#my ​lego architecture skyline collection

[mylegoarchitecturecollection]

San Francisco Skyline

[bearlytolerant]

it sure is Tuesday which meanssss hey Edith.......... whats in your toy collection? 😌

Oh this ancient stuffed rabbit from when I was a kid, guitar hero including my janky Xbox 360, and a LEGO Architecture set that’s of the London Skyline that I’m still working on (lbr it’s probably never getting finished).

[krumbine]

The Zen of LEGO in the Din of Adulting

Life sucks.

It’s disappointing. Sad. Devastating.

Worst of all, it’s loud.

The political noise of the past year alone has been enough to drive the sanest of social warriors mad from the sheer insanity of discourse.

Fortunately, we have LEGO.

I don’t think anyone has to look far to witness the stress of a career not going in the direction they want it to or watch helplessly as a relationship or marriage falls apart. There’s an agony to seeing a family crisis unfold from hundreds of miles away and being helpless to do a single thing about it.

Fortunately, we have LEGO.

And let’s not forget terrorism. Or mental health crises. Or a plague of mass shootings that show no sign of abating and leaders who seem uninterested in taking any action against.

Fortunately, we have LEGO.

And I don’t say ‘LEGO’ to make light of any of these painfully heavy realities — I say it, literally, because it’s a sad, tragic, devastating and loud world out there right now.

And I don’t know about you, but I need a break from it every now and then.

I’ve never been to Paris, but I’ve built the Eiffel Tower. It’s part of the Architecture series which includes models like the Flatiron Building, a New York City Skyline (which features a micro-version of the Flatiron Building!), the Louvre, US Capitol, Sydney Opera House, and more.

But back to the Eiffel Tower.

It’s a 321 piece model. The base that the model sits on has a few green and black tiles, but otherwise, the tower is a mess of a grey bricks.

I can’t tell you how long it takes to piece together because that really isn’t the point (although I can say that a WALL-E and a Doctor Who TARDIS models have been the most time-consuming by way of intricacies).

I can tell you,  for the rock-living uninitiated, that there’s nothing difficult about a LEGO set, no matter how many hundreds or thousands of pieces there may be. (Nothing difficult, that is, until your monster cat scatters a collection of tiny, easily lost bricks.) Every set comes off the shelf with simple, wordless  instructions that belie a deeper truth:

Great, complex things happen one tiny (seemingly insignificant) step at a time.

The Eiffel Tower comes in a handsome black box and the instruction manual, unlike typical LEGO sets, is also a small book with facts about the life-size structure in France. Those gray bricks typically come in smaller, numbered bags — you’re instructed to open one bag, put those pieces together, then move onto the next.

Regardless of the set, I like to open all the bags at once. This is the first step in my Zen of LEGO approach. This is where I begin to tune out all the noise of the world around me and slip into flow.

You’ve probably experienced flow in one form or another. It’s when you’re concentrated on a task — you’re in the zone — and time disappears.

In light of the world today, I call it a state of bliss. My neurotic, over-stressed, anxiety-prone brain is finally settled.

The din of the world fades and I begin sorting bricks.

It’s a simple process: all duplicate bricks are sorted and clicked together by way of a single stud until what was once a disorganized mess of plastic is now a neat, tidy collection of all the pieces of a grand puzzle.

I know there are people who will scoff at the time it takes to patiently sort 321 (or more) bricks and for those people, the best equivalent I can describe is mowing the lawn. Or vacuuming. Or that side-to-side sweeping satisfaction of powerwashing the driveway.

After all bricks have been sorted, it’s now time to build. And it always starts so innocuously: random pieces coming together and forming no recognizable shape.

But the flow envelops and we trust the instructions. Brick by brick, small pieces form larger pieces, elements become structures, and an Eiffel Tower begins to emerge.

An indeterminate amount of time later (the longer the better), the model is done and the real world beckons.

I’m not saying taking an hour or two (or three or six) to build a LEGO set will fix any of the problems with the world around us, but it will help turn the noise off for a little while.

That might not sound like much, but it’s really noisy out there.

And sometimes all we need is just a little break.

Fortunately, we have LEGO.

Or sex. That works, too.

