Jen Liu + Mies van der Rohe / Loos / Fuller

Dawn of The Alpha Genesis
Video, 4', Berlin 2005

In her videos Jen Liu plays with the technical-optimistic visions by the modernist architects. Animated in an 80ies videogame-style her heroes Mies van der Rohe, Adolf Loos and Buckminster Fuller have to destroy cities.

Rita McBride + Le Corbusier

Rita McBride: Settlements (Chandigarh, India), 2009, Bronze, Stahl und Messing, 35 x 130 x 120 cm

via MAI 36

Juan Araujo + Bo Bardi

 Glass House No. 6  2006

Glass House No. 7  2006

Antoni Muntadas + Mies van der Rohe

On Translation: Paper BP / MVDR, 2009

via Fundació Mies van der Rohe

Guy Tillim + Guedes

Apartment building, Beira, Mozambique, 2008

Apartment building, Beira, Mozambique, 2007

via Michael Stevenson

Enoc Perez + Foster

"Bank of China Tower, Hong Kong" 2010, oil on canvas. 16x20 inches.

"Swiss Re HQ, London" 2010, oil on canvas. 80x600 inches

"Hearst Tower, New York" 2009, oil on paper. 42x30 inches;

"Hearst Tower, New York" 2009, oil on canvas. 60x80 inches

via Enoc Perez

Erwin Wurm + Mies van der Rohe

Mies van der Rohe melting, 2005

Josiah McElheny + Mies van der Rohe / Taut

Bruno Taut on Mies van der Rohe (1922), ii 2009.

Dirk Brömmel + Mies van der Rohe

V.T. Nr. 13, 2002.

V.T. Nr. 3, 2002.

V.T. Nr. 4, 2002.

Angela Ferreira + Mies van der Rohe

Crown Hall / Dragon House, 2009

Sophie Tottie "Squares"

Squares, 2008.

via Sophie Tottie

Lorna Simpson + Gropius

Corridor, 2003. Double-projection video installation, video transferred to DVD.
13 minutes, 45 seconds, sound.

via Lorna Simpson (movie here)

Corridor is a film that shows the daily routines of two women living in two different centuries and two different worlds. The actions of the women, which are projected in parallel, take place in two historically and architecturally important domestic interiors in New England: the Coffin House in Newbury, Massachusetts, occupied by the Coffin family in 1678, and the single-family residence in Lincoln, Massachusetts, that Walter Gropius built for himself and his family in 1938.

The two protagonists, both played by Wangeshi Mutu, are young women, dressed appropriately for their respective historical setting, doing their daily chores at home. In the Coffin House we hear songs that the black pianist “Blind Tom” Wiggins composed in the middle of the eighteenth century; in the Gropius House we hear twentieth-century jazz.

The film, whose action does not lead to a dramatic climax and simply occurs without any didactic impulse, follows a precise, even tempo. The parallel strands of the action and their musical themes establish a dialogue between the two women. The lost time, the light, the furnishings, and the young woman’s impenetrable face suggest a number of interpretations without asserting any of them.

In Corridor Lorna Simpson, who became internationally known in the early 1990s for her works combining photography and text, replaces text with music that establishes an interrelation with the visuality of the film.

Barbara Visser + Guerrini / La Padula / Romano

Former Futures 2 (Hiroshi Sugimoto - wall paper), 2008

Isa Melsheimer + Le Corbusier

Press Release

For her third solo show at Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Isa Melsheimer is presenting a project centered on architect Le Corbusier (1887 – 1965) and his relationship, at the beginning of the 20th century, with a Parisian collector, Charles de Beistégui.

In Paris during the 1920s, Charles de Beistégui, a fervent admirer of surrealism, asked Le Corbusier to build him an apartment, which would serve exclusively for parties. Unlike Charles de Bestégui, the architect’s interest in surrealism was limited.

