a picture of a picture of a Betye Saar at the NY Historical, by Lexi Parra for NYT
Robin Pegrebin reports in the Times that soon after opening its debut exhibition in its swanky new wing, the New York Historical quietly removed 20 objects and replaced them with reproductions. The issue was light sensitivity; the director directed that giant, south-facing windows be uncovered, because blinds that protected the artworks and historic artifacts were “disrespectful of the architect [Robert A.M. Stern]’s final museum project.”
Go to Pogrebin’s story for the on the record quotes of how this went down, and stay to admire its immediate impact. Because after several weeks of displaying it, when the NYH found out the Times was on it, they removed the flat color picture of Betye Saar’s 2017 sculpture, Extreme Times Call for Extreme Heroines.
Which, honestly? Right call. The NYH’s facsimile is slightly smaller than Saar’s object. Based on the dimensions of the Augusta Savage sculpture below it, the paper is close to the size of the sculpture (21 1/2 x 8 5/8 in.), but the image is 10-15% smaller.
Charles Ray has said that to feel “life-size,” a figural sculpture has to be just slightly larger than its human subject, in order to account for the person’s physical movement. Of course, a static sculpture doesn’t occupy space in this way. But printing an 8.625 inch sculpture on 8.5 inch paper, then not accounting for the margins, and calling it close enough feels hilariously half-assed.
And this is all before considering the installation of a multi-sided sculpture on a wall. Saar’s washboard sculpture has the abolitionist image of the slave ship Brookes on the back—which is actually the original front—and that motif is also printed on the Mammy figure’s apron. I would love to find out that the photocopy they tacked to the wall was printed on both sides.
And this leaves unaddressed the question of what happens next. The NYH really should decide if the Tang Wing is going to be a museum space where light-sensitive objects can never be shown. Partly because if it is, they really should get better at their facsimiles. And partly because the Met is building a Tang Wing, too, and it’d be good to let curators know in advance, rather than have to resign after the fact.
Albrecht Dürer et al, The Triumph of Maximilian, 1515-17, printed 1799, collection NYPL
Rather than build an actual f’ing arch the Emperor Maximilian commissioned a monumental print arch, which could be reproduced and installed all over. It was the only of his grandiose print projects that was completed during his lifetime. Albrecht Dürer and a workshop of least four other artist/printers spent two years producing 198 woodblocks to print on 36 folio sheets (18 x 24 inches). The assembled image is 12 x 10 feet, and was printed in five editions, beginning in 1517. The first edition of around 700 was distributed to the princes of the Holy Roman Empire. The Fraktur typeface was commissioned for this print.
The New York Public Library says their The Triumph of Maximilian on view at 42nd Street at the moment, printed in 1799, is a third edition. But the third edition was printed in 1559; the edition printed in 1799 was the fourth, which sounds a little rough. [The NYPL item listing has this correct.] Nevertheless, it is on view, and should be seen before it goes into storage in October. [h/t @arthistory.bsky.social for the heads up].
Detail of the Met’s proof of Maximilian’s arch, with blank space, and the outline of Folio sheet 28.82.25
[A FEW MINUTES LATER UPDATE] In the three 16th century editions, the 24th panel of historical events was left blank. It was to contain an image of Maximilian’s tomb, which would be created, printed, and distributed for installation after his death.
Albrecht Dürer [sic], The blank 24th historical panel (1559) [sic] from the 1st edition [sic] of the Triumphal Arch, woodcut with traces of gilding and hand colouring, 258 x 159 mm, upside down at NGV
In the Met’s proof, that folio sheet includes the thick column at the center of the detail above, and two rows of scenes. The National Gallery of Victoria, meanwhile, has a 3rd edition of the Arch, printed in 1559, with the 24th panel replaced. But they also have the blank 24th panel [from a 1st edition?] The inclusion of a border likely means it was cut out of an assembled Arch, not from the sheet, and not, it seems, from their Arch, whose decorative border looks intact. Also, they show it upside down.
