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February 27th, 2011
Jason Green, “Recurrent 2″, hand-cast and glazed terra cotta units, wall-mounted, 6 1/2 x19 x 2 in. (2008). Click on images to enlarge and play slideshow.
On Thursday, March 3rd, we will be opening our booth at the Verge Art Fair in Dumbo, Brooklyn. This is rather a significant undertaking for us, as it represents the first time we’ve participated in an organized collective art-related event. Perhaps more significantly, we’re bringing together five contemporary artists whose work investigates the theme nearest and dearest to our heart which, of course, is modularity. Now, we’ve come across other recent shows with the term modular in their title or description, but honestly, we were consistently hard pressed to recognize just how the concept related to the work being shown. So perhaps our brief showing at Verge is the first time this particular aesthetic preoccupation is being examined among multiple artists from the post-Minimalist generation since, well, since the heady days of modular machinations when people like Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin and Donald Judd were doing their seminal work.
A lot has changed since then, of course, including the way in which the post-Minimalist modulartists approach their chosen theme. It’s our intention to discuss these changes in a series of subsequent posts. For now, we’d simply like to present images of a few pieces in the upcoming show by each of the participating artists, all of whom we’ll profile in greater depth in the later pieces.
Show Information:
Location: 1 Main Street, Dumbo, Brooklyn
Booth: Number 1
Dates/Times: 3/3-5 12 to 10pm, 3/6 12 to 6pm
Telephone: (718) 360-9305
Email: us@art-rethought.com
Fair website: www.brooklynartfair.com
ABOVE: Susan Weinthaler, “FIX”, wood, paint, epoxy, magnets on steel. 48 x 48 in. (2011). Each colored wood unit has a magnet mounted on its back side, which allows it to be moved to any position on the steel “canvas”. The images above show the same work, but with the pieces re-arranged into different patterns.
ABOVE: Moshé Elimelech: “Cubic Construction #25″, twenty-five hand-painted wood cubes in velvet case with brushed aluminum frame, 25 in. sq., 4 in. d. (2010). Another example of interactive, customizable module art: both images are of the same piece. The cubes are removed by hand from their case and rotated to display one of six variously painted faces. We previously discussed Elimelech’s work here.
ABOVE: Donald Rattner, Studio for A.R.T. and Architecture, “Tapestry NO-2-1 in Red and Black”, wool felt modules, 48 1/2 x 58 1/2 in. (2010). This modular tapestry is assembled by connecting individual felt modules together by means of interlocking slots and tabs. Hanger pieces permit the piece to be hung on a wall-mounted rod.
ABOVE: Trevor Elliott, “Untitled Number 29″, reclaimed wood and magnets, 12 x 34 x 3/4 in. (2011). Magnets are particularly amenable to interactive modular art because of their connective (and dis-connective) qualities. Elliott has used them for innovative product design as well, such as his GrowFrame modular picture frames.
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See you there!
January 7th, 2011
The Architecture Foundation (UK) has launched an international design competition for a modular and portable bike shed at Bankside, south London.
With up to 17 per cent of regular trips to the area made by bicycle, the competition is part of Better Bankside’s EU-funded Smart Green Business strategy which aims to boost local businesses’ eco-performance and promote further cycling in the area.
Open to architects, designers, artists, product designers and other disciplines, entrants are encouraged to produce ‘flexible and innovative yet realisable’ proposals.
A prototype of the winning entry will be built with Better Bankside keen to establish the bike shed in the western end of its zone by March.
Entries will be judged anonymously by a jury featuring Deborah Saunt of DSDHA; Ashok Sinha, chief executive of the London Cycling Campaign; Sarah Ichioka, director of the Architecture Foundation and Jonathan Bell, architecture editor at Wallpaper* magazine.
The deadline for registration and payment is 16 February, 2011 with Architecture Foundation members exempt from the competition’s £30 entry fee.
The final deadline for submissions of ideas is 18 February, 2011.
