Santiago Borja + Le Corbusier

 

SITIO is a site-specific art project produced for the Villa Savoye in Poissy, France. SITIO furthers the thesis developed by Adolf Max Vogt in his book Le Corbusier, The Noble Savage (2003), where Vogt traces back the invention of pilotis to childhood memories permeated by imagination and fantasy, rather than the high rationale argued by Le Corbusier.  It will employ the same site: the iconic modern building and works created by the artist Santiago Borja, which depart from traditional artisanal techniques of certain Mayan communities in southern Mexico. As part of an anachronic montage, three main pieces will be presented: Destinerrance, which will superimpose two palapas installed in the park; Tapis (rugs), which is conceived for the floors of the Villa's living spaces; and Cosmogonie Suspendue, a weaved ceiling meant to represent the Mayan cosmos, produced for the building's terrace.

Born in Mexico City in 1970, Santiago Borja has a bachelor's of science in architecture from Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, and a master's degree in the theory and practice of contemporary art and new media from the Université Paris 8, France. He has completed several training programs at Central Saint Martins in London and at Centro Nacional de las Artes in Mexico City, and his work is built on the intersection between art and architecture. Among other awards, he has been granted a SNCA-FONCA fellowship, and has received production grants from the Fundación Marcelino Botín and Fundación/Colección JUMEX. Recent projects include Fort Da / Sampler at the Neutra VDL-Research House in Los Angeles; In the Shadow of the Sun at the Irish Museum of Modern Art; Divan at the Freud Museum in London; Décalage at the Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City; and Halo at the Pavilion Le Corbusier, Foundation Suisse, CIUP in Paris. Forthcoming projects include Sitio at the Villa Savoye in Poissy and Chromatic Circus at Laxart in Los Angeles.

Xavier Veilhan "Les Architectes"

Wilfrid Almendra + Neutra

Killed in Action (CSH #6, Omega, Richard NEUTRA)
2009
51.18 x 82.68 x 14.96 inches
Pièce unique
The Case Study House project n°6, or 'Omega' house (1945) should have been the neighbor of the CSH n°13, or 'Alpha' (cf. infra) and in harmony with it. It shows off an industrial sheet metal roof and exemplifies the typical Richard NEUTRA architectural features visible in the slight slope and in the large excesses. The low cost of the construction and the efficiency of the materials corresponded to the purchasers needs. Covered by white light reflecting gravel and made to prevent the penetration of warmth, this roof ensures a very good isolation to the whole construction. Finally the cruciform plan allows the inclusion of four courtyards, each having a specific function.
Wilfrid ALMENDRA uses the sheet metal roof principal and imagines the various it could have suffered, possible additions or perforations. He also evokes the four courtyards through a geometrical paving made of four polish polished steel plates, which are reminders of both Carl ANDRE' s theories and Frank STELLA's shapes.

Killed in Action (Case Study Houses)

The Case Study Houses were experiments in residential architecture, aimed at building modern, efficient, affordable houses; it took place on the US West coast, mainly around Los Angeles, between 1945 and 1966. Sponsored by Arts & Architecture magazine, the program's ambition was to create model houses that could help face the real estate boom caused by the end of World War II and the return of millions of demobilized soldiers, mainly young men about to start a home and family.

The program's announcement stated that each 'house must be capable of duplication and in no sense be an individual "performance"; (...) the houses will be conceived within the spirit of our times, using as far as is practicable, many war-born techniques and materials best suited to the expression of man's life in the modern world.' Major architects of the time were commissioned, including Richard NEUTRA, Charles and Ray EAMES, Pierre KOENIG and Eero SAARINEN. Out of 37 projects (35 detached houses and two apartment buildings), 26 were built (25 houses, amongst which some became icons of architecture, and the first part of a block of apartments) and stand, for those still existing, as part of one of the major architectural programs of the 20th century.

As for the ten projects that were not built, they became the inspiration of Wilfrid ALMENDRA's new series Killed in Action (Case Study Houses), a set of ten works each taking after one of the projects. The series takes its title from the official military expression and suggests that these aborted projects, whose 'raison d'être' and building processes were directly linked to the war, were soldiers of Modernism fallen to the field of honor. Wilfrid ALMENDRA made ten 'wall sculptures', low or high reliefs, which switch architecture from the horizontal to the vertical plan.

Each sculpture draws inspiration from the corresponding project's floor plan for its shape, as well as from the techniques and building materials planned for its construction. Wilfrid ALMENDRA finds here an opportunity to demonstrate his art of assemblage from a wide palette of materials: wood, concrete, metal, stone, glass, metal, plaster, tiles etc. As it is often the case with this artist, who considers the production process to be part of the artwork, these materials tell parallel, often autobiographical stories: a piece of asphalt cut from a road with an industrial lapidary becomes the ground for a house; the pyramid-shaped tops of concrete fence poles from a working class house, pavilions' roofs; and the door of his own family house in Portugal, the on piles platform for these pavilions.

