(TrendHunter.com) Erwin Wurm is a very interesting Austrian artist who has created an ongoing series of ‘One Minute Sculptures’ since the 1980s, where he poses models in rare unexpected situations and snaps a picture. These…
(TrendHunter.com) Welcome to our 2008 architecture trend countdown.nbsp; This list features the top architecture trends in the last year.nbsp; The report is a crowd-filtered ranking based on TrendHunter.com monthly traffic (several…
Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lime Kilns: Meppel, 1968, 2005
In the mid ’70s, a group of young photographers were studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Their professors were Bernd and Hiller Becher, a couple who had gained fame for taking sharp b&w photographs of industrial archetypes long before it was fashionable to do so. The Becher took pictures like passionate and determined collectors, treating images of water towers, grain elevators, warehouses and other industrial buildings as if they were butterflies that had to be aligned with the utmost care in a catalog. They portrayed the mundane with an unprejudiced and clinical eye.
Becher, Bernd und Hilla, Wassertu?rme/Cha?teaux d’eau, 1999
You might have heard of some of the students, they are among today’s most successful photographers. Actually one of them is said to be the highest-priced photographer alive. While sharing the same tutors at the department of the photography, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and others have adopted a more personal vision and applied new technical possibilities to the neutral method professed by the Bechers. As a result, their respective artistic paths are exposing greater contrasts than similarities.
An exhibition currently running at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (which has the least modern website a museum of modern art can dream of) retraces the short and inspiring story of what came to be called the Dusseldorf School of Photography . Objectivités: La Photographie à Düsseldorf presents some 160 works that gives a spectacular overview of the breadth of the photography department of the Kunstakademie from the early 1970s to today.
Türken in Deutschland, Rudolfplatz Köln, 1975. Sammlung Deutsche Bank (via)
Before turning her lens to sumptuous interiors devoid of any human life, Candida Höfer portrayed the Turkish community living and working in the Germany of the ’70s. She would photograph them in their shops, street gatherings or enjoying a family picnic in the park, letting them pose as if for a family album. It was one of my favourite body of works but i haven’t been able to find much images online.
It is extremely surprising to see how Höfer broke away from the intimate portrays of the Turkish Gastarbeiter (guest workers) to photograph grandiose libraries, museums and other public places, with wow effects, lavish colours but not a single living soul in sight.
Candida Höfer, Goethe-Theater Bad Lauchstädt I, 2006
Laurenz Berges found fame with his photographies of empty constructions as well. First he documented abandoned Russian barracks, back in the early ’90s after the Red Army had left the East of Germany.
Laurenz Berges, Potsdam V (from Räume in Kasernen), 1994
The artist now dedicates his work to the ghost villages of the Rhenish brown coal area, a region between Cologne and Aachen abandoned by whole communities who had to relocate because of the advancing open-cast mining. Berges’ photographs speak of private lives while having a broader, more social relevance.
Laurenz Berges, Vor Vechta, 2008
Petra Wunderlich pays a more direct homage to the neutrality rule set by her tutors Bernd and Hiller Becher. In 1994, she started to document religious buildings in New York. The frontal view makes the buildings even flatter than they already are, the b&w is made more dispassionate by the absence of any human figure and most of the time only the writings on the facade indicate that these are places of worship. In fact, her images reveal that many local synagogues have been converted into Buddhist temples or Baptist churches, while others have been torn down and a few restored (via).
Petra Wunderlich, Brooklyn VI, 2003
Petra Wunderlich, Manhattan X, 1994/2004
Ursula Schulz-Dornburg Bus Stops in Armenia (1997 / 2004) pictures dignified people waiting for public transport vehicles to stop by what is often an inadequate shelter.
Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Bushaltestelle, Armenien: Echiniadzin-Erivan, 2002 © Ursula Schulz-Dornburg
Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Bushaltestelle, Armenien: Erewan-Yegnward, 1997 © Ursula Schulz-Dornburg
Thomas Struth gives even more importance to the people in the picture. They become involuntary actors and the setting almost anecdotical. The Museum Photographs series portrays groups of sluggish tourists in shorts, t-shirts and a camera around the neck as they wander around museums. The master pieces behind the visitors are reduced to wallpapers.
