Frank Lloyd Wright/Google Design Contest

June 14th, 2009 § 0

WRITTEN BY ALEXANDER

Think you have what it takes to be the next Frank Lloyd Wright and get into his prestigious School of Architecture? Now you can prove it.

In conjunction with two current exhibitions celebrating the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and his students, Google and the Guggenheim Museum are holding a competition for architectural designers of any level. The Design It: Shelter Competition is an extension of the exhibition Learning By Doing, and gives those of us who did not attend the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture a chance to see what it would be like.

Example of shelter designed by a Wright student
Example of a shelter designed by a Wright student.  Kaman Amin (Scottsdale, Arizona), Lotus Shelter, 1963, Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Arizona

So, without further ado, the challenge: Using SketchUp (Google’s 3D modeling program) and Google Earth, create a 100 square-foot shelter and put it anywhere in the world. Keeping with Wright’s style, the shelter must respond to the environment you have chosen and create an interesting dialogue between architecture and place. Furthermore, the human needs of safety and comfort must play a key role in your design. The shelter cannot have heat, hot water, or electricity and must provide spaces for the study and survival of one individual.

Not tech-savvy? No worries–the official website is full of tutorials and helpful hints to guide you in the creation of your design.

This challenge is actually based on an assignment that students at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture have been doing for over 70 years. Their task is more or less the same, but they must place their designs somewhere in the landscape of the school’s Arizona or Wisconsin campuses. In some cases, these shelters were actually constructed! Learning By Doing showcases plans, models, and photographs of five such projects.

The competition runs through August 23, after which all complete designs will be submitted to both a group of students at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture and a Jury of Experts. The students will choose ten finalists whose designs will be showcased from September 7–October 10 and will be voted on by the public. At the same time, the Jury of Experts will choose their top pick. On October 21, both winners will be announced at the Guggenheim’s 50th Anniversary Celebration.  Prizes for the winners include cash, a trip for two to New York City, a behind-the-scenes tour of the Guggenheim and the Google Offices, admission to other NYC museums, and a SkecthUp Pro license.

So, what are you waiting for? Get designing — and take me along on the behind-the-scenes tour!

Design It: Shelter Competition | Sponsored by the Guggenheim Museum and Google SketchUp
For information on how to enter, the rules, and the exhibitions, go to Guggenheim.org/shelter

New Layout: Patience Please!

May 26th, 2009 § 0

Although we’ve had a bit of a hiatus for the past month or so, we’ll be back to posting soon. For now, I’m implementing a new layout — and ask for your patience, as there will likely be some bugs as I work to fix it live. This new layout should present some exciting new possibilities for the site, and I look forward to posting some new thoughts very soon! Until then, thanks for understanding. Let us know what you think of the new layout in a few days when it’s complete!

Right image: Preparation photo from Thomas Hirschhorn, Cavemanman, 2002, at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (Photo courtesy CMoA’s Flickr stream)

Guest Post at Blogs.com

March 29th, 2009 § 3

I recently wrote a guest post over at Blogs.com, on my top ten favorite art history and museum-related blogs.  Check it out here, and let us know what you think of the list.

A Late Vermeer — Or is it?

March 14th, 2009 § 1

We read Martin Gladwell’s Blink for my museum studies seminar — a bestseller that focuses on the importance of those inexplicable moments of intinct. In the first chapter, he talks about the Getty Kouros  controversy.  Curators at the Getty, looking over the Greek statue for months, became convinced of its authenticity and purchased it at great price; yet others, such as Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan, saw it at first glance and simply knew it could not be real.  Whether or not the Kouros is a forgery or not remains unknown, but Gladwell argues that those first glace, gut-instinct moments should not be ignored.

Attributed to Vermeer, A Young Woman Seated at the Virginals, currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Click image for larger view)

I had a “blink” moment in front of the controversial Vermeer now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I wrote about a few months ago.  As I walked through the Italian Renaissance rooms to the Dutch Golden Age galleries, I was completely ready to dismiss the Vermeer as a fake.  After all, in reproductions we’d viewed in my seminar, it looked so preposterous: a huge yellow shawl, blank walls, ringlets in her hair and those hands (click the image to the right to view it closeup, and you’ll understand what I mean).  But when I walked in to the room, turned the corner, and marched straight up to the little painting, the first thought that popped into my mind was: Wow, it really is a Vermeer.

It took me a good twenty minutes or more in the room — happily, surrounded by almost all of the Met’s authenticated Vermeers for comparison — to put my fingers on exactly why my gut instinct was so positive.  The second thought in my mind was when I looked at the ribbons in the figure’s hair.  They are painted with such care but at the same time such simplicity — a single pulling of bright red paint, a few daubs of white — that immediately made me think of a very similar detail in the Louvre’s Lacemaker (see gallery below): the red and white threads pooling over the pincushion are painted with just as much care.  Interestingly, the ringlet hairstyle I’d originally considered so odd appears in that very painting, too. Moreover, the Lacemaker is about the same size as this intimate, small painting.

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Dia:Beacon

February 21st, 2009 § 4

diabeacon_view
View of Dia:Beacon on the Hudson River, from Wikipedia.com

Step through sculptures made of strings, see yourself reflected in what seems to be a volcano of glass, walk through a towering rusted spiral, gaze into huge, endless geometric pits, and imagine who wrote each of a set of 4,000 vintage postcards.  Where else can you do all these things but at the amazing Dia:Beacon?

I’ve attended college in the Hudson Valley for four years, and only now, in my final semester, have I at last managed to visit Dia:Beacon, the sprawling contemporary art installation museum in Beacon, NY (located about an hour or so from New York City).  Dia:Beacon has all the greats of contemporary art, including Richard Serra, Gerhard Richter, Donald Judd, and Agnes Martin, as well as a number of artists I’d never heard of before, but whose art fully engrosses you.

diabeacon_sandback
Fred Sandback, Untitled from Dia:Beacon website

The museum is a playground of optical illusions.  The stark white galleries immediately present you with the eye-numbing neons of Dan Flavin and then the meticulously layered pencil murals of Sol LeWitt, who seems a Dia favorite.  Throughout your journey through the huge, echoing Dia warehouse, you constantly wonder: What is real? What am I looking at? What is this space?

Fred Sandback’s string sculptures (a view, at left) ask these questions playfully, creating larger-than-life rectangles and triangles that you know are flat and empty, but at the same time have deceiving depth, leaning against gallery walls as if discarded by the artist. On Kawara’s room of dated paintings from his ongoing Today series is a pristinely executed inquiry into time that manages to be both intimate and distant; the air is even ionized, and it feels somehow lighter as you inhale and exhale within the space.

diabeacon_heizer
Michael Heizer, North, South, East, West, from Dia:Beacon website

Meanwhile, the gaping holes of Michael Heizer’s North, South, East, West (right) are an exploration into illusions of infinity, simultaneously mesmerizing and terrifying.  And one could spend hours in Zoe Leonard’s You see I am here after all exhibition — reading the text and studying the subtle differences in printing of the 4,000 vintage postcards of Niagara Falls, collected by the artist over the course of the year, getting lost in the stories of this place and forgetting any sense of space around you altogether.

(Not to be missed, by the way, is their bookstore, which, though small in size, houses a treasure trove of books on art, design, and theory from around the world.)

All in all, the collections of the Dia, much like the installation art in general, defy description, and beg instead to be experienced. And after all, isn’t that the point?

Dia:Beacon, Reggio Galleries, 3 Beekman Street, Beacon NY 12508 | Zoe Leonard’s You see I am here after all exhibition is on view until September 9, 2009

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