architecture – Page 3

This Is Not A Frank Gehry Skateboard

Essential Design, Lot 128: That is not a Frank Gehry skateboard. image: wright20

I am officially on the record as a skeptic of artist skateboard collabs, but I can also say that no one wants there to be a Frank Gehry skateboard more than me.

But this is not it.

This group of skate decks in next week’s Essential Design sale at Wright20, “is comprised of decks by AWS for Alien Workshop, Marc Johnson for Enjoi Skateboards, Rick McCrank and Eric Koston for Girl Skateboards, One Fifty One Skateboards, Frank Gehry, and Toy Machine. Printed manufacturer’s mark to six examples.”

New Museum Skateboard as product, 2014, and the SANAA building it echoes. image I was about to make ganked from 9yo artnet article instead.

And the only thing better than a Frank Gehry skateboard is a signed Frank Gehry skateboard. But again, no. This is the upside-down silhouette of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa’s of SANAA’s New Museum. It is the shape the museum uses as a logo, turned into a skateboard. The limited edition of 150, produced in 2014 by Chapman Skateboards, is still available in the New Museum’s shop.

Castator and Duff @ NuMu, 2012, published to Castator’s tumblr [rip], then published by Complex and blackholed once they wrung enough eyeballs out of it, recovered via the Internet Archive

The idea originated with a 2012 window installation by Canyon Castator and Richard Duff, who put the woeful off-the-rack Supreme artist collab skatedecks to shame with their janky, hand-chopped-and-reassembled New Museum board. Which I am now adding to my auction watch list.

[update: the listing has been updated.]

Polly Pocket-Size Pavilion

Dan Graham, *Children’s Day Care CD-Rom, Cartoon, Computer Screen Library Center*, 1998, at Marian Goodman, image via @visitordesign

The Dan Graham tribute show at Marian Goodman looks fantastic; there’s a whole gallery of models/maquettes/studies, tiny little Dan Graham pavilions on pedestals that almost make me want to move to the country.

Visitor took this picture of one of what look like a mountain of gems: a 1998 model called Children’s Day Care CD-Rom, Cartoon, Computer Screen Library Center.

Is There Life After Breakfast? organized by Peter Fischli, runs through Apr. 29, 2023 [mariangoodman]

Walden, Or Afterlife Of The Wood

“I have been long inquiring whether any remenant of the house at Walden remained, feeling that it would be a choice relic of axe strokes that were literally heard round the world,” wrote Yale professor Henry Seidel Canby in 1932.

Stud sections and nails from Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond, a gift of Henry Seidel Canby to the Yale Collections of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Yale’s Henry David Thoreau Collection is small but intense. Of sixteen items, seven are holographs, texts written in the author’s hand. There are pencils made by Thoreau’s father, and the label for a pencil box they might have c piome in. There are a couple of surveys the author made as part of his dreaded work. And there are two pieces of wood and two nails, which are reported to come from Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond. They were donated by Professor Canby.

There are two documents in the Collection pertaining to the material history of Thoreau’s cabin: One is the 1932 provenance statement accompanying the wood and nails by Canby, a noted Thoreau fanboy and biographer [who was called the “dean of American literary critics” in his bio in The Saturday Review, which he founded and edited for 12 years.] The other is a 1949 essay/survey of the cabin’s post-Walden history which its authors, two then-students, Francis Shelden and G. Peter Shiras called the first “exact, authenticated history of the Thoreau hut.”

l’Ultimo Mobile, di Martino Gamper

l’Ultimo Mobile, 30 October 2020, by Martino Gamper, image: Robinson Barbosa via Serpentine Galleries

It feels unusual, but it’s important to remember it was unusual times.

Enzo Mari died at 88 on October 19, 2020, and his wife, Lea Vergine, died the next day at 82, both from COVID. Hans Ulrich Obrist and Francesca Giacomelli’s major exhibition of Mari’s work had just opened, improbably, miraculously, incredulously, in the middle of the pandemic, and the beginning of the Milan Triennale, on October 17th.

