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Archive for the ‘Exhibition’ Category
August 29, 2012
Venice Architecture Biennale Opens Today
Today, August 29, marks the official opening of the 13th International Venice Architecture Biennale. The overall theme of the Architecture Biennale, as determined by architect David Chipperfield, is “Common Ground.” (The U.S. Pavilion, curated by Cathy Lang Ho and covered extensively by Architect Magazine, builds on the overall theme with Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good.) On the main Biennale website, Chipperfield explains, in compelling terms, why he chose this year’s overall theme of “Common Ground”:
“To encourage my colleagues to react against the prevalent professional and cultural tendencies of our time that place such emphasis on individual and isolated actions. I encouraged them instead to demonstrate the importance of influence and of the continuity of cultural endeavour, to illustrate common and shared ideas that form the basis of an architectural culture…I was inspired to direct this Biennale towards concerns of continuity, context, and memory, towards shared influences and expectations, and to address the apparent lack of understanding that exists between the profession and society.”
Click here to learn more about the Common Ground theme of the 13th International Venice Architecture Biennale.
August 27, 2012
Spontaneous Interventions Website Relaunched
The U.S. Pavilion team for the 13th International Venice Architecture Biennale today relaunched their official exhibition website, SpontaneousInterventions.com. The exhibition itself, addressing the theme “Design Actions for the Common Good,” runs August 29-November 25, 2012. For those that can’t make the trip to Venice, however, the new website as well as the special issue of Architect Magazine (profiled here previously), both provide great windows into the show, the 124 projects, and the energy around them all. In their curators’ statement, Commissioner & Curator Cathy Lang Ho along with Co-Curators David van der Leer and Ned Cramer introduce the exhibition as follows:
Spontaneous Interventions celebrates a movement for democratic change in cities in the United States, inspired by a kindred activism around the world. The actions–planting abandoned lots, occupying and reprogramming public spaces, and generally making cities more beautiful, inclusive, productive, and healthy—are planning at its most direct, expressions of a desire for good places that cannot simply await the sanction of the “authorities” to find their form. As these small but powerful works multiply and coalesce, a just and sustainable city, a city of all its communities, is being born. This is a celebration of a long and vibrant history of urban activism and takes particular pride in representing the U.S. during the tenure of a president whose career began as an urban community organizer.
Click here to visit the newly redesigned SpontaneousInterventions.com website.
August 23, 2012
Architect Magazine Dedicated to Venice Biennale
This month’s newly-released issue of Architect Magazine, available in its entirety online here and as an interactive PDF here, documents the offerings of the U.S. Pavilion of the 13th International Venice Architecture Biennale. Addressing the theme “Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good,” the exhibition itself as well as the issue represent the latest effort to capture the spirit and impact of public interest design. In her essay, curator Cathy Lang Ho writes:
In researching projects for the exhibition, we found hundreds of examples even before we issued an open call in January, which itself yielded over 450 compelling self-initiated urban improvements. We narrowed our choice to 124–the maximum number we could fit in the 4,000-square-foot permanent American pavilion in the Giardini, the public gardens of Venice–though we wish we could have included many more. We were expansive in our consideration of what qualifies as a “spontaneous intervention,” including projects that encroach on the territory of art and graffiti, well aware that some acts are more about self-expression than tactics for long-term change. Our goal was to find a diversity of original projects that transform public urban space to better serve the common good, seeking those that would add up to a useful archive of actionable strategies that could be replicated in other cities facing similar problems.
Click here to access the full interactive PDF version of this month’s Architect Magazine, or click here to access it online at ArchitectMagazine.com.
August 22, 2012
Graham Foundation Grants to Organizations
The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts has announced its 2012 Grants to Organizations, with 43 awards totaling $413,000. (These are on top of $410,000 to 57 individuals from earlier this year.) The organizational grants will go to support “public programs around the world that demonstrate innovative approaches to understanding architecture and the designed environment.” Funded organizational projects include exhibitions, films, new media initiatives, publications, and other programs.
Among many others, a select few grantees in the public interest design space include: Archeworks New Practice program to “develop and test new definitions of socially responsible practice and promote actionable leadership and civic innovation among designers;” a major exhibition on the work of Studio Gang–well-known for its commitment to pro bono design–at the Art Institute of Chicago; and an exhibition, called “Architecture as Social Form,” to take place at the University of Toronto‘s Justina M. Barnicke Gallery.
Click here for more information on the Graham Foundation’s 2012 Grants to Organizations, online at GrahamFoundation.org. Caption: Photo from Archeworks New Practice program profile.
August 2, 2012
Beyond Zuccotti Park Call for Posters
Occuprint (profiled here previously) in collaboration with the AIA Center for Architecture in New York are inviting the public “to expand the visual language and cultural expression of the conversation on public space and freedom assembly by submitting poster designs that provoke thought and dialogue.” The poster series is part of a larger, multi-partner exhibition, called Beyond Zuccotti Park, taking place September 6–21, 2012 at the Center for Architecture. The deadline for submissions is August 20, 2012.
