LONDON—On Sunday night, the traditional seating arrangement in London’s Old Vic theater was done away with in favor of an in-the-round arrangement, but no actors mounted the venerable stage. Instead, as the lights dimmed and the curtain rose, the audience saw what appeared to be Ulrich Rückriem’s raw, solid, upright sculpture Untitled (Granite) (1984) — [...]
One of the greatest historians of American architecture, Henry-Russell Hitchcock helped shape the way we consider the medium today. An advocate of architecture as art over absolute function, Hitchcock wrote numerous books on the subject of architectural style. We recently happened upon the 1948 edition of “Painting Toward Architecture,” a Bradbury Thompson [...]
I imagine Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Inception (2010), is already being turned into a pop philosophy book. Perhaps it will be part of the same series as The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002) and Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts (2004). Inception ’s [...]
New York–based video artist Mika Rottenberg is known for her large-scale installations and interest in labor as well as process. Her latest work, Squeeze, a twenty-minute video installation, combines documentary and fictional footage. The work is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art until October 3 and [...]
The work of Frank Michels pours with honesty and shows promise. Michels was born and raised in Luxembourg, but he pulls in a diverse background into his work having been exposed to experiences in Italy, Portugal and studying architecture at The Berlin University of the Arts and then finished at [...]
London based illustrator Dan Has Potential draws pictures, mainly of vases and wavey lines at the moment. He makes music videos for various people including Metronomy, Late of the Pier, Kate Nash and the Cribs and also likes walking and eating.
What have you got planned this week?
I plan to do some video [...]
The Rumpus is an immaculately curated online magazine interested in “culture, not pop culture”. They’ve also recently started their own book club. A monthly subscription ensures you one new, unreleased book through your letterbox every month, access to a lively discussion group, and an invitation to join in a moderated chat [...]
Left: Jo Baer. Right: Cover of Jo Baer’s Broadsides & Belles Lettres: Selected Writings and Interviews 1965–2010 (2010).
Jo Baer has been painting since the early 1960s and is known for her inimitable hard-edge abstractions as well as figurative works. Her book Broadsides & Belles Lettres: Selected Writings and Interviews 1965–2010 [...]
Mathematically-inspired bug houses designed to promote urban biodiversity
Winning London’s recent Beyond The Hive competition, the “Insect Hotel” is a five-star refuge for bugs living in urban environments. Architecture firm Arup Associates designed individual compartments in a mathematically-derived pattern known as a Voronoi tessellation to house an array of species spanning [...]