​###

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jordan Krumbine is a professional video editor, digital artist, and creative wizard currently quarantined in Kissimmee, Florida. When not producing content for the likes of Visit Orlando, Orlando Sentinel, or AAA National, Jordan is probably yelling at a stubbornly defective Macbook keyboard, tracking creative projects in Trello, and animating quirky videos with LEGO and other various toys.

Leave a dollar in the Tip Jar: https://ko-fi.com/krumbine

Short stories: https://bit.ly/2XY5D7I Books on Amazon Kindle: https://amzn.to/3bsqK5Y YouTube: https://bit.ly/2W41nSG Twitter: https://bit.ly/2VH0Vbu Facebook: https://bit.ly/2VpnylZ LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/2xnmk1e

http://www.krumbco.com

[dicloniusgames]

LEGO Architecture Singapore Build Review

Being able to travel is a wonderful thing, but being able to travel via LEGOs is an awesome thing...especially to places you’ve never been to. 

On January 1st, LEGO released the most recent skyline in the Architecture series as the Republic of Singapore. When I first saw this, I knew it had to be the centerpiece of my architecture collection as it would overtake Dubai as the largest set (which I’ll get into piece count later) and produced in a different kind of box (which I’ll also get into later). 

Design

While I’ve never been to Singapore, there’s one iconic setting in this set that has its’ own set which is Marina Bay Sands, but good luck finding it as that’s retired. I’m glad it’s included as I get to build a mini version of it and from the images shown, I think it looks a lot better than the standalone set. Other iconic settings included are the OCBC Centre, One Raffles Place, Lau Pa Sat and the Fullerton Hotel along with the tree garden in front of Marina Bay Sands which has interchangeable tops on the smaller tree crowns which give it a different look at the builder’s discretion. I chose to go with the ones provided in the instructions. 

Build & Difficulty

At 827 pieces, this is the largest architecture build so far put out by LEGO which I was surprised by at first as I was used to the 500-600 piece designs I’ve built previously and hadn’t built an architecture set in a while. 

The base was actually simple to build this time along with the Singapore River. One of the few things that can trip you up is building the boat quay and the houses within it as it can be a little difficult to put them in the right spot and place the roof pieces on how the instructions show along with the box. The other “hard” element of the set is building One Raffles Place. At first it does look easy until you’re dealing with the black pieces that represent the windows of the building and the pattern can get harder to follow as you sometimes don’t know if you need a 1x1 or 1x2 piece besides the pieces the instructions have arrows pointing down. Marina Bay Sands is the most exciting part of the build for me especially since I’ll never get to own or build the standalone Marina Bay Sands set (as it costs $2,000 on Amazon). Getting to build even a mini version of the Sands was exciting as while it seemed repetitive, it was a simple form of repetitiveness that didn’t get boring as when you build the roof, that repetition was well worth it when you hook in the roof via six support pieces at the bottom of the roof build in three open spaces. While the garden itself isn’t anything difficult, it’s nice to have four interchangeable tree toppers if you want to change the look of the garden every now and then. 

Final Thoughts

The Singapore skyline is a good challenge for those looking to get into the architecture theme as it bucks the trend of it being just another 500 or 600 piece set. At 827 pieces for $59.99, you’re definitely getting a good value of price per piece. You also get a mini Marina Bay Sands which will satisfy architecture builders who never got a chance to build the standalone Marina set. It will also grab the attention of people who either live in or have been to Singapore as they’ll recognize iconic landmarks. A couple of the only downsides have nothing to do with the set itself. One being the box design as it isn’t a standard architecture box so you’ve got to use your thumbs to open two flaps on the side thus ruining the box and the instruction book looks out of place if you place it next to other architecture instruction books. As with the set itself, the only downside is part of the build of One Raffles Place as the window pattern can get a little confusing at first after putting on the first layer of those pieces. Otherwise, this set is well designed and a good challenge for architecture fanatics, maybe not as demanding as something like The Statue Of Liberty or the Empire State Building, but for a skyline, it’s a little demanding. 