The result: an apartment near the Champs-Elysées having no roof, a living room directly open to the sky, and furnished only by a fireplace. The walls were limited to 1.5 meters in height to parcel the view of certain places. For example, from one perspective, the walls allow only the upper half of the Arc de Triomphe to be seen, and from another perspective, only an upper section of the Eiffel Tower was visible. The walls could be displaced using an electrical remote control, however the apartment itself had no electricity and, consequentially, was lit with candles. This apartment no longer exists today.

Through the works in this exhibition, Isa Melsheimer searches to become aware of the odd relationship that united the two men during the duration of their project. Using very different mediums such as concrete, embroidery, and gouache, the artist strives to bring to the forefront a rather surprising result, for the apartment made by Le Corbusier is actually close to a surrealistic installation.

Two concrete sculptures recreate two important points of the “roof-garden”. A wax sculpture on the floor made from burning candles night after night and sculpted by the wind refer to the space’s candlelit evenings.

On a “Paris” scarf bought in a souvenir shop, Isa Melsheimer embroidered the map of Paris, an allusion to Le Corbusier and his schematic and naïve vision of the city.

A step down to the lower, second exhibition space, the artist has chosen to create a more intimate atmosphere. A bird posted on a “tree” limb made from glass and perched near the wall conjures the apartment’s only “occupant”. Two large, kitsch embroideries take on details of the view of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe and, in this way, recreate a situation scenario within the space.

Some architectural details of the apartment, such as the spiral stair, surface in a very peculiar manner in the gouaches hanging on the far wall.

via Galerie Wolff

Barbara Visser + Rietveld

This work revolves around the critique that the current way of building does not accomodate the multiple social, professional and psychological changes in peoples' lives today. 
The text Transformation House I was submitted for an architectural competition to design an alternative dwelling for the new city of Leidsche Rijn in the Netherlands, organized by Bureau Beyond. The text is published in 'Barbara Visser is er niet' (2006). For the final round of the competition, the animation was made, not as a design, but to visualize the concept of a structure expanding and shrinking as a consequence of the development of an individual life. 

Animation made in collaboration with Olivier Campagne at Artefactory, Paris, F.

Exhibited
Maak ons Land, Nai, Rotterdam / Space for your Future, MOT, Tokyo, Japan / How to live together, 27th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil / VIP Huis Competition finals, Het Gebouw, Leidsche Rijn

via Barbara Visser (download here her letter to Rietveld)

Angela Ferreira + Oud / Siza

Two Houses 2001

In Rotterdam, the influence of architecture in the work of Angela Ferreira is focused on a special building project from the 1920s: the Kiefhoek by J.J.P. Oud. The way in which the renovation of this public housing project has altered its meaning and function inspired Ferreira to design an architectural sculpture. She drew a parallel with a 1970s housing project in Bouça, Portugal, which was designed by Alvaro Siza. Although the housing in Bouça is still in use - in Rotterdam the Kiefhoek has, in the meantime, become a museum the residents, influenced by the architectural tourism, have sold features such as window frames as museum objects.
In Squatters, Ferreira juxtaposes the two projects in a scale model that visitors may only enter in their socks. A functional structure has thus been transformed into an aesthetic object that must be regarded from afar and can no longer be used.

Terence Gower "Ciudad Moderna"

Ciudad Moderna, 2004
Digital Video. 6 Minutes

Shown as a digital video projection, Ciudad Moderna is a composite of clips taken from a popular Mexican Film released in 1966. Each film fragment shows images of 1950’s and 60’s Mexican Modernist architecture, either interiors, facades or streetscapes.

The source film, Despedida de Casada (Dir. Juan de Orduña), is treated as a document of the contemporary city, and is re-edited to show off the architecture of Mexico, such as the Museum of Anthropology, the apartment buildings of Avenida de la Reforma, and the Hotel Presidente in Acapulco.

The clips are interspersed with single frames which each capture an image of the architecture in pristine black and white, or dissolve to a perspective rendering (below right) like illustrations from an architectural monograph. Ciudad Moderna untangles the architecture from the narrative thread of the original film and recomposes a story of the city as a built environment.