Obrist hosted conversations and reminiscences about Mari and Vergine on the Triennale’s Instagram Live, including one with Martin Gamper, where he discussed the tribute Obrist and Serpentine curator Rebecca Lewin requested of him:

“I wanted to make something to remember his spirit, his thinking, his ideas, […] and I wanted to continue his project, the Autoprogettazione. So I made two coffins [in the style of the Autoprogettazione], as a way for me to think about Enzo and Lea’s legacy. I call them L’Ultimo Mobile, or the last furniture. It’s the idea of extending the book somehow – not just to chairs and tables and cupboards.” Gamper has made the coffins in his studio using Mari’s restrictions of 2 x 4 timber and nails, as specified in the Autoprogettazione. “Creating an object for someone you care for and love could be an interesting process for all of us,” said Gamper. “Sawing and hammering, and remembering the person.”
Disegno Daily quoting from Martino Gamper’s Triennale IG Live, posted October 29, 2020, but subsequently redesigned into oblivion.

Spread from the Corraini re-edition of *Autoprogettazione* showing the Letto/Bed 1123 xM, as offered in Tokyo by Twelve-Books

Gamper fittingly chose one of the Autoprogettazione beds as inspiration for his coffins’ design. Robinson Barbosa’s black & white photos, too, are tributes to the stark offset printed images of Mari’s 1974 book.

Martino Gamper in his studio, having sawed and hammered, remembering Enzo Mari

What Barbosa’s photos do not show, until they do, is the actual scale of Gamper’s creations. To honor the ratio inherent in Mari’s chosen material—2×4 pine lumber—Gamper used 1×2 to make quarter-scale, tabletop caskets. In English a casket can be either a coffin or a box. In Italian, a casket/box is a cofanetto, and a casket/coffin is a bara. These are not objects of utility, but of tribute and memory, and media. Made for the ‘gram. Actually, that is all utility, too. And in the dark and weary days of October 2020, I would say these coffins, with their little feet, were serving their purpose as well as could be hoped.

The Last Furniture: Martino Gamper’s Tribute to Enzo Mari [serpentinegalleries.org]

Autoprogettazione, Autodistruzione

Designer Enzo Mari and his wife, critic Lea Vergine, passed away one after the other in October 2020, the pre-vaccine stage of the COVID pandemic. Disegno Journal assembled a roundtable reminiscence of them, with Mari’s longtime assistant, Francesca Giacomelli; designers Martino Gamper and Corinna Sy; design historian Cat Rossi; and curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Lorenza Baroncelli. Thanks to greg.org reader/hero Doug for sharing the transcript, which has recently been republished.

When Mari died, my regret at never sending him information about my Mari X IKEA table exploration was quickly subsumed by my outrage over the fate of his archive and studio. Mari’s archive, his research, his documentation, his journals, his vast collections, all come up many times in the extensive and fascinating discussion:

Francesca: “This archive is a complex codified diary in which Mari collected and conserved his projects and wider programme of revolutionary ideas; it is his life’s work, the essence of his research. For Mari, “The research is the design, not the product”. Now we need to rediscover those methods and ideas, preserve them, and celebrate their astonishing transformative potential.”

Hans Ulrich “Francesca has this immense knowledge and there are literally 2,000 projects or more that Enzo created during his career – she knows each of those 2,000 projects by heart. There’s no-one on the planet who knows more about Mari than her, but this idea of knowledge production was key for Enzo. He wanted design to convey knowledge and so the exhibition in that sense also has to be about producing knowledge. It would be absolutely contrary to his idea of work if the exhibition was about objects and not research.”

Martino “He was also a collector and had a really big knife collection, for instance. Whenever he traveled, he would buy knives. I wanted it for my Serpentine show [Martino Gamper: Design Is a State of Mind, 2014, ed.], but he wouldn’t lend it. He was an avid collector of everyday objects – a bit like Castiglioni, but actually a lot more. I don’t know what’s going to happen with his private collections. They’ve never been shown. He must have kept the knives in his house, because I never saw them in his studio.”

