Yesterday, Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Check out the great feedback!
By way of Arrested Motion
Monthly Archive for January, 2010
Check out this city built entirely out of shipping containers outside of Mexico City. In the addition to housing he city consists of restaurants, bars, shops, art galleries, and an open public area with ping pong tables. There are similar projects in London and a development going up in New York on Lafayette Street.
For more: FP: Pic of the Day: Shipping Container City
Also have a look at the Container City website with some interesting projects.
PS 216 in New York is getting an edible schoolyard with the help of Work AC, Edible Schoolyard NY and the Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Foundation. The edible schoolyard will begin construction this summer and will include a solar powered building that will hold a kitchen classroom with communal tables where children can share meals they make from food they grow in the garden. In addition Work AC incorporated a chicken coop, a composting system, an outdoor pizza oven and a cistern to collect rainwater. A movable greenhouse will be rolled out each fall.
Fore more: NYT: School Adds Weeding to Reading and Writing and AD: Edible Schoolyard / Work AC
A couple of days ago the MoMA officially announced the winners of P.S. 1′s Young Architects Program: Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (SO-IL). Their project, Pole Dance, is an “interconnected system of poles and bungees whose equilibrium is open to human action and environmental factors.”
Barry Bergdoll, the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA, sums it up the best: “Pole Dance is a brilliant – playful and sincere at once – response to our increasingly virtual world of social media and computer screen games. For a season, with simple materials and elegant engineering, the P.S.1 courtyard is converted into an occupiable game and social zone with many of the markers of the virtual world realized in elements that partake of the traditional playground or gym. Here the net is literal and physical, the space tangible, the encounters unprogrammable. Yet the system is dynamic and interactive and – in the spirit of this year’s call for a response to contemporary issues of sustainability – all the materials can be reused and redeployable.”
For more: AD: SO-IL wins P.S.1 competition or read the MoMA’s press release.
Here is a great post by way of our friends at CoolHunting.com about the SEED Emergency Housing project by the Department of Architecture and the Department of Landscape Architecture at Clemson University. The project uses designs made of shipping containers that were originally made for housing in the Carribean. Ever since Katrina and now Haiti, these homes are being used as solutions to the housing problems since they are built to withstand Hurricanes and Earthquakes. For more: CH: SEED Emergency Housing Shipping Containers
Here are a couple of new options for emergency housing by way of Design Observer. Of course they have their drawback: limited production, cost and delivery time but with time and effort this can all be improved. All in all the designs look very promising and will hopefully be implemented very soon.
As you can all imagine one of my main concerns with Haiti (other then medical and food) is shelter and infrastructure. I have been doing some reading that I want to share with you. One of the most prominent organizations for this cause is Architects for Humanity and Cameron Sinclair. Sinclair wrote a very important article for the Huffington Post that anyone who is interested in the reconstruction of Haiti should read. He is right on the ball.
Here is the article: HP: Haiti Quake: A Plan for Reconstruction.
Please visit the above links and article for more information. You can also follow me on my twitter page or click on the sidebar twitter button. I will be posting all I can find on the subject on my twitter page so please don’t hesitate to connect and/or follow me or drop me a line by email.
By way of Flavorwire
James Franco seems to be everywhere these days, on soap operas, on sitcoms and in the art world. Here is an interesting post by way of Flavorwire, the arts and culture wing of Flavorpill that dares ask…Is James Franco the next Warhol?
Earlier in the week we learned that Jeffrey Deitch, one of the most important dealers of contemporary art today, was being hired as the new director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. As you can imagine, the hiring of an art dealer to the post of director of a museum has understandably stirred quite the criticism from the non profit world. One of those responses is from CultureGrrl. In her article Dealer-to-Director: Why Jeffrey Deitch is Wrong for LA MOCA she points out a number of reasons why she feels that Deitch is the wrong choice. My focus is on when she mentions “time-honored museum management practices” as she discusses how LA MOCA got into the mess they are in now.
