Along the Lake Michigan shoreline, Reuben Wu created a unique confluence of light shows over the water last summer. Known for creating light paintings in dramatic landscapes using drone-mounted lasers, his ongoing series SIREN marks a new direction of illuminated “aeroglyphs,” which transcend their original geometries to open up into more fluid shapes.
“This series captures ephemeral, curtain-like structures that hover delicately in space, shaped by their environment rather than imposing upon it,” Wu says. The cascading white forms mimic the lake’s rolling waves and, on this particular evening amid a Perseids meteor shower, the surprise appearance of the northern lights.
Real art in museums stimulates brain much more than reprints, study finds
A neurological study in the Netherlands has revealed that real works of art in a museum stimulate the brain in a way that is 10 times stronger than looking at a poster.
Commissioned by the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague, home to Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, the independent study used eye-tracking technology and MRI scans to record the brain activity of volunteers looking at genuine artworks and reproductions.
Vincenzo Pagliuca Traverses the Apennines in Search of Singular and Solitary Houses
Throughout the central region of Lazio, Italy, to the southern reaches of the country, Vincenzo Pagliuca traces the Apennines in search of distinctive, solitary houses.
Pagliuca’s series mónos draws on the ancient Greek word for alone, which also means unique or singular. He sought specific lighting conditions by capturing portraits of stone, concrete, and timber structures during the winter and at sunrise.
Pagliuca likens the isolated houses to “places of dream and meditation, inviting us to reflect on the symbolic meaning of the house for the human being.” Small, faded, and sometimes idiosyncratic structures are devoid of people or current signs of use, yet they sit strikingly amid mountain expanses and alongside country roads as reminders of past lives.
HGA restores San Diego Symphony’s Jacobs Music Center
For three years the Jacobs Music Center in Downtown San Diego has undergone renovation work. The theater, previously known as The Fox Theatre movie palace, brims with Spanish Baroque detailing. Architectural firm HGA in collaboration with acoustician Paul Scarbrough and theater planner Schuler Shook, led the renovation. Their attuned work enhances the acoustic experience, while not straying away from the unique spirit of the historic music venue.
Improvements included a custom-designed orchestra enclosure with tunable ceiling reflectors, made to enhance sound distribution, and modifications to deepen the acoustic enclosure created in the stage. Seating has been reconfigured to improve sight lines, remove restrictive sound barriers, and improve access and circulation of the space. This arrangement has expanded the space to accommodate up to 1,823 people, who will be immersed in a more encompassing auditory experience.
Rotterdam-based David Moreno prefers his spatial pieces to oscillate between initial sketches of architectural projects and fully-realised constructions. His steel sculptures are comprised of lengthy metal strips and piano strings that are arranged to form building complexes, cathedrals, and steep flights of stairs. Despite being three-dimensional artworks, they mimic an architect’s outlines with their swooping lines and grid-like qualities.
Kengo Kuma’s Swooping Canopy Reorients Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian in Lisbon
The extension to Lisbon’s Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian (CAM), designed by Kengo Kuma & Associates, orients a much-adored park and cultural complex in a different direction. This singular foundation—established by the will of oil magnate Calouste Gulbenkian and today one of the world’s largest in its endowment—first acquired a swath of the city’s Santa Gertrudes Park in 1957 to build a museum for the display of its patron’s highly curated collection of pre-modern art.
The design, by a trio of Portuguese architects—Ruy Jervis d’Athouguia, Pedro Cid, and Alberto Pessoa—brought art and nature into immediate proximity within a Modernist pavilion, which contained two internal gardens, and windows that frame the plantings like artworks. Lisboans flocked to this cool refuge set amid laurels, eucalyptus, and poplar.
Jakob Factory Rollimarchini Architekten and G8A Archietcts
The Jakob Factory project offered the design partnership of Rollimarchini Architekten from Bern and Swiss-born G8A Architects the unique opportunity to propose a highly innovative and highly specific manufacturing space, set to become a design reference for tropical sustainable architecture.