Video editor: Anita Chao. Photo work: Lindsay Stadig. Graphic work (below right): Natalia Porter.

via Terence Gower

Caspar Stracke + Le Corbusier

Rong Xiang (2008)

Rong Xiang is a work on architectural replicas, piracy and its political consequences. It is a comparison of LeCorbusier's chapel Notre Dame Du Haut in Ronchamp, France with its exact replica in Zhengzhou, Henan province East China. The work further compares LeCorbusier's human-scale informed "Modulor" concept with ancient Tao philosophy of Confucius and master builders of the Han dynasty. The Ronchamp replica in Zhengzhou is now a legend - it was short lived, erected in 1994 and demolished in 2006 after a three year lasting dispute with the "Foundation LeCorbusier" in Paris.

Sadie Murdoch + Gray / Johnson / Mies van der Rohe

Water and Dust (2004), 7 minutes

The artist disguises herself as architect Eileen Gray and crashes Philip Johnson's favorite table at the Four Season's restaurant (designed by Johnson in 1959). Murdoch's character proceeds to play with the equivalent of a set of building blocks, transforming Johnson's monolithic guest house designed for his own estate in the early 1950s into the Monument to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, equally monolithic and designed by Johnson's "master" Mies van der Rohe in 1926.

Sadie Murdoch + Perriand

Work-in-progress for Modelling Charlotte Perriand, Sadie Murdoch 2006. Reproduced courtesy of the artist.

The 1928 Chaise Longue, a design classic, has often been attributed simply to Le Corbusier, but was in fact designed in collaboration with Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Jeanneret. The now iconic photograph that illustrates the piece was not only staged but also modelled by Perriand herself. In this provocative and beautifully realised exhibition, artist Sadie Murdoch uses her own formal language to reshape this historical image. By impersonating Charlotte Perriand and photographing herself in the same pose on the chaise longue, Murdoch asks complex questions about authorship and identity.

This reinterpretation of the classic image has involved Murdoch in a painstaking process of finding props, clothes and black and white stage make-up in order to produce a monochrome image on a colour film. Even the shadows in the original photograph have been re-made, in a move which undermines the rationalist project of modernism.

Sadie Murdoch is an artist who has compellingly pursued her fascination with modernist architecture and design and how it is represented. The often antagonistic but ultimately mutually dependent histories of the female and male designer is a subject which has interested Murdoch for some time and in two recent solo exhibitions in London she has examined the positions of Lilly Reich and Eileen Gray. As well as giving a feminist reading of modernist design, Murdoch offers an incisive commentary on its materials, highlighting their sheen and transparency but also their degradation and vulnerability.

Sadie Murdoch (b.1965) studied at Leeds Metropolitan University (BA and PhD) and at Chelsea (MA), and on the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in New York. She has recently shown at domoBaal contemporary art and at the Henry Peacock Gallery in London (2002 and 2005).

via The Henry Moore Institute

Maurice Utrillo + Abadie

La Rue Norvins à Montmartre, c. 1910

Andy Graydon + Wright

Untitled (plate tectonics), 2009.
By installing excavated stones from New Jersey in a gallery, Robert Smithson, in the late 1960s, revealed the dialectic between abstract and actual locations. Sometimes in containers, sometimes piled, the stones in the gallery represented a far away location without resembling it. Something of New Jersey, Smithson maintained, was held in those rocks and their displacement resulted in the expansion of the original site, both physically and conceptually. The Site Non-Site dialectic, as Smithson called it, feels particularly familiar today as our daily lives are continually reshaped by place-defying technologies in communication, information and travel.