It would be my new favorite Dürer print, but the Met says only the column and the first two scenes on that sheet are by Dürer; the rest is by Hans Springinklee. So I guess it is my favorite Springinklee.
Cabin, October 14, 1979, photographed by Marian Zazeela, via Mela Foundation
First, La Monte Young is not related to Brigham Young. Not a grandson, not a great great nephew, not a third cousin, none of that. It was such a standard part of the composer’s Mormon roots origins that I assumed it had been checked, or that it had come from him. Brigham Young University musicologist Jeremy Grimshaw obliquely dismissed any connection in the foreword to his 2011 biography of Young, Draw A Straight Line And Follow It, only to somehow embrace it as confirmation of Young’s prophetic narrative. And it still persists, probably for reasons.
I mention Young’s genealogy because he cites childhood experiences in towns in rural Idaho founded by his Mormon pioneer ancestors as foundational to his most important musical innovations. The earliest sustained tone sounds Young recalls, he often recalls, included the droning hum of power lines and the electricity substation next to his grandfather’s gas station in Montpelier; and the winter wind whistling through the walls of the log cabin where he was born, five miles up the Bear Lake Valley in the tiny cheese-making enclave of Bern.
And I mention it now because according to Cameron Rowland’s Estate, Dia bought the cabin in 1979, “for La Monte Young historical site and museum. Birthplace of La Monte Young. Never used.” This was in January, just after closing on the second building in Marfa for Donald Judd, and just before buying 6 Harrison Street, a 45,000 sf building in Tribeca as a performance and rehearsal space for Young, Marian Zazeela, and Pandit Pran Nath. 6 Harrison was sold in 1985, during Dia’s first financial implosion. But Young and Zazeela’s New York City real estate is well known, or as well known as Dream House, the sine wave drone and light installation they’ve been performing in various locations since 1979.
2025 Google Streetview capture of the Bern cabin, which is actually two one-room cabins combined
It’s the cabin in Bern that seemed exceptional. Dia transferred ownership of it to Young and Zazeela’s MELA Foundation in 1993, amidst another of Dia’s spasms of financial upheaval and its separation from Dream House. It turns out Zazeela’s photo of the cabin on the MELA Foundation website, [top] was taken during a visit in 1979 on Young’s 44th birthday.
Trying to figure out what story a La Monte Young Birthplace Museum would tell, I did the most Mormon thing, and looked at his family history on FamilySearch.org. While people in the minimalist music and postwar avant-garde were confused about La Monte being related to Brigham, the Youngs posting decades of family photos and personal histories to their communal online genealogy network knew the whole family tree. There are letters where La Monte’s parents, Dennis Young and Mary Evelyn Grandy let relatives know that LaMonte and Zazeela will be joining them at family reunions in Idaho during the 1980s, the Dia era.
So it was just me, then, who was surprised to learn Young’s connection to Bern came from his father’s mother, who, like almost everyone else in Bern, was a Kunz. Dennis was 22 and Mary Evelyn was 19 when La Monte was born in 1935, and Dennis’s mother, Ella Grace Kunz Wilde, was married to her second husband (both named Leonard), and single-handedly running the Bern Cheese Factory. Wilde turned 800-900 pounds of milk/day into 80-90 pounds of cheese, in two log cabins built by her grandfather John Kunz in 1872. In the Salt Lake Tribune’s 1938 article, the cabins don’t look so different from the one the Youngs lived in. They were still there for the 1940 census, but decamped to Los Angeles in 1942, looking for work.
In a 1979 interview transcript with her aunt Florence Kunz Jenson, Mary Steck mentioned, I think, La Monte’s museum project: “Isn’t that little Bern Library or Bern Museum cute? It’s not much yet but I think it has the beginnings of something really special. I hope ( ?) keeps up with it.”
“He will, for as long as he’s alive, you know – and maybe it’s a good thing Warren’s involved. Warren’s a little younger than him.”
“Warren cares about it. I know he cares about it. He’s very proud of his heritage.”
