High Lights, Clear View on the Vista

Stars so close,
You can reach out and kiss one.

Salk Institute of California, Ezra Stoller image

Kennedy Airport, Ezra Stoller image

Architectural photographer Ezra Stoller was a nostalgic master of chiaroscuro, invoking Film Noir and the old world glamour of Hollywood with his deep focus and razor sharp foreground detail.

"My photos, tend to be confusing.  I show a great many vistas."

- Ezra Stoller

Stoller's images offer up a number of different framed views in each single shot, reflecting on his own photograph of the Salk Institute of California (Louis Kahn), Stoller says "there are I think nine separate areas you can view through, nine vistas."

Salk Institute of California, Ezra Stoller image
more here

Natalie Bookchin and Lev Manovich:Porno-Pictorialism, 1995

This digitally manipulated image by Lev Manovich and Natalie Bookchin, has us viewing a scene of viewing, though this time we do not see the viewer's gaze, only infer it from her legs and feet.  The oval framing of the scene suggests either peephole or classic oval frame, the latter associated with time remembered.  The spherical distortion of the end of the bed suggests a wide-angle lens, but in any case, the oval masking and optical distortion place us in the position of voyeur.  We do not see her expression to understand what she makes of her collection of art nudes and we do not see her hands.  The title suggests the erotic reverie of a teenager.  The picture reminds us that art has long sanctioned the viewing of naked bodies and one could do worse than these books of images when musing upon one's nascent sexuality.  The train bearing down on the bedroom would seem an obvious paste-in and portentous sign of the force and power of that sexuality.  It contrasts strongly with the delicacy and obliqueness of the rest of the picture. (Perhaps also an allusion to Alfred Stieglitz's The Hand of Man).

Alfred Stieglitz: The Hand of Man, 1902

Absorption/recognition: a notion that gained currency in the Diderot era of France that the viewer's pleasure in a painting with human figures, lies in the works ability to wholely engross the viewer.  It depends on the assumption that the subjects are not posing, rather, that they are absorbed in whatever they are about, and this absorption is a condition for our absorption in viewing them.  more here

Jeff Wall: The Destroyed Room, 1978

Jeff Wall considers this large format photograph to be his first successful attempt in challenging photography norms using lightbox transparencies. Referencing pop culture (illuminated cinema signs, advertising) and the sense of scale invoked by classical painting, The Destroyed Room is a staged scene of destruction in the bedroom of a young woman in which only the lithe figurine on the bureau and one black stiletto remain standing. The discarded objects are the debris of commodities that promise personal beauty, but are subject to constant changes in style and planned obsolescence.


Wall has said that he “filtered” the work through Eugene Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalous (1827), a painted depiction of aggression and violence. Thus, Wall has associated his picture with the tradition of Western painting just as it was turning from the idealization of historical painting toward a preoccupation with the late Romantic emotional turmoil or psychological disruption.

Eugene Delacroix: Death of Sardanapalous, 1827

The personal possessions strewn across the floor invoke not only images of anger, the state of mind the imagined gestures might have revealed, but also, the notion of the abject embodied in commodity fetishes in a culture of waste. This photographic tableau is a beautiful picture of a devastated interior in a present marked by the commodity culture of late capitalism. more here

And so apt that Sonic Youth made use of it then for their compilation album of tracks (hand picked by the band) previously only available on vinyl, limited-release compilations, imports, and b-sides to international singles, including unreleased material:
The Destroyed Room: B-sides and Rarities. 

Mirrors on the ceiling

 pink

champagne

Hollywood Hills’s Glass House Architecture, John Lautner

on

ice

Sheats Goldstein Residence

Falling Water

"exalting the simple laws of common sense or of super-sense if you prefer determining form by way of the nature of materials..."

Frank Lloyd Wright, Fallingwater, Kaufmann House, Bear Run, Pennsylvania, 1936. 

From snapshots of friends to abstract images created sans camera in darkrooms or photocopiers, Wolfgang Tillmans has explored the medium of photo image making for more than two decades.  For his most recent collection of photos he explains “my travels are aimless as such, not looking for predetermined results, but hoping to find subject matter that in some way or other speaks about the time I’m in.” 
His exhibition Wolfgang Tillmans: Neue Welt will be on at the Kunsthalle in Zurich until November 2012.

There's more to life than books you know

But not much more.