With Untitled (plate tectonics), Andy Graydon similarly explores the physical dimensions of location in contrast to its perception. After obtaining the ambient sounds of eleven “natural” art locations in New York – museums, fairs, galleries – Graydon cut the recordings onto unique acetate phonograph records, dubplates, that allow visitors to reshape PROGRAM’s gallery space with sound. Environment is used as a material. Replaying the sounds of these New York institutions as they intermix with the ambient sounds of PROGRAM, space is at once extended and collapsed. Dubplates, for the music industry, are used in mastering studios before the final master. They are meant for temporary use, they deteriorate over time. The sounds recorded on their surface begin to dissolve after about fifty plays.

Untitled (plate tectonics) is accompanied here by Scaffold (Invalidenstrasse 115), an installation piece that uses video-projected light to animate and complicate certain characteristics of the exhibition space’s architecture, suspending it somewhere between architectural and cinematic space.

Artist's statement:

What is a visitor to the Met doing when she views the Greek sculpture garden almost exclusively through the LCD panel of her camera? What kind of experience is being produced? It is a familiar lament that our culture is losing its ability to attend, to look with engagement at art and at everyday experience. But that lament overlooks a compeling fact: the visitor is composing.

In those photos, sounds, or videos, the art and the surrounding space are collapsed together (i.e. onto a picture plane) and rendered plastic, malleable, in a sense modular. Most importantly they are incorporated into the world of the viewer, rather than the reverse. In this sense there are few more democratic gestures in an exhibition than to point a device and make a recording, not to preserve a record of the place, but to impose upon it a unique continuity, a contour of one's own experience; to sculpt with it.

A museum or exhibition space aims to present a coherent itinerary of (largely visual) experience. Sound tends to tell a different story, revealing places and intervals that are disruptive, distracted, intense, or diffuse, but rarely discrete. Indeed, sound abhors discretion. It can only exist through disruption and agitation. Sound is inclusive and immersive: if you hear it, it is vibrating you. This helps to explain the conflicted relationship contemporary art exhibition has had with sound work, in which playing pieces on headphones has become the favored way of taming sound into an ideally discrete sound-object.

With this in mind, Untitled (plate tectonics) works with the exhibition space (both recorded and present) not as a resolved environment for the reception and contemplation of works, but rather as both an impulse (as in electrical energy) and as a material, a moldable substance useful in the creation of other ideas, further experiences, alternate places.

via Program

Christine Hill + Bauhaus

Christine Hill, Do it yourself bauhaus, 2009.

The needs of the people, not the dictates of luxury.
Hannes Meyer

Do it yourself bauhaus is a project by Christine Hill and Volksboutique commissioned within the exhibition Modell Bauhaus/Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin. This work is based on reviewing the core tenets of the founding of the Bauhaus with how they survive today in contemporary design. Hill does this by critiquing both Bauhaus ideas and their current dilution in mass marketing. This major installation follows her success at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and her 2009 Volksboutique Armory Apothecary at the Armory Show in New York.

Karen Kilimnik + Wright

Karen Kilimnik, Untitled, 2009, Three postcards with glue and glitter, two parts 10.2 x 15.2 cm each, one part 15.2 x 10.2cm

Larissa Fassler on Zentrum Kreuzberg

Kotti, 2008
Materials: grey cardboard and glue
Approximate scale: 1 footstep = 3 cm cardboard
Dimensions: 300 x 300 x 135 cm

Kotti is a model representation of the publicly accessible areas of the Zentrum Kreuzberg (ZK) housing estate and its surroundings. Starting once again with the act of walking I have measured this concrete housing estate as well as its front plaza and underground access tunnels in order to construct a third model-like structure that questions the impact of urban planning on communities, and conversely, the impact of communities on planning.

via Larissa Fassler

Elena Bajo "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The Woodmill, 2010 Plan for a Choreography and performance based on an architectural floor plan for a social rehabilitation center in London, 1968, found in The Woodmill Building.

via Elena Bajo

Olafur Eliasson + Barragán

Olafur Eliasson
'The Barragán House Kaleidoscope', 2002
kaleidoscope, mixed media
(120 x 120 x 70 cm)