November 5th, 2010
Title:
“Mass Customization in Architecture and Urban Design: Models and Algorithms”
When:
6:00 PM – 8:00 PM Tuesday, November 9th, 2010
Where:
The Center for Architecture
536 LaGuardia Place
NY, NY 10012
Reservations:
AIA NY Chapter
(212) 683-0023
More:
The modernistic approach to the design of a large number of objects, such as a housing estate, was to design a limited number of types and then to repeat it based on market analysis. This approach led to uniform housing and rigid urban plans. Contemporary processes may overcome such limitations by using rule-based computer-aided design and manufacturing processes. The goal is to give mass-produced houses some of the qualities associated with individually designed ones and to endow planned environments with the qualities associated with traditional settlements. The lecture will first focus on research carried out to develop a rule-based framework for customizing mass housing and then explain how such a framework might be reconfigured to enable flexible urban design. Several case studies will be presented, including systems for existing planned and non-planed designs, such as the one for Siza’s Malagueira houses and the one for the Marrakech Medina, as well as systems for original designs. The last part of the lecture will focus on real-time responsive environments, seen as a particular form of customization.
Organizer:
AIANY Technology Committee
This AIANY event is made possible – and kept free – by the generous support of ABC Imaging.
Via: AIA New York Chapter
August 27th, 2010
About the Conference
From the FABRICATE website:
FABRICATE is an international peer reviewed conference with supporting publication and exhibition to be held at The Building Centre in London from 15-16 April 2011. Discussing the progressive integration of digital design with manufacturing processes, and its impact on design and making in the 21st century, FABRICATE will bring together pioneers in design and making within architecture, construction, engineering, manufacturing, materials technology and computation. Discussion on key themes will include: how digital fabrication technologies are enabling new creative and construction opportunities, the difficult gap that exists between digital modeling and its realization, material performance and manipulation, off-site and on-site construction, interdisciplinary education, economic and sustainable contexts.
FABRICATE has emerged as the first in a series of focused events from the highly successful ‘Digital Architecture London’ Conference and ‘Digital Hinterlands’ Exhibition in September 2009. Organised by The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London in collaboration with The Building Centre London, this conference intends to frame discussion around the presentation of built or partially built works by individuals or collaborators in research, practice and industry selected from submissions through our Call for Works.
Representing the broad disciplinary spectrum from design to production, the presentation of built work will contribute alongside leading invited speakers from Australia, Europe, North America, and Asia. A significant and supportive context for the event will be provided by London’s extensive network of global creative consultancies, many no more than a short stroll away from the venue.
We welcome original, innovative and pioneering projects for the Call for Works and we would also encourage works in progress to enter too. Submission requirements emphasize strong and informative visual material with succinct analytical text and project synopsis. Selected conference submissions together with articles from keynote speakers will be featured in ‘FABRICATE: Making Digital Architecture’ published by Riverside Architectural Press and launched at the conference.
Call for Works
Download Call for Work Poster
Central to the aim of FABRICATE is to interrogate and disseminate difference, similarity and innovation across design and making practices in industry and academia. Submissions will be independently blind reviewed by two members of an international panel of experts. Selected submissions will be featured in ‘FABRICATE: Making Digital Architecture’ published by Riverside Architectural Press.
The Call for Work deadline is the 20th of September 2010.
Submission Instructions
On our submission page, you will need to read and agree to our terms and conditions and provide the following information.
- Author(s) Details
Fill in details of the author(s) and collaborators if any.
- Project Title
The project title as you wish it to be published, followed by the site location if applicable and finally the year.
- Keywords
Provide between three and seven keywords that help us choose appropriate reviewers from our panel of experts.