Warren Kunz was Florence’s nephew, six years younger than La Monte, who sold the cabin to Dia. He died in 2017.
GSV of Bern
In Zazeela’s photo, the cabin looks like it’s in the absolute middle of nowhere, which may be how Bern feels compared to big towns like, say, Montpelier, or nearby Paris. But it’s right on the main road in town, across from the little LDS chapel, and next to the brick schoolhouse, built in 1921, whose roof has since collapsed. Google Streetview finally came to town last year, and captured the cabin’s next door neighbor storing parts for a project truck in front of it.
These days, adverse possession is probably low on the MELA Foundation’s list of concerns. A decade of funding shortfalls and the pandemic left Mela’s current Dream House installation, its performance program, and its archive in “existential” peril. Besides a general gofundme in 2020, MELA put out a fundraising plea in 2023 specifically to help make urgent repairs to the cabin’s roof. The “archival postcard” prints of Zazeela’s cabin photo, signed by Young, are still listed for sale on MELA’s site. Zazeela died in 2024. An email inquiry to MELA about the cabin’s status has so far received no response.
[few days later update] A representative of MELA kindly responded that there is no public program at or about the cabin, and the artist wishes people not to visit the site or engage any locals.
I finally got a copy of Estate (2024), Cameron Rowland’s publication for their Dia exhibition Properties. The book also has the title, Dia Art Center Real Estate 1974-2024, and it’s a pageturner. It includes both acquisitions and dispositions, which, for Dia, is like half the story.
And while I knew the general narrative around conflicts, like the whole Judd/Marfa/Chinati mess; and the never-quite-permament permanent home for LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Mela Foundation; and the way the building that’s now The Kitchen was originally going to be for Robert Whitman, seeing it play out in chronological, site-by-site transactional detail is still fascinating.
And then there are some surprises. Lke, I knew about buying thousands of acres within sight of Lightning Field, but I did not know Dia’s acquired 520 acres around Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, too. And I don’t think I’d ever heard about the Cy Twombly Museum, for which Dia bought a 3-story, beaux-arts building at 324 West 23rd St in 1980. Twombly had shown at Heiner Friedrich’s gallery since 1964. And in 1978 he showed Fifty Days at Iliam at the Lone Star Foundation, a de Menil/Friedrich joint for purchasing art that later consolidated with/into Dia, so I can see it happening.
The Cy Twombly Museum (RIP), 1980-86, 324 W 23, via Streeteasy
I guess it all imploded in 1983, with the Marfa suit. Friedrich and Dia were burning through Philippa de Menil’s Schlumberger shares, and in 1985 her mother Dominique staged an institutional intervention. The family took over Dia and put Philippa’s inheritance in a trust.
Dia ended up selling the not-Twombly Museum in 1986. (They bought it for $550k, and sold it for $1.675m. In 1988 it got turned into a horrible-looking condo tower with a Citibank.) To ease Twombly’s loss, Dia gave him a show in 1988 in Bridgehampton instead. The series of green paintings Twombly made in 1988 for Venice were conceived as a permanent installation, and the Menil, which opened in 1987, eventually came through. All in all, a surprisingly coherent moment. A Twombly Museum on 23rd St. would have been amazing, though, ngl.
Anyway, what’s also interesting is what is not included in Dia’s real estate portfolio, namely the Spiral Jetty and Depreciation, Rowland’s own 2018 project in Edisto, SC. Dia does own Spiral Jetty the artwork, but not the lakebed land, which is, of course, leased from the State of Utah. Ask me how I know. As for Depreciation, when Rowland acquired the one-acre site of former plantation and reparation land, he placed the title in a non-profit company he manages. Dia has a longterm stewardship agreement with the artist. But unlike any other art-related Dia property, it is meant to not be visited.
Security theater prop: Frank Gehry’s Icehenge desk looking its absolute best, images all via Freeman’s
I knew but didn’t really clock that Frank Gehry made his massive cast glass security guard station specifically for the lobby of Skidmore Owings & Merrill’s Inland Steel Building in Chicago.
