Off Center

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Niteroi, Brazi.

The process leading to a new building — particularly when that building is home to a major arts institution — is anything but slapdash. Just ask the people who spearheaded the massive capital campaigns and selection of architects that led to the new Walker, Guthrie and Minneapolis Institute of Art buildings. That’s why I’m baffled with the crux of a New York Times story today about handwringing over the recent work of Oscar Niemeyer, one of the 20th century’s most influential architects.

Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff leads off by asking “What to do with our aging architectural heroes? What if their genius deteriorates and they begin tinkering with their own masterpieces?” and points to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Niteroi, Brazil, as particularly egregious. Ouroussoff should have posed a more poignant question — “Why did you select this architect?” — to the people responsible for commissioning Niemeyer. Perhaps Niemeyer, whom Ourousoff describes as “one of Brazil’s greatest national treasures,” is so synonymous with architecture there that nobody dared think critically about Niemeyer’s contemporary relevance.

Most projects go to bid, a process in which selection committees vet competing proposals. Not so with the new Walker. For Expanding the Center: Walker Art Center and Herzog & de Meuron, recently departed director Kathy Halbreich wrote an essay detailing the “extensive search and several flirtations” leading up to selecting the architect:

“We eschewed a competition because we wanted to begin the process with a lengthy series of conversations rather than a stack of preconceived ideas or partially digested drawings. This is the first of many risks we took that in hindsight make perfect sense. The architects worked like inspired detectives, mining our archives, studying topographical maps, talking to staff … and drawing, drawing, drawing.” Halbreich goes on to write “We know the form the new Walker has taken is specific to its mission to be ‘a catalyst for the creative expression of artists and the active engagement of audiences.’ It’s not a model for all institutions, and it may not be a model for any others.”

You have to ask, why not? The new Walker, now almost three years old, is a success by almost any measure, among them large increases in paid admissions, box office receipts and business in the gift shop. Nobody can say how much of that can be pinned on the architecture, but it doesn’t take an advanced degree in the field to see that a thoughtful, thorough front end is the best insurance against surprises on the back end.

Michael Edson at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Eye Level blog writes about the opening of their new courtyard on Sunday. The courtyard reminds me of the Mall of America, but with art instead of shopping. It is an impressive encapsulation of a formerly out of doors space, with a unique walk-on-water pathway, letting everyone be Jesus. Jeff Gates wrote about the experience:

My natural inclination was to walk around the feature. But it was designed to be walked on (and designed so that, by the time you reach the entrances to the museum, your feet will be dry). I’m sure children will get a kick out of the experience. And if we can overcome our predilection to keep our feet on dry ground, adults will too.

And SAAM’s doing the new media thing too. They are live-blogging the public opening (prediction: lots of people) and have created a flickr group for visitor’s photos.

Photo credits: David S. Holloway/Reportage by Getty Images for Smithsonian Institution, Jeff Gates

Chiang Mai-based architect Aroon Puritat writes in to share more photos of the house he designed for (and with) Rirkrit Tiravanija in the northern Thai provincial capital. And Bangkok-based architect/writer Rachaporn Choochuey offers her perspective on the structure, reminding us of Rirkrit’s work in architecture (including his 1997 installation of a 1:2 scale model of Philip Johnson’s Glass House in the courtyard at MoMA). She says Rirkrit’s is “the first real ‘contemporary’ Thai house”:

Rirkrit told us that the idea of the house is to have very simple concrete building, elevated from the ground - the least touch. The exisiting site has a lot of trees, they did not want to cut any of them. So the building is inserted in the site in a zigzaging manner among the trees around. The main space is this big, simple, rough but very strong courtyard of the house where the main activities (the kitchen, the library and the entrance). The veranda running around the courtyard, connecting everything around together is very crucial part here… Altogether, the space is very relaxing but strong…

Haque Design + Research has created an fantastic 80,000 lumen interactive projection on the facade of York Minster cathedral, in York, England. It is called Evoke:

The facade is brought to life by members of the public, who use their own voices to “evoke” colourful light patterns that emerge at the building’s foundations and soar up towards the sky, giving the surface a magical feeling as it melts with colour.

People with voices of different frequencies, rhythms or cadences will be able to evoke quite different magical patterns upon the surface of the building - a staccato chirping will result in a completely different set of visual effects to a long howl for example, blending old and new to continue animating the facade of the Minster.

I would love to see video of this. This may be blasphemy, but it has a look reminiscent of a blinged-out myspace page or a super-saturated screenprint test page. The neon colors are totally foreign to gothic architecture, and it looks like something too far out for even a Blade Runner world.

