Philip Beesley takes the same core idea as the point of departure both for his architecture and his otherworldly installations: the shared experience of public space. “How architecture makes a place fundamentally,” says Beesley, “and the collective experience of dwelling, encounter, and sharing stands at the core of both practices.”
Rob Fischer, whose background is in sculpture, has been building domestic structures since college and often moves them from one remote rural landscape to another, exploring the seemingly opposing ideas of protection and adventure.
Sarah Oppenheimer studied painting at Yale, where she received her M.F.A. in 1999, but, over the last decade, architecture has been her canvas and medium. Oppenheimer manipulates existing architectural spaces, distorting our perception of an interior’s geometry and programmatic logic.
Snarkitecture, the name that artist Daniel Arsham and designer Alex Mustonen have given their nearly 10-year-old design collaboration, cuts two ways. On the one hand, it references the fictional creature in Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem “The Hunting of the Snark”; on the other, it invokes the arch tone of Internet writing.
Architects and artists alike have long idolized Gordon Matta-Clark for his aggressive transformations of existing buildings. From slicing a suburban home in half (Splitting, 1974) to carving a cone out of 17th-century French apartments (Conical Intersect, 1975), Matta-Clark pioneered the manipulation of found architecture to create complex perceptual and social effects.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has been collecting architecture and design since 1870, when it was given a Roman sarcophagus. More recent acquisitions include a stairway from the Chicago Stock Exchange Building, by Louis Sullivan, and an entire living room by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Museum curators tend to stay behind the scenes, especially when high-profile artists are involved. But the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, which runs through October 19, has been so lavishly praised that its curator, Scott Rothkopf, couldn’t stay out of the spotlight if he tried.
A set of rowhouses combines a traditional all-wood structure with strategies for generating and saving energy, offering a new model for low-carbon living.