That realization came from reading the auction listing: “Although conceived specifically for its site, Gehry reportedly entertained the possibility of reconfiguring the 16 elements over time, allowing the work to evolve over time and in new settings.”
Now that you mention it this is a helluva thing to have put in front of this perfect Richard Lippold sculpture, but I guess they had to put something. s/o to the mirror finish chrome cabinet on the lower left
Which, hmm, “reportedly entertained the possibility” better be enough to work with, because Gehry’s dead; his partners defaulted on the $56 million mortgage; New York Life seized the building in 2025; and the security desk known as Icehenge is being sold this week, sold and evicted: “Buyers will be responsible for arranging transportation, shipping, etc. from the lobby of the Inland Steel Building.”
Auction in Philadelphia, pickup in Chicago. Which is wild, because photos and slideshows really do not capture the sense of what this thing is; and buying it without seeing it in person feels crazy to me.
the view from the pile of Amazon packages behind the desk of the worst monitor and phone imaginable for this situation. s/o mirror finish chrome cabinet on the lower right
The concept seems clear enough, in that it seems like a sculptural jumble of iconic Gehry-esque forms, but in cast glass. But what you’re buying is actually two slab tabletops resting on two cast glass cubes and two cubic plywood cabinets laminated in mirror finish chrome, surrounded by freestanding blocks and towers of blocks of freeform cast glass. I think there are twelve, and that the 16 elements mentioned above is just the glass and not the cabinets. I have to think the stacks and towers of chunks are fused together; there’s no way they would’ve survived just being perched on each other.
The mirror cabinets disappear and distort like they’re in a Paul Mpagi Sepuya photo, and the whole thing toggles from sublime to banal to ridiculous, depending on the angle. That monitor and phone feel like found objects stuck on a Rachel Harrison sculpture. And that’s without a keyboard, a mousepad, a chair. It’s as if Gehry never entertained the possibility a human being might actually do a job here.
[UPDATE: lmao it sold for $243,200, plus shipping, and will soon become the sickest private equity guy’s home office zoom backdrop it was destined to be. Great work, everybody.]
At first I thought the sunblasted video of Rick Owens’ 2027 collection, presented last week on the shadeless place of the Palais de Tokyo in the midst of the 40-degree Saharan omega heatdeath of Europe, felt like a prequel to Mad Max, with stranded club kids trudging through the desert, clinging to the increasingly tenuous expectation that there’ll be a gas station, and it’ll have gas.
As I was typing this out, I thought of a rebooted Gerry, Gus Van Sant’s near-wordless exploration of survival and the violent sublime, with the roles of Casey Affleck and Matt Damon replaced by 100 models.
But then I come back to Sand and Sea (Marina), the climate catastrophe opera installation at the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, where performers loll about on a doomed beach, only it’s restaged by the S&M goths scurrying under the glass floor of Anne Imhoff’s Faust in the German Pavilion the Biennale before.
Having experienced complicated awe at Owens’ similar show on the identical site in 2024, I have to say I had some concerns, stifled them, and now find it bleaker than I feared.
Everyone is talking about Trump’s mock up arch at the Great American State Fair, so I filmed it from top to bottom and front to back for everyone who can’t see it in person.
I have never changed my mind so quickly and thoroughly as I have about the f’ing arch. Now that I’ve seen it, I support it completely. It is the perfect monument to the man and the moment, an authentic marker for all he and his movement have achieved so far, and it is indicative, even prophetic, of the things to come every day he remains in power.
I admit I was under the impression it was going to go on the traffic circle at the cemetery, but I expect they’ll just put it on a flatbed truck after this Mall thing wraps up. The pool guy probably has one.
