Ben Wolf at SPRING 2011 ART + ARCHITECTURE SHOW

Ben Wolf (b. 1983, Nashville) is a Brooklyn-based sculptor whose abstract assemblages and installations express the “decadence of abandonment” in architectural materials including rotten boards, rusted stair wells, peeling paint and other found and salvaged objects. Wolf often works on a large scale, taking over and reconfiguring entire lost buildings and towns. He received a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute in 2005 and in 2008 received a Brooklyn Arts Council grant for public art works and a residency with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC). In 2010 Wolf participated in a Power House Productions group residency in Detroit, constructing a massive sculptural work from the remnants of forgotten homes. An avid traveler, Wolf has produced and exhibited projects in Australia, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland, as well as throughout the U.S. You can see more of Ben’s work on his website.

Art + Architecture 2011 at the Gowanus Ballroom
55 9th Street Building 61, Brooklyn, NY 11215 April 8th – April 17th

Brownbook Magazine: Contemporary Arab Culture

One of my favorite things I saw at Miami Basel was Brownbook, an urban lifestyle magazine that covers contemporary design, politics and creative culture coming out of the Middle East and North Africa. Based in Dubai, the beautifully printed and bound publication feels a little bit like Monocle with its layout but the coverage is more diverse ranging from Istanbul Design Week to Afghani indie rock. The current issue, Urban 50, is their annual survey of fifty unique people and ideas that are transforming the Middle East.

For our annual roundup issue, we’ve scoured the region for the people, ideas, places, businesses and buildings that we think are making the Middle East better today. In Brownbook 24, Our search has taken us to a Cairene radio station, to a college on the banks of the Red Sea, to a rundown area in Casablanca that’s had an injection of community spirit from a converted abattoir.

The coverage in Brownbook along with the NYTimes' recent feature on the many ambitious architectural projects in the Middle East gets me excited about visiting in the upcoming years. Check out the full NYTimes article here and Nicolai Ouroussoff's the accompanying video piece featuring IM Pei, Frank Gehry, Norman Foster and Jean Nouvel speaking about their individual museum projects in Abu Dhabi and Qatar.

EcoArk

A cutting-edge engineering project has turned 1.5 million used plastic bottles into the world’s first large-scale recycled-plastic building.

From a distance, the building looks like a smart new addition to Taipei’s skyline—an angular, approximately nine-story-tall silver and white structure on Zhongshan North Road, not far from Taipei’s landmark Grand Hotel. Close up, it is a surprise for first-time visitors, as it is constructed with plastic bottles—1.5 million of them to be exact.

Since the building, known as the EcoArk, has taken shape, it has received much attention not only from local media, but international media including the BBC, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, and Bloomberg news services. National Geographic also has been filming it for the last half year for the TV channel’s MegaStructures program to air in early January.

The Taiwanese company that built it, Miniwiz Sustainable Energy Development Co. Ltd., a relatively young company started by a Taiwanese overseas returnee in his 30s, has also garnered a lot of attention. That is because the EcoArk is the world’s first fully functional, large-scale plastic building made from recycled plastic bottles. Taiwan is one of the biggest consumers of plastic bottles in the world, with the island’s 23 million residents using up to 4.6 billion polyethylene terephthalate or PET bottles each year. It took the company only a couple of weeks to gather enough used bottles to make the building, which it did by collecting them from department stores belonging to the Far Eastern Group, the project sponsor and one of Taiwan’s biggest conglomerates.

Read the full article here!

Jean Nouvel in the Desert

Nicolai Oroussoff has a beautiful piece in today's NYTimes about Jean Nouvel's new National Museum of Qatar. Read the full article here.

Few architects have invested more time trying to bridge the gap between the high-tech aesthetics of the West and the traditions of the Middle East than Jean Nouvel.

His design for the Arab World Institute in Paris in 1987 was dominated by mechanical, light-regulating apertures arranged in a pattern that evoked Islamic motifs. A planned branch of the Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi will be shaded by a gigantic dome that turns its grounds into a kind of oasis. And workers are putting the final touches on an office tower in Doha, Qatar, that is sheathed in aluminum latticework and capped by a filigreed, mosquelike dome.