Wilfrid ALMENDRA also plays with the specific architectural details of the various projects, which become as many abstract forms: here a monumental roof is turned into a totem of metal and wired glass; there a staircase or a ramp access, a terrace or a swimming pool, or a monumental indoor / outdoor fireplace are integrated into the compositions. Other elements, having to do with the projects context of conception or with the vision they conveyed, are similarly included into the sculptures. For instance, for one of the projects, all sketches at the time were staging a model family, with the father coming back home in his personal helicopter, tomorrow's common means of transportation – a naively optimistic vision of the future, and a blind faith in technique and progress; in Wilfrid ALMENDRA's sculpture, the helicopter blades themselves merge with the house.

But Wilfrid ALMENDRA also extrapolates on what the projects, if built, would have become, hence questioning the suburban destiny of the Modernist utopia. Indeed, before the historical importance of the whole program was recently acknowledged, many of the Case Study Houses that were built had been long neglected, or had undergone significant transformations, and even sometimes had been deeply denatured to adaptto the needs of their inhabitants. ALMENDRA's sculptures tell us about both the ageing of architecture – and through it about the passing of time –, and its 'customizing', whether it is with thick roughcast or unauthorized building modifications. For instance, in one of the works made out of cast concrete, the prominent reinforcing bars recall at the same time those who appear under the eroding concrete of dilapidated houses and the ones seen in houses built without authorization and never finished – skeletons of concrete with pointing metal bars, familiar silhouettes in Southern Europe.

The works of the series Killed in Action (Case Study Houses), shown here along with preparatory drawings and reproductions of original documents, subtly combine several levels of reading: at first, the display of a remarkably abstract aesthetic quality, they also offer a deep reflection on Modern architecture and its becoming, while investigating with empathy the way people adapt their habitat and to their habitat.

via Bugada Cargnel

Veronika Kelldorfer + Lautner

Silver Lake, Lautner 2,
2008, single panel silk-screen print on glass, 59 x 87-3/4 inches, 150 x 223 cm, VK069

Veronika Kellndorfer + Koenig

Pierre Koenig,
2008, single panel silk-screen print on glass, 43-1/4 x 90-1/2 inches, 110 x 230 cm, VK071

thenorthroom + Le Corbusier

Such Is Our Pleasure
Szu-Han Ho and Jesse Vogler
16 mm film loop
2008

This film reanimates one account of the utopian impulse–Le Corbusier’s Plan for a City of Three Million, a project that has become iconic of both the visions and failures of the modernist moment. That this work has come to epitomize a modernist directive for city planning, one both eerily familiar and outlandishly distant, serves as the basis of our inquiry into the uncanny space of a dislocated subject. By collapsing a digital animation of the City of Three Million onto the recognizably antiquated medium of 16mm stock, this project attempts to complicate the path between a memory of existing urban forms and the possibilities of future urban arrangements.

http://www.thenorthroom.org 

Matthias Müller + Costa / Niemeyer

Matthias Müller
Vacancy
1998
16 mm film transferred to DVD, projected, 14:30 minutes
Courtesy Thomas Erben Gallery, New York

Ursula Mayer + Goldfinger

INTERIORS
2006
3,10 min
super 16 mm transfer on DVD
color and black and white
Copyright © Ursula Mayer

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE AND ITS SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS IS AGAIN AT THE CENTRE OF URSULA MAYER'S FILM INTERIORS (2006). FOR THE SET, MAYER CHOSE THE HOME OF THE ARCHITECT ERNÖ GOLDFINGER AND HIS FAMILY, LOCATED ON 2 WILLOW ROAD IN HAMPSTEAD. THIS PLACE REPRESENTS THE ARTISTIC AVANT-GARDE IN 1930S LONDON. GOLDFINGER'S ART COLLECTION, WHICH COMPRISES CLASSICAL MODERN WORKS FROM MAX ERNST TO MARCEL DUCHAMP, IS USED IN THE FILM AS A UNIQUE SETTING AND DRAMATIC ELEMENT. WITH THIS HISTORICALLY SIGNIFICANT BACKGROUND, A MEETING BETWEEN A YOUNG WOMAN AND AN ELDERLY ONE IS IMAGINED TO TAKE PLACE, WHEN IN FACT IT NEVER DID. ULTIMATELY, A REPLICA OF A SCULPTURE MADE BY THE PROMINENT BRITISH SCULPTRESS BARBARA HEPWORTH, AS A DIFFERENT PERCEPTION OF TIME AND REALITY, BECOMES BOTH A SEPARATING AS WELL AS A BINDING ELEMENT BETWEEN THE CONTRASTS OF THE TRADITIONAL AND THE MODERN.
“MAYER'S FILM HIGHLIGHTS THE ABSENCE OF A FEMALE PRESENCE IN ARCHITECTURE AND FILM BY MEANS OF A SEQUENCE OF ENCOUNTERS, SOME OF WHICH APPEAR LIKE STILLS, IN THE TRADITION OF CINDY SHERMAN'S UNTITLED FILM STILLS.”
(WALTER SEIDL, INTERIORS, CATALOGUE, VERBUND SAMMLUNG WIEN)