Ellsworth Kelly, Seaweed, 1949, oil on canvas, 72.4 x 99.7 cm, 📷: @albemuth at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it was a 2023 gift of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation
I forget what a delight it is to read Ellsworth Kelly’s catalogue raisonné, especially the first volume, which covers Kelly’s years in Paris. As Yve-Alain Bois, who’s writing the CR, has noted frequently, Kelly was exploring and discovering and inventing so many things that would become the focus of his decades-long career. Between this generative importance and Kelly’s own exhaustive archiving, Bois wrote an essay filled with new insights and historical detail for basically every painting.
I’d forgotten all this when I saw @albemuth post his photo of Seaweed, the largest painting Kelly made during his 1949 stay on Belle-Île, off the Atlantic coast near Nantes. It’s one of several fascinating, mostly white paintings from the moment, that toggle between the seemingly abstract and the diagrammatic, including two favorites, Toilette and Kilometer Marker, which were both in the EK100 show at Glenstone in 2023.
And I’d completely forgotten that these white works especially were part of Kelly’s grappling with Picasso, whose spindly, spiky linear postwar paintings loomed over Kelly’s sojourn in Paris. Kelly threaded a path between Picasso’s distorted visions and the world as he—Kelly—saw and found it, and then spent seventy+ fruitful years making art in that reality.
Beginning, in important ways, with Seaweed, which Yve-Alain identifies as the first example of Kelly faithfully recording a flat compositional source onto a flat canvas, a crucial non-compositional strategy he—Bois—calls transfer. Kelly splayed the tendrils of a piece of seaweed found on the beach and pinned to the wall of the one-room shack he’d rented on Belle-Île, and then he painted it, and then erased [sic] extraneous parts with white overpainting to complete the picture. And it’s somehow those palimpsests, like shadows, that give Seaweed a vibrational presence. And then there’s that pin, which now looks like the head of some winged creature. But that’s probably just me.
Ellsworth Kelly, Monstrance, CR65, 1949, oil on plywood, 61 x 50.2 cm, as published in the EK CR, Vol. 1
And I’d not forgotten this other fascinating painting from Belle-Île, but really had never clocked it all. Monstrance‘s title refers to the sunburst-shaped stand that holds the consecrated eucharist in a Catholic liturgy. But reading Yve-Alain’s entry for the work, the motif turns out to be based on a sundial-like construction on the facade of a building next to the church on Belle-Île. Tracing the iterations and adaptations through Kelly’s sketches and notes, Bois shows how Kelly processed seeing Picasso’s The Kitchen in Paris, and fused multiple references—to a sun-shaped monstrance he sketched in a Paris museum and to the sundial in front of him—into a single painting.
Ellsworth Kelly, Austin (larget monstrance-shaped detail), 2015, 📷: Jason John Paul Haskins via flickr
And so I’d completely forgotten this Monstrance was connected the other window in Austin, Kelly’s chapel at The Blanton. And I did not realize Kelly left the painting to The Blanton after his death. Which now makes me want to see a stained glass version of Seaweed, tbh.
Mukai-ya, a sake shop in Hiroshima built in 1832, 📷: Futagawa Yukio via Nihon no Minka
The months after coming back from Japan are always when it hits the hardest, the desire to live in a minka by the sea. Except most minka are not by the sea, so you’d have to move it there. Or you’d have to live where the minka remain, in the mountains.
whole bunch of minka in Satsuma Shinashi, Kagoshima, I think, 📷: Futagawa Yukio for Nihon no Minka
Instead, I just pull out my copy of Itõ Teiji and Futagawa Yukio’s incredible 1957-59 survey of minka, 日本の民家, and soak in it. I read Craig Mod’s accounts of walks, and consider that rapidly depopulating rural Japan is probably not the place for foreigners to grow old in.
And then I rewatch Minka, Davina Pardo’s extraordinary 2011 short film about the love and life of two men and their house. And as I wonder if Yoshihiro Takishita still has any minka lying around, waiting to be reassembled, and then I’m like, yeah, three hundred years in, the heating really does sound like an unsolved issue, maybe I’ll just visit.
