Artist Dominic Wilcox has created this amazing installation called “Field” for the London Design Festival that I think is just exquisite in both message and execution. Using 200 pairs of sustainable built shoes from Terra Plana with 400 laces, Wilcox added what he called “a touch of magic to the show laces as they rise up in unison and grow towards the window’s light.” See the video below for a description of the installation from the artist.
Tuesday September 29th 2009, 10:09 am
Filed under: Art, Temporary
Drawing lines in the sand is interesting when you think about how the English idiom of to ‘draw a line in the sand’ is to essentially create some artificial boundary of which should not be crossed without consequence. This can be a serious matter but what if these lines were to cross, curve or basically dance across the shimmering grains at the edge of the sea…it becomes playful and fun, anything but serious.
San Fransisco-based artist Andres Amador paints, or rather rakes, beautiful lines into the sandy canvas of beaches in his California home city. In over the last 5 years he has managed to create over 100 pieces of tidal art. From a doodle he creates larger computer drawings to work out the details before launching into action with his rake. Since he must work according to the tides, his window of opportunity is limited so each design has to be carefully planned ahead of time.
Working with the constraints of the tides does make it challenging for crafting the pieces as well as allowing only for a short viewing time, but it is this temporary nature that makes them so exciting when a viewer is lucky enough to happen upon them. It’s a surprise, a discovery and a unique opportunity. It shows that beauty is everywhere, even if only for a small glimpse before disappearing.
Tuesday September 29th 2009, 8:33 am
Filed under: Notes
Lately I’ve felt rather exhausted by the idea of green building design. Put a building in a tree, bury it or cover it in some unidentified field of green fuzzy stuff and it’s suddenly sustainable, no matter how absurd the concept may be. When I saw this sketch from one of my favorite sites, Variations on Normal, I couldn’t help but laugh in how appropriate it was in it’s absurdity. But let’s be honest, who doesn’t want to sled down that hill? I’ll take the penthouse suite please.
Most of the time I love looking at things that go way outside the box because, why not? It’s good fun. But so many times in architectural designs plants have become an accessory like wall covering or paint and gets tacked on in the most ridiculous ways and expected to survive or even produce food. Reaching beyond working solutions has almost become the norm and the photoshop renderings littering the blogosphere are beginning to look eerily similar in both style, content and that infamous greening filter. I find myself looking at drawings and constantly asking, what IS that patch of green? Lately reading has been less inspiring and therefore blogging as well which has sadly taken a backseat to my busy schedule as of late. Time to get back to it, things are piling up.
Last Friday the 18th was the annual PARK(ing) Day event where people from all corners of the globe take over parking spaces and turn them into temporary public parks for the day. This is an especially fun event because it’s not limited to designers, but includes anyone who’s willing to take the day off from work and put together a park to hang out in including local businesses, magazines, food vendors, community groups, artists, musicians, etc. It’s a great way to bring the community together in public spaces to interact, engage and play.
This year I had the opportunity to get together with two friends and fellow landscape architects, Brett Milligan and Jason King, to have a little fun up in Seattle while supporting some fabulous urban void activation headed up by Keith Harris on the People’s Parking Lot in Capitol Hill. A full list of the participating groups can be found here. Here’s just a few of the highlights…
In the middle of the whole event, the Capitol Hill Community Council and Unpaving Paradise, sponsors of the event, teamed up for a lush, tent-covered park. The park become a welcome place to relax since the site was bathed in hot sun for most of the day.
The Seattle Arts and Lectures park titled “Words Matter” featured a table of cookies, tea and inspiring books along with a board that encouraged people to paint, draw and incorporate inspiring phrases in a community art piece. One book on their table that particularly caught my attention was “Wake Up In Brightness”, a book they published that features poetry and prose from students. It was mpressive to see entries from students as young as early grade school years craft such beautiful words.
Brite Collective, an extension of JOIN, provides fun lectures and events aimed at uniting Seattleites through design and igniting inspiration to take part in their creative community. For PARK(ing) Day, Brite held an event called “Negative Space: A Biographical Field Sketch” which included a 1 hour interpretive walk to explore the identity of space, discuss cognitive mapping and sketch in a provided journal.
Hollow Earth Radio, a community-run online radio station, had a tent on-site where they were taking the urban confessions of anyone who was interested in talking. These will then appear on their website at a later date.
Flash Volunteer was there with some green space in support of their pretty cool project that helps bring events and volunteers together in an organized fashion.
This park called “Air Stream” was created by a group of designers who called themselves Signal to Noise. The intention was that the plastic rods along the edge would wave in the wind but unfortunately or fortunately, it was sunny and not at all windy that day.
Our neighboring park by the Seattle-based multidisciplinary firm SvR Design was complimentary to ours with a rec room outfitted with a couch, comfy chairs, a table full of games and a popular ping pong table.
