architecture – Page 27

Malibu Air: Lens Color Cast Corrections

House exterior (test)
Malibu, CA

Kitchen
Malibu, CA
Ian James is a recent CalArts graduate. He posted a series of images–photos–of Lens color cast correction on his blog. which are kind of fantastic:

Lens Color Cast is an dilemma specific to digital photography. Digital sensors are incredibly flat and are designed to receive light straight on. In the case of ultra wide angle lenses, light reaches the sensor diagonally and creates wild color casts and flares which are incredibly difficult to fix in Photoshop. Thus to the only way to correct is at the time of shooting by utilizing a particular lens filter that is a combination of diffusion and a translucent diamond pattern that evens out the light coming hitting the sensor. This image is saved in capture software as an adjustment setting and then applied to all related images as a set. A new LCC image must be made everytime the camera is moved into a new lighting scenario.
The images generated for the LCC are thus abstract functionaries of a larger endeavor. The LCC images in this set were all generated from an architecture shoot of the ins and outs of a Malibu beachfront home. Each image relates to one particular setup, such as master bedroom, guest bedroom, office, kitchen, outside patio, front exterior, etc.

They remind me a bit of Bruce Nauman’s monochrome photographs of the Los Angeles sky, which he published in a couple of artist books: CLEA RSKY (1968-9) is all blue skies. Which is fine.

But I like L A AIR (1970) better. The point/joke is that the smog-filled air of Los Angeles produced a much more varied and interesting range of colors. Both were included in “Elements and Unknowns,” a beautiful little show of enigmatic artist books organized last fall by May Castleberry, the contemporary editions editor at MoMA’s Library Council.
Lens Color Cast Correction [ian james eats photographs]

Public Art On The Mall: Centerbeam & Icarus

While we contemplate the Colombian Heart Attack that has befallen Washington DC, it might be worthwhile to remember the good old days, such as they were, when the National Mall was the site of ambitious public art projects. Projects like Centerbeam and Icarus.
Centerbeam was the result of a 22-artist collaboration organized by MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies under the leadership of the artist Otto Piene. It was a ~~144-ft long~~ 128-ft long [in DC] steel sculpture resembling a radio tower on its side, which served as a platform for an array of artistic deployments of cutting edge technologies, including laser projections on steam, holograms, neon and argon beams, and electronic and computer-generated music. And giant inflatable sculptures.
After a highly acclaimed debut at Documenta 6 in 1977, Centerbeam was reinstalled on the Mall during the Summer of 1978. The site was the open space north of the newly opened National Air & Space Museum, and directly across the Mall from the just-opened East Gallery of the NGA [where The National Museum of the American Indian now stands].
Centerbeam gave nightly performances/happenings/experiences throughout the summer, culminating in two nights’ performance of Icarus, a “sky opera” in steam, balloons, lasers, and sound created by Piene and Paul Earls.
Based loosely on Ovid, Icarus cast Piene’s 250-ft tall red and black flower-shaped sculpture as the title character; another red anemone-shaped balloon was Daedalus, and Centerbeam was the Minotaur.
Centerbeam was officially sponsored by the National Park Service, which has jurisdiction over the Mall, and the Smithsonian. The directors of both the NGA [Carter Brown] and the Hirshhorn Museum [Abram Lerner] are thanked for their encouragement in MIT’s 1980 catalogue of Centerbeam, but no Smithsonian art museum–and no art curator–appears to have been involved in the presentation of the work. Most of the coordination was handled by Susan Hamilton, who worked in the office of Charles Blitzer, the Assistant Secretary for History and Art. In fact, the Air & Space Museum’s director and staff gets the most effusive praise and seems to have been the most closely involved with the project, even to the point of using the NASM as Centerbeam‘s mailing address.
The Washington Post did not review Icarus, and in the paper’s only feature on the opening of Centerbeam, Jo Ann Lewis cited anonymous critics who “generally saw it as a big, endearing toy, but not art. There seems no reason to amend that conclusion here.”
Of course, no one cares what the Post says about art, and Piene and his CAVS collaborators probably did not mind the absence of more traditionally minded art worlders. Since his days as a founder of Group Zero in the early 1960s, Piene had been self-consciously seeking a path that would lead art out and away from the rareified, precious object fixations of collectors and museums.
Group Zero was ahead of several curves, and their place in the story of conceptualism, minimalism, Arte Povera, and other important developments of art in the 1960s is getting a boost. And Piene’s work looked pretty nice and strong in Sperone Westwater’s very fresh-looking Zero show last year. Are Centerbeam and Icarus really just wonky art/science experiments, examples of the played out model of unalloyed, Utopian technophilia that spawned earlier collaborative dogpiles like the Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair?
Or is there a real history of “real” art by Piene and his collaborators that needs to be looked at again? Despite the apparent indifference of its official art world at the time, was Washington DC actually the site of some significant artistic production that did not involve freakin’ Color Fields? Inquiring balloon-sculpting minds want to know.