Pros: 

+Great attention to detail & accuracy of Singapore

+Fun elements to build 

+Great piece count for the price 

+May potentially lead to larger skyline sets 

Cons: 

-Weird box design leaves the box useless 

-Unusual look to the instruction book

-Some build elements can get tricky 

Score: 

Build Design: 4.5/5

Build Difficulty: 3.5/5 

Creativity & Fun: 3/5

Final Score: 11/15

Final Grade: C

Recommendation: Wait For Sale

[krystangreen-blog]

Alicia Keys captured the essence of New York City in her song Empire State of Mind when she wrote, “Now you’re in New York, these streets will make you feel brand new, big lights will inspire you.” Likely, you too will find yourself enraptured by this city’s buoyant energy the moment you step off the plane.

If you’re already familiar with things to do in New York City, you’ll want to dig deeper into the city that never sleeps with each visit. But for those new to NYC, you’d be remiss if you came here and skipped any of these classic must-do experiences.

Sightsee for Less

Save with the New York Pass

Includes FREE entry to 100+ top New York attractions.

Take in the View from the Empire State Building

The Empire State Building provides spectacular views of New York City. Your experience begins at the 34th Street entrance and Visitors’ Center where you’ll pass through security and buy your tickets before boarding second-floor elevators that take you to the top.

Highlights of your visit include the 80th floor Dare to Dream Exhibit depicting the iconic 102-story Art Deco building’s 13-month construction in 1930-31. The 86th floor is New York’s highest open-air observatory and the world’s most famous where 360-degree views include Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Statue of Liberty. The 102nd-floor wraparound top deck offers panoramic views up to 80 miles away. Your experience ends in the stunning 5th Avenue Lobby.

Some tips for your visit – skip the line with an Express Pass, beat the crowd by arriving before 11 a.m., and use the second-floor bathrooms before getting in line for elevators. Note that kids under six are free. The second floor ESB store is open whenever the building is open. Shops and restaurants line ground level along 33rd and 34th streets, and 5th Avenue.

The Empire State Building is open 365 days from 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m.

Meet Lady Liberty

The Statue of Liberty is the most recognizable icon of the United States, a symbol of freedom and democracy. There are a number of ways to experience Lady Liberty in New York Harbor, both free and paid.

You can see the Statue of Liberty for free from the Staten Island Ferry that leaves Manhattan’s Battery Park every half hour. The 25-minute ride through New York Harbor passes by the Statue offering riders great views. Or, you can stay on land at Battery Park and enjoy the view from there. Head to the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn for great land views from Louis Valentino Jr. Pier.

For the full experience, take a tour of Liberty Island followed by Ellis Island with Statue Cruises, the only vendor authorized by the NPS to land on the islands. If you plan to climb to the Statue pedestal or crown, you have to make advance reservations. There are 377 steps to the crown and no elevators.

A final option is a New York Harbor cruise that circles the Statue of Liberty. Dinner cruises are popular, offering magnificent nighttime views of the Statue and the Manhattan skyline.

Attend a Broadway Show

We saw Hamilton and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child during our last visit to New York City. I highly recommend both.

Getting a ticket to the Broadway show of your choice can be arduous. Many of your favorites may already be sold out, but don’t despair. If you’ve been lusting after tickets to Hamilton or Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, there may still be a way. If you’re creative, you may not even have to pay full price.

The easiest way to get a ticket to a show on Broadway is to purchase it online months in advance. Since this won’t work for everyone, here are some other things to try. (The more flexible you are, the better your chances.) Grab some same day discounted show tickets from TDF’s TKTS Booths at 47th and Broadway or 62nd and Broadway – many with deep discounts. If you have your heart set on a big show, try a lottery at the theater of choice, or on TodayTix.

Even if you aren’t able to secure a ticket to a Broadway show, consider off-Broadway. The tickets are cheaper and generally easier to come by, and you’ll still have a fabulous New York theater experience. (Harry Potter fans should book tickets to Puffs, a hilarious off-Broadway spin on the popular series.)

(Tip: Don’t forget that there’s also the Apollo Theater in Harlem which first opened in 1914 as a burlesque theater. When the city’s mayor banned burlesque, the theater was closed and reopened as the Apollo in 1934 showcasing African American performers from the Harlem Renaissance. The theater’s famous Amateur Night quickly debuted such greats as Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Billie Holiday, and Count Basie.

To get to the Apollo, you’ll make your way to the heart of Harlem on West 125th Street. You can tour the theater by joining a daily, guided group tour. One-hour tours are led by Mr. Billy Mitchell, who’s worked at the Apollo since 1965, so you’ll hear plenty of behind-the-scenes stories.

