Double blight: unused Wal-Marts

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It doesn’t happen often enough but at times you’ll see vacant Wal-Mart stores (and yes, we’ve all seen vacant K-Mart stores). Some towns are putting these to good use. Julia Christensen, author of the newly published Big Box Reuse, collects stores about those uses. For example, the Calvary Chapel in Pinellas Park, Fla., formerly housed itself in a former Winn Dixie grocery store. It doubly blessed the community by renovating another big box store, this time a Wal-Mart, for its new home.
Read more about the book and the big box rehabs at Sustainablog.org.

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Filed under: architecture, art, community

Space design in a film

Be on the lookout next year for the release of My Playground. Meanwhile read Architechnophila’s blog post about it. If the film, which includes conversations from architects and urban planners as well as philosophers and politicians, is as good as the trailer, it’ll inspire your own sense of space.

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Filed under: art, design, urbanization

O’Keeffe Shows Artful Side of Architecture

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When artist Georgia O’Keeffe and photographer Alfred Stieglitz moved into New York’s Shelton Hotel in 1925 they and their fellow artists were rampantly chronicling the urbanization of their surroundings. One of O’Keeffe’s pieces from this period is The Shelton with Sun Spots, available for viewing at the Art Institute of Chicago.
In his book The Unfinished City Thomas Bender wrote that they loved midtown Manhattan’s geometry. O’Keeffe’s piece of “the sharply etched skyscraper forms” is “energized by a giant sunspot on the building at the picture’s center.” He compares it to Charles Sheeler, the leader of the precisionist art movement (of which Charles Demuth also was a member; see a previous blog post about Demuth, whose work stands as the icon of SpaceDesignJournal.com).

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Architects debate through art

San Diego-based architect Teddy Cruz and Mexico City-based artist Pedro Reyes have together been deliberating on, among a host of other interconnected matters, the relation between design strategy and social transformation in the age of globalization. Under the initiative of San Francisco Art Institute’s Exhibitions and Public Programs, they come together again to repurpose their “micropolicies” for transfiguring the socio-urban topography as resolution procedures, in particular, for the variously imbricated, ground-level conflicts obtaining in post-invasion Iraq.
This free exhibit has been extended through 31 January. Learn more about it.

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Pieter Jansz: Architectural Art in the 16th century

Image credit of Interior of the St. Martin’s Dom (Cathedral) in Utrecht: Wikipedia
One doesn’t often conjure stellar architectural art with Dutch Baroque era painters, but Pieter Jansz (1597-1665) should be a household name for anyone interested in the aesthetic value of architecture. His works achieve an awe-inspiring dimension, light and shading, detail, and texture with vivid colors. He, like contemporary architectural photographers, incorporating people and objects into the paintings to demonstrate a sense of scale and proportion.
Why not bridge your art viewing and architecture experience? Find Jansz’s work at Louis Kahn’s Kimball Art Museum in Fort Worth?

Jansz image from Kimball Art Museum’s collection

Photo Nichole L. Reber

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New book hails public purpose of architecture

Proliferating the reality that architectural design need not be merely for the urban haute bourgeois, Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism is a compilation of essays from practicing architects and designers. The book discusses architecture’s role in shaping everyone’s lives. Practitioners, including planners, from around the world write about the public interest of architecture and its influence on daily lives.
The Metropolis Books publication was released in October and is available from Amazon.

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I Live Here

I Live Here, the book, released last month. It also comes accompanied by an ongoing interactive web site featuring videos and a blog.
Viewers are encouraged to shoot a few minutes of their own home town or home life to be shared on the I Live Here YouTube channel. The stories span the globe from Mexico to Malawi, and are personal depictions of women’s lives, children’s lives, and more. Some are intensely private, others are ontic. Some of the project smacks of art school. Yet in total this is a means of social networking concerning our home lives.

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Charles Demuth: Architecture via Precise Art

Demuth’s Lancaster (credit)

Charles Demuth’s Buildings is the icon on this blog. Demuth was part of an early-20th-century American art movement called Precisionism. This movement took as its cue photographic characteristics and subject matter that was often the American landscape. Demuth and fellow Precisionist Charles Sheeler created boundless existential pieces of American buildings, infrastructure and other communal architecture.
His watercolors are not the soft, lust pieces of the Impressionists. They are stark, and demanding.

His most famous work is I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold. Learn more about Demuth at his foundation and museum.

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