l’Arroseur Arrosé

Maybe it’s a matter of missing the reportorial bowl, but Paris’s experiments with anti-public urination architectural technology are more interesting than the Wall Street Journal makes them out to be.
First off, the utter untimeliness of the story. Paris’s public toilets have been free since 2006. The single anti-urination wall, or mur antipipi, mentioned in the piece has been in place since 2005. The UK Telegraph and the Guardian re-covered the topic at length in 2007, basically by translating a Nouvel Observateur story featuring Etienne Vanderpooten, municipal architect for the City of Paris, and the inventor of the mur antipipi.
We’ll get to that in a minute. Among the other piss-thwarting streetscaping strategies: filling corners with “treacherous concrete cones”; and a steeply sloped “granite parapet” which is designed to be hard to stand on, especially after “la 3e cannette de bière.”
But here’s the wall from Google Streetview. About the zig-zag profile, Monsieur Vanderpooten explained it with a cinematic reference: “The jet of pee is rather oblique. If it meets a sloping surface it is sent back to the trousers…It is the case of the arroseur arrosé.”
Originally titled, le Jardinier, l’Arroseur Arrosé, or The Waterer Watered/ Sprinkler Sprinkled, was one of the Lumiere brothers’ first short films. It was shot in the Spring of 1895, first screened in June, and it was one of the ten shorts in the Lumieres’ first public cinema screening in December. Other shorts captured slices of life or street scenes; l’Arroseur Arrosé was the first one staged for the camera, the first comedy/gag, and some would argue, the first cinematic narrative.

You can imagine a remake set in the corner of the Cour des Petites Ecuries and starring a drunk football fan who step out of a nearby tabac would be pretty damn funny.

Stickin’ It To The Man

Classic. Throw it on the compost pile; it is done. Burning Man’s official delusional complicity in its own cynical corporate exploitation is now complete.
This year, the Man has been set atop a pyre [above] made of 2x4s swirled into a fantastical, organic architecture designed by Rod Garrett. The design is an explicit reference to Uchronia, aka the Belgian Waffle [below], from the 2006 Festival.

The Waffle was controversial for many reasons: it was built in the open playa, not in the city. It was burned the night after the Man burned. At the time, the Waffle’s Belgian designer/marketer Arne Quinze claimed his 100-person crew were all volunteers, but it turned out they were all paid employees. Because it was later revealed that the entire Uchronia Project was an experiential branding campaign organized and executed by Quinze’s agency for the launch of the newly redesigned Lexus L460 luxury sedan.

See, Burning Man turned out to be only the opening act, the precursor for several Lexus pop-up showrooms with mini-Waffle installations, including one in Beverly Hills and another in Miami Beach which was timed to coincide with Art Basel.

At the time, I got a lot of grief over my criticism of Quinze’s spectacle, and burners, including the BM organization’s official curator, were in angry denial about what had really happened. [My inbox got predictably quiet after the rest of Quinze’s elaborate Lexus installations were unveiled.]
All that mattered was for burners to believe–even if just for a few days–that there was still a chance to escape the consumption-obsessed world, and to create, free from advertising and logos and clients and bullshit corporate sponsors and their moneygrubbing agendas.
And now, just three years later, the namesake of the festival is built on a replica of the biggest corporate punking and co-option ever. Congratulations.
Working for the Man; The State of the ART [top image via blog.burningman.com]
Relive the complete greg.org Uchronia=Lexus saga here.