Lorenza “His studio was impressive. It’s going to be destroyed, in accordance with his wishes, but every room was devoted to a topic. One room for materials; one room for prototypes; and all the chairs were stored in the bathroom. The most interesting room was the kitchen, because that was where they produced objects. He was also obsessed with the archive, so created two books with the list of all the objects in the studio and all the documents. He gave Arabic numbers to every object and catalogued everything in those two books. This programmatic system was the basis of his work and I think is the reason why there was no difference between art and objects and graphic design – for him, it was all part of one unique path.”

Wait what? Yes, you read that right. His studio was going to be destroyed, in accordance with his wishes. And his archive, given to the City of Milan, is sealed from public view for “two generations,” forty years.

On the one hand, and it’s a big hand for me, this is basically the rest of my life. On the other hand, it just feels optimistic, maybe even a little dangerously naive, to entrust one’s legacy to a world as it will exist forty years from now. Maybe that’s the bigger hand, the non-zero possibility that society, much less the Milan municipal government, will not be around to open the Mari box in 2060. Between Francesca and Hans Ulrich, can we not crack this open a little sooner please?

Enzo Mari was a Universe [disegnojournal, s/o designnow]

That Time The Blackmailer Took Photos Of The Salt Lake Temple

c. 1911, by Gisbert Bossard, as published in Dialogue (Fall 1996)

One of the wilder stories I found while researching the Art in America essay on LDS architecture was of the first known photographs of the interior of a temple, which only happened in 1911. That feels late in terms of photography, especially because all four of the Pioneer-era temples in Utah–in St. George, Manti, Logan, and Salt Lake City–all opened in the late 19th century, when photography would have been possible. But though several hundred non-Mormon guests were invited to tour the Salt Lake temple before its dedication in 1893, there was no effort to share images of the interiors of temples with nonbelievers.

the Annex was the glass conservatory filled with plants on the south side of the temple. it was removed after 1941. photo c. 1911, by Gisbert Bossard, as published in Dialogue (Fall 1996)

Which is why in 1911 Gisbert Bossard, a disaffected 21-year-old convert from Switzerland thought the Church would pay a lot of money for the 80 or so photos he secretly made by sneaking into the SLC temple while it was closed for maintenance. Bossard got in with the help of a groundskeeper who tended the conservatoryful of live plants in the room that represented the Garden of Eden, and seems to have had the run of the place. Some of his photos included the offices of the church leaders on the temple’s top floor, and the Holy of Holies, a prayer room off the celestial room reserved only for the president of the Church–and Jesus.

Wait What? Osaka ’70 Isozaki X Thomas Ruff Japanese Press++

Where to even start when I’ve been at it for so long?

World’s Fair pavilion artworks at Expo ’67. Which led to pavilion artworks by painters, and a modest, domestic proposal to chop them up to share with the people,

*Study for Chop Shop Newman Painting No. 1 and Nos. 2-6*, 2015, jpg

which became a thing at an art world’s fair.

World’s Fair pavilion by artists, E.A.T.’s Pepsi Pavilion at Osaka ’70, surrounded by Robert Breer’s float/robots.

On Writing About Mormon Architecture for Art in America

Surrender Dorothy, a classic, early 80s view of the Washington DC LDS Temple from the Beltway, which someone almost immediately flagged as resembling Oz. Ganked from the Washington Post or wherever

A few months ago the editors at Art in America asked if I’d like to write about Mormon architecture for a religion-themed issue. I was like, “Do you want the spectacular space-age temples; the scrappy DIY pioneer rusticity; the mass-produced, suburban Mormcore cringe; or the unprecedented grappling with historical preservation?” And they said, “Yes, absolutely.”

