The artist Iván Navarro takes an anachronistic piece of New York’s skyline and turns it into one of his perception-confounding, selfie-ready installations. They are as much a symbol of New York City as the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings, but far more humble. The wooden water towers that dot the city’s rooflines seem like relics from an older era, and yet they still provide water to thousands of buildings, doing their job well enough that centuries of technological advances have failed to render them entirely obsolete. For his exhibition This Land Is Your Land, Chilean-born, Brooklyn-based artist Iván Navarro planted
Two young collaborators organize an art fair like a puzzle. Andrew Feuerstein and Bret Quagliara designed a configuration of temporary exhibition spaces for the Independent Art Fair, which runs March 7-9 in New York City. Art and design fairs often provide a platform for emerging designers—Design Miami has long commissioned installations for its entrance, and Frieze New York’s serpentine tent gave a serious boost to the career of SO-IL, to name a few. But this year, the Independent Art Fair took a risk, hiring a couple of untested young collaborators to design the exhibition spaces at its New York fair,
To adapt to a rapidly changing context, Andrew Berman updates a New York art space’s historic building, originally renovated by Maya Lin. A rendering of Andrew Berman's addition to and renovation of SculptureCenter's building, a 1908 former trolley repair shop in New York City. To get to SculptureCenter—the tiny but influential contemporary art institution in New York City—when it first moved to Long Island City, Queens, you used to turn down a narrow, mildly forbidding dead-end street in a low-rise industrial neighborhood. Alongside beat-up brick facades, plywood barriers, and chain link fences, a shimmering metal gate designed by Maya Lin
The Museum of Modern Art’s contemporary art space, MoMA/P.S.1, announced today that the winner of this year’s Young Architects Program commission will rise with the help of a kind of architectural huitlacoche. The winning proposal, designed by New York firm The Living (helmed by David Benjamin, a director at Columbia University's Living Architecture Lab), calls for a cluster of towers built inside the courtyard at MoMA/P.S.1, a former public school in Queens, New York. The structure, titled Hy-Fi, will be made from components that combine corn stalks with mycelium, a root material in fungus that grows into mushrooms. Both ingredients
A firm transforms Mexico's national cinema into a bustling, sexy civic hub. The joke goes like this: the person handing out woven mats for visitors to sit on while watching outdoor film screenings on the lawn of Mexico City's Cineteca Nacional is said to ask young couples if they would like one mat, or—lilting into a suggestive tone—two.
Everything in its Place: In Northwest Arkansas, a design firm responds to a hemmed-in site for a Montessori elementary school with a playfully inventive plan.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Maria Montessori wrote, “Education is a natural process carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words, but by experiences in the environment.”
In typical Robert Moses fashion, when a 1961 urban renewal project added an ice skating rink to a blighted section of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, it came along with an imposing facility and a 250-car parking lot. The change took a chip out of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s diamond-shaped masterpiece, cutting off a lake at the southern end of the park from the broad pathway that winds around its perimeter.
Early this afternoon, during a preview of his firm’s new building for the Perez Art Museum Miami, Jacques Herzog sat in a window seat in a second floor gallery and discussed what the building lacked. “It doesn’t really have a form,” he said, looking out at Biscayne Bay past rows of thin concrete columns supporting a trellis overhead. “It’s more about its permeability. There is so much form in Miami. We wanted to do something that shows the potential in this city to let in sun and vegetation.” In a town where form is often everything and ornament is the
The 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale feels like a work in progress. But that’s the idea, according Beatrice Galilee, the London-based editor and curator who organized the exhibition.