The Art of Assemblage

 

“Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.”

 

-Richard P. Feynman

 

We enter a fabric womb, a cave-like space of soft stalactites that brush against us, shifting and pooling us into groups. We’ve stumbled into the world that is Give, an installation by artists Bird Feliciano and Juliana Raimondi.

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Carlo Scarpa In Person

“Carlo Scarpa, Berkeley, California, 1969,” photo courtesy of the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

 

When one turns the page of an architecture magazine and the work of Carlo Scarpa appears unexpectedly, a quiet inner thrill is felt. Since his passing in 1978, we seem increasingly moved by Scarpa’s caress of material, his strange but faultless sense of placement and proportion, the contemplative nature of his details. These appreciations are heightened by the knowledge that his output was relatively limited. > Read More

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Urban Activation Device & TXP

Spanish art & architecture collective Todo Por La Praxis is seeking collaborators and participants for their experimental research on activating the urban void. > Read More

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Mr. Waka’s Dog House

Joseph Kosuth reviewing plans for the art installations at the Dog House. Photo by pm cook.

 

“Get out at the Sakuragaoka post office. Turn around and you’ll see a Lawson’s. Walk to it and then turn left. Walk up that street and you’ll see the Dog House on the right.” Typical Tokyo directions from the art impresario and entrepreneur Joni Waka. > Read More

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Bay Lights Ignite: One Part Business, Two Parts Pleasure

Photo by Lucas Saugen, courtesy thebaylights.org

 

Perched on a bar stool at Sinbad’s Pier 2 Restaurant with a friend, I sipped a glass of white wine on a warm spring night. Sinbad’s is definitely a touristy establishment with its wonderful view of the Bay Bridge. And that is why I was there—to take in the recently ignited “Bay Lights” project on the Bridge’s Western span. > Read More

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SANAA’s Anti-Louvre

Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” at the terminus of the Louvre-Lens’ grand gallery. (Photo by Richard Ingersoll.)

Just before Christmas a superb new museum—a subsidiary of the Louvre in Paris—opened in the ex-coal mining city of Lens in northern France. To promote this breakthrough in museology, the curators chose the familiar icon of revolution, Eugène Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People,” one of some 200 artworks on loan from the parent institution, the world’s most popular museum. Richard Ingersoll paid a visit. > Read More

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The New Urban Opera House

The future of opera may soon arrive at the 16th Street Station in Oakland. Photo by Christopher Hall.

Opera is a child of the city. It was born in 1600 in Florence, the cradle of civic humanism, in the homes of a wealthy group of intellectuals who were investigating Greek drama. With its agglomeration of poetry, drama, music, costume, sets and stagecraft, opera became a popular entertainment that spread to other urban centers with a supply of musicians and artisans large enough to create and articulate the spectacle. > Read More

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Nothing to See Here

Joshua Band, Enter House Left. Photo by Janice Suhji.

Tom DeCaigny, Director of Cultural Affairs at the City and County of San Francisco says he knows this place. He and I are standing in front of a life size mural photograph on canvas depicting a forested and theatrically lit night scene. In the image, a small sign stands at the base of a dirt path that leads into a dense and naturalistic planting of camellia and pines. > Read More

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Urban Prototyping Festival Rethinks SoMa’s Streets

 

For the past few decades, Market Street has been an illogical disconnect in San Francisco, where the confluence of its not-quite-intersecting streets and abrupt diagonal grid shifts have evolved radically different but adjacent streetscapes. > Read More

Manifest Destiny!

Photo by Cesar Rubio Photography.

 

The view walking along Bush Street towards downtown San Francisco recalls the exaggerated perspective of a Wayne Thiebaud painting. The sharp crest of the hill forces the gaze forward and down, revealing the urban fabric below where Manifest Destiny! — a19th-century, smaller than life-size cabin—adheres like a barnacle to the blank façade of 453 Bush Street, three and one half stories up. > Read More

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Under her Watchful Gaze: Installing the Cindy Sherman Mural at SFMOMA

Cindy Sherman mural, SFMOMA 4th floor. Photo by Sabrina Brennan.

 

I recently had an opportunity to install a mural for the Cindy Sherman exhibition at SFMOMA, currently on view through October 8, 2012. > Read More

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International Orange

Interior of Fort Point during International Orange. Artist Cornelia Parker’s “Reveille” can be seen at the end of the corridor. Photo by John Cary.

On May 27, the tranquil beauty of the Bay and the grace of the Golden Gate Bridge were rocked by a spectacle of pyrotechnics and light to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the bridge. > Read More

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Flection : A Phenomenology of Folds

Sara VanDerBeek. Western Costume, Black Satin (Day), 2011, detail. Courtesy of the artist and Altman Siegal Gallery.

Flection, a group exhibit at Hedge Gallery through September 1st, explores the fold in abstract art. > Read More

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Looking at Mark Bradford

Mark Bradford, Smokey, 2003; billboard paper, photomechanical reproductions, acrylic gel medium, permanent-wave end papers, and additional mixed media on canvas; 60 x 72 inches; collection of Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz; © Mark Bradford; photo: Bruce M. White

 

The Mark Bradford retrospective, currently at the SFMOMA and YBCA, collects Bradford’s best work from 2000 to 2010, representing his primary concerns of a decade. > Read More

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‘Architecture in the Expanded Field’

Photo by Yuki Bowman

 

Co-curated and designed by CCA’s Ila Berman and Douglas Burnham, ‘Architecture in the Expanded Field’ is an Herculean and painstakingly crafted 3-dimensional exhibit that indexes some 75 works of ‘installation architecture’—an experimental terrain of practice explored by Erin Hyman for this magazine. > Read More

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STRANGE ATLAS 02: PULL IT TOGETHER

Gerhard Richter. Atlas. Tafel 5. Albumfotos 1962-1968. ©Gerhard Richter 2011.

 

The creative process is an intriguing design problem of its own: how should you craft the method used to craft other things? This is the second in a series of essays exploring this topic through the lens of strange atlas, an interpretive creative process. Although this approach applies beyond narrow disciplinary boundaries, the essays focus on its application for designing the built environment.

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TINO THE GIANT (PART ONE)

Costantino Nivola at his farmhouse, Dicomano, Italy, 1981. Photo courtesy of Richard Ingersoll.

 

Memories of the sculptor and painter Constantino Nivola, a friend of Corbu, a neighbor of Jackson Pollock, and in the 1970s a lecturer at Berkeley CED.

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