But Mr. Nouvel’s design for the National Museum of Qatar, scheduled to be unveiled on Tuesday at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, may be that French architect’s most overtly poetic act of cultural synthesis yet. One of a number of major museum projects in Doha, including I. M. Pei’s year-old Museum of Islamic Art, it is part of a government push to encourage the exchange of cultural traffic — between East and West, tradition and modernity — after many years in which it seemed to move only one way. Every level of Mr. Nouvel’s project, from its materials to its dominant forms to its sprawling layout, reflects a richly imaginative effort to retain a connection to the fading world of the Bedouins from which modern Qatar sprang, while also embracing the realities of a rapidly urbanizing society.

Future Vision Banished to the Past

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

How old does a building have to be before we appreciate its value? And when does its cultural importance trump practical considerations?

Those are the questions that instantly come to mind over the likely destruction of Kisho Kurokawa’s historic Nakagin Capsule Tower.

A rare built example of Japanese Metabolism, a movement whose fantastic urban visions became emblems of the country’s postwar cultural resurgence, the 1972 Capsule Tower is in a decrepit state. Its residents, tired of living in squalid, cramped conditions, voted two years ago to demolish it and are now searching for a developer to replace it with a bigger, more modern tower. That the building is still standing has more to do with the current financial malaise than with an understanding of its historical worth.

Yet for many of us who believe that the way we treat our cultural patrimony is a fair measure of how enlightened we are as a society, the building’s demolition would be a bitter loss. The Capsule Tower is not only gorgeous architecture; like all great buildings, it is the crystallization of a far-reaching cultural ideal. Its existence also stands as a powerful reminder of paths not taken, of the possibility of worlds shaped by different sets of values.

Founded by a loose-knit group of architects at the end of the 1950s, the Metabolist movement sought to create flexible urban models for a rapidly changing society. Floating cities. Cities inspired by oil platforms. Buildings that resembled strands of DNA. Such proposals reflected Japan’s transformation from a rural to a modern society. But they also reflected more universal trends, like social dislocation and the fragmentation of the traditional family, influencing generations of architects from London to Moscow.

Of the five members who made up the group, Kurokawa was the most glamorous. A photo taken in 1958 at a Moscow student conference, when he was just 24, shows him surrounded by fawning girls, signing autographs. Trim and handsome, often outfitted in elegantly tailored suits and a bow tie, he became a regular at Tokyo nightclubs. His Space Capsule Disco, opened in the 1960s, was a hot spot for young creative types.

The Nakagin Capsule Tower was completed as the movement’s influence was beginning to wane. Composed of 140 concrete pods plugged into two interconnected circulation cores, the structure was meant as a kind of bachelor hotel for businessmen working in the swanky Ginza neighborhood of Tokyo.

Inside, each apartment is as compact as a space capsule. A wall of appliances and cabinets is built into one side, including a kitchen stove, a refrigerator, a television and a tape deck. A bathroom unit, about the size of an airplane lavatory, is set into an opposite corner. A big porthole window dominates the far end of the room, with a bed tucked underneath.

Part of the design’s appeal is voyeuristic. The portholes evoke gigantic peepholes. Their enormous size, coupled with the small scale of the rooms, exposes the entire apartment to the city outside. Many of the midlevel units look directly onto an elevated freeway, so you are almost face to face with people in passing cars. (On my first visit there, a tenant told me that during rush hour, drivers stuck in traffic often point or wave at residents.)

But the project’s lasting importance has more to do with its structural innovations, and how they reflect the Metabolists’ views on the evolution of cities. Each of the concrete capsules was assembled in a factory, including details like carpeting and bathroom fixtures. They were then shipped to the site and bolted, one by one, onto the concrete and steel cores that housed the building’s elevators, stairs and mechanical systems.

Read the full article on the NYTimes here!

Under the Brooklyn Bridge

 

From the good people at the Storefront for Art and Architecture