Post Office Gets On Board for Grand Central’s Centennial
Grand Central Terminal to have its own stamp. (Courtesy USPS)
This year’s a big one for New York’s Grand Central Terminal: On February 2, the Warren & Wetmore-designed train station will celebrate its 100th birthday. We expect to hear quite a bit about Grand Central all year long, as a massive rezoning effort takes shape around the Beaux Arts landmark. For instance, take a look at the Municipal Art Society’s recent recent reimagining of the terminal by Norman Foster, SOM, and WXY.
Now the United States Postal Service is getting on board with a stamp by artist Dan Cosgrove depicting Grand Central’s main concourse. The Express Mail stamp carries a price tag nearly as big as the station itself, but like the trains running beneath Grand Central, it’s sure to offer speedy transit. [Via Gothamist.]
On View> Alyson Shotz’s Geometry of Light at the Indianapolis Museum of Art
(Courtesy Indianapolis Museum of Art)
Alyson Shotz: The Geometry of Light
Indianapolis Museum of Art
4000 Michigan Rd.
Indianapolis, IN
Through January 6, 2013
Following the U.S premiere of her animated Fluid State, which visualizes the creation of matter in a fictional landscape, artist Alyson Shotz has adapted her installation The Geometry of Light for the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion Series. Shotz—who is recognized for exploring the physical world by engaging with concepts of light, gravity, and space—uses industrial materials such as stainless steel wire, silvered glass beads, and cut Fresnel lens sheets to form a sculpture that considers the duality of light as both particle and wave. During daylight hours, natural light filters through the lens sheets, and the varying angles bring life to the piece as the position of the sun changes throughout the day. By moving through the room, visitors perceive how light and motion shape the experience of space.
On View> Sreshta Rit Premnath’s “Folding Rulers” Explore Visual Representation
(Courtesy Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis)
Sreshta Rit Premnath: Folding Rulers
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
3750 Washington Blvd
Through December 30, 2012
Sreshta Rit Premnath’s exhibit, Folding Rulers, at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis questions processes of representation, attempting to identify why certain objects, images, events, and discourses are chosen to represent larger ideas, cultural periods, or histories. Using various mediums, Premnath investigates why and how icons, places, and people— specifically the concept of power—are so symbolic. By analyzing and reducing these symbols and their meanings, his new work offers new readings of people, places, and times.
Video> Fly Through Norman Foster’s Proposed Changes To the New York Public Library
Last week, AN reported on Norman Foster’s newly-rendered plans to transform the landmark New York Public Library at Bryant Park. Foster’s $300 million plan will, most dramatically, gut the off-limits-to-the-public book stacks and replace them with a light-filled atrium and reading space. The NYPL has now released a video fly-through of the project, above. Enjoy!
Second that Motion: Lexus Jumps In the Auto-Design-Award Game
Check your rearview mirrors, Audi. The Japan-based luxury car company Lexus recently announced the launch of a new design award that calls for proposals on the theme of “Motion”: ”Our daily lives are continuously filled with motion. The motion of things, the motion of people. Moving people’s hearts. Shifting consciousness…” You get the idea. And it’s one that may ring a bell—the theme of this year’s Audi Urban Design Award was “Mobility.”
In an intriguing twist, architect Junya Ishigami of Tokyo, one of the 2012 Audi award finalists who dropped out of that competition before the October judging, has now reappeared as a “mentor” to the Lexus award. There’s the requisite big-name panel of judges (Antonelli, Ito, and more), and a five million yen (about $60,000) prize for each of ten winners. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Audi.
On View> Diagramming Schematic Intangibility by Robert Strati
(Courtesy Robert Henry Contemporary)
Diagramming Schematic Intangibility
Robert Henry Contemporary
56 Bogart Street
Brooklyn, NY
Through January 6
Robert Strati’s work uses everyday materials to expose overlooked and unseen parts of our everyday lives. Employing ink-jet prints, wire sculptures, balloons, and packaging tape, Strati blends art with architectural theory, music, and science. His prints imitate scientific formulas, on top of astrological maps, on top of musical staffs, creating an interaction between formal shapes—points, lines, and planes—and metaphysical visualizations. Three-dimensional space is explored through wire sculptures and balloons that reveal invisible forces, like air and wind. The use of simple materials to reveal complex “dimensions of reality” was inspired by the works of Kasimir Malevich, Agnes Marin, Eva Hesse, Guglielmo Marconi, Leslie J. “Airplane” Payne, Gego, and Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks.