One of our personal favorites was the sweet tunes 12 Hour Notice was pumping out from his pimped out ride. Seriously, the shopping cart was pretty cool, pictures don’t do it justice. He was there in his spot for most of the day, hardly moving. I’m not even sure he ate anything all day. When I went over to tell him how much we appreciated having him on the lot, I also found out that he was incredibly nice.
The only thing that got the mobile dj to sit down was the hour long performance from Toy Box Trio towards the end of the day. They brought with them a concertina, toy piano and tuba that mixed together for an interesting sound with a carnival flair. At one point they even introduced the sounds of an old fashioned typewriter.
Our park titled “4-Play” was split into quadrants of two areas of game play and two areas of vegetated seating, displaying that a park isn’t just made up of recreation or green space but instead consists of a good mix of both.
The games in the park consisted of a much longer twister game made of soft carpet and an oversized connect four game that became the highlight of the park and brought out the kid as well as the competitiveness in many people that stopped by to play a game or two.
In our green space, we had grassing seating “booths” that featured retro carpet dots covering one side for a soft surface to lean against and a poster board on the other side filled with planter pockets of bright yellow in both the national and Seattle PARK(ing) Day posters.
images (c) Lisa Town
At the end of the day an awards ceremony was held that included all parks within the Seattle metro area. Our park won the award for “Most Playful” park and we left Seattle with a prize of some park-based games from two local game shops. It was a fun event and we met lots of wonderful people and it was great to be a part of the local community for a day. Thanks to everyone on Capitol Hill that was involved and to Keith Harris for organizing the memorable event. I’m already looking forward to PARK(ing) Day 2010!
Wednesday September 23rd 2009, 4:40 am
Filed under: Art
When I first saw imagery of the work of swiss artist Felice Varini, I thought they were images that someone had drawn shapes overtop of with some sort of computer program. The stark colors with their slight look of transparency seemed unusual and I wasn’t sure of why someone would choose to draw such simple shapes over images of interior and exterior spaces. And then I realized it wasn’t drawn on the photo, but the actual space itself. Suddenly everything was different.
Varini has been making his unique style of art since the late 70’s that focuses in on the relationship between the viewer and the art, not just the space the art inhabits. His lines appear to be floating within the spaces, suspended but semi-transparent.
It’s interesting to see not only the warping of the lines to achieve the right perspective but also that he has to take into consideration the objects within the space and how they should interact with the lines.
The image at the very top of this post is also interesting to see when viewed from other angles other than the “right” one. The lines run horizontally and vertically, across the face of the building, over windows and curving faces. I would imagine this was quite a challenge due to the organic nature of some of the pieces surrounding the building.
He even works with odd viewpoints like having his objects appear in a mirror within the space where the mirror becomes the viewer of the correct perspective.
Another interesting piece was a circle seemingly hovering above and yet intersecting with a highway in Switzerland. This would certainly be an interesting find while driving through the mountainous country.
It would be interesting to witness the feeling of surprise upon seeing the circle and then observing the distortion while driving closer and understanding just how the piece was done. A very curious moment in auto observations indeed.
While playing with perspective is not a new concept but rather one that artists have dealt with for centuries, there are always new ways of looking at it and warping it to fit the artists vision. This is certainly an interesting take on fitting a drawing of painted lines into the reality of space that I find intriguing. For many more amazing images of Felice Varini’s decades of work, visit his website.
Things have been busy lately and between various trips and other things, I haven’t found much time to make good use of all the fabulous things that are accumulating on my computer. Things are definitely piling up on that front. Although, it’s nice to take some time off and sort of disconnect from the virtual world temporarily.
One thing I’m certainly looking forward to is the PARK(ing) Day event on Friday the 18th which seems to be getting more and more interesting as the day draws near. I’ll be participating with some friends in Seattle in their Central Park, a parking lot turned into a mass of mini parks along with entertainment, lectures, charettes, food and whatever else. There will even be a prize for the best park.
More upon my return regarding the event and the park I’ve been working on for the last few days and hopefully some fabulous pictures as well. And if you are in Seattle and want to come check out the event, check the People’s Parking Lot(s) blog for more info about the space and the event that will be taking place at 500 E. Pine in Capitol Hill. I hope to see you there!
At 8 stories tall, rising from the street of Piccadilly to the top of the penthouse, the new green wall designed by Patrick Blanc for The Athenaeum Hotel is London’s tallest living wall. In addition to 12,000 plants making up the vertical artistic greenery, the wall hosts the world’s biggest collection of Urticaccae chosen from countries in Asia which will thrive within the shade of the ground level.