More Small Metal Objects

greg.org reader Kara C. just sent along this new photo of A. Lawrence Rocher & Albert Frey’s Aluminaire House, a fantastic early prefab design–and Frey’s first building in the US–which is currently parked on the Islip, LI campus of the NY Institute of Technology.
When it was first exhibited in NYC in 1931, the speed with which it was built [10 days] led people to call it the “Zipper House.” But NYIT architect Michael Schwarting, who was instrumental in saving the house from demolition in the late 1980s said, “It was made more like a refrigerator than a house.”
And as that M-Class clearly demonstrates, the Aluminaire House is barely the size of a Sub-Zero in a Five Towns McMansion.
Kocher & Frey’s Aluminaire House: a making of primer
another contemporary view from early August

Aluminaire House: The Making And Remaking Of

Haha, It only took ten days the first time. When Wallace K Harrison reassembled Kocher and Frey’s Aluminaire House on his property in Huntington, LI, after buying it for $1000 and taking it apart in a matter of hours, it took a lot longer and cost a lot more. That was due, “in part because the components for the house were left outdoors and a strong rain washed away the identifying chalk markings, leaving a jigsaw puzzle to be put back together.” Ultimately, the structural integrity was compromised, and anyway, Harrison soon added onto and moved and later even partially buried what he called the “tin house.”
That’s all according to the 1999 revised edition of Joseph Rosa’s Albert Frey, Architect, which is on Google Books.
Rosa also gives some hint as to the house’s structure and materials, none of which sound like they’d pass muster with a building department today:

the whole thing rested on six five-in. aluminum columns attached to aluminum and steel channel girders.
the “battle deck-pressed steel flooring” was sandwiched with insulation board and linoleum.
the non-loadbearing walls are “narrow-ribbed aluminum,” insulation board, and building paper, “joined by washers and screws.”
the dining room and living room were separated by a glass&steel china cabinet, a retractable rubber-top dining table, and the risers for the shower cantilevered from the bed/bath overhead.
the balcony was lined with concrete-asbestos brick.

Fantastic, but seriously crazy. The only way you could logically cantilever a shower over a living room is if it has glass walls. Which sounds like something Paul Rudolph would do, or probably did.

Yesterday And Tomorrow In Aluminaire House News

So sweet. Check out this awesome aluminum-clad house, which curator/architectural historian Erik Neil spotted yesterday on the campus of the NY Institute of Technology:

I looked it up on the Internet, and found this post, which I wrote last weekend. It’s Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey’s Aluminaire House as it exists today, or yesterday, anyway, which is pretty damn close.
This house is completely fantastic. Who’d have thought that looking like a 1930’s industrial refrigerator would result in such wonderful architecture? Put some quilting on those aluminum panels, and it’d be like living at Florent.
Neil visited the house because he’s including it “Arcadia to Suburbia: Architecture on Long Island 1930-2010,” an exhibition on the history of modernism on Long Island set to open in January at the Hecksher Museum in Huntington.
He also pointed out that Joe Rosa, who was a key player in saving the Aluminaire House from demolition in the 1980s, included it in his 1990 monograph, Albert Frey, Architect, which I have somewhere in storage, but which I might sell just on principle because–hello–it’s like $115-$581 on Amazon right now. Crazy days.

DDOS Cannot Silence Awesome Christopher Hawthorne LiveTweet

LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne delivered a mordantly hilarious stream of live Twitter updates from a Sci-Arc panel discussion last night. I’ll be damned if I can comment on it, and I’m not sure I can even link to it all, but it is awesome.
The show started with Anthony Vidler talking old-school Freudian smack–complete with accent–about Schindler/Neutra, Neutra/Schindler, or vice versa. And then he moderated a “architects in LA”-type discussion among Hitoshi Abe, Peter Cook, Eric Owen Moss, Thom Mayne, Peter Noever, and Wolf Prix.
My favorite is right toward the end *SPOILER ALERT*: “The philosophical–not to mention gen.–homogeneity of panel is astounding. Guess that was predictable, but still. Hoping Hitoshi Abe can……rescue us from Boomer avant-gardism.”
Help me, Hitoshi Abe, you’re LA’s only hope. I hope Sci-Arc puts this thing on YouTube…
Schindler / Neutra, Neutra / Schindler; L.A. / Wien: On the Couch [sciarc.edu]

And Now A Report On The Latest Trends And/Or Story Ideas From The World Of Architecture!