- Synopsis (Between 500 and 1500 words)
Please pay particular attention to to this part of your submission. Synopsis should both introduce the project and focus on any specific innovations in the design and fabrication of your work. We are also interested in the development of the project including challenges and lessons learnt, conclusions on the approach you took, and where your practice goes next from this project. Furthermore, we ask you to add a paragraph at the end of your text where you can include any further details about your project that you feel are important e.g. you may wish to acknowledge sponsors, clients, contractors, universities etc.
- Images (Between 5 and 15)
It is recommended that submissions include an appropriate range of images including concept sketches, early iterations, CAD and physical models, photography, manufacturing or construction information, scripting, test pieces, prototypes, parallel experiments, final assemblies, artifacts in use, revisions, renovations, and subsequent iterations. PLEASE NOTE images MUST be submitted as a single combined PDF not exceeding 30Mb in size. All images must be fully captioned, credited and dated in the PDF. The PDF with your images is the only part of your submission in the form of attachment. Everything else should be filled in in the appropriate fields of the online submission form.
- The submission process is only online, no postal submissions will be accepted.
- Multiple submissions are permissible.
Please note that this is a complete article submission. No pre-submission of abstracts is required.
Ready to submit? Click here.
References
FABRICATE website
August 2nd, 2010
It was only recently that we stumbled on the work of Charlotte Posenenske, a German artist who was born in 1930 and survived life in Nazi Germany during World War II despite her partially Jewish heritage. Posenenske’s story is remarkable in a number of ways, not the least of which is that she is best known for a tiny body of work produced in just two years of a truncated ten-year career in visual art. That her tenure as an artist was relatively short had nothing to do with her passing in 1985 from the effects of cancer: rather, she had deliberately walked away from the art world seventeen years earlier, in 1968, never to look back again despite invitations for her to return. Instead, she spent the last part of her life pursuing a career as a sociologist, studying the effects of industrialization on organized labor.
Her choice of an alternative vocation, however, was not quite as disconnected from her preceding artistic pursuits as might seem the case at first glance. For in the sculptures for which she is now celebrated are interwoven some of the very same themes she would take up in her new profession: industrialism and its relationship to art and craft; how things are made and who is equipped to make them; and how we value objects in the marketplace. Imagine our excitement when we discovered that someone had been exploring several of the very concepts that interest us at A.R.T. today – only a half-century ago. Sure is hard to have an original idea around here!
  
The principal sculptures which we and others particularly admire were assembled by Posenenske from pieces which she designed to resemble ventilation ducts, such as one might find inside a building. Pieces were either of a rectangular, square or transitional section, and could be attached to each other with screws. Her choice of materials was limited to galvanized sheet metal and corrugated cardboard, with no hand-finishing or post-production treatment to pretty them up and belie their industrial origins.
As visually appealing as they may be in a purely formal sense, an important distinguishing feature of her duct sculptures is more conceptual than visual: that is, the pieces were designed by Posenenske to be re-configurable, meaning they could be detached and then re-attached in a myriad of different configurations. In other words, they were modular.
Posenenske put the fact of her sculpture’s modularity into practice by leaving it to curators to arrange the pieces as they saw fit when exhibited in galleries or curated spaces. By implication collectors and spectators would also be empowered to install them to their own specifications. For one event Posenenske herself choreographed a performance piece in which a crew of assistants dressed in white Lufthansa jumpsuits re-arranged a set of modules suspended from a ceiling in order to reinforce her ideas about the fluidity of their composition.
  
But her preferred environment for their display were public spaces, especially transportation nodes – airports, traffic islands, train stations. In part this stemmed from her political sensibilities; keep in mind this is all happening in 1967-68 when the counter-cultural wave of democratization and anti-establishmentarianism was about to reach a crescendo. The socially conscious Posenenske did not want her work to be the object of market speculation by collectors banking on their appreciation in value for reasons of a limited supply and the rising reputation of the artist. Besides physically locating her sculptures in more ‘democratic’ contexts than the privatized gallery space, Posenenske also intended for them to be produced in open edition and sold for the cost of their production.