Playing House: Amanda Burden Smitten With Tiny Apartments
Amanda Burden stands in a full-scale floor plan of a Micro Apartment with HPD Deputy Wambua and Mayor Bloomberg. (Courtesy of NYC Mayor’s Office)
Do radically small apartments automatically beget a transient population and all that entails? That’s the fear of residents in the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan, the pilot site for a new building that will be 75 percent micro-units, or apartments that total about 300 square feet each. Community Board 6 finds it hard to imagine that anyone other than students or elves would be game, but City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden is charmed by the diminutive plans, stating at a recent presentation, “I think you’ll all agree that the apartment behind me is some place that one and two [person] households would be delighted to live in.”
The Cultural Landscape Foundation’s Charles Birnbaum is known as a passionate advocate, and occasional agitator, for the profession of landscape architecture. Blogging for the Huffington Post, Birnbaum has compiled a list of notable developments in landscape, including well known projects like LA’s Grand Park by Rios Clementi Hale to lesser known works like Sugar Beach in Montreal by Claude Cormier & Associates. It’s an engaging list, and it also includes a mention of a recent AN editorial, “Landscape Architecture’s Ascendance.” AN is glad to be a part of the dialogue of this important design profession.
On View> Manhattan’s David Zwirner Gallery Presents Diana Thater’s Video Installation, Chernobyl
(Courtesy David Zwirner Gallery)
Chernobyl
David Zwirner Gallery
519 West 19th Street
New York City
Through December 22
Diana Thater’s video installation, Chernobyl, captures the effects manmade disasters have on the natural environment. Situating her work on the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear explosion in the Ukraine, which left a no-man’s land with the sudden evacuation of over 100,000 people, Thater highlights the possibilities nature has to rebuild itself when the ruins of industrial infrastructure are left to decay. She focuses on Prypiat, a city that was built to house nuclear plant workers, and the city’s wildlife, specifically the Przewlski’s Horse species that were released post-disaster and left free from human contact. Her work, both beautiful and startling, forces us to consider how we perceive images and their potential to dictate how we see our world.
The Shortlist> Top 5 Competitions of the Week
Vidal’s Modular Camouflage for the Transparent Shelter Competition. (Courtesy Innosite)
Don your thinking cap and put pen to paper in one of these architecture and design competitions drawn from AN’s online competitions listing. We’ve selected five of the most interesting competitions for you here, but be sure to browse the full listing here. If you’d like your competition to be included in the listing, please submit it here.
Transparent Shelter Competition: Deadline: 01.20.2013
The Nordic Centre of Glass is challenging designers to create a glass bus stop design to prove the material is both visually appealing and practical. Entrants will base their designs on an actual bus stop in Holbaek, Denmark that offers little shelter from the elements.
Street Seats Design Challenge: Deadline: 02.01.2013
Design Museum Boston’s competition is calling for international designers to create a bench or “street seat” to inspire socially and environmentally responsible design for South Boston’s Fort Point Channel in the growing Innovation District. The entries will be displayed publicly in an outdoor design exhibit held from April through October 2013.
Historic Park In BJØRVIKA, OSLO: Deadline: 01.04.2013
An open ideas competition organized by a free association of young planners called ByFabrikken. Submissions are accepted in various mediums and entrants can choose to plan the entire park area in Oslo or a designated section. The ten best proposals will be presented in an exhibition and the top three winners will earn a small cash prize as well as tickets to a music festival at the park site.
Boulder Civic Area Ideas Competition: Deadline: 01.11.2013
The City of Boulder is asking student and professional designers to redesign Boulder Civic Area to meet the community’s social and environmental needs. The winning proposal will be published in Urban Land magazine and receive up to $15,000 in cash and prizes.
Nikola’s Belvedere: Deadline: 01.15.2013
As part of the Archstoyanie Festival, Nikola-Lenivets Project has announced the Nikola’s Belvedere competition in search of a design for an observation deck/belvedere for Versailles Park. The winning design will link the park’s art objects, a rotunda and arch, offer a panoramic view, and will be awarded 100,000 rubles and funding for construction.
Shuttle Shhhh: Details About Endeavor’s Permanent Home Take Flight
The Space Shuttle Endeavor in its new Los Angeles home. (Sam Lubell / AN)
Amid the hubbub surrounding the Space Shuttle Endeavor landing inside its temporary digs at the California Science Center (our favorite part at the opening: James Ingram crooning I believe I can Fly, with LA Mayor Villaraigosa dancing in a trance behind him), the museum has done its best to keep the plans for the orbiter’s future home under wraps. But we’ve managed to uncover some tantalizing details of the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center: For one, the new building by ZGF will measure around 200 feet tall, enough to accommodate the spacecraft and its booster rockets standing upright. It may also feature a slide to the base of the Space Shuttle. Now that’s what we’re talking about.
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