The article is now online. “Building Mormonism: The Fascinating History of LDS Architecture.” Honestly, it feels like it could be three articles, and three more would come out of it. The more I dug and looked, the more interesting and revelatory stuff I found about the way the Church has approached its physical spaces and structures over its almost 200-year history. There’s probably a dissertation to be written on the early 20th century mandate to include a basketball court in every new meetinghouse. Or on the building missionary program that tried to optimize expertise and volunteer labor when demand for churches outstripped the local members’ construction skills. Or the impact on the built sacred environment of having a trans woman lead one of the most ambitious architectural eras in the Church’s history. [I think she’s already writing that last one herself.]

c. 1904 stereograph, The Mormon Temple at Kirtland, Ohio, image via LOC

I’ll add links to resources I found especially useful, and images of the buildings mentioned in the piece, so check back. In the mean time, I would have been lost without two blogs and one book:
Historic LDS Architecture, where Bridger Talbot has been posting original research, photography, and travelogues since 2014
ldsarchitecture.wordpress.com went dormant in 2012, but is still full of photos and accounts of visits to architecturally notable church buildings.
Places of Worship: 150 Years of Latter-day Saint Architecture is Richard W. Jackson’s 2003 historical survey of all the worship places of the LDS Church, and an institutional history of the Church’s Architecture Department, where he worked for many years.
scottcsorensen.templephotos on Instagram provided a steady drip of inspo, and also a sense of perspective, that there was someone else spending even more time thinking about Church architecture than I was.
And of course, whether that is comforting or Content Warning @TexturesofMormonism is the go-to source for recognition of the Church’s 70s and 80s homogeneous aesthetic.

Drawing of the facade of the Nauvoo Temple by architect William Weeks, now in the collection of the LDS Church History Museum, after being preserved for over a century by Weeks’ family

I Want To Live in A Cyklopen

Cyklopen Kulturhas, 2013, Stockholm, design by Viktor Marx

If the Eames House was not available, I decided it would be fine to live in a gas station felt like an appealingly modernist alternative. I’ve kept a list, to which I also added a decommissioned Minneapolis skyway, a temporary MoMA fire escape, and a reconstituted world’s fair pavilion or two. I would also add a greenhouse. There used to be a most excellent abandoned greenhouse on the roof of a building which you could see from the Roosevelt Island tram. Perhaps, I thought, Lacaton & Vassal could help me persuade the family, who, it turns out, really do not want to live in any of these repurposed industrial structures.

Cyklopen ground floor and mezzanine, image: archilovers

Now there is another. [shoutout Geraldine for the heads up] From 2011 until 2013 Stockholm architect and organizer Viktor Marx worked with Cyklopen, an autonomy-minded community organization, to rebuild their gathering space, which had been firebombed by neo-nazis. The result, Cyklopen Kulturhas is as spectacular as it is utilitarian.

Cyklopen ground floor looking the other way, image: mies van der rohe prize

The 2-storey, 459 sq. m. structure was optimized for safety, for flexibility, and for the self-sufficient group’s donated labor. A laminated lumber core was raised by hand, Amish barn-style, and ringed with upscaled scaffolding, on which the greenhouse-style tinted polycarbonate skin was hung. The upper floor, aka The Box, is enclosed and climate controlled; the open ground floor and mezzanine space are not. Let’s say it’s responsive to the climate.

Cyklopen 2 concept art showing Tetris-style tint design, also how The Box fits

There is room to spend a little more than almost no money to bougie up the place without, I think, losing the adapted reuse credibility. Solar panels. Radiant floors. Some Kieran Timberlake-style Bosch Rexroth extruded aluminum beams. [It’s fascinating that even with some formalist similarities, KT’s Cellophane House was optimized for the diametric opposite factors to Cyklopen: high end components were pre-constructed offsite, then shipped and craned into place in midtown in a few days, with stupendous logistical complexity and expense.]

Kieran Timberlake’s *Cellophane House*, 2008, temporarily built on West 53rd Street for MoMA’s prefab show, Home Delivery, image: Aaron Peter at KT

Ultimately, I find what is holding me back from living the gas station/greenhouse/shed dream–besides the family buy-in, obviously–is the suburbanity, the single family house-ness of it all. I am a city person. We are city people, and a site where I could reasonably build a Swedish anarchist Bifröst greenhouse is nowhere near a subway–at least since MoMA built that Jean Nouvel supertower on the vacant lot next door. So I will add Cyklopen to the moodboard in my heart, and wish the original a bright and impactful future.

They accept donations, btw. [cyklopen.se, thanks to @geraldine@post.lurk.org for the heads up.]