If you’re familiar with some of the thinking behind the portfolio of work we offer through A.R.T., you can see immediately why we feel such a strong affinity for this fascinating figure.
 
Happily, public interest in Posenenske’s work seems to be rising again with a new book and catalogue, an exhibition at documenta 12 in 2007 and now, at the Artist’s Space in New York, a series of events and films (left) organized around the Vierkantrohe Series (Square Tube Series) of sculptures that we have focused on here. Part of the program at Artist’s Space faithfully reflects Posenenske’s attitude regarding the non-static character of art: four living artists have been invited to position the modules in the space to their liking over the course of successive weeks. Listen, if she was okay with some guys in Lufthansa suits playing around with her tubes, what harm could a few artists do?
References:
Artists Space Exhibition and Film on Charlotte Posenenske through August 2010
Charlotte Posenenske by Burkhard Brunn (2009) at Amazon
July 12th, 2010
ModuLibris installation by Studio for A.R.T. and Architecture. A Jenny for your thoughts?
We must admit, despite our own efforts in the field of Word Art, that we’ve often felt uncomfortable with the preachy tone of a lot of work coming out of this genre. Maybe that’s because the conversation has always seemed…well, kind of one-sided. And in your face. And over-scaled. And prone to one-liners and the self-consciously profound. And most of all, very top-down because of the tendency among word artists to deliver their content in the form of proclamations, an attitude underscored by the widespread use of text laid out in all caps.
But in the age of crowdsourcing this sort of dictatorial attitude can no longer relied upon to attract viewers, so it’s interesting to see how the art world is straining to meet the crowd halfway by associating a major figure in Word Art like Holzer with an interactive art project. Titled ADDRESS (there are those caps again), the project is connected with an exhibition of her work at Montreal-based DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art, running from June 30 to November 14, 2010. It’s billed by the host as an Art Education project, which is a somewhat puzzling label and perhaps reflects the uncertainty of the host as to how to involve spectators in the otherwise passive experience of viewing art exhibitions.
  
Projects by Jenny Holzer, from the artist’s website. Words words words!
In any case, the project has something to do with inscriptions, postcards, mailboxes, graphic imagery, video and the Canadian postal system, although how they interrelate is not altogether clear from the DHC/ART website. Perhaps you will have better luck if you read it yourself:
Project
Participants will create a postcard based on the theme of social engagement. At the end of the exhibition participants will be invited to take part in a happening where as a group, each card will be addressed and deposited in a selected mailbox as a symbolic, group gesture.
In reference to themes explored by Jenny Holzer, the participant will call up and reflect upon social engagement inspired by:
- a point of view on human behavior
- a point of view on culture
- a reflection or critique on society
Text is central to this project. The challenge is to express an idea in a one word or concise phrase in order to remain within the constraints of the postcard format, which may motivate the participant to take a poetic approach.
Creation of a postcard
The participants will receive a short presentation from the DHC/ART Educators about the postcard’s presence in art history, on the public function of objects and the impact of words in poetic writing in order to contextualize the project.
Each participant will then receive a blank postcard on which they are free to:
- Visually interpret the word or phrase on the front of the card
- Write the word or phrase on the back of the card and to create a visual on the front that is thematically linked to the word or phrase
The participant may use drawing, photography, painting, collage and decoupage to make their creation.
Exhibition
The projects will be exhibited in the Education Space and in a virtual gallery on DHC/ART’s website. A reception will be held to conclude the project.
Happening 10 / 11 / 10
During the closing reception, participants will be invited to go as a group to a selected mailbox where the cards will be deposited as a symbolic gesture. This event will be documented on video and posted on DHC/ART’s website and Facebook page.
*DHC/ART will provide postage for the mailing. Canada only. [Thanks guys! ~Eds.]
References:
DHC/ART website
Exhibition: Jenny Holzer at DHC/ART
Interactive Art Project: ADDRESS at DHC/ART
Jenny Holzer website
June 16th, 2010
Morphosis: Design for 41 Cooper Square, New York.
