Art visual np2

Here is the project that Hans Schabus achieved for the Venice Art Biennale 2005: a monumental piece of rock in the middle of the Giardini. The inside part is as impressive as the outside with numerous wooden beams and posts maintaining the building's structural integrity.

The new installation in the Tate Modern 's turbine hall in London for the now traditional Unilever Series has been created by the Chinese artist/architect Ai Wei Wei who populated the ground by 100 millions (!) hand made unique porcelains mimicking a sunflower seed. Visitors are invited to set foot on this particle-landscapes and probably experience the change of the surface imposed by their body. Tate Modern 12 October 2010 – 2 May 2011 (London) photographs belong to the Tate Modern

photograph by Matthieu Kavyrchine I already published some information about R&Sie(n) 's exhibition An Architecture "des humeurs" but I thought it was definitely worth it to introduce less the exhibition in itself and more of the speculation as much as emphasizing the fact that R&Sie(n) is one of the extremely rare architectural offices who offer the totality of documents and information on their website. As an introduction of Francois Roche's lecture at Columbia last week, Mark Wigley brilliantly elaborated on the fact that a lot of contemporary architects are self proclaimed "experimental", "provocative", "on the edge", "innovative"; however the proper of such characteristics is to disturb people by their novelty and few architectures can be defined as suchnowadays. Wigley then affirmed that Roche was one of those few who lead you in the uncomfortable zones of experimental architectures and narratives. Only a little h...

Following is the programme of an upcoming event I really invite you to join ! I'll be around for an installation, and I'll try to do a report for the unlucky ones that won't be able to come. See you there! Utopia today? Saline Royale Arc-et-senans, 22-24.10.2010 friday 22.10.2010 14:00 – 14:30 Andri Gerber, Brent Patterson (ESA Paris) introduction 14:30 – 14:50 Michel Pierre, Director Saline Royale welcome 14:50 – 15:00 Martial Marquet, Paris Rise above 15:00 – 15:30 break 15:30 – 16:00 Ole W. Fischer (Harvard) After Modernity – architecture between utopia, nostalgia and dirty reality? Comments on the uncertain state of an ancient profession… 16:00 – 16:30 Michel Pregardien (Université de Liège) Il n’y a plus de place pour l’utopie 16:30 – 17:00 break 17:00 – 18:00 David Harvey (New York) 18:00 – 19:00 round table discussion , moderators Odile Decq, Andri Gerber, Brent Patterson 19:00 – 20:30 dinner 20:30 movie projection ...

Professor Ivan Shumkov and his crew of courageous Pratt students are opening this Monday at 6:00PM an exhibition on Le Corbusier 's work entitled Miracle Boxes . Pratt being one school that claims itself as fully part of the avant garde, it is quite refreshing to see that this claim still allows an exhibition on one of the most important modernist architect. Here is the text related to the exhibition and the associated lectures: Pratt Institute School of Architecture and the Pratt Library will present "Le Corbusier - Miracle Boxes", a multidisciplinary, three-part exhibition on the work of renowned Swiss-French architect, urbanist, designer, writer, and painter Le Corbusier (born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris), who is considered by many to be the most important architect of the 20th century, starting August 30, 2010. "Miracle Boxes," the first New York exhibition dedicated entirely to the work of Le Corbusier, is curated by Ivan R. Shumkov, Ph.D., adjunct ass...

Lots of things have been already posted online about the Metropolitan Museum's current terrace exhibition, Big Bambú by Starn Studio ; nevertheless I decided to publish some of the photographs I took yesterday while visiting the exhibition. But, rather than attempting to explain the form of this installation (that you can probably find somewhere else), I preferred to insist on the complexity of the lines in order to lost the viewer. One has to admit that Big Bambú is not as extreme than in its former version (see previous post ) since the MET requested a horizontal platform for people to walk on (at least, those who survived from the pretty bad organization of the museum) which forced the installation to re-adopt a more traditional structure made of vertical and horizontal lines than the previous one. Despite this fact, one can still imagine a giant bamboo forest populated by hundreds of Barons in the Trees moving from branch to branch without ever touching the ground again...

After the construction of the French Pavilion at Shanghai which has strictly nothing to say in architectural matters, here is the new proof of the little French architecture world's stupidity. They (La Cite de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine) found nothing more clever to be noticed than to plan to build a 10m tall tower made exclusively out of food in some kind of XVIIIth century nostalgia when it was pretty tasteful to play with food when most of the country was struggling to eat. As Jerome Auzolle recalls in his letter to the Minister of Culture, currently in France, 750 000 people are obliged by their situation to survive thanks to the National Food Aid. This tower is thus a symbol of Sarkozy's France: a society where a majority struggle while a minority do not even understand what reality is made of. "If you don't have a rolex when you're fifty years old, you are a looser" said Jacques Seguela, advertiser and good friend of the President...this coul...

Numen is a Vienna based office that created four different installations exclusively with tape. They appropriate a site, find some attachment nodes and create a penetrable cocoon for their visitors. Those Tape Installations have been produced for two different sites in Vienna, one in Belgrade, and recently one for Berlin's former airport Tempelhof.

Playing the building is a 2005-09 project by Musician David Byrne who connected a piano to a series of devices that make the building around releasing a sound. The sounds can thus be combinated which ultimately creates a symphony that John Cage would have probably not deny. Each visitor of the exhibition are encouraged to try this building instrument that develops a peculiar way of interacting with a building Thanks Martin !

Field Trips is the name of a 2002 exhibition organized for the Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Serralves in Porto. It gathered the work of Bernd & Hilla Becher and Robert Smithson inspired by their visit to Oberhausen in the Ruhr (Germany) in 1968. The fantastic book of the same name offers beautiful photographs by the Bechers and documents (inventory, drawings, pictures etc.) by Smithson, including his famous Asphalt Rundown (1969) that dramatized a stream of burning hot asphalt on the earth.