1981 pic by Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker of Andy Warhol at 860 Broadway with the caption identifying the stuffed dog, but not the Albert Speer-related paintings behind him, via @twixnmix via @voorwerk
I swear, until this morning I was just going to like and reblog this photo of Warhol and move on. And then the Angel of History started piling rubble on top of rubble on the White House lawn.
Albert Speer was Hitler’s favorite architect, and Andy Warhol loved him. In the early 80s he made multiple paintings of Speer’s Lichtdom, and they seem to exist only in the backgrounds of snapshots of Warhol himself. Though they appeared in a major international exhibition in 1982, they seem to have been ignored by dealers and curators and historians then and since.
Alice Garden on Streetview in 2017, when the two trees had railings for seating instead of platforms, and there was a coffee truck, and a tool shed.
Kenzo Tange’s Peace Memorial Park is the largest and most significant architectural public space in Hiroshima, and it always will be. But on a recent visit my curiosity was piqued by a weirdly eccentric post-modernist confection of a public plaza in the messy center of the city’s central shopping district. Even in aging cities outside of Tokyo, teardowns are the norm; the new Hiroshima Gate Park Plaza, built across the street from the ruins of the Genbaku Dome, on the site of the city’s old baseball stadium, is slated for recycling in less than 20 years. So it seemed wild to me that a small park/event space named Alice Garden has survived, mostly intact, next to the department store Parco, for over 30 years.
the Google Maps plan of Alice Garden shows the program—fanciful entrances to underground parking on the upper west and southwestern sides, stair and ventilation structures and restrooms on the east, bleachers facing an ellipse-shaped plinth/stage with an “objet”
After wandering into the space by chance and being surprised by the extent of its design—and, again, its survival—I’ve spent the last couple of weeks researching Alice Garden and its designer/architects. So far, I’ve had little success. Its architecture is mostly undocumented online, and questions of design and history fall beyond the capacity of the city offices tasked with managing the space and calendar. Though maintenance is a mess, the site is not wholly neglected. Alice Garden was in regular, light, use, and active with event programming. But its integrity feels threatened by indifference to its holistic design, and to its barely historic era: a boldy whimsical, almost corny, post-modernist plaza from the early 90s feels very susceptible to underappreciation.
How I found it: this wacky, angled, bike parking structure, tagged and faded, but intact. all the pics, until otherwise noted: me.
At its core, there are contradictions in Alice Garden that make it more interesting, but that also put it at more risk. One is, there’s no creator to rally around. So far, I can’t find an architect or firm involved besides Parco, whose tile-covered new building [shinkan], completed in 1994, matches the all-tile plaza. The closest I’ve come to identifying an architect is Parco Space Systems, the shopping center company’s design subsidiary. After decades of corporate consolidations, it has been subsumed into J. Front Prime Space.
And then there’s the fundamental design incongruity between the Garden and one of its central elements. Linear Cycle (1994) is a major public sculpture by artist/musician Takashi Suzuki, that sits on an elliptical plinth that doubles as as an event stage. Suzuki’s sculpture is modernist and rational in a way that belies the surrealist narrative po-mo jumble of the park it inhabits. Whatever brought these elements together, I think the passage of time—and their survival—has made them a family. They have earned their place, and deserve attention—and more attentive care.
So a nazi-aping fascist’s monomaniacal proposal to build an arch on swampy riverfront is in the news. In 1941 Hitler’s architect Albert Speer got approval to build a giant triumphal arch on a main axis of a redesigned Berlin, and quickly built the Schwerbelastungskörper, or heavy load-bearing structure, to test the ability of the marshy soil to support such a ridiculously large structure. It was built with forced labor from captured French soldiers.
The Heavy Load-Bearing Structure is a cylindrical pressure body made of solid concrete 14 meters high, with a diameter of 21 meters. Its 11-meter diameter concrete base extends 18 meters deep. The 12,650 ton weight was calculated to approximate one of the arch’s four base legs.