The funny thing is, I think my problem is I couldn’t have made something like this up:

Hi Greg,
Here’s a trend and story idea for the growing number of architecture company cars piling up from economic downsizing: The majority of small businesses and firms lease cars for tax purposes. However, owners must still make payments on those cars if the leases are stuck in park from staff cutbacks. But a new program is now helping small firms get unused car leases off the books giving finances a new lease on life.
–Small business owners have had to downsize staff, leaving many of these car leases sitting idle in the parking lot (but still requiring monthly payments).
–Owners can’t sell the lease and if they turn them back in to the bank they will get slapped with early contract termination fees upwards of $10,000 per car.
–A new Small Business Car Release program helps architecture firm owners ditch the lease by transferring the contract to someone else (most popular service being PressReleaseSender.com).
–The car lease company is involved in the program, it takes about 2-3 weeks for the transfer and removes the small business owner from obligations to make the monthly payments.
–Paying for unused car leases is salt on the wound considering rising health care costs and less credit available from banks.
Sources To Quote:
–Sergio Stiberman, CEO and founder of PressReleaseSender.com, to discuss the new Small Business Car Release program.
–Also speak with the executive director of Auto Fleet Leasing on industry trends and number of small businesses leasing vehicles.
Additional Story Titles:
Company Helps Small Business Unload Excess Car Leases
Small Business Help Allows For Immediate Release of Company Cars
Small Business Relief When Company Car Can’t Start Up
Program Helps Small Business Move Company Cars Stuck in Park
Program Offers Small Business Relief for Unused Car Leases
Unemployment Leaves Small Business on Company Lease Collision Course
Unused Company Car Leases Eat Into Already Thin Margins

So many wonderful titles to choose from, I need an intern to help me decide!

Lawrence Kocher’s Black Mountain College?

I stumbled across Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey’s Aluminaire House last night while trying to figure out who built this house at Black Mountain College. It’s from the Charles Olson Research Collection at UConn, and was posted at An Ambitious Project Collapsing [get some permalinks there, buddy!]
Olson ran BMC from 1951 until its closing in 1956. But though it’s in the Olson BMC portfolio, the photo is credited to Frank Ballard, and is dated 1977, and is taken at a place called Camp Rochmont. So what gives?
Well, Camp Rochmont is actually Camp Rockmont, a non-denominational Christian boys camp, and it is Black Mountain College. When the school closed, 550 acres around Lake Eden was sold and turned into the camp. Another 60 acres full of BMC buildings is now Lake Eden Events, which hosts concerts and gatherings large and small.
As editor of The Architectural Record, A. Lawrence Kocher had recommended to BMC in the late 1930s that they collaborate with Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, fresh from the Bauhaus, to design a new modernist campus at Lake Eden, a failed, half-built resort complex. When fundraising fell through, Kocher himself began designing a building and planning out the rest of the site beginning in 1940. He was apparently in residence from 1940-43, teaching architecture and leading BMC’s trademark student building projects.
Of all the architects associated with BMC, Kocher seems the most likely architect for structure above. He designed two houses in 1940-41: one for the music teacher, the Viennese composer and early Schoenberg student Heinrich Jalowetz [now called the Sequoia Cottage, and available for $250/night, but not this year], and a 2-story house “for the kitchen staff and other black workers.” [It was still the segregated South, after all.
In The Arts at Black Mountain College, Mary Emma Harris described the Jalowetz house design as “based on four-by-eight-foot plywood panels,” a favorite material of Kocher’s. As the picture clearly shows, the house above is also designed around plywood sheet dimensions. And don’t the raised base and ribbon windows kind of give off an Aluminaire vibe?

The only house on this map of the Lake Eden Campus I can map it to is #9, the Service House, which is indeed on the Rockmont side of the lake.

For all its seemingly awesome, modest simplicity, something called a Service House, built for staff in a far corner of BMC sounds unlikely to have much more documentation–and probably doesn’t appear too often in the typical photographic record of the day. I’m not too optimistic about finding out much more, but I’d love to be wrong.

Who What? Kocher & Frey’s Aluminaire House?

