La Maison de Verre by Yukio Futagawa

I was looking at La Maison de Verre today as a precedent in one of the project we’re working on at the moment. My colleague had a beautiful book from GA series about this Early Modern masterpiece illustrated with Yukio Futagawa’s photographs. This one doesn’t show the well known view of the living space with the characteristic glass block wall but Madame Dalsace’s day room with retractable stairs to one of the bedrooms.

To me there is generally so much taken from Japanese aesthetics in these interiors and this image I love the most because it perfectly captures the meaning of “mono no aware”!
Beautiful! :)

Noah Kalina

My latest discovery – Noah Kalina’s photographs.
The first one reminded me of Robert Frost’s poem “Two Look at Two”.
You can read it here and Noah’s web site here.
Enjoy!

Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

Two really interesting exhibitions are at the moment in Wolfsburg Kunstmuseum.
The first one is the one that originally brought my attention, Interior/Exterior. Living Art is shown until the 13th of April. This exhibition explores the modernist phenomenon of private living space seen then not only as home and refuge but also as its occupant’s means of representation. This modernist art of design and architecture is illustrated with installations, reconstructed interiors, photographs, paintings, videos and modern design objects. The list of names is long and imressive: Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec, Dan Graham, Andrea Zittel and many more…

The other exhibition On Top of the Iceberg, New Photography from Finland is shown till the end of May. This show presents (as said in the title) the work of the young generation of Finnish photographers that are known for their Nordic melancholy and very specific observation of Northern reality.
Wolfsburg Kunsthale pesents, among many others, work by Pertti Kekarainen and Ola Kolehmainen reflecting on space and architecture.

What sounds particularly interesting to me, is a long-term projects undertaken by Joakim Eskildsen and Tiina Itkonen, photographs of Eskimos and their villages in north-west Greenland also with their investigation of culture of the Roma in different countires that helps us understand their backgroung.
Well, to me Wolfsburg Kunstmuseum looks like a great destination on a map of interesting cultural events in Europe this year! If only it was near enough…

Lifting Mies by PARA Project

With this theoretical project by PARA Project is changing Mies van der Rohe’s Seagrams Building’s identity using comparison to procedures of plastic surgery.
Lifting Mies is a catalog of such surgical procedures that operate directly on Mies’ I-beam.
“The techniques eschew the addition of unnecessary material, the conventional approach to ornamentation, and instead rely on the alteration of what exists — as a facelifts would. No longer identifiable as something dispensable and separate from the restructured body, surgery allows ornamentation to evade easy recognition, just as the ideal facelift transforms one’s identity without revealing the work of the surgeon. By cutting, reshaping, and stitching, surgical techniques make ornament essential to the body, and the pace of New York image-making.”
You can read more about this and other PARA projects here.
I wonder if my brother – as plastic surgeon – will find it interesting ;)

Ribcage with Heart

I’m not into Valentine’s Day but I just love this Ribcage card!
What a great idea!
Then again, I guess it's not a card designed specifically for that day ;)
(via swissmiss)

Garazh

The Garazh, or GCCC (Garazh Centre for Contemporary Culture) Moscow is the new and now the biggest art exhibition space in the Russian capital. Located in astonishing in presence and scale Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage, designed in 1927 by Konstantin Melnikov with 8,500 sq m venue has been compared to the Turbine Hall in the Tate Modern.
The gallery’s first exhibition, Alternative History of Art and Other Projects, is a collection of large installation pieces by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, a Russian-born artists that currently live in New York.
Looking at few available photographs I must admit that exhibited pieces, even though large in scale, seem lost in this vast space of the gallery. Hopefully the future intervention by London based architect Jamie Fobert will help in accommodating future events and exhibitions but at the same time respect the character of this avant garde building.
The only worrying thing is the fact that the owners/curators don’t seam to know much about modern art (Guardian interview). Hopefully they will look for help among professionals to keep this vision alive!

Studio Banana

Studio Banana TV is an “internet-based creativity-focused tv platform”. On their blog you can find so many videos from different disciplines (architecture as well!). Interviews, documentaries and reportages of art, design, architecture, music, culture and general creativity.
I wanted to post one of the videos but I’m overwhelmed, there’s so much to see so please have a look for yourself here!