Thomas Struth, Museo Del Prado 8-3, Madrid 2005. © 2007 Thomas Struth
Andreas Gursky might be one of the very few artists who, through manipulations, manage to re-invent historical landmarks like the Chartres Cathedral. One of the minuscule silhouettes at the bottom of the photo is none other than movie director Wim Wenders.
Andreas Gursky, Kathedrale I, 2007
To make stunning Kamiokande, the artist traveled to an underground neutrino observatory in Japan. 1000 meters under the surface of the earth, a tank containing 50,000 tons of ultra-pure water and surrounded by over eleven thousands golden photomultiplier tubes keeps watch for supernovas in our galaxy. You could almost miss two tiny figures in lab uniforms standing on their inflatable rafts. Just like the picture of the Chartres Cathedral, Kamiokande is far more impressive in large-format.
Andreas Gursky, Kamiokande, 2007 © Adagp, Paris, 2008 : Andreas Gursky / Courtesy: Monika Spru?th / Philomene Magers
Thomas Ruff leads the genre to more audacious abstractions, in particular with his jpegs series. Over the past decades, we’ve seen pastoral landscapes and tragic disasters alike succumb to digitization. Their passage through a computer leaves its imprint on our collective memory. But no matter how many photos, we don’t get any more critical or conscious of what lays before our eyes.
jpeg ny02, 2004 © Thomas Ruff. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York
Ruff turns JPEGs culled from the web into abstract works using digital technology. The JPEGs are enlarged to gigantic scale. Seen from close view, the exaggerated pixel patterns leave the image nearly unrecognizable, they acquire an Impressionist patina. The viewer has to stop and take their time to enjoy it, they must watch the images in close-up, mid-range and from far away to fully appreciate them.
On view at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris through January 4, 2009. They have a tiny photo gallery.
Photo on homepage: Bernd and Hilla Becher, (Blast Furnace) Neuves Maisons, Lorraine, France, 1971.
Conscientious has translated an interview with Hilla Becher .
(TrendHunter.com) This strange-looking Austrian art gallery called “Kunsthaus Graz” in German is also known as the “friendly alien,” by locals in the urban city.
Designed by architects Peter Cook and Colin Fournier of…
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The Infrastructural City – Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles, edited by Kazys Varnelis (Amazon UK and USA.)
Publisher Actar says: Once the greatest American example of a modern city served by infrastructure, Los Angeles is now in perpetual crisis. Infrastructure has ceased to support its urban plans, subordinating architecture to its own purposes. This out-of-control but networked world is increasingly organized by flows of objects and information. Static structures avoid being superfluous by joining this system as temporary containers for people, objects, and capital. This provocative collection of photography, essays, and maps looks at infrastructure as a way of mapping our place in the city and affecting change through architecture.
I was waiting eagerly for The Infrastructural City – Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles. 3 reasons for that.
Number one, is Blue Monday: Stories of Absurd Realities and Natural Philosophies, Varnelis’ previous book which he co-authored with Robert Sumrell. Anyone who had that one in their hands will get my point.
Lane Barden, Fifty-Two Miles Downstream: An Aerial Survey of the Los Angeles River and Channel
Reason number 2 is Los Angeles, the one city on this planet i should be averse to. The first time i was there i saw creatures that freaked me out: Chupa-Chup ladies -heavy and round on top, super slim on the rest of the body- and all sort of people walking around with some rather stunning attributes that had been recently implanted. I could not accept that no one ever ‘walks around the city center’ to do some shopping, have a drink and sit down in a park. And where was the city center anyway? I realized i would never survive in L.A. without a driving license. The skyscrapers were tiny Lego structures thrown in a heap by the highway. And the river. Even that poor repudiated and alien river looked fake! I should never have liked LA. I tend to measure every city to a European one. I manage that tour de force almost everywhere but in LA the attempt is more preposterous than ever. That’s what charmed me so much. That and many other things. Los Angeles is the only city in the USA where i would be tempted to live.
