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This summer, internationally renowned artist Chris Burden will exhibit a new sculpture at Rockefeller Center in New York — WHAT MY DAD GAVE ME, a dramatic, 65-foot-tall skyscraper made entirely of toy construction parts. Standing more than six stories tall at the Fifth Avenue entrance to the Channel Gardens, WHAT MY DAD GAVE ME will pay homage to the historic skyscrapers that populate New York and give the city its iconic architectural presence. WHAT MY DAD GAVE ME will be on view, free and open to the public, from June through July 2008. The exhibition is presented by the Public Art Fund and hosted by Tishman Speyer, co-owners of Rockefeller Center.thanks lisa!
WHAT MY DAD GAVE ME will be by far the most complex artwork that Chris Burden has ever made, comprised of approximately one million stainless steel parts that are replicas of Erector set pieces, the popular 20th-century children's building toy. Over the past decade, the artist has been using these specially stamped stainless steel metal parts based precisely upon those of the original Erector set to create complex and elegant sculptures of bridges. Intricately engineered to support and bear enormous weight, Burden's colossal toy constructions showcase the versatility, simplicity, and strength of their unassuming parts, combining technical sophistication with a child-like enthusiasm: building for building's sake.
In 1912, an inventor named A.C. Gilbert created the first Erector set, inspired by the steel framework of skyscrapers that he saw under construction in New York City, then at the height of a building boom. The Erector Mysto Type I—the first set Gilbert made—was a collection of small metal girders, which could be assembled with miniature nuts and bolts. Burden's fascination with this original—and now rare—building kit led him to create his own replica parts, fashioned in stainless steel and electro-plated to produce a polished nickel finish in order to make them weather—and rust—resistant.
Despite being constructed with toys, WHAT MY DAD GAVE ME will take on the dimensions of a full-scale building. Burden anticipates that its construction will require approximately one million parts total, and that the sculpture will weigh over seven tons when complete. Models and collectibles have long been important in Burden's work, reflecting his fascination with humankind's industrial ingenuity and creativity, investigating relationships between power and technology, nature and society, and enlightenment and destruction.
“Action/Abstraction,” at the Jewish Museum, is more a perambulatory essay than an art exhibition, though it incorporates superb exhibits: classic paintings by the rival godheads of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and fine works by other members (notably Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still), important followers (Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler), and rebellious successors (Jasper Johns, Frank Stella) of American art’s greatest generation. Arshile Gorky’s prophetic “The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb” (1944), from the Albright-Knox, in Buffalo, alone is worth the visit. It is a desperately vivacious, songful tumult, seemingly executed with bundled nerve ends. Ragged zones of hot color, like open wounds, interact with tight, buzzing linear glyphs—fragments of organic life—that bespeak the artist’s lingering debt to Surrealism, all in concert with intuitions of a new, expansive kind of pictorial space. Something epochal is afoot: a dovetailing of raw personal emotion and disinterested aesthetic experiment, Dionysus and Apollo. Those opposed qualities became the magnetic poles of Abstract Expressionism (which was named in 1946 by the New Yorker art critic Robert Coates) and also the virtual battle stations of the movement’s great, mutually hostile critics, Harold Rosenberg (1906-78), who interpreted the new art rather exclusively in terms of existential drama, and Clement Greenberg (1909-94), who exalted formal invention as an end in itself. Rosenberg gravitated toward de Kooning, Greenberg toward Pollock. They squared off over Newman’s smooth expanses of color inflected with vertical bands or lines—spiritual hierophancy to Rosenberg, aesthetic engineering to Greenberg.
The Jewish Museum’s chief curator, Norman L. Kleeblatt, has focussed “Action/Abstraction” on the writers, interspersing paintings and sculpture with abundant texts, photographs, and memorabilia. Film clips display the men’s differently impressive rhetorical panache: Greenberg is incisive and imperious, Rosenberg droll and oracular. (Parallel shots witness Pollock dripping and de Kooning stroking.) Born to Jewish immigrants in New York, both critics were public intellectuals in the heroic mold of Partisan Review and other small but scarcely humble organs of cosmopolitan thought. Buoyed by America’s ascendancy among nations after the Second World War, they projected the confidence of New York as the new world capital of progressive culture. Each seemed to covet a throne of high-cultural authority which proved, in the end, not to exist. Their quarrels have been outlasted by the art that was their pretext. The resilient mergers of feeling and form in Pollock’s galvanic fields, de Kooning’s dismembered figuration, Rothko’s transcendent color, and, in sculpture, David Smith’s stately animation mutely chastise lopsided partialities of any stripe. But the notion of bracketing the artistic and the critical audacities of the watershed postwar era is so good it’s a wonder that no museum has tackled it before. The result suggests, to me, the pleasant conceit of considering Rosenberg and Greenberg themselves as types of Abstract Expressionists, in discursive prose: Rosenberg lyrically impulsive, like de Kooning; and Greenberg as starkly decisive as Newman. Both aspired, à la Pollock, to perfect unconventional modes of argument that would knock any would-be antagonist cold.
RS 20k house
all arch daily wood tags
at 95 sf the living lab
the barns of bucks county pa
The Pennsylvania Barn: Its Origin, Evolution, and Distribution in North America
casa negro remodel
another black farm house / osb interior
the barn journal
The glass exterior of Phillis Wheatley Elementary School in Treme was replaced with a plastic substitute in dull shades of blue and green decades ago. Rust collects on once-gleaming steel trusses, and dented air conditioning units leak condensation from the elevated, cube-like structure onto the littered schoolyard, which has been shuttered since Hurricane Katrina.
No one would argue that the eye-catching building could use some work. But as the clock ticks toward the August release of a final School Facility Master Plan for Orleans Parish, a debate has begun on exactly what kind of work is needed for the landmark Modernist building.
Wheatley is one of four mid-century architectural landmarks that could be demolished, according to the latest draft of the master plan released in January by the Orleans Parish School Board and state-run Recovery School District.
Laurie Blazek (left) was thrilled when a team of researchers told her Frank Lloyd Wright had designed her modest, three-bedroom house on William Street in River Forest. Though the house has a ground-hugging profile, geometric art glass windows and other characteristic features of Wright’s Prairie Style, she always thought it was shaped by a lesser architect—someone from Wright’s circle, not the master himself.
“I never in a million years thought I would be lucky enough to live in a Wright home,” said Blazek. “Ever since I bought this house, my mother said I spent too much money. Now she’s less critical.”
Just down the block, a comparable Prairie Style home is for sale, but the real estate agent, Margaret McSheehy, is cautious about its authorship. “Research is currently being conducted to determine if this home was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright,” says the Internet listing for the property, a stucco-faced three-bedroom priced at $699,900.
Did he or didn’t he?
That’s the question hovering around 29 houses in Chicago’s suburbs—one each in Glen Ellyn and Wilmette, two in Berwyn, and 25 in River Forest, including 24 of the 26 houses in the 700 block of William Street—now that the researchers are going public with their claim that they’ve found “undiscovered works” by the man widely considered to be America’s greatest architect.
“We stumbled on this and said, ‘My God,’” said the leader of the team, William Allin Storrer of Frankfort, Mich., author of two respected books, “The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion” and “The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright: A Complete Catalog.”