As Kansas City appreciates.

Part of the revitalization project for the downtown precinct, the facade for the new library's car park is clad in iconic book bindings as voted on by local residents, celebrating literature in it's physical form, this lovely literary homage was designed by Dimensional Innovations.

The Architect and the Painter

 

Julius Shulman (1910–2009), photographer, Pierre Koenig, architect,
Stahl House (Case Study House #22), LA, 1960 © J. Paul Getty Trust

After seeing the incredibly cool and very well designed California Design, 1930–1965: "Living in a Modern Way" exhibition at LACMA and then purchasing the equally inspiring catalogue, catching this doco was a no brainer.  There are now only a few days left to catch the insightful, sweet and inspiring doco on Charels and Ray Eames - Eames: The Architect and The Painter at ACMI and I highly recommend it.
 

From architecture and art to film making and industrial design, these guys made magic.  

 Winner of the San Francisco International Film Festival Award, 1958, this portrayal of the Mexican Day of the Dead consists of still shots reflecting the annual Mexican celebration of “All Souls Day”.

I ask you - who else would design a kite of this caliber?

 A little perspective from their most famous 1968 film about orders of magnitude.

 Dream Living - Case Study House #8 

(the building I chose at uni to learn CAD many moons ago)

Sunday Ummm

The beautiful design of the new Serpentine


Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2012 designed by Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei from Serpentine Gallery on Vimeo.


The 2012 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London created by Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei.  A cork-clad structure that allows visitors to move beneath the Serpentine's lawn and explore a hidden history of previous incarnations.

"Our path to an alternative solution involves digging down some five feet into the soil of the park until we reach the groundwater," say Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei. "There we dig a waterhole, a kind of well, to collect all of the London rain that falls in the area of the Pavilion. In that way we incorporate an otherwise invisible aspect of reality in the park – the water under the ground – into our Pavilion. As we dig down into the earth we encounter a diversity of constructed realities such as telephone cables and former foundations."

A lovely video of people interacting with the space can be found here on Domus.

These ideas of making visible a ghostly structure of secret space resonates with the work of Studio Velocity and their House in Chiharada.  Roughly translating as “a bottom floor with a view of the sky and a top floor that’s like a town” the plays on form and scale reflect a landscape inside the home.

 

 Located in Aichi prefecture, the home derives it’s name from the way stairwells rise up in the living room to resemble buildings in a town. 

architectural model

night shot 

Welcome to my Lair

Courtesy: upcoming publication Power Houses by The Cool Hunter

Koolhaas

After mentioning the formidable architect duo Herzog & de Meuron in the Tokyo post, I thought it prudent to touch on their vunderful VitraHaus.

Nestled in the Vitra Campus amongst other formidables: Frank Gehry (Vitra Design Museum, 1989), Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando (Conference Pavilion, 1993) and all round hero Buckminster Fuller - this crazy series of stacked pitched-roof boxes was designed to display the Home Collection (design classics & re-editions/products by contemporary designers).


The concept of the VitraHaus connects two themes - the archetypal house and stacked volumes. Employing a domestic scale to display domestic goods this cantilevered five-storey building of structural extrusions and glazed gable ends, affords a cheerfully chaotic multifaceted assemblage.


More here.

a nightcap, neat

Marc Jacobs, Tokyo: Stephan Jaklitsch Architects


Being constructed in Omotesando next to the equally inspiring Prada store (Herzog & de Meuron - right), this 3,000 sq ft project, the most recent in the design series of Marc Jacobs stores around the world by Stephan Jaklitsch Architects, has already won an Award of Excellence (AIA, New York).












By night the architecture frames the light - a grand glass street lamp, an ice cube in a glass of whiskey, a nightcap, neat.


By day, the joy of MJ, Mochiron!

More at Archdaily

Electric Blue

Performative architectural presence, the Electric Hotel is 4 floors of full-length windows, revealing the lives of 7 characters, connected by 1 mysterious blue box.


This David Lynch-esque work offers repetitive loops of movement that develop connections between characters. Simultaneously, spatial relationships between the dancers and audience clash with the impact of this vast structure on it's urban surroundings projecting depth and intrigue.

Modernist set designer Börkur Jónsson, navigates interior & exterior in the form of six 40 foot high shipping containers, deconstructed at the end of each season and driven across the country to be erected again in less than 3 days. Next stop - London.