From the series Los Angeles parking booths by Mac Kane
Let’s get to reason number 3. The Infrastructural City will drive you way beyond Los Angeles. The idiosyncrasies, stories and lessons described are thought-provoking enough to make you look at your own city with a more inquisitive eye. In this book, Los Angeles is little more than a (fascinating) case study, a pretext to explore the effects that today’s complex and distorted infrastructures, whether planned by public entities or developed by private and competing corporations, have on contemporary urbanism.
As Varnelis writes: Our goal was not modest: we set out to replace Reyner Banham‘s Los Angeles. The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971) as the key text for understanding the city urbanistically. Instead of four ecologies, The Infrastructural City offers essays commissioned to researchers who bring the discourse on urbanism outside of its usual and sometimes way too formal boundaries. These essays cover the three scales of networks: landscape, urban fabric and the object.
In one of the essays of the book, David Fletcher invites us to ’embrace freakology rather than bucology’. The advice could apply to many aspects of the Los Angeles. Its river, for example. Instead of following blindly the assumption that it is an eye-sore and a disgrace whose dignity would only be recovered when the concrete is removed and its native vegetation and wildlife reimposed, one should be aware of the fact that coming back to the ‘natural’ state could only be done at the cost of anihilating a complex ecosystem made of exotic and native species that has slowly found its equilibrium over decades.
Image from the project Not A Cornfield
This hotchpotch of imported and original flora can be observed all over L.A. making it one of the most bio-diverse areas in the world. Most of us however, tend to reduce Los Angeles to its ubiquitous and iconic palm tree, a tree that is actually not a native species either. Most of them were planted to beautify the city for the 1932 Olympics, at a time when a city built around cars felt that it might have to re-invent its landscape. The average lifespan of the palm tree is 70 to 100. Its days under the California sun are numbered. And it doesn’t seem that the city is going to waste much tears on them as no palm tree has been invited to the Million Trees party.
Hopefully this will mean that the new breed of palm tree that double as cell antenna is going to loose some popularity as well:
Cell phone antenna camouflaged into fake tree
If trees of all sorts and a river are to be expected in a section dedicated to the landscape of L.A., lowly gravel is not. Neither is oil. Well, not in the way Frank Ruchala (don’t miss another of his essays, Recovering oiLA, you can access it on Lulu) pictures it: an actor which used to supply as much of the US’ oil demand as Saudi Arabia, an asset whose value nowadays has to compete (most often than not unsuccessfully) with real estate. Los Angeles contains one of the most intense concentration of pipelines in the world yet, the presence of the precious resource is often camouflaged behind mundane facades. As we all know now, the Industry with a big I in Los Angeles is no longer the one that earned it the nickname of ‘Oildorado.’
Postcard view (ca. 1900) of oil rigs in a booming giant oil field in the Los Angeles area. © Peter A. Scholle, 1999
The rest of the book explores what is below that patch of pavement, inside the backyard garden of an unassuming house or what goes though monster warehouses. Each chapter is written by a different expert but the many photographies, graphics and a certain spirit enable the book to find its own voice.
Photograph by Ric Francis/Associated Press (via)
As i mentioned above most of the infrastructures analyzed in the book provide food for thought wherever you happen to live.
Cables overhead. Image Xeni Jardin, One Wilshire flickr set
One Wilshire, the unassuming container of the U.S. telephone and data connections reaching across the Pacific evokes the very tangible spin-offs of information society. The analysis of Los Angeles & Long Beach’s ports, both major dispatchers of an unprecedented rise in the volume of goods from the Far East to the city and to the rest of the country, speaks to our seemingly unstoppable gluttony. I found some of the most illuminating comments in Roger Sherman‘s essay about change-based thinking, a position that invites architects and urbanists to envision their work under a different lens, one that would ‘sett a trap’ to capture potential change that inevitably occur in the lifespan of a city.
Image on the homepage from Lane Barden‘s series Fifty-Two Miles Downstream: An Aerial Survey of the Los Angeles River and Channel.
Two of my favourite mags The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest and Volume are out:
Volume is an architecture and urbanism magazine. It’s neither a highly specialized print that mere mortals like me find hard to approach nor is it one of those glossy Vogue-lookalikes with chichi spreads of fashionably ‘sustainable’ buildings. It’s not ‘something in between’ either.