On behalf of The Emerging New York Architects Committee, Versa Design, Lero Lero Productions and Archinect.com, we would like to invite you to the premiere event Shifting Paradigms: Design in Transition.
This event will explore the evolving relationship between the creators of the built environment and the technological advancements in the design and fabrication process that are facilitating a new contemporary language of architecture.
Shifting Paradigms will feature the premiere of (Re)centering the Square, a documentary film which provides in-depth analysis of the recently completed 41 Cooper Square in New York City. Designed by Morphosis Architects, this academic laboratory exists as a pure child of the digital age, providing a comprehensive model of how digital technology and a growing concern for environmental sustainability have impacted the design disciplines over the last decade. Framed around an engaging discussion with the Project Manager, Jean Oei of Morphosis Architects and Dr. George Campbell, President of the Cooper Union, (Re)centering the Square features a compelling visual tour of the facility, a detailed narrative from multiple perspectives explaining the forces which drove the design process forward and captures the transformation of the architectural profession over the last ten years through the lens of this visionary project.
Following the film, a panel of leading practitioners and researchers will examine how contemporary advancements in digital technology and environmental sustainability are propelling our most innovative design experiments, facilitating a new architectural discourse, redefining the relationship between designers and machines and helping to shape how humans will interact with the built environment in future generations.
Tuesday June 22nd at the Center for Architecture
FREE ADMISSION + WINE & H’OURDERVES
6:00pm Wine & H’ourderves
6:35pm Film Premiere
7:15pm Panel Discussion
Panelists Include:
Marty Doscher: Morphosis Architects
Paul Seletsky: ArcSphere
David Benjamin: The Living New York / Columbia University GSAPP
Neil Meredith: Front / Columbia University GSAPP
David Pysh: Gehry Technologies
Moderated by Jason Ivaliotis: Versa Design
(Re)Centering the Square
Director: Elba Calado
Executive Producer: Jason Ivaliotis
For more Information: jason@versa-design.com
Tuesday, 22 June 2010
18:00 – 20:00
Center for Architecture
536 LaGuardia Place
New York, NY
Via Bustler
June 1st, 2010
 Organizer:
TEX-FAB is a new resource for designers, academics, fabricators, and students seeking out the innovative application of digital technology to the physical environment. Within Texas there is an emerging network of companies, institutions, and individuals focusing on the exploration of parametric design and the digital production of building components. Specifically, there is a growing opportunity for collaborative exchange between the academic, technical, and professional communities by leveraging the immense resources found in some of the largest metropolitan centers across the United States. TEX-FAB seeks to create a forum for the exchanges of these ideas and techniques through workshops, lectures, and exhibitions.
Brief:
REPEAT is an international competition established to foster the creative spirit in the burgeoning field of digital fabrication. We encourage the generation of cutting edge design proposals for a structure of your design with the only caveats being it must serve a purpose, be generated and conceived digitally, incorporate repetitive elements, be optimized for ‘flat-pack’ transportation and be produced through fabrication technologies available within Houston, Texas.
The evaluation of all the REPEAT proposals will focus on the cohesion of the design concept to digital fabrication techniques and methods of assembly. Factoring in these two foundational requirements for the competition, the entrant is encouraged to propose a solution that is both formally challenging in the mechanics and aesthetics of the connections, but also speak to the issues of use and performance.
Timeline:
Materials become available June 16, 2010
Deadline for submissions is October 3, 2010
Website:
http://tex-fab.net/category/compete/
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Mission Henry Ford, move over – the era of mass production has come to a close! Personalization is the name of the game now. People want a role in shaping the physical world around them to suit their individual needs, tastes and resources; to satisfy that goal they're looking for works of art and design that are reconfigurable, interactive and scalable. This blog explores how creatives are responding to the quest for customization, as well as the impact customization is having on the creative disciplines themselves.
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