Let me get this straight: the first modernist prefab in the US; one of two US houses included in Phillip Johnson’s 1932 International Style exhibition at MoMA [the other: Neutra’s Lovell House]; built in 10 days from off-the-shelf industrial materials, with no formal plans or blueprints; Albert Frey’s first US project; bought and disassembled in hours, then saved and bastardized by Wallace K. Harrison; quoted nearly perfectly–concept, materials, and form–by Kieran Timberlake in their Cellophane House; and yet somehow Aluminaire House itself was not included in “Home Delivery,” MoMA’s 2007 show on the history of the modern prefab Please tell me I just missed it or blocked it from my memory.
But I’m hardly the only one.
Lawrence Kocher was editor of Architectural Record and later involved with Black Mountain College. The 27-year old Albert Frey was fresh off the boat from Le Corbusier’s studio. They whipped up Aluminaire House from donated parts and materials for a 1931 building show and Architectural League exhibition at Grand Central Palace, an expo hall that filled the block between 46th and 47th streets and Park and Lex.

Kocher’s concept was a light-filled, modernist prefab house made of innovative, industrial, mass-produceable materials: aluminum, steel and glass. The 3-story, 5-room, 28×22-ft, 1,200 sf building was barely more than a mockup, an exhibition pavilion. Frey later compared it more to a refrigerator than a building in its construction; it was light steel bolted together with nuts and washers and skinned in ribbon windows and corrugated aluminum, a material Frey would use extensively in California. The floor was ship decking covered in linoleum. Interior walls were rayon fabric. It was supported on five aluminum pilotis.
The main living space [LR/DR, Kit, MBR, BA] was on the second floor. The living room was double height, open to a partially enclosed library/2nd bedroom on the third floor, which also had a terrace. A second bathroom with shower was cantilevered over the living room, which frankly sounds like a joke.

Harrison bought the Aluminaire House for a thousand dollars after the expo ended, and reassembled it at his house on Long Island. In ’32, Johnson showed the house in the International Style exhibition, but didn’t include it in the catalogue. Harrison proceeded to enclose the ground and third floors and add on some circular structures, rendering the house nearly unrecognizable.
Which is why it was almost demolished in 1987-8 when Harrison’s estate was chopped up and developed. The architecture department of the New York Institute of Technology took the Aluminaire House on as a school project. They studied and dismantled it, then eventually reassembled and restored it on a new pad on their Central Islip campus. Which looks to be about 10 minutes south of Exit 55 on the LIE, within easy pilgrimage visiting by every design snob in the Hamptons.
And yet, no one really seems to care or know about it. In a brief blurb about a 1998 Arch. League show on restoring Aluminaire House, Herbert Muschamp got the location and story of the house wrong. No one who writes about it sounds like they’ve actually seen it. There aren’t any contemporary photos of it online, only one shot from Harrison’s yard.

It’s on Google Maps, of course, and that’s Microsoft’s Bird’s Eye view on the right. But no mention of it on NYIT’s site. [The architecture department was moved from Islip to a campus in Old Westbury, so if it served any academic purpose before, the Aluminaire House seems kind of orphaned now. A 2007 messageboard post said that it was to be relocated as part of a redevelopment/selloff of part of the campus. If it hasn’t happened yet, I’m sure it won’t happen for a while.
But it sounds to me like there’s an unloved, unappreciated pile of historic modern awesomeness in the middle of Long Island that needs to be liberated and returned to loving domestic use. At the very least, will someone take half an hour on the way to the beach and go shoot some freakin’ photos?
The only lengthy discussion of Aluminaire House I can find online: docomomo’s 1998 Modern Movement Heritage by Allen Cunningham [google books]

Microarchitecture On ebay.fr, Only Two Days Left!

Estuaire is the three-time biennale in beta for the Nantes region. This year, the second incarnation includes I.C.I., Instant Carnet Island, a habitable, riverfront collection of micro-architecture which is for rent–EUR10/person/night, bring your sleeping bag–and for sale.

Several of the structures have been put on French eBay. Available items include both Antonin Sorel’s L’étoile de l’amour [above, left], which is several puns at once on L’étoile de la mort [the Death Star, though in Star Wars ep. IV, it was actually called l’Etoile Noire]; and Damien Chivialle’s ark for “amoreux hedonistes” [above, right]; but not, alas, Ant Farm’s time capsule/video lounge recreation of their Media Van [above, center], which could probably teach the kiddies a thing or two about hedonistes, amiright?
There are less than two full days left, and so far, with only one 16-seat picnic table by the Dutch design firm 24h Living meeting the reserve, the whole thing seems destined to be a primarily conceptual exercise.
Unless people start bidding now!