This issue presents many trends, people, ideas that might look like they do not directly belong to the world of architecture and urbanism but are perfectly pertinent and relevant to architects and urbanists. And because almost anything architects and urbanists do ends up concerning the hoi polloi (that’s you and me, my friend), there’s much food for thoughts and heated discussions in Volume 17:
The editors explain: At the close of this era of expansion and surplus Volume speculates on one of the period’s emblematic inventions: Content Management, or the collecting, organizing and sharing of digital information. Our retrospective appraisal of recent developments in the managing of information offers inside into the ability of Content Management to serve the current realities of digital abundance and material shortage, and to protect both vast and extremely limited quantities.
Jesse Seegers and Jeffrey Inaba quizz Ken Goldberg on burning dollar bills and other less trivial matters, Chris Anderson about ‘free’ culture and PageRanking on business cards. They also get Julien De Smedt to discuss his views on free-wheel experiementation, the proliferation of ‘post-OMA offices’, why not choosing and mismanaging can be valuable strategies. Benedict Clouette and Forrest Jessee’s interview with publisher Lars Müller (whose Face of Human Rights is on my must read list) evokes books as a form of content management.
Volume dives into almost mainstream US culture with an interview of Rachel Maddow (available online) and another one with Arianna Huffington (best enjoyed after having savoured this article about the so-called death of the blogosphere.)
Entrance of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Credit: Mari Tefre / Global Crop Diversity Trust (more images)
Those are only a few of the many interviews of smart people by other smart people.
Just to contradict all the above i should add that many of the issues covered in Volume 17
1. are not interviews. C-LAB explores the World Heritage, the content management system for cultural and natural treasures. Easy happiness is at reach in “Architecture is Merciless”, a presentation by Jacques Herzog about Beijing’s Bird Nest and in a short series of photos that display how Vogt Landscape Architects transplant nature into a constructed context. “Seeds of Paranoia” gives the lowdown on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. This must be one of the rare articles that goes beyond the hype aspect of the project.
2. openly belong to the world of architecture. For example, Professor of Architecture at Columbia University Mark Wigley has a short essay on architecture seen under the lens of content management.
The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest by the same publishers who released the very excellent the book, An Atlas of Radical Cartography.
Among all paper magazines, JoA&P is probably the one most likely to truly and gently give rise to social changes. Smart, wonderfully edited and available for a mere $15, the magazine is heavily centered on the US scene and i wonder if we have anything similar in Europe. And if we don’t i wonder what we’re waiting for.
The 300 pages of the sixth issue are broken down in three ‘conceptual’ sections.
1. I Love To We is a call for a new terminology to describe the formations of grassroots cultural resistant practices. These “interventions, strategies and tactics in the territory” explore the war on terror and the global order. A quick selection of the many essays featured in this section: LA-based organization Bicicocina (or Bicycle Kitchen) describes its self-assigned mission to teach people to work on their own bikes. Lisa Anne Auerbach wrote an insightful essay on the new “Don’t Do It Yourself” battle triggered by corporations’ avid assault and capitalisation of the D.I.Y. culture. Aimee Le Duc analyzes what happens when an old police station in San Francisco is bought and transformed into a home and office by someone like artist and architect Bruce Tomb.
2. Antiwar Survey Respondents has almost 20 activists not only describe their antiwar activities but also answer vital questions such as “How do you measure success for this activity?’ and ‘In order to continue and be successful with this or other related activities, what would you do or need?’ The answers should convince readers that activist actions do have an impact and inspire them to join the movements or start their own.
Center for Tactical Magic collaborating with UC Santa Cruz students on Wells Fargo Embargo
3. Another Theory Section. Under a title which could hardly get any more cloudy and bland are a handful of lessons learnt (sometimes the hard way) by artists and activists: problems encountered when trying to get art in public space, the recent history of the art collective in light of the persecution of the Critcal Art Ensemble, the danger of nostalgia to culture, etc.
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Cruisers can enjoy a…
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
