Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

Mark your calendars: MAD (Museum of Arts and Design) is presenting a retrospective of director Andrei Tarkovsky's films this Summer. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time "presents the work of the revolutionary director and includes screenings – all on 35 mm – of all seven feature films and a behind-the-scenes documentary." The retrospective starts on July 10, with one film screened per week until August 28.


[Nostalghia, 1983, Andrei Tarkovsky, image courtesy of Kino Lorber]

To date I've only seen Nostalghia from 1983, his first film made outside of Russia. It is, like the rest of his films (or so I've been told and read), a slow and meditative film. It is so full of poetic images that it is easily one of the best films I've ever seen; it is cinema as a true art form. It made me want to see the rest of the films, but it's often hard to devote more than two hours to one of Tarkovsky's films or to get in the mood for them – they are the antithesis of today's binge-watching screen culture. Perhaps I needed MAD's retrospective as an excuse to finally see Solaris, Stalker, Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Rublev, The Mirror, and The Sacrifice, not to mention the documentary Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky that came out in 1988, two years after the director died.


[Nostalghia, 1983, Andrei Tarkovsky, image courtesy of Kino Lorber]

The name of the MAD program takes its name from a book by Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, of which I've read only parts but can nevertheless see the parallels between his words and his images. He writes near the end: "Today it seems to me far more important to talk not so much about art in general or the function of cinema in particular, as about life itself; for the artist who is not conscious of its meaning is unlikely to be capable of making any coherent statement in the language of his own art." Tarkovsky's statements may not always be obvious, but like any poetry, his films are worth watching to discover meaning and to behold as things of beauty.

Read More

BIG's 2WTC for FOX

Wired magazine has unveiled Bjarke Ingels' design for Two World Trade Center, which he took over from Norman Foster after Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox and News Corp decided to move into the tower developed by Larry Silverstein.


[All images are screenshots from the video found at the bottom of this post]

In a three-minute video from Silverstein Properties, Ingels describes the 1,340-foot-high tower as melding the glass towers of Lower Manhattan with the historic building stock of Tribeca.



Seven roughly twelve-story blocks are stacked atop each other and shifted to create terraces rising on the east side of the tower and ticker-tape soffits on the north.



Yet from the WTC memorial the tower's south and west elevations are flat, in order to fit with the other towers and complete the development's spiral of four towers.



The video is kind of a hoot, with one minute of Ingels speaking and gesturing, a one-minute voyage inside the building (blink and you'll miss Homer Simpson), and some hard-driving keyboards accompanying the various tower renderings at the end.



Check it out:

Read More

A Short Guide to the LFA

Head on over to World-Architects to see some highlights from the London Festival of Architecture taking place this June.


[Yellow Pavilion by Hall McKnight Architects in King’s Cross, as part of ID2015’s New Horizon_architecture from Ireland, for the London Festival of Architecture 2015. Photo: ©Ed Reeve]

Read More

Today's archidose #842

Here are some photos of The 606 by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, which opened today in Chicago, Illinois. Photos by John Zacherle.

















To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

:: Join and add photos to the archidose pool

To contribute your Instagram images for consideration, just:

:: Tag your photos #archidose

Read More

The Collectivity Project

Last Thursday, artist Olafur Eliasson, with some architects from the area (OMA, Field Operations, Steven Holl, DS+R, BIG, etc.), unveiled The Collectivity Project on the High Line at 30th Street. It looked like this:

[Photo by Timothy Schenck, courtesy of Friends of the High Line]

Two days later, when I visited with my wife, our daughter, and some friends, it looked more like this:




My wife overheard somebody who worked at one of the participating architecture firms say that their "building" was completely unrecognizable. For me, the most signature model from the ones shown at top is the OMA contribution in the left foreground, a mini version of their unbuilt 23 West 22nd Street project (a design meant for LEGOs really). With only a bit of the walls with windows intact, the design looked pedestrian:


So as quickly as 36 hours the creations of notable architects were reduced to rubble, in some cases, or strange hybrids. Their creations will be something else entirely by the time The Collectivity Project ends in late September. There's a lesson here somewhere, but all I know is my daughter really enjoyed it, and I can't imagine any kid who wouldn't:

Read More

Book Review: Portraits of the New Architecture 2

Portraits of the New Architecture 2 by Richard Schulman
Assouline, 2015
Hardcover, 170 pages



As the title to this coffee table book makes clear, it is the second Portraits book by photographer Richard Schulman; the first was released in 2004. Paul Goldberger, in his introduction, states Schulman didn't intend that book to be the first in a series, and when my sister got me the book for my birthday a decade ago, I can't say I considered it the first installment of a series either (in my review, though, I did say a future update would be good, to make up for a geographical bias). But it makes sense to do it again. The format – portraits of well known architects paired with photographs of one of their recent buildings – is a unique and compelling way of presenting contemporary architecture and the personalities creating it.