The Flake House [above, currently EUR2310] by the Paris architects OLGGA is pretty rustic-slick, about as practical as a folly can get; and Dre Wapenaar’s Treetent [current bid: EUR2000] is a classic. But I think I’d take Spanish artist Alicia Framis’s Billboard House [top] first. The opening bid is just EUR1000 [including breakdown and loading, but not shipping or reassembly].
Originally conceived for the Land project Rirkrit Tiravanija organizes in Thailand, Billboard House consists of just three billboards and a raised floor. It threads the utopian needle very nicely. It’s unprecious and low-tech, a totally plausible-seeming affordable housing solution–for folks living the Thai, along the side of the road, do all your cooking and socializing and hygienic activities outdoors lifestyle.
Estuaire 2009 | Instant Carnet Island runs through Aug 16 [estuaire.info via thingsmagazine]
check out Estuaire09’s items on eBay France, auctions end July 31 Paris time [ebay.fr]
Billboardhousethailand (2000) [aliciaframis.com]
update: in the end, everything had at least one bid, but only two of 24h Living’s three tables sold.

Julius Shulman Is Dead! Long Live Julius Shulman!

Like everyone else, I see modern architecture–the whole modern world, or at least the West Coast of it–in glorious black and white, thanks to Julius Shulman. Just as Hugh Ferris’s smoky charcoal skyscraper renderings defined Gotham a generation earlier, Shulman’s has been the formative, definitive lens through which postwar Los Angeles has been seen and understood.
So even as I miss him in one human sense, I’m kind of relieved he’s finally gone. Now maybe a new perspective of modernism has a chance to take hold. Or maybe an old one, who knows? Just something, anything besides relentless Shulmanism.
Christopher Hawthorne has a couple of open-eyed remembrances of Shulman and his double-edged relationship to the city he documented so long and loved so much:

Shulman’s vision of modern, stylish domesticity was in many respects an airbrushed one. It’s hard to believe anybody actually ever lived the way the carefully posed models in his photographs seemed to, carrying a tray out onto a poolside terrace, or sitting in perfectly pressed suits and dresses on the edge of a Mies van der Rohe chaise longue, city lights twinkling in the distance.
But his images were impossible to resist as a kind of mythmaking, even for the most tough-minded observers of life in Los Angeles. To look for any length of time at a Shulman picture of a great modern L.A. house is to get a little drunk on the idea of paradise as an Edenic combination of spare architecture and lush landscape.

Hawthorne also wrote another, more personal reminiscence of Shulman:

He was known for a certain blunt irascibility by that point in his life – he was 94 when we met, for God’s sake – but I never saw that side of his personality. He was dogged in his view that life in Los Angeles, as he told me once, was “simply glorious,” and that put him at odds with the generation of photographers, architects and artists who followed him, many of whom were more interested in exploring a grittier, less elevated vision of what it meant to be here.

The one time I met Shulman was after a public event, where his cantankerous charisma was turned up to 11. It was impossible not to be rooting for him all the way that night, even though I kind of regretted it in the morning.
That phrase, though, about others who “were more interested in exploring the grittier, less elevated vision of what it meant to be here [i.e., in Los Angeles]” gets to me. Hawthorne saw Shulman as a promoter; I’d probably go with evangelist. But the point is, sometimes it’s not a matter of exploring what it means to be someplace, it’s a matter of just being there and seeing what’s around you. It’s like Shulman knew what he’d see before he ever got there.

You Had Me At Muschamp in Monaco

Herbert Muschamp in a giant weather balloon movie in Monaco WHAT?

This is something we did in Monaco where we put Herbert Muschamp’s text, “Bubbles in the Wine,” to film. It was my job to go out and find these weather balloon manufacturers that had these funny-shaped screens that had projectors inside them. And what Peter with Imaginary Forces did was to figure out how to cut a nine-screen film simultaneously so you sometimes get a single image, you sometimes get multiple images on the balloons.