Designs may consider the following questions: What is the public and what are public spaces? How do we define and how are we defined by our public spaces? How can we design and build our public spaces to facilitate civic participation? What are the processes and mechanisms of how public spaces are built and organized? How can we promote transparency in public space regulation and plurality in it use?
Click here for more information on the Beyond Zuccotti Park poster project.
February 15, 2012
MoMA’s “Foreclosed” Exhibition Opens
Today, February 15, through July 31, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York is exhibiting “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream,” described as “an exploration of new architectural possibilities for cities and suburbs in the aftermath of the recent foreclosure crisis.” The show is part of MoMA’s Issues in Contemporary Architecture series. It builds on work undertaken last year by five interdisciplinary teams of architects, ecologists, engineers, landscape designers, and urban ecologists, who conducted public workshops at MoMA PS1 to “envision new housing and transportation infrastructures that could catalyze urban transformation, particularly in the country’s suburbs.” The five teams were led by MOS, Visible Weather, Studio Gang, WORKac, and Zago Architecture. Each focused on a specific location within five “megaregions” across the country.
“Foreclosed” participant Jeanne Gang co-authored a New York Times op-ed last Thursday, touching on many of the themes from Studio Gang‘s exhibition work. She and co-author Greg Lindsay of NYU write, “[B]etter design is precisely what suburban America needs, particularly when it comes to rethinking the basic residential categories that define it, but can no longer accommodate the realities of domestic life. Designers and policy makers need to see the single-family house as a design dilemma whose elements–architecture, finance and residents’ desires–are inextricably linked.” Click here to read the full article.
Click here for more information on MoMA’s “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream exhibition.”
January 20, 2012
Venice Architecture Biennale Call for Projects
Formally announced on Wednesday with a new dedicated website, “Spontaneous Interventions: design actions for the common good” is the theme of the U.S. Pavilion this fall at the 13th International Venice Architecture Biennale, August 29 to November 25, 2012. Now in its 13th edition, the Venice Architecture Biennale was formally established in 1980 and is held every other year (alternating with the Venice Art Biennale, which was first held in 1895). Presented by the Bureau of Educational & Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Pavilion theme was proposed by Cathy Lang Ho through the Institute for Urban Design with Ned Cramer of Architect Magazine serving as a co-curator.
In recent years, there has been a nascent movement of designers acting on their own initiative to solve problematic urban situations, creating new opportunities and amenities for the public. Provisional, improvisational, guerrilla, unsolicited, tactical, temporary, informal, DIY, unplanned, participatory, open-source–these are just a few of the words that have been used to describe this growing body of work…They share an optimistic willingness to venture outside conventional practice and to deploy fresh tactics to make cities more sustainable, accessible, and inclusive.
Click here for more information about the U.S. Pavilion, including project submission guidelines for the upcoming February 6, 2012 deadline.
January 20, 2012
Tu Ciudad Project photojournalism effort
The Latino Design & Research Lab (LDR-Lab) at Cornell University is seeking contributors for Tu Ciudad Project, a web-based photojournalism effort that will narrate the contemporary experience of Latino/as and the U.S. city. The goals of the project are: “To make the invisible, visible, and to bring forth the lives and stories of a diverse culture and write a collective place-based history.”
An independent, nonprofit student organization affiliated with Cornell University, LDR-Lab is dedicated to the planning and design of culturally, environmentally, and economically sustainable Latino communities in the United States and abroad.
Click here to contribute or for more information about Tu Ciudad Project. Special thanks to Luis Martinez, 2013 MRP candidate with the Department of City & Regional Planning at Cornell University for the referral.
November 14, 2011
Review: “Design With the Other 90%: Cities”
The second edition in the Smithsonian‘s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum‘s groundbreaking socially-responsible design series is now on display at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. PublicInterestDesign.org‘s own John Cary reviewed the exhibition for Architectural Record, which is now available online and paired with an extensive image gallery.
In many cases, the pieces featured in the show are credited to both the designers and the communities where they work. Yet the voices and stories of the people affected by these design interventions are noticeably absent. Did the colored walls in Rio de Janeiro make the residents feel safer or happier? What was it like for a Nairobi woman who had never owned a camera nor seen her image on celluloid to have her likeness unfurled on the side of a building? Do people enjoy living in the low-tech homes in South Africa? Without these testimonies, we’re only getting half the story, or less.
Click here to read the full review, or click here to visit the DesignOther90.org website. Credit: Photo by Matt Flynn / Smithsonian Institution.
November 3, 2011
Upcoming Studio H exhibition in Portland, OR
The good work of Project H, specifically its high school design/build program, Studio H, will be the subject of a special exhibition opening later this month at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Ore.
This exhibition asks viewers to reflect on how that process can teach the next generation of designers to transform the world for themselves. Artifacts from Studio H, the project in rural Bertie County, North Carolina where Emily Pilloton and partner Matthew Miller teach design thinking to high-school students, will be on display to illustrate how a socially engaged design process can result in significant and positive solutions. Together, Pilloton and Miller engage in a bold experiment of design-led community transformation.
Click here for more information about the exhibition, Project H, Studio H, and some of our recent coverage of their efforts here and here and here and here.
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