Tasty Chandigarh Bookcase

Lot 270, Toomey & Co. design auction, 13 dec 2022

Where has this Pierre Jeanneret teak and steel and glass bookcase been all my life? The Central State Library, you say? Can you loot three more to match?

Suddenly I’m rethinking my moral objections to the emptying of Chandigarh for the aesthetic enrichment of the bourgeoisie of the west. [oh wait, I already rethought it.]

[A couple of obsessed hours later update: there is another. A similar bookcase was sold at Christie’s in Paris in November 2021. It had the same estimate, was in what looks to be less attractive condition–and sold for EUR225,000.

The lot essay says Jeanneret’s “crenelated shelves of the Central Library display case recall the undulating glass panels and alternating railings of the interior architecture he had designed.” Hmm. Here is a photo of the cases installed in the library.

Interior views of the Central State Library, Sector 17, Chandigarh, India by Pierre Jeanneret, photo: Jeet Molhothra, via CCA

Lot 270: Bibliothèque from the Central State Library, Chandigarh, est. $30-50,000 [UPDATE: sold for just $30,700!] [toomey]
Previously, very much related, in that they’re Chandigarh pieces I want: Chandigarh Find

From The Thumbnail Files Of Mr. Walker Evans’ Paintings

Walker Evans, *[House with Gridded Panel and Palm Trees]*, Oct. 14, 1958, tempera on panel, 16×20 in., collection: metmuseum.org

Walker Evans the photographer also painted. Yesterday, art historian/hero Michael Lobel tweeted a selection of Evans’ paintings from the Metropolitan Museum, which holds the artist’s estate and makes copyright claims on it.

The quickest way to describe Evans’ painting is to say he was in the School of Jacob Lawrence. There are 17 paintings by Evans at the Met, plus photos of one–and probably two–others, plus one by his second wife. All are stylized, spare, and flat, painted in tempera on paper or panels. Unlike Lawrence, who often includes figures and crowds in his tempera paintings, Evans’ are landscapes and homes, and buildings, empty of people.

Schindler Pink By (Claudine Schindler and) Stephen Prina

Stephen Prina, *As He Remembered It*, 2011, installation view, Secession, Vienna
image: Wolfgang Thaler

You may remember Stephen Prina from such blog posts as Stephen Prina’s Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet helped inspire the 1:1 scale certificates of authenticity for Facsimile Objects.

I remembered him today as Stephen Prina made two housefuls of Rudolph Schindler furniture and then monochromed them all the 2011 Color Of The Year, PANTONE® 18-2120 Honeysuckle.

What I’d forgotten about As He Remembered It, Prina’s 2011 show at the Secession in Vienna, besides the title, was that it was based on a memory from the 1980s of stumbling across a Schindler built-in desk that had been painted pink, and which had been ripped from its original site, and put on display in a La Brea Avenue shop window.

WilliWear Showroom by SITE, 1982-87

Screenshot of SITE’s WillieWear Showroom and a building they scavenged, from James Wines’ GSD presentation. photos: probably Andreas Sterzing

SITE founder James Wines spoke at Harvard GSD last night for the first–but hopefully not last–time in his 90 years. [It was great, and available online. s/o Alexandra Lange]

Though SITE is most frequently brought up in an architectural context for their BEST Products stores, a project that jumped out at me from Wines’ talk was the 38th Street showroom he and SITE partner Alison Sky created for WilliWear, the groundbreaking ’80s street fashion label of designer Willi Smith. SITE and Smith both had a love for found materials, salvage, junk, and the fabric of the city. Wines talked about how Smith took him on inspo trips to seedy gay clubs on the West Side, and then they’d jack construction material, hardware, plumbing, fencing, bricks, you name it, which ended up artfully installed in the showroom.

Those do look like shackles, but perhaps they’re just abandoned stevedore gear from the piers? Screenshot of a model in SITE’s WilliWear showroom, from James Wines’ GSD talk

SITE’s simple genius was to #monochrome it all out, painting everything a highly aesthetic, and flattering backdrop grey. A runway rulebreaker, Smith used the showroom for fashion shows, too, which, Wines giddily announced, included much nudity.