From hotels website: “Using his pioneering planting techniques, Patrick Blanc has created another spectacular Living Wall at The Athenaeum. It uses more species of plants than any other Vertical Garden in the UK – including the world’s biggest single collection of Urticaceae. Patrick carefully collected the different species from dripping warm locations all over East Asia. Next, he propogated the plants in a nursery in the South of France then inserted the roots into the specially constructed, irrigated felt at The Athenaeum.”
Patrick Blanc’s latest work of art in the heart of London near Hyde Park features both native species as well as tropical ones that have been chosen for their ability to thrive in a climate that is similar to that of the microclimate on the hotel wall. Noteworthy plants include Begonias, Fuchsias, Impatiens, Iris, Ficus, many species of nettles and one of my personal favorites, the maidenhair fern.
Wednesday September 02nd 2009, 11:24 pm
Filed under: Art, Guerilla
Kim Brusselmans, a native of Belgium currently living Barcelona and owner of both a publicity and a t-shirt company, has been exploring an interesting style of street art through his guerilla-style street art, he attempts to bring a little love to the street in a somewhat subtle and surprising way. He even has a book called Love Injections that captures the whole lot. It’s an interesting thought in that it can be ways of expressing your feelings for the one you love, the one you want or just spreading a little love to those in the near vicinity. Either way, it’s highly entertaining and smile-inducing.
Brusselman’s street art project simply goes by Brusse and has three different projects thus far: Streetlove, Heart Attacks and Love Injections.
Heart Attacks focuses on oversized heart-shaped locks with messages located within, on or around specific objects or scenery.
Love Injections…
And last but certainly not lease is my favorite of the bunch, the Streetlove project that explores the act of love as represented through various objects and setup situations within the urban street environment.
During the life of a vehicle, it goes through a few tire changes. With a lot of vehicles getting new tires, that’s a lot of of tires piling up. And now with the Cash for Clunkers program…that’s a lot more tires. So what to do with all this rubber? Well, there’s a few options, one of them of course being art.
This first set of pictures is of an installation that uses hundreds of inner tubes by Héctor Serrano Studio in honor of World Environment Day 2008 in Valencia, Spain, commissioned by the City Council. His website explains that the “installation transforms the tire into an architectural element, questioning the use and perception we have of garbage.”
The image above is a sculpture made from shredded tires called “Gridlock” by Chakaia Booker, an artist who uses tires as her medium of choice in all of her art, often full of rich textures created entirely by cutting, molding, shaping and shredding this typically rigid material into something flexible.
Above is an installation from The Whitney Museum of Art Biennial 2000 called “It’s So Hard To Be Green” featuring re-purposed tires on wood. Below is a piece called “No More Milk and Cookies” created in 2003, now resides in the DeCordova Sculpture Park in Lincoln, MA and manages to take this otherwise rigid material and transform it into a fluid piece that almost seems as if it were trying to capture the effect of motion or rather, emotion. The name of this piece, according to DeCordova, is a “statement [that] carries a different meaning as an adult. Booker questions our commercially driven society, and what happens when consumption is prohibited. ‘No matter how old you are, you’re constantly being checked,’ says Booker, who closely observes the influence of marketing and the profusion of products in our daily lives. The artist believes that the inability to obtain all material desires does not stop us from believing that life would be better if there were just one more cookie on the plate.”
Another piece in the sculpture park by Booker, “The Conversationalist” features rubbery black collumns splaying and fanning out while at the same time weaving in on itself. From DeCordova, “Like an actual conversation, this piece physically represents a gradual building of elements that climax at a point of tension or harmony. The many angles of this sculpture create negative spaces that represent opposing arguments and varying opinions. Beginning with conflict and disagreement at its base, the form labors to break free of emotional constraints as it pushes towards the sky and comes to a realization. While independently complex, the two segments that define the overall layout of the sculpture arrive at a final point of accord at the apex.”
The details of the sculpture provide another layer of depth with the overlapping pieces of rubber revealing the movement of the old tire tread wrapping and weaving around the collumns. The metal screws holding the pieces in place give it an industrial feel.
With the growing amount of this malleable material, I can only imagine all the products and art that will continue to emerge. It’s not garbage, it’s potential.
Food carts. We love ‘em. And here in Portland they’re practically a way of urban life. There are even blogs out there like Food Carts Portland that are dedicated to carts throughout the city…telling people what’s new and where the best food is located. There are even sites that map out the location of the carts and link to each one’s website. It’s a great way to activate a street or enliven the edge of a parking lot and provide affordable lunch time eats for the downtown professionals.
Now, there is a new site that has popped up here in Portland that wants to help give a personal spin on the carts. The site is iheartfoodcarts.com and while it is located in Portland, the site hopes to extend beyond the Oregon borders to encompass the entire food cart culture. The site is calling for food cart stories and pictures to publish a type of magazine, something based solely around the love for urban carts. So you have thoughts to share, check it out. It will be interesting to see where this goes.
image via 
