That didn’t take long. We hear that the funds promised for the LA Unified School District’s innovative prefabricated prototype schools by the likes of Craig Hodgetts, Swift Lee and Gonzalez Goodale have been routed instead to updating LAUSD schools’ wifi systems. We know that getting on the Internet without a cord is cool, but more important than shelter from the storm? Say it ain’t so! Now that the program is on hold there is one silver lining. It appears that LA’s charter schools are jumping over themselves to get a prefab prototype. Stay tuned.
On View> The Architecture and Legacy of Pietro Belluschi
(Sally Painter)
The Architecture and Legacy of Pietro Belluschi
Oregon Historical Society
1200 Southwest Park Avenue
Portland, OR
Through September 9
Shortly after migrating from Italy in 1922 and graduating from Cornell, Pietro Belluschi began practicing architecture in Portland with A. E. Doyle. He would quickly become one of the most important architects in America, first building churches, homes, and office buildings in Oregon and later throughout the country. Belluschi’s early work in Oregon contributed to the style of Pacific Northwest Regionalism, reflecting the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Arts and Crafts movement as well as the nascent modernist style. In 1951, when he became dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Belluschi continued to innovate in the field of modernism by collaborating with firms on buildings around the country. For the first time, Belluschi’s contributions to architecture will be exhibited along with personal mementos from the Belluschi Family archive.
Pulitzer-prize winning Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin had better go hat shopping. He’s got another feather for his chapeau! A super prestigious Neiman Fellowship from Harvard! “My aspirations for the fellowship are straightforward: To return to my job refreshed and refocused, so I can provide our readers with the most sophisticated, discerning coverage of architecture—and, in the process, to demonstrate anew why newspapers should cover this inescapable art,” Kamin told Time Out Chicago. Congratulations Blair. Don’t get tempted to stay on the coast. The Midwest needs you!
On View> Currents 35: Tara Donovan at the Milwaukee Art Museum
Unititled, 2008. (Tara Donovan/Courtesy The Pace Gallery)
Currents 35: Tara Donovan
Milwaukee Art Museum
700 North Art Museum Drive
Milwaukee, WI
Through October 7
The work of Tara Donovan demands close reading. By using strict rule-based systems, Donovan accumulates individual pieces of material into installations that defy easy identification. Milwaukee Art Museum chief curator Brady Roberts explains, “Donovan’s process involves selecting one material and finding one unique solution for its construction, whether it’s folding, gluing, stacking, or pressing.” Taking cues from 1960s conceptual artists like Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt, whose works rely on rule-based processes, Donovan obscures her quotidian materials to compose spectacular objects. The exhibition includes several major works including Haze, a 32-foot wall covered in approximately three million straws, Unititled, 2008 on polyester film (detail, above), and Drawing (Pins), 2011 composed of gatorboard, paint, and nickel-plated steel pins.
On View> Edward Burtynsky: Oil at the Nevada Museum of Art
Edward Burtynsky, SOCAR Oil Fields #6, Baku, Azerbaijan, 2006. (Edward Burtynsky)
Edward Burtynsky: Oil
Nevada Museum of Art, Feature Gallery South
160 West Liberty Street, Reno, NV
Through September 23
One of the most important topics of our time, oil and its industry serve as the departure point for the work of one of the most admired photographers working today. From 1997 through 2009, Edward Burtynsky traveled the world chronicling oil, its production, distribution, and use. Through 50 large-scale photographs, Burtynsky illustrates stories about this vital natural resource, the landscapes altered by its extraction, and the sprawl caused by the development of infrastructure needed to transport it. Behind the awe-inspiring photography is an epic tale about the lifeblood of mankind’s existence in the 21st century. Curated by the Center for Art + Environment, Oil forces the viewer to contend with the scale and implications of humanity’s addiction to energy.
On View> Judith Turner: The Flatness of Ambiguity
(Judith Turner)
Judith Turner: The Flatness of Ambiguity
University of Michigan Museum of Art
525 South State Street
Ann Arbor, MI
Opening June 14
Judith Turner’s photographs are the subject of the University of Michigan-Museum of Art’s new exhibition The Flatness of Ambiguity. Turner’s work captures architecture through an intense editing process where architecture is reinterpreted through unusual views. Operating from severe angles, the photographs capture the buildings in black-and-white compositions that play with the ambiguity of light, shadow, and tonality. Cropping them to further pull the buildings from their context, Turner abstracts the built landscape, transposing buildings into often unrecognizable flat artworks. Turner’s highly abstract signature style heightens the aesthetic character of her subject matter and reveals visual relationships that are not apparent when experiencing the building in traditional ways, in person or in photographs. This exhibition consists of approximately forty works, which span Turner’s three-decade-long career.