SITE has used the monochrome strategy in other contexts, to great effect; Wines mentioned how it helps make the public notice each other, and to look good to each other. He didn’t mention Warhol, though, or the Silver Factory, which had a similar effect almost twenty years earlier.

And he didn’t mention if a young Cady Noland worked as an intern at WilliWear, or as a fashion reporter cutting her chops covering these performance art-like shows. But this urban hardwarescape is definitely putting off a Nolandian vibe, which is something I’d not considered before.

Cady Noland, The Clip-on Method, Summer 2021 exhibition at Galerie Daniel Buchholz

Wise also didn’t mention SITE’s design for the Willi Smith retrospective at the Cooper Hewitt. Which, the much-anticipated show opened, haplessly, at the beginning of March 2020 and existed–I can’t say it was open or closed–until the end of 2021. I can’t find any photos; maybe no one saw it in person?

He did mention Rauschenberg as an American Arte Poverist and an inspiration, which Hilton Als had just mentioned, too, in his review of the JAM show at MoMA: “if there is a Black aesthetic it’s about making do, and using what little you have to express who you are.” JAM was Smith’s era, but it’s not clear if it was Smith’s jam; there don’t seem to be any mentions of JAM or Linda Goode Bryant in the Willi Smith Community Archive (yet).

Screenshot of Willi Smith’s office by SITE, featuring what is now called the De-Arch Desk, made of brick, mortar, paint, and glass, from James Wines’ GSD presentation

I did not see the Willi Smith desk turn up in Miami last year. Wines recreated the pile of scavenged bricks and glasstop desk from Smith’s office for Friedman Benda. It is/was available in an edition of 10, though I think he’d respect a bootleg. If you want to head out to a construction site tonight, I’ll bring the car around.

Margaret McCurry Lectureship in the Design Arts: James Wines [harvard.edu]
SITE site [sitenewyork]
Willi Smith: Street Couture [cooperhewitt.org]

Here Are The Coordinates For Michael Heizer’s City

38°01'59.5"N 115°26'37.0"W
a screenshot of the googlemaps image of the above coordinates, which is where the label for michael heizer's city used to be until aug. 22, apparently. maybe just not going is the best flex at this point.

Which has apparently been removed from Google Maps? [h/t @bbhilley]

Previously, related, from 2005 (!): Earth Art via Satellite
cf. Peter Morse’s early roundup of looking for Earth Art via Google Maps [archive.org link]
2002: arguing with the guy who wrote for Artforum about not being able to find the Spiral Jetty [sheesh, I was insufferable, but so was everybody else. 2002 really was another internet country.]

Isamu Noguchi’s Stonecutter’s Ceiling

Stone House, 1972, by Tadashi Yamamoto and Masatoshi Izumi, Mure Japan, image: Yoshi Makino/Cereal

Searching for Isamu Noguchi ceiling is highly recommended.

In 1972, the Noguchi’s longtime collaborator, Masatoshi Izumi, built a house next to the artist’s at their stonecutting yard in Mure, Japan. Izumi, who descends from a long line of stonecutters, worked with a plan by architect Tadashi Yamamoto to realize Stone House. Jared Frank wrote about it for Cereal Magazine:

This salvaged cylinder [made from local aji stone, and the basalt core of the first sculpture Izumi and Noguchi created together] still bears the scars of its violent removal, and is the physical and spiritual core of Stone House. It supports a slender truss system that floats over the walls. Painted red at Noguchi’s urging, the grid is flagrantly hi-tech in contrast with the low-tech stonework. Equal parts Superstudio, Cedric Price, and Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects (1964), Stone House is a compelling, one-of-a-kind synthesis of competing trends in late modernist thought and design. To this day it remains both timeless and distinctly 1972. Noguchi appropriately dubbed it a “modern temple.”

Here are more of Yoshihiro Makino’s photos of Stone House. And a 2018 tumblr post with photos from a Japanese magazine feature.

I went to Noguchi’s Museum and house in Mure when we went to Naoshima in 2006, but I did not know to put Stone House on the itinerary. [1 hour of google map searching later update: it is not next to Isamu-ya, Noguchi’s reconstructed Ed0-era house. I feel better about missing it.]