CREDITS:
Written and directed by
URSULA MAYER
Cinematographer
DAVID ROM
Actors
ELAINE BANHAM
KATI URHO
Editors
URSULA MAYER
KONRAD WELZ
Sound design
KONRAD WELZ
Thanks to
NATIONAL TRUST
MILNER REBECCA
MARTIN FLETCHER
Produced for
steirischer herbst 2006
No space is innocent!

Andro Wekua, Pink Wave Hunter

Andro Wekua, Pink Wave Hunter, 2011
Installation view with Pink Wave Hunter Series, 2010/2011 and Sunset Painting, 2005/2011. Courtesy: the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York/Brussels. Photo: Nils Klinger

Marc Camille Chaimowicz + Mies van der Rohe

 

Curtain (MvdR), 2008.

Tilman Wendland + Hansen / Le Corbusier / Niemeyer

Untitled, 2006

Cardboard, masonite, magazine copy,

varible dimensions

Courtesy of the artist & European Art Projects

Photos: Krzysztof Zieliński / European Art Projects

Tilman Wendland (*1969, lives in Berlin) creates from basic, light materials such as paper, cardboard and PVC ephemeral structures, which are integrated in existent architectural situations. They provide comments, criticisms or also caricatures. Normally, his works, which are seldom intended to last, are rendered completely in white. In spite of the strict reduction of colour and form they reveal themselves through a playful-ironic treatment of the subject.

For Ideal City - Invisible Cities Wendland developed a room installation, which enquired into the architectural and city planning shapes and elements of Le Corbusier, Oskar Hansen and Oscar Niemeyer. The ideal city concepts of the architects were condensed by Wendland into space-penetrating white cardboard shelves, sublime and also perishable

via Invisible Cities

Valeska Soares + Niemeyer

Tonight, 2002

Titled Tonight (2002), the video was first installed in the very dance hall where the sequences had been filmed. The soundtrack is a remixed version of Burt Bacharach’s song The Look of Love (1967), altered by Belo Horizonte sound artists O Grivo. A first version of Folly has been shown at the 51st Venice Biennial in 2005.

Anthony Auerbach + Johnson

The State of New York, aerial survey, New York State Pavilion, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, New York, 11–13 October 2006, 2,427 vertical photographs

Lucy Williams + Mies van der Rohe

The Glass-Walled House in Summer 2005 mixed media, 28-1/2 x 28-1/2 x 1-1/2 inches Courtesy McKee Gallery

Jim Isermann + Le Corbusier

Project Unité Firminy
1993
papier peint sérigraphié, linoléum coupé, coussins de mousse
dimensions variables

 via Jim Isermann

Natasha Kissell + Mies van der Rohe

 

Pink Canyons, 2008, 48" x 42", oil on canvas

Angelina Gualdoni + Costa / Niemeyer

Praca dos Tres Poderes, Noon
Oil and Acrylic on Canvas
48" x 84"
2005

via Angelina Gualdoni

Christine Erhard + Lubetkin

Penguin Pool, 200670 x 90 cm

via Christine Erhard

AKassen + Mansilla / Tuñón

Window to the world
Window glass from the facade of the museum is installed in three sets of joined automatic slidingdoors. The piece functions as a kinetic sculpture activated by the movements of the audience and itself.

via AKassen

Christian Anderson + Mies van der Rohe

Installation view: Christian Andersson, From Lucy with love, Moderna Museet Malmö, 22 January-24 April, 2011. Photo: Terje Östling © Christian Andersson/BUS 2011. All works courtesy the artist and Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin/Stockholm.

http://www.christianandersson.net/shows/from-lucy-with-love

Fiona Tan + SANAA

 