It’s also an electrifying experience to be part of the Amateur Night at the Apollo audience, cheering or deciding when to “sweep” a performer from the stage. Who knows? You may see the next Lauryn Hill, Jackson 5, or James Brown.)

Spend Time in Central Park

The state of New York set aside 750 acres of urban parkland in 1853, which became Central Park. It’s known as the lungs of New York City with thousands of trees that help to improve the air quality, myriad of jogging and biking paths, and green space to enjoy in good weather. There are so many things to see and do here, you’ll want to check out their official website, visit one of their Visitor Centers, or grab an interactive map to chart your own course.

A must-see in Central Park is the famous Central Park Mall & Literary Walk. This is the most photographed and recognizable part of the park having been featured in countless films. Mature elm trees form an elegant arc over a wide pedestrian walkway lined with benches. At its southern end is the lesser known Literary Walk with statues providing tributes to prominent writers.

Other park highlights include the bronze Alice in Wonderland sculpture, Wollman Ice Skating Rink in winter, the 1908 vintage carousel, Central Park Zoo, the Dairy Visitor Center & Gift Shop, and Bethesda Terrace. Families love Conservatory Water for its climbing sculptures, model boats, story-telling programs, and café. We tend to stay at Mandarin Oriental, New York in Columbus Circle because we like walking from the hotel into the park in a matter of minutes.

Experience Times Square

Times Square, aka Crossroads of the World, is the heartbeat of New York City. The billboards alone, or spectaculars as they’re known locally, are electrifying. At Midnight Moment, they’re also synchronized. This is classic New York, high energy hustle and bustle with everyone on the move. You’ll find something to please each member of the family in Times Square. It’s hectic but a must-do at least once in a lifetime just to say you’ve been there.

There are more than a few things to do at Times Square with kids. National Geographic Encounter: Ocean Odyssey is the most high-tech attraction with 60,000 square feet of exhibition space – for virtual sea life encounters. There’s a whole miniature world at Gulliver’s Gate, the best selection of Marvel comics at Midtown Comics, and three floors of chocolate at M&M’s World. And that’s only the beginning.

Other must-do Times Square attractions include touring Madame Tussauds wax museum and joining the studio audience for a TV show “Good Morning America.”

Explore the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Our most recent visit to the Temple of Dendur in the Sackler Wing.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has assembled an astounding collection representing over 5,000 years of cultural artworks from around the world. One really could spend days here and it’s a top pick for things to do in New York City with kids. The Met even has a family map. My daughter has always loved the Degas ballerinas, Egyptian mummies, Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), and Arms and Armour.

To make the most of your time with this vast collection, you’ll want to choose a guided or audio tour (there is also an audio tour for kids) that matches your interests. You can choose from a variety of engaging one-hour tours presented in various languages that begin at the Great Hall.

The Museum Highlights tours are regulars with other tours on rotation depending on featured collections. All guided tours are free with the price of admission.  

You can spend all of your time at The Met Fifth Avenue (where most people start) or also visit The Met Breuer for an Architecture Tour, and The Met Cloisters for European medieval art and architecture audio tours. All three museum locations open at 10:00 a.m. seven days a week, but The Met Breuer is closed on Mondays.

Top of the Rock and Rockefeller Center

Head over to Rockefeller Center for a variety of activities. In winter, enjoy the massive Christmas tree and famous ice skating rink. During the rest of the year, admire some of the best NYC views from the Top of the Rock Observation Deck or take a behind-the-scenes tour of NBC Studios. Make a booking for brunch at the famous Rainbow Room. Snag a banana pudding and cupcakes at Magnolia Bakery. Also popular with kids is the enormous LEGO store, Nintendo store, and FAO Schwarz.

Don’t forget that you can request tickets for the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon or even catch a performance at Radio City Music Hall.

Close proximity to Rockefeller Center is a benefit to staying at The Towers at Lotte Palace.

Take a Walk over the Brooklyn Bridge

Many New Yorkers consider walking across the Brooklyn Bridge a rite of passage. Visitors wanting to experience New York like a local flock to the bridge to check it off their bucket list too. The popular pedestrian walkway, elevated above traffic, connects Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan.