A good deal has changed in the eleven years since the first Portraits, be it in terms of architectural form making, how information about architecture is disseminated, and the architects designing the buildings that get the most media attention. In regards to the last, even though some of the architects in Portraits 2 – Tatiana Bilbao, Bjarke Ingels, nARCHITECTS, SO-IL, WORKac, etc. – are too young to have been considered for the first book, there are older generations in the same pages: David Chipperfield, Fumihiko Maki, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Rafael Moneo, Moshe Safdie, and Alvaro Siza, to name a few. This diversity indicates that Schulman takes a broad approach to presenting architects and their buildings, and that the roughly 30-50 spots in each book is not enough to cover all of the worthy architects. Perhaps a third installment will arrive sooner than 2026.



Although much has changed in the decade since the first book, Schulman's style of photography is relatively consistent; it's not unchanged, but with the portraits in particular his distinct approach to lighting, framing, and composition is apparent. As in the first book, Schulman likes strong shadows, colored lights, and settings conducive to comfort – many of the architects are filmed in their offices, at home, or inside one of their buildings. Most of the portraits are full-body or waist-up shots, and most of the architects are found indoors, so exceptions to these tendencies stand out: a close-up of Tatiana Bilbao pressing her forehead to a window to look down and Fumihiko Maki standing on a Manhattan rooftop, as two examples.

But when so many photographers (professional and amateur alike) are washing out shadows with too much white light, I most appreciate Schulman's dark shadows, more evident in the portraits but present as well in the shots of buildings. There is something to be said for using shadows to emphasize a shape or a space, whatever the case may be, and to let the shadows describe something to the viewer in a way that doesn't reveal everything. Ultimately the book – its portraits, individual buildings, and short, two-paragraph descriptions by Schulman – does a similar thing: it gives a taste of the architects and their creations, all the while using his photographs as a link between the two.

Read More

Book Review: Conversations with Architects

Conversations with Architects: In the Age of Celebrity by Vladimir Belogolovsky
DOM Publishers, 2015
Paperback, 584 pages



Curator and author Vladimir Belogolovsky did not set out to make a book on the celebrity phenomenon in architecture, as the name to this collection of 30 interviews with well known architects might indicate. Rather, as part of his work as a curator and a curiosity he partly attributes to the late John Hejduk, the conversations that took place starting in December 2002 were about various aspects of architecture and its profession, only occasionally about "starchitecture." Sure, the names are big ones, as evidenced by a quick glance at the cover, but this has more to do with particular projects, exhibitions, or other circumstances that led to the conversations, rather than Belogolovsky having sought out celebrity architects just for being such.

Nevertheless, Belogolovsky does not shy away from the elephant in the room, since architects have to deal with the celebrity phenomenon just like any profession, and putting all these architects into one book would eventually lead to that theme coming to the fore. As Belogolovsky spells out in his introduction, he started interviewing architects when they gained the national and international spotlight thanks to the competition for the World Trade Center master plan in late 2002. In his mind, the publicity around the competition put architects and architecture in the public eye more than ever before. The book is then a way of exploring the theme of celebrity, at least inadvertently or from another angle, rather than head on. Whatever the case, the interviews are a delight to read, thanks to Belogolovsky's probing questions and his curiosity as to an architect's motives. The best conversations are the long ones where the architects are open and when the two are able to delve further into specific projects or ways of thinking.

In addition to the interviews with architects, the book has conversations with Charles Jencks and Kenneth Frampton, both serving to provide context, like the author's introduction. Following the 30 interviews is a section with quotes by "missing architects," those who weren't interviewed or whose interviews didn't make it into the book (since 2002, Belogolovsky has interviewed over 100 architects). This short section – followed by a color page of magazines featuring architects on their covers, most of them non-trade magazines like Fast Company, Time, and Wired – extends the reach of the celebrity theme, as does the index, which includes other big-name architects who are mentioned in the interviews. Based on number of mentions in the index, the most popular celebrity architects are, in descending order, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Le Corbusier, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Mies van Der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright. These names make clear that the celebrity phenomenon is not new, even though the prevalent digital and print media make it appear to be a contemporary creation.

Read More