In the wake of economic recession, art is about much more than beauty and posterity; it’s about finding a fresh perspective.
“You’ve taken money out of the hands of a mother who can barely buy her kid’s asthma medicine,” wrote Lydia from New Jersey on a New York Times blog. (more…)
There’s no question, that commerce as we know it is turning green. With all the recent attention to climate control, greenhouse gases, carbon emissions and global warming, retailers and manufacturers have to change the way they do business. (more…)
When a film by the late Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni comes to mind, I think of a quiet, contemplative place full of bold, mysterious, almost overwhelming images. Not since the silent era has a director placed such dependence on the image to convey his vision. (more…)
Westerners traveling to Japan for the first time often get the impression that the country is packed. Japan is, in fact, one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Its population is less than half of the US, yet its land area is thirty times smaller. Much of its land – made up of an archipelago of over three thousand islands – is volcanic and mountainous and only twenty (more…)
Can your surroundings prolong your life? Can where you live provide you with good health? Can you actually reverse your destiny? According to Architects Arakawa and Madeline Gins, yes, and for 45 years they have been building on the mantra that dying is optional.
Artists, poets, architects Arakawa and Gins (more…)
Let’s get twisted. The Chicago Spire (formerly known as the Fordham Spire of Chicago) promises to be a spiraling plume of smoke, fossilized through the mediums of metal, glass, and light. A description of it does not transfer over to the conventional skyscrapers of the Windy City. The record-shattering Sears Tower will be undeniably dethroned from its singular glory on home (more…)
According to the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, an NGO based in Geneva, 1.5 million people were forcefully displaced by Olympics related construction. These people were primarily displaced for city ‘beautification’, improvements to city infrastructure and to create space for the newly designed and constructed Olympic venues. (more…)
“It may have escaped your attention,” says Elizabeth Costello, the title character in a 2003 novel by J.M. Coetzee, “but I slipped in, a moment ago, a word that should have made you prick up your ears. I spoke about my essence and being true to my essence.” Costello, an aging writer, has dropped the bait. She has invited the other writers, artists and scholars in the room to (more…)
The City
Tel-Aviv has not been the same ever since UNESCO declared the city a World Heritage site in 2004. Hundreds out of its nearly 4,000 Bauhaus buildings — the source of the prestigious recognition — have already been restored and many others are poised for restoration. The city experiences a revival of one of the most influential architectural and design styles of the last century.
Not everything goes smoothly. There are several (more…)
Guadalajara, Mexico’s second biggest city, is packed with mildly neglected colonial buildings with wrought-iron window guards and flamboyant, paint-chipped color washes, squeezed between minimalist 60s and 70s era cubic structures and various bastardizations in between. As contemporary architecture goes, the city is not in the vanguard.
Back in 2005, however, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (more…)