The Brooklyn Bridge is hands down the most iconic bridge in New York City, featured in films like Saturday Night Fever and Gangs of New York, among others. The architecture alone is stunning, but be sure to take note of the Manhattan skyline on your way across. Guided walking tours are available, including some focused on the bridge’s history or architecture.

At just over a mile long, it will take a half to full hour to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, one way. You’ll want to plan for it to be pretty windy with no protection from the elements. Wear a hat and sunscreen in the summer. Also, walkers share the bridge with cyclists, so be cautious. There are no essentials on the bridge like bathrooms, snacks, or water.

We started on the Brooklyn side and walked across to Manhattan. It’s a bit of a walk from the Brooklyn subway station (about 10 minutes) to the base of the bridge. It’s a well-marked path but not exactly through a major thoroughfare. On both sides, during a hot summer day, vendors sell much-needed bottled water and ice cream. 

Pay Respects at the 9/11 Memorial

Many visitors to New York City want to pay their respects to the victims of September 11 with a visit to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. The two are located adjacent to each other on an eight-acre Memorial Plaza, and are part of the larger 16-acre World Trade Center. They serve as a tribute to those who lost their lives as a result of terror attacks on February 26, 1993 and September 11, 2001.

The 9/11 Memorial Plaza includes 400 white oak trees, and two one-acre pools with the nation’s largest manmade waterfalls where the twin towers once stood. Every name of those who perished is inscribed in bronze surrounding the two Memorial pools. Memorial Glade includes six stone monoliths dedicated to rescue and recovery workers, relief workers, survivors, and community members affected by the attack. The Survivor Tree that endured the attack is a symbol of resilience and rebirth.

The 9/11 Memorial Museum is the nation’s primary institution dedicated to the remembrance of September, 11. Visitors will find state-of-the-art multimedia exhibits, monumental artifacts, and significant archives. The museum tells the story of both victims and survivors. Visitors can purchase tickets for guided Memorial tours, Museum tours, or combination tours which are also included options on various New York sightseeing passes.

Bask in the Nostalgia of Coney Island

Seriously, Coney Island was much more fun than I thought it would be.

Even if you’ve never been to New York City, you’ve likely heard of Coney Island. This nostalgic seaside resort is embedded in our culture through our music, theater, film, literature, television, and even video games. Once upon a time, over a century ago, it was the preeminent seaside getaway in America.

Today, it’s been revitalized to recapture at least some of its former allure. There are new bars and restaurants, and even the amusement park has gotten a major facelift. But the old carny-style ambience has remained too. You’ll find some of the same concessions that have been here for decades, an enduring circus sideshow, the traditional annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade, and of course, the famous boardwalk.

Must-do experiences at Coney Island include riding the Cyclone wooden roller coaster at Luna Park, and the 150-foot 1920s Wonder Wheel Ferris wheel at Deno’s Wonderwheel Amusement Park next door. An afternoon at the beach, or visit the New York Aquarium along the iconic Boardwalk are also good bets. Grab a hotdog from Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs, or a caramel apple from the 75-year-old Williams Candy store. If it’s playing, you can even watch a family-friendly sideshow.

Save on Things to Do in New York City With Sightseeing Passes

There are several options for NYC sightseeing passes that help you save month on attractions. They also conveniently allow you to skip the ticket booth lines in many cases.

The New York Pass is a popular all-inclusive pass for active sightseers as it includes admission to over 100 attractions across 1, 2, 3, 5, 7 or 10 days. 

Less active sightseers or those who are weaving in a few major attractions in between eating glorious food and shopping may prefer the New York Explorer Pass. We used this during our trip a few months ago. This NYC sightseeing pass provides entry to 3, 4, 5, 7, or 10 attractions and tours from 90 options. You have 30 days to use the pass from its first activation.

Both are accessible via mobile phones apps so that you can skip the ticket lines and go straight to the gate in many cases. They also don’t require you to choose which attractions to visit in advance with the exception of guided tours which need reservations.

What are your favorite things to do in New York City?