[via Interactive Architecture]

Johnson, Gehry, Pelli, Herzog & de Meuron: Architecturally, Minneapolis has got it all, a fact Coolhunting acknowledges with a new video, led by tourguide and University of Minnesota architecture professor John Comazzi.[via]

Some of the ideas that guided Rirkrit Tiravanija’s constructed “space-stage” in the 2006 Walker exhibition OPEN-ENDED (the art of engagement) are behind his new home, an experimental modernist house in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Designed by the young Thai architect (and Tiravanija’s former student) Aroon Puritat, the project, like Rirkrit’s stage, provided a basic framework on which the architect and the artist’s other collaborators could create. This art was dubbed “relational aesthetics” by theorist Nicholas Bourriaud, because it prizes relationships over aesthetics. The architecture, however, seems to cherish both values equally.

“[T]he house was born from a plan without a plan,” writes Sant Suwatcharapinun in the Thai magazine art|4|d. “The only requests were to retain, as much as possible, all the trees on the property, to install a bedroom, bathroom, a sitting and relaxation area, living room, kitchen, a work room for his artistic pursuits and a photography studio for his wife Annette Aurell, a photographer from New York.”

Beyond that there were no budgetary or conceptual restrictions — other than not obscuring views for Tiravanija’s family or his neighbors. The resulting home — a U-shaped construction of glass and concrete, with wood and polished concrete floors, plus tile and lighting designed by area artists — reminds the author of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, out of context in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai.

But the collaboration between artist and architect reminds him of Tiravanija’s art, which Puritat encountered both as a grad student at Silkaporn University and at “the land,” the rice farm/sustainability project Tiravanija and artist Kamin Laitcherprasert founded outside nearby Sanpatong. Aside from open-endedness, a key aspect of Tiravanija’s work, and apparently the architecture, is the Buddhist notion of “doing less” — that is, as Suwatcharapinun writes, “not trying to embellish or make something more than what it is”:

From another perspective, it is a new work by Rirkrit who worked in a different medium; from cooking and using musical instruments to that of an architectural structure. Further, those who come across this new structure and those who were involved in the development have changed. It is with certainty that this time, the efforts were subjected to more restrictions and limitations. However, it is more of a reiteration of the 'Doing Less' concept. Moreover, if I were to interpret it differently, presuming that it was 'loosely controlled', then Aroon and his friends have become a part of the architectural results. However, looking at it from yet another viewpoint, it is a house that was very thoroughly planned and designed. This is something architects dream of - collaborating with a group of people with a sufficient degree of understanding, working closely with the owner of the house and receiving feedback with efficiency.

Just a quick note about the MPR story that woke me up this morning (love my clock-radio). The new owner of Linden Hills’ first weeHouse, which dropped into the neighborhood today, first learned about his prefab house from the Walker’s own exhibition Some Assembly Required: Contemporary Prefabricated Houses.

Neighborhood gawkers pictured below:

A just fascinating story I came across this morning:

On January 1st, 2007, a funny thing happened in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The city of approximately eleven million people, South America’s largest, awoke to find a ban on public advertising. Every billboard, every neon sign, every bus kiosk ad and even the Goodyear blimp were suddenly illegal.

The ban on what the mayor calls “visual pollution” was the culmination of a long battle between the city’s politicians and the advertising industry, which had blanketed Brazil’s economic capital with all manner of billboards, both legal and illegal. Within months, the city has gone from a Blade Runner-like vision of the future to a reclaimed past.

Businessweek also has an article on the ups and downs of the ad ban:

Already the law has led to some strange discoveries. Because the site-ing of billboards was unregulated, many poor people readily accepted cash to have a poster site in their gardens or even in front of their homes. With their removal, a new city is emerging: “Last week, on my way to work, I ‘discovered’ a house,” says Piqueira. “It had been covered by a big billboard for years so I never even knew what it looked like.” The removal of the posters has “revealed an architecture that we must learn to be proud of, instead of hiding,” says de Marco.

But there are downsides--Piqueira worries that much of the “vernacular” lettering and signage from small businesses--”an important part of the city’s history and culture”--will be lost. The organisers of the São Paulo carnival have also expressed concerns about the long-term future of their event now that sponsors will not be allowed to advertise along the route. The city authorities for their part have made it clear that certain public information and cultural works will be exempted from the rules.

The São Paulo No Logo photoset by Tony de Marco gives a good idea of the effect this can have on the way a city looks. You start to understand just how many times per day we are bombarded with visual messages.