The intelligent distribution of work spaces combined with the plantation façade and completely modular interior walls provide a comfortable working space, a pioneering initiative as Jakob Factory becomes the first project in Vietnam proposing completely naturally ventilated manufacturing halls.
Ethan’s research and practice focuses on historical narratives and the idealized and uncomfortable ways in which they are told, retold and molded into powerful, absurd and subjective tales.
Twin Gables Invite Light and Nature Indoors at This Destination Coffee Shop
In the beachside town of Chonburi, Thailand, a slithering, twin-gabled building takes shape in a grove of trees. Home to a coffee shop called Harudot, the design is the fruit of a collaboration between a coffee roaster and a landlord who sells exotic plants. IDIN Architects conceived of a building that merged form and function, creating inviting spaces to sit and meet while placing nature at the apex both physically and conceptually.
Harudot’s vaulted interior is clad in warm, natural pine, and large oval apertures in the ceiling let in abundant light that sustains indoor trees. Outside, smooth, black panels silhouette a graceful, curvaceous form punctuated with two tall peaks that literally bring nature inside.
Since the dawn of time we, people, have always been afraid of new technology. Writing, electricity, computers and many others were predicted to end society.
People worried that subways violated the will of God by getting people closer to hell, and that telephones would let people communicate with the dead. Early elevators were plagued by consumers who felt “elevator sickness” after their rides. And with the advent of the passenger train, people worried that “the unprecedented speeds of railroad travel could send women’s uteruses hurling from their bodies.” Link
Now is AI's turn. In more than 10 years posting here in tumblr as ArchAtlas, I have never received more anonymous hate messages as I have because I featured the work of two AI artists.
Maybe I'm too old, or technology has developed at a crazy pace in my lifetime (I grew up with one b/w tv in the house, one phone connected to the wall, no computers, etc) but its always the same story and as much as technology advances it is still always dependent on us: humans. AI is trying to mimic us, we are not trying to mimic AI. Art will change, like it did after the invention of photography and "good" art was not the one that could more closely resemble its subject anymore.
Negating its existence will not change reality.
Here are three examples of how technology was going to cause the downfall of culture and society:
Invention of Writing
As great a philosopher as he was, Socrates had his moments of idiocy too. He was not big on actually committing ideas to paper, for example, because he thought it would result in peoples’ memories getting worse. In his own words, “This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” Thank the stars nobody listened to the old coot, because if I had to orally recite every blog post, I’d be crazier than he was. Link
Invention of Photography
Photography was me targely with hostility to begin with. It was seen as taking work from artists and devaluing their work. However some people began to realise that there is more to artistic representation than simple recording of what the camera sees. Link
Invention of Computers
In the early 1980s, the age of the personal computer had arrived and "computerphobia" was suddenly everywhere. Sufferers experienced "a range of resistances, fears, anxieties, and hostilities," according to the 1996 book Women and Computers. "These can take such forms as fear of physically touching the computer or of damaging it and what's inside it, a reluctance to read or talk about computers, feeling threatened by those who do know something about them, feeling that you can be replaced by a machine, become a slave to it, or feeling aggressive towards computers." Link
Na Chainkua Reindorf creates empowering and inspiring artwork for NYC basketball courts
Artist Na Chainkua Reindorf has refurbished two basketball courts in Downtown Manhattan together with cosmetics brand Glossier, creating large-scale artworks to celebrate women in sport.
OYO transforms derelict Dune House in Belgium with warm wood interiors
Architecture studio OYO has renovated a derelict house in Belgium, lining its interiors with wood and bringing it "into more harmony with the nature of the dunes" that surround it.
Aptly named Dune House, the home is half buried in its sandy plot and has been overhauled by OYO to bring it to modern-day standards while enhancing its connection to its site.
The alterations also aim to celebrate its existing character and structure, which was partially destroyed by bombing during world war two and then reconstructed in timber during the 1960s.