The war diverted resources and attention from the arch and the redesign of Berlin, and the HLBS was left behind. Scientists and soil management technicians used the structure for data collection until 1983—postwar analysis showed the ground was too soft to have supported Hitler’s arch without major intervention, btw. And it became a historical monument in 1995, “the only tangible example of National Socialist urban planning.”
heavy load-bearing structure visitor information center and viewing platform via google streetview
Now there is a visitor information center, monthly tours, and a Schwerbelastungskörperaussichtsplattform, a Heavy Load-Bearing Structure Viewing Platform, which looks exactly like what a visitor center for a useless nazi concrete plug should look like.
The Isa Genzken show at Buchholz has an archival feel interspersed with some bangers. It’s focused on Genzken’s public projects. Actually, no, it’s what it says on the label—Projects for Outside—and so it excludes public commissions like the U-bahn station she did with Richter. And yet there is the OG 1982 World Receiver. And a Kunstverein edition World Receiver further in. And original documentation of her original 1987 World Receiver installation in a music store window. Which counts as a project for outside, I guess? I have to say, the World Receiver in the window of Buchholz’s new space on 54th St is so close to the glass, the only way to photograph it is from outside. So yes. Also, yes, this was the Manolo Blahnik store.
Please note the angle of the wall at the left, the one that seems covered with Brice Marden graffiti, but it is a Ben Shahn mosaic mural. George Nakashima, Arts Building/Minguren Museum, New Hope, PA, photo: World Monuments Fund
The Nakashima Compound in New Hope, Pennsylvania feels well-loved, impressive when visited, and very haphazardly documented. Probably because it is and has been in near constant use and change since George Nakashima built his first workshed in the 1940s. Maybe also because Nakashima did all the designs, and though he was trained as an architect, he was most known by the photographing and publishing classes, at least, as a woodwizarding furnituremaker.
Please not that angled wall again, or rather, please note the angle of that wall. photo: April Frantz for PA Historic Preservation
Whatever the situation, it has been difficult to find the photos I need to understand something that fascinates me in the Arts Building (1965 or 1967), first known as the Minguren Museum, the pointy, triangular-looking open structure with a hyperbolic paraboloid roof made of plywood. [There is also a poured concrete paraboloid roof structure, the Conoid Building, and the slatted, curved ceilings look similar inside, which is confusing. Also, did Nakashima really name buildings after his furniture lines as part of the marketing? I think a trip to the Compound/showroom/workshop was part of many large commissions, when clients came to select a tree or whatever. Maybe it all makes sense on the ground.]
In this Pennsylvania Historic Preservation blog post, it says this experimental roof was, in 2021, the subject of a Getty-funded conservation project undertaken by the University of Pennsylvania. After it had been flagged by the World Monuments Fund. So maybe there’s documentation after all. [Also, as someone from Raleigh, a town whose pioneering concrete hyperbolic paraboloid roof house masterpiece was neglected and destroyed by absolute idiots, I have to say the potential longer term viability of the Nakashima plywood roof gives me new hope.]
interior of Minguren Museum with some truly epic wood slabs, and the fieldstone and concrete coffered foyer and mezzanine in the corner, with a cast-in-place concrete parapet and railing at an angle via IG
But that’s not the point right now. Look inside the Arts Building or Minguren Museum, or the Nakashima Foundation for Peace. Entering at the building’s apex into a coffered concrete and fieldstone foyer, and discovering the space opening up, yes, and then the Loft definitely not floating above you.
The Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in BF industrial Milan [but in a different BF industrial Milan from the Fondazione Prada, so plan accordingly] is about to open a show of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s architectural projects.
The pic above is from Untitled, 1995, which was a half-scale version of a modernist house by Sigurd Lewerentz which Tiravanija built at the Rooseum in Malmö. MoMA’s 1997 caption described the interior decorations as “by the children of the Storken day care center ages 5-7,” but that was clearly preceded by a trip to Ikea.
Collaborators: photo of Rirkrit’s 1995 Malmö installation from the brochure for his 1997 MoMA Project