Cloud Island I, Project for the Venice Architecture Biennale, 2010

2 channel HD installation
colour, stereo
2 HD-cam safety masters, 2 HD projectors, 2 harddisc players, 2 stereo amplifiers, 4 stereo speakers, 1 double-sided white projection screen 2.0 x 1.12 m

Filmed on location on Inujima and Teshima, Japan

Commissioned by the Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum Foundation
Funded by Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum Foundation and Wako Works of Art, Tokyo

via Fiona Tan

John Riddy + Soane

London (Bank) 2008, 2009
Photograph on paper
image: 720 x 930 mm
on paper, print

Ed Ruscha + Armet & Davis

 

Norm's, La Cienega, on Fire, 1964, oil on canvas 64 1/4 H x 124 1/2 W (inches)

Ed Ruscha + Pereira

Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1968, oil on canvas 53 1/2 H x 133 1/2 W (inches)

Pierre Bismuth + Le Corbusier

 

Complexe des villas / Bâtiment Le Corbusier (élévation)
2010
Ink on polyacetate
28.35 x 20.47 inches
Pièce unique
Pierre BISMUTH performs the impossible synthesis between the two faces of Le Corbusier: from the villas blanches to housing projects, with a sense of humor and economy of means that are his trademark. He superposes, in a small scale model, section views and computer generated images (Complexes des villas / Bâtiment Le Corbusier, 2006-2010), several Villas Savoye, to create a building that the Swiss architect might not have rejected – let alone the destiny of neglected social housing and the carcass of torched cars in front.

via Bugada Cargnel.

George Maciunas + Le Corbusier

http://fluxusfoundation.com/fluxus-as-architecture/george-maciunas-and-le-corbusier/

Xing Danwen + Holl

Urban Fiction
2004 - present
photography with digital manipulation


My interest for urban subject has been complated in my mind for years but the particular idea of this work was forged some time in 2004 while I traveled extensively in Europe. After being in so many cities in the world, I realized that globalization has made urban landscapes everywhere similar and blurred the boundaries between them. So often, "here" can be anywhere. With this work, I have brought my vision and perspective to these urban spaces.

The architectural structures that I photographed are all maquettes made to promote real-estate developments that are being planned in China today. Some of the buildings already exist, and others will soon begin construction. When you face these models showing such a variety of different spaces and think about the life-styles associated with them, you start to wonder: is this the picture of life today? Do we really live in this kind of space and environment?

Globalization is reshaping our urban environment and our vision of contemporary life - which celebrates the “new” constantly replacing the “old.” As personal living spaces expand with the growth of income, the cityscape becomes more dense, filled up with modern buildings and high-rise towers. People live in cubes that are squeezed next to one another, separated only by thin walls. This physical proximity, instead of leading to greater closeness and intimacy between people, can often create psychological distance and loneliness.

The sculptural form of these new residential buildings, the floor plan of the apartments, and the various interior designs are all related to the inhabitants and their “individual” taste and needs. The models of these new living spaces are perfect, clean and beautiful but they are also so empty and detached of human drama. When you take these models and begin to add real life - even a single drop of it - so much changes.

This entire body of work of "Urban Fiction" is playful and fictitious - wandering between reality and fantasy. All the figures in this series are acts of me, playing different characters. This creates another paradox: “I” am real but at the same time “I” am unreal. The figures act out totally imaginative roles and fanciful stories, staged within the maquettes, their plots invented by me and visualized for these spaces. For example, “I” am a white-collar office worker brought to despair by job pressures and spiritual emptiness. Sometimes “I” am a materialistic woman enjoying a life of pleasure and dissipation. Or “I” am a young girl who, in a moment of unrestrained rage, accidentally killed her lover. Together, the resulting pictures compose an episodes, serialized narrative structure for "Urban Fiction". As a whole, these images represent the state of urban life today.

In the period of my childhood in China, skyscrapers were unattainable concepts connected to the West, viewable only in films or magazines. Today I live in the pictures I make and I, along with my compatriots, can imagine our future by bending down to examine tiny models of buildings. This, perhaps, is another reality of the "fantasies" which govern our contemporary life.

The photographs are shot both digitally and on film and manipulated, creating many layers, utilizing computer program tools.

The medium is photographic C - print.
Large size: DIASEC (back-mounting on dibond, face-mounting with Plexi-glas, rectangle brace behind)
Small size: back-mounting on dibond and with frame around.

There are 2 sizes:
Large size: the height is fixed at 170cm, the width varies from 210-270 cm; Edition of 5.
Small Size: the height is fixed at 80cm, the width varies from 100-150 cm; Edition of 8.

via Xing Danwen

Frederic Gmeiner, Torsten Posselt & Benjamin Maus + Libeskind

Jüdisches Museum, 2009
via Extracts of Local Distance