[connorrenwick]

Where I Work: Duan Tran of KAA Design

As with many people around the world, KAA Design partner Duan Tran had to carve out a workspace at home during the ongoing pandemic. Luckily the licensed architect, husband, and father of three, designed an addition to his Culver City, California home last year that added much needed space, and now, a spot for Tran to work. The dining room setup gives him the space during the day to spread out and work while easily transitioning to dinnertime in the evenings. The space is filled with natural light, especially when the folding door system is open, making it perfect for detailed work, at the same time as keeping an eye on his children playing outside. For this month’s Where I Work during quarantine times, we visit Duan Tran at home to see how and where he’s getting his work done.

What’s your studio/work environment like?

Great natural light and a view! When we transitioned to a work from home mode, I quickly set up shop at our dining table which overlooks the backyard garden and has great natural light throughout the day. I’m fortunate to live in a climate [southern California] that allows me to open our folding door system and achieve a wonderful indoor/outdoor working environment.

How is your space organized/arranged?

Tidy and minimal. I’m not one for too much fuss, so my traveling laptop and what I may be working on for the day are all I have on the table. Given the fact that I work at the dining table, it’s easy to clean up and transition to dinner time at the end of the day.

KAA Design office

How long have you been in this space? Where did you work before that? If you could change something about your workspace, what would it be?

123 days… but who’s counting! Our workplace office is a dynamic and creative work environment with great energy. I tremendously miss the energy of being in that high energy environment with all of our talented team doing great things together.

Is there an office pet?

Absolutely, where would we be without Fox and Pepper?!

Do you require music in the background? If so, who are some favorites?

I love music. John Mayer, Maroon 5, Kendrick Lamar, and Post Malone are a few favorites that I find myself humming a tune to during the day!

How do you record ideas?

Email. I have a thousand draft emails in my mailbox that I use to collect ideas and thoughts. Since I always have my phone, it’s easy to type in something quick everywhere and anywhere.

Do you have an inspiration board? What’s on it right now?

Given our work from home environment, I’ve been more focused on creating inspiration boards on both Pinterest and Instagram. I love the mobility of it all and my ability to add or call up an inspiration image anywhere I go.

What is your typical work style?

I’m fairly regimented in my work style. Given all of the touches that I need to have with clients, team members and other colleagues, I find myself a slave to my daily calendar to ensure I cover all of my bases during the workday. For focused design time, I love working late at night when it’s quiet and just me. I must say I have seen the sunrise from time to time when I find myself in my happy place, inspiration wise.

What is your creative process and/or creative workflow like? Does it change every project or do you keep it the same?

Great question. I would have to describe it as consistent, linear and layered. I’m very iterative in how I approach design. It usually starts with a big idea, or an unforgettable design image that I love, then I run it through a series of iterative studies that allow me to edit away and find the purest essence of a project or concept.

What kind of art/design/objects might you have scattered about the space?

What started off as child’s play with my LEGO collection has continued on to influence and entertain me to this day. I’m especially fond of the Lego “Architecture” series that has scaled replicas of many of the world’s iconic skylines and buildings. The best thing honestly is that it gives me an opportunity to bond with my daughters and engage in something I am passionate about.

What tool(s) do you most enjoy using in the design process?

We utilize a 3D BIM platform called ArchiCAD that allows us to explore design concepts three-dimensionally, fluidly, and very early on. It’s been quite the game-changer for us, not only internally, but also externally with our clients, because we can present design in a way that is much less technical and beyond 2D.

Let’s talk about how you’re wired. Tell us about your tech arsenal/devices.

I’m completely wired into my iPhone which allows me to access email, people, drawings, and quite honestly anything else that I could ever need during the day. Our needing to work more remotely has further pushed my dependence on devices like this.

What’s on your desk right now?

We are finishing up an exciting design concept for a private residential compound in Dubai. Beyond that, keeping a watchful eye on my kids is always top of mind.

Is there a favorite project/piece you’ve worked on?

We recently completed a project in Southern California that I’m personally very proud of. Situated on a 2.5-acre hilltop property, we designed a very unique site-specific private residence that hovers overtop the existing hillside while framing amazing indoor-outdoor views of the Pacific Ocean beyond.

Tell us about a current project you’re working on. What was the inspiration behind it?

Our latest project in Dubai was an exciting exploration into how we could modify the landscape and grading to achieve some unique opportunities for natural light to infiltrate and play with the architectural form of the residence below grade. We were inspired by the Antinori Winery in Italy, as well as Tadao Ando’s Benesse House in Japan.

