Entries Tagged 'ARCHITECTURE' ↓

sort of… Yves Klein on The Tube

Like, where is all the publicity this year? You’d think the Sydney Writer’s Festival was all that was on. But here’s architecture critic Elizabeth Farrelly, on Sugimoto:

“Someone asked me to make a building,” he said, “and why not?” Like, this is so easy. The building was the Izu Photo Museum, which opened – with a Sugimoto show, naturally – last October. It’s a shocker. Crude, gauche and charmless, the museum clearly shows just how hard it is to make a decent garden, let alone a decent room.”

slip across and see cai guo-qiang’s exhibition of “peasant da vincis” at the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai until August 8th, 2010 on designboom now

now that the ABC 1 has officially played that embarrassing ground-hog day fill-in “I ask myself what makes a building sing…” (the evolving model in the forest) for the 1000th time, there must be a way to vote the dork of all architects OFF our tubes? Ideas?

Have you seen what they do in front of the Serpentine Gallery in London for summer each year? So where’s the Architecture lobby when you need it? What better way of invigorating the dead heart of Canberra? While there’s still some $$$ in the Chief Minister’s kitty…

And did you see? “There is no budget for the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion commission. It is paid for by sponsorship, sponsorship help-in-kind and the sale of the finished structure, which does not cover more than 40% of its cost. The Serpentine Gallery collaborates with a range of companies and individuals whose support makes it possible to realise the Pavilion.”

See the slide show of all the pavilions here.

Remember the first competition for a redesigned MCA in Sydney? We could have had an iconic SANAA building before they became famous. Now they’ve won the Pritzker Prize… What went wrong?

James Weirick wrote, in part: “…in 1997 a competitive process was launched to select an architect, based on briefing papers by Graham Jahn. Seven eminent architects were interviewed: Andrew Andersons (Sydney) in partnership with Atsushi Kitagawara (Japan); Peter Corrigan and Maggie Edmond (Melbourne); Mikko Heikkinen and Marku Komonen (Finland); Steven Holl (United States); Enric Miralles (Spain); Kazuyo Sejima (Japan); Tod Williams and Billie Tsien (United States). The selection committee consisted of John Reid, then chairman of the MCA board, director Leon Paroissien, chief curator Bernice Murphy, NSW Government Architect Chris Johnson, and filmmaker George Miller. The winner, announced in June 1997, was Sejima [half of SANAA]. George Miller captured the panel’s enthusiasm, declaring that Sejima combined “tremendous technical rigour… with the ability to enchant. Like all great art her work is clear, potent and ineffable. I have no idea how she does it, but the magic is unmistakable.” This was the last Sydney heard of the Sejima scheme. The abandonment of Sejima is the tragic prequel to the current competition. How it happened is not entirely clear, but funding problems and management changes were undoubtedly major factors…”

(I wish I could track an image of SANAA’s MCA for you…)

See Australian Design Review. Note to self: west-facing wall will pose a few challenges, no?

And see this example in the Sudan, a housing complex for hospital employees…

Once the most densely populated place on earth. On Magnesium Photos.

is a tumbler blog (or so I’m told). Imaginary photo-narratives built on images from Dwell.

When you paint an office building, you have to clean lots of rollers everyday. So you use the Dulux Envirowash System, don’t you? Gives a good impression, doesn’t it? Corporate responsibility at its best…

And then at the end of each day you empty about 100 litres of grey paint into Lake Burley Griffin, and then you hose down the evidence.

Positioning it over the stormwater drain opening should have given the game away…