the block looks like a piece of sculpture. The three-dimensional sketches of architect Duane Oyler look like art while the precise graphite sketches of a cut diamond by artist Jennifer Wolf look like architecture. Pieces of Mark Mack’s sketches appear to be extracted from the colorful, amorphous art of Huguette Caland.
Álvaro Siza Wins The Golden Lion
Álvaro Siza Vieira to receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement . (Courtesy Álvaro Siza office)
Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza Vieira has been awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement of the 13th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. The announcement was made today by Biennale board director Paolo Baratta and director David Chipperfield, who noted Siza’s authority on designing with bold forms, shaping light, and creating reflective compositions. “Secured by his isolated location, he exudes worldly wisdom. Experimenting with forms of extreme geometry he manages to produce buildings of great rigor. Developing an architectural language that is uniquely his, he seems to speak to all of us. While his work exudes the security of judgment, it is clearly intensified through cautious reflection. While we are dazzled by the lightness of his buildings, we feel the seriousness of their substance,” Baratta and Chipperfield said in a statement.
Projecting the Social Life of Small Urban Stoops
Oh.No.Sumo's "Stairway Cinema" in New Zealand. (Simon Devitt/Courtesy Oh.No.Sumo)
New Yorkers like to believe that they’ve perfected stoop sitting culture, but half a world away in Auckland, New Zealand, experimental design collaborative Oh.No.Sumo has taken stoop sitting a step higher. As part of St. Paul Street Gallery‘s 2012 exhibition program of curatorial practice, Oh.No.Sumo created a small-scale tactical intervention forming an unexpected theater on a small stoop where the steps are the seats. Responding to the intersection’s lack of social life and the public’s retreat into smart-phone isolation, the Stairway Cinema creates a communal node and conversation piece.
Rogers Marvel Tapped for Brooklyn Bridge Park Housing/Hotel
Rogers Marvel-designed mixed-use building in Brooklyn Bridge Park. (Courtesy Rogers Marvel)
Just as rolling hills of green lawn have replaced the industrial waterfront at Brooklyn Bridge Park (BBP), two new buildings by Rogers Marvel Architects will soon mask the terraced autopia of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway cutting off Brooklyn Heights from the park below. City officials announced today that the mixed-use proposal by Toll Brothers and Starwood Capital Group was selected from a list of seven proposals to be built alongside immediately south of the Brooklyn Bridge along Furman Street at the entrance to the park’s Pier 1, providing much-needed maintenance and operational funding for the new waterfront green space.
While the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s headquarters at the Carnegie Mansion is under renovation (set to reopen in 2014), the museum is popping up in locations across New York City to keep design in the eyes of the public. In the digital world, the Cooper-Hewitt launched its new online store, allowing design enthusiasts to bring a curated selection of products into their homes. The site was launched on Monday by Cooper-Hewitt director and famed industrial design Bill Moggridge at a swanky party in Manhattan’s Norwood Club hosted by the museum and party aficionado and Mediabistro founder Laurel Touby. The Cooper-Hewitt also recently launched a website detailing events happening at Design Week NYC.
Public Art, If It Holds Up
ARO's prototype art display in Bogardus Plaza. (Branden Klayko/AN)
If all the world is a stage, according to Shakespeare, all the city is a kunsthalle in the eyes of the New York City Department of Transportation. Bogardus Plaza, a tiny pedestrian plaza carved out of a little-used block of Hudson Street in Lower Manhattan and named for architect James Bogardus, the inventor of the cast-iron building, just received a well-deserved facelift and has now been chosen to host a prototype art display case designed by Architecture Research Office (ARO).
Casting Bogardus Plaza in an Architectural Light
Bogardus Plaza. (Branden Klayko / AN)
It’s not every day that architects get a public space named after one of their own, but tucked away in Lower Manhattan is a small pedestrian plaza named after one of the most important 19th-century architects around. Bogardus Plaza occupies one block of Hudson Street on the corner of Chambers Street and West Broadway only a few blocks from AN headquarters and is named from James Bogardus (1800-1874), the inventor of the cast-iron building, and last week the plaza received a fresh coat of gravel-epoxy paint.
Evolution and Growth at the 2012 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion
Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2012 designed by Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei.
The twelfth Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London is nothing without the first eleven. The collaborators responsible for the wonderfully intricate Beijing National Stadium (aka the Bird’s Nest) in 2008—Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron and Chinese artist Ai Weiwei—have designed a temporary pavilion inspired by the archaeology of previous structures by Peter Zumthor, Jean Nouvel, and Zaha Hadid, among others.
Ten Thousand Blue Citibikes to Hit New York Streets
A Citibike demonstration at today's announcement. (Branden Klayko / AN)
Beginning this July, thousands of bright-blue Citibikes will begin swarming the streets of Manhattan and eventually Brooklyn and Long Island City, Queens. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYCDOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan made the formal announcement today that Citibank has signed on as the official sponsor for the city’s new bike share system.
Deborah Berke and Students Toast Urban Industry
Chester Prescott Distillation Tower by Francesco Galetto.
With investment in American cities on the rise, mixed-use development is all the buzz, but architect Deborah Berke says we must be careful not to leave industry out of the mix. “We need to sway mixed-use back to the direction of a real mix. We’ve gone to all residential,” she said. Berke and critic Noah Biklen just finished teaching an architectural studio at Yale on boutique urban manufacturing, where students explored bringing a bourbon distillery to downtown Louisville, Kentucky.
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