That’s Greg Lynn, speaking last year at MoMA’s “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibition, as presented by Seed Magazine.

Sure enough, he wasn’t making it up. In 2006, Germano Celant brought in Lisa Dennison to help curate, “New York, New York,” a giant summer show at the Grimaldi Forum. Lynn, Imaginary Forces, and UN Studios worked as United Architects, the collaborative they formed for the World Trade Center rebuilding competition.
Here’s the brief:

UA created an immersive space that told the story of the last 50 years of New York Architecture through an animated narrative, scripted by Herbert Muschamp. Eight synchronized films and a uniquely New York soundtrack told a story of the past, present and future of the city. By suspending eight 20-foot balloons with interior projection from the ceiling and walls, IF transformed the balloons into a new architectural media delivery system.

And here’s IF’s quick making of video, which Warner Music Group unceremoniously stripped the soundtrack from:

Hmm. First off, this all sounds straight from the Eameses’ expo playbook. Their collaboration with George Nelson, for example, at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow. Glimpses of the USA was a 7-screen film epic of American material awesomeness, shown in a dome pavilion, and designed to blow hapless Commie minds. [My mind was blown a little bit just by this photo of the Eameses standing inside a mockup of the pavilion. via]

And of course, the Eameses went on to make approximately one million movie/slide/multimedia presentations and exhibitions for IBM, a format which was later cloned in every Park Service visitors center I went to as a child. So on the bright side, there’s no need for a proof of concept!
All told, the installation as realized, with the balloon screens seemingly dispersed on either side of the narrow, Nauman-esque exhibition space, doesn’t seem to have quite the impact that UA originally imagined. Check out the drawing over Lynn’s shoulder above, where the balloons are all clustered like sperm around an invisible egg. [Which would have been you, by the way, the viewer. You were the egg. And Joe Buck was the sperm. Muschamp is whooping in Heaven right now at the thought, I’m sure.] Point is, the panoramic wall is closer to what UA realized in their “New City” installation at MoMA.
Meanwhile, there’s not much online about “New York, New York,” which was subtitled, “Cinquante ans d’art, architecture, photographie, film et vidéo.” From the Art in America writeup, it sounded like a sprawling mess and a bit of a trophy dump, not necessarily a bad thing. Of course, half the article is about expo logistics and insurance and transporting masterpieces [sic], so who knows? Also, I can’t find this Muschamp “Bubbles” essay anywhere online. Please tell me someone somewhere’s working on a collected works.
Monaco starts around 3:30: Seed Design Series | Greg Lynn: New City [seedmagazine, thanks greg.org idol john powers for the tip]
Experience Design | Bubbles in the Wine, 2006 [imaginaryforces.com]

House On The Moon On The Ericsson Globe

Josh Foer is on fire, and I’m like a moth to the flame. Foer’s guestblogging at BoingBoing, and is just lobbing up one crazy-awesome megasphere after another. It was his charticle in Cabinet a while back about the history of giant spheres that introduced me to satelloons in the first place.
So it’s no surprise that he surprises me again with an offhand reference to the Globe Arena in Stockholm, which is just “the largest spherical building in the world.” And it also happens to be at the center of the Sweden Solar System, the world’s largest scale model of the solar system, where Pluto is a ball 300km away.
No, the Globe, which Ericsson just paid to have renamed the Ericsson Globe, also has a small stuga, a traditional red Swedish cottage stuck on top of it for the summer.
A month ago, the Swedish artist Mikael Genberg, whose primary medium seems to be the traditional red Swedish cottage, attached one to the Globe in preparation for his much larger project, which is to dispatch a traditional red Swedish cottage-building robot to the moon in 2012, and have it build a traditional red Swedish cottage there. On the moon.
I’m not sure how this syncs with the Sweden Solar System, where I assume the 100-m diameter Globe is standing in for the sun, not the moon, but the visuals are pretty irresistible.
Sweden Solar System [atlasobscura.com via boingboing]
Ericcson Globe, aka Stockholm Globe Arena [wikipedia]
houseonthemoon.com project blog [houseonthemoon.com]
MikaelGenberg.com [insane, optimized for Netscape 4, unclickable]
Swedes sending robot to the moon to build nice little cottage [gizmodo.com]
image and video: Röd stuga på Globens topp [svt.se]