Do you have anything in your home that you’ve designed/created?

My current work from home workspace. We fortuitously took on the challenge of doing an addition to our existing home last year to give our family of five more living space and to thoughtfully connect to the rear yard. It’s been quite the godsend to have this space given recent circumstances.

via http://design-milk.com/

from WordPress https://connorrenwickblog.wordpress.com/2020/09/15/where-i-work-duan-tran-of-kaa-design/

[newssplashy]

MILAN — The lambent new tower of art galleries Rem Koolhaas and his Rotterdam-based firm, OMA, have designed for the Prada Foundation is a chameleon.

From the east, the elevation presents a slim, unadorned, milk-white concrete block, nine stories high, punctured by loggias — a signpost, like the traditional village bell tower, rising above a low, scruffy neighborhood.

To the north, where the facade meets Milan’s skyline and becomes mostly glass, cantilevering over the street, the block breaks into a zigzag of shifting floor plates, rectangles and trapezoids, the whole building wedged onto a triangular plot.

The south end makes plain how the structure stands up. An ensemble of enormous cables encased inside a giant beam counteracts the thrust of all those heavy, cantilevered concrete decks. Like a sword in a stone, the beam angles from the top of the tower through the red-tiled roof of an adjacent former warehouse, anchoring in the floor below.

In the Arthurian legend, the wizard Merlin put the sword in the stone. Koolhaas must be Merlin, I suppose. That makes Miuccia Prada, the Lady of the Lake.

The tower completes the arts campus OMA has spent the past decade conceiving for the Prada Foundation. An offshoot of the global fashion conglomerate, dedicated to contemporary art and culture, the foundation commissions new art, presents exhibitions and organizes film festivals and other events. It also oversees the vast art collection that Prada and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, have put together. For years, it operated in far-flung locales.

In 2008, Koolhaas and a partner, Christopher van Duijn, were enlisted to reimagine a former, turn-of-the-century distillery Prada owned as the foundation’s permanent home. Walled-in, abutting a weedy stretch of railroad tracks, the distillery was a picturesque assortment of dilapidated stables, a bottling facility, a carriage house, some offices and warehouses.

The architects cleared away some of the old buildings, refurbished others. They built new ones. The tower was the last piece of the puzzle.

Without it, the site first opened to the public in 2015. It featured about 120,000 square feet of new or reconfigured exhibition space; a new cinema; a new two-story Miesian pavilion of wide open gallery spaces, called the Podium, the whole building clad in light, shimmery panels of foamed aluminum, an automotive and medical industry material also used for bomb blast absorption that looks a little like rough stone. There was even a 1950s-style Italian cafe straight out of a Wes Anderson movie.

That was because Wes Anderson designed it.

Chameleons themselves, Koolhaas and Prada made natural confederates. She was the famous communist turned high-fashion mogul whose empire evolved from bags and backpacks constructed out of an industrial nylon lining material. He was a prophet of global cities who declared the countryside his real passion after everyone else jumped on the urbanist bandwagon.

Her clothes always seemed less about what men desired than what whet her creative appetite. He was once invited to propose an expansion for the Museum of Modern Art and thumbed his nose at the selection committee by suggesting a billboard that said “MoMA Inc.” They were both contrarians and closet optimists.

And they shared a sense of humor. At one time it was rumored that Prada might back the Dutch architect for a seat in the Italian Parliament.

The foundation became their love child. It is unlike the eye-popping art gallery Frank Gehry designed for the Louis Vuitton Foundation beside the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, with its billowing glass sails, conjuring up flounces of silk and memories of Bilbao. The Prada campus feels, by comparison, world-weary, sneakily luxurious and — especially with its new tower — a mini-city, fragmentary, full of craft and secrets. Cities enshrine history and agitate for change. They’re forever unresolved.

This has been Koolhaas’ mantra. It is reflected in a foundation that’s neither a preservation project nor a tear-down-and-build-new venture. Its mode is bricolage. More is more. Both is better.

Cities are theaters and shape-shifters, too. I’m vaguely reminded of the old Cinecittàstudios outside Rome, where Fellini worked and Anderson has made films. A stable house in the former distillery now resembles the cabinet rooms in old master museums. A tiny, Alice in Wonderland door opens onto an immense warehouse, 60 feet high and 200 feet long