The first object that visitors find when they arrive at Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity at New York’s Museum of Modern Art is not a tubular steel chair or a coffee and tea service or any of the other icons that have come to represent the storied German school. Instead, it is a photograph showing a group of students posing inside a stack of gridded shelves taken as a memento when founding director Walter Gropius departed. Photo ' Scott Rudd (top); Estate of Erich Consemüller (bottom) Installation view of Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity at the Museum of Modern Art
An idiosyncratic show in Chicago evokes a designer’s inclusive architecture. The spotlight given to Lina Bo Bardi’s work leading up to her centennial last year revises one of the great oversights of 20th-century design history. Though the Italian-born architect who practiced most prominently in Brazil designed several monumental projects, her legacy had long been overshadowed by the likes of Niemeier and Costa. But to a contemporary eye, her work offers a humanist rejoinder to the grandiose forms of her male peers, and it has recently found a wider audience with a wave of monographs and exhibitions. One small, but well-traveled
This Jordan-based architect is monitoring the ISIS-led destruction of historic sites and spearheading efforts to stop it. In a video that provoked outrage as it made its way across the Internet in February, men in military clothing ransacked Iraq’s Mosul Museum, toppling statues of ancient rulers from their pedestals before pounding the figures—some replicas but others original—with sledge- hammers.
Even on a particularly airless late-summer evening, the appeal of the Bywater, a once-working-class New Orleans neighborhood just downriver from the French Quarter, cuts through the oppressive humidity.
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.
Andreas Angelidakis is not sure why millions of people are obsessed with cat videos. “It’s a curious thing, what captures people’s attention,” he says. “Architecture is a lot slower than that kind of exchange of images.”
Allyson Vieira builds monuments—but she uses unexpectedly humble material. Take her 2013–14 exhibition The Plural Present. There, the New York–based artist filled a gallery with Classical ruins: The City Wall, 2013, delimited the space with a colonnade that framed Beauty, Mirth, and Abundance, 2013, three figures striking acontrapposto that echoes the famed Greek statue of the three graces at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.