PROFILE> Bill Kreysler Explores Composite Facades with Joshua Zabel
Bill Kreysler of Kreysler and Associates. (Photo Jorgen Gulliksen)
Composite materials, a.k.a. “composites,” are the result of the two different materials being combined but remaining physically and chemically distinct. For over 40 years Bill Kreysler, founder of the Napa County-based Kreysler Associates, has been leading developments in molding and application of composites for architectural use. On July 27 Kreysler and his associate Joshua Zabel will lead a special workshop on how composites are used in facades today as part of the AN‘s upcoming conference Collaboration: the Art and Science of Building Facades, taking place July 26-27 in San Francisco.
After getting his start in manufacturing sailboats, Kreysler founded his own firm in 1982 and brought his knowledge of fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) to bear on architectural and industrial products as well as large scale sculpture (his workshop boasts three CNC-milling machines). Currently chair of the committee to write Guide Specifications and Recommended Practice for FRP Architectural Products and a founding member of the newly formed Digital Fabrication Alliance, Kreysler is also co-author of Composites, Surfaces, and Software High Performance Architecture with Greg Lynn.
Through lectures and a rare opportunity for hands-on learning, the upcoming July 27 workshop will provide participants with both the creative and technical knowledge to design and prototype composite based building components. Participants will also be eligible to compete in a limited competition to have a small component fabricated full-scale by Kreysler & Associates to be exhibited at ACADIA 2012, a conference on computer-aided design. To register for the Collaboration conference, click here.
On View> Bruno Cals: Horizons through September 28
(Bruno Cals)
Bruno Cals: Horizons
1500 Gallery
511 West 25th Street #607
New York
Through September 28
For city dwellers, the horizon line where the earth meets the sky can be impossible to find, hidden by the topography of the skyline. By pointing his camera upward, Bruno Cals repositions the horizon and reframes the built environment in terms of landscape itself. Cals deliberately obfuscates the subjects of his series; the photographs read not as structure but as texture and line.
On View> Collab: Four Decades of Giving: Modern & Contemporary Design
(Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art)
Collab: Four Decades of Giving
Modern and Contemporary Design
Philadelphia Museum of Art
26th Street and Benjamin Franklin Pkwy
Philadelphia, PA
Through Fall 2012
Few art institutions have design collections to rival the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s, thanks to the support of Collab, the Group for Modern and Contemporary Design at the museum. Since its founding in 1970, Collab has been an enthusiastic partner in the acquisition and promotion of modern and contemporary design. Spanning the history of design from 19th-century industrial arts to contemporary works, the collection showcases the history of design presented chronologically. From modernist furniture design by Charles and Ray Eames and Scandinavian designs by Alvar Aalto to post-modern designs of Ettore Sottsass (above), and contemporary work by Frank Gehry and Philippe Starck, these works showcase the unique support that Collab has given to the museum’s collection.
On View> Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974
(Patricia Johanson)
Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
152 North Central Avenue
Los Angeles, CA
Through September 3
The Land Art movement emerged in the 1960s as a mode of expression that used the earth as a medium and removed art from traditional context of galleries and museums. Focusing on the early years of experimentation to the mid-1970s when Land Art became an institutional category, Ends of the Earth will provide historical context to the movement. The exhibition reveals the movement’s social and political engagement, understanding Land Art as a media as well as sculptural practice shaped by language, photography, film, and television. Works by more than 80 international artists and projects will be on display, including Michael Heizer’s renowned work Double Negative (1969–70) from MOCA’s permanent collection. An illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition, featuring reflections from curators, critics, and dealers who contributed to Land Art and its development in the 1960s and ’70s as well as contemporary scholars who position Land Art in the critical discourse of today.
On View> The Graham Foundation presents Zak Kyes Working With…
(Courtesy Graham Foundation)
Zak Kyes Working With…
Graham Foundation
4 West Burton Place
Chicago
Through September 22
The first American solo exhibition of Swiss-American graphic designer Zak Kyes, founder of the design studio Zak Group and art director of London’s Architectural Association, will be on view at the Graham Foundation. Representing a wide array of his work, the show will feature projects arranged and presented not as a chronological body of work, but as collaborations with architects, artists, writers, curators, editors, and graphic designers. These working relationships highlight the impact of graphic design on its related fields, but also show how it is simultaneously shaped by those disciplines. By focusing on the intimate intellectual, formal, and business links of the collaborations, from conceptual to pragmatic, urgent to abiding, and ephemeral to long lasting, the exhibition focuses on the creative potential of collaboration to transform our understanding of graphic design, art, and architecture.
SHFT+ALT+ DEL: June 1, 2012
D.B. Kim has joined Daroff Design as a principal and will lead the firm’s luxury hotel and resort practice. Kim was previously at Pierre-Yves Rochon and prior to that at Starwood Hotels and Resorts.
Design Trust for Public Space‘s executive director Susan Chin was elected Vice President of the 2013-2014 AIA National Board at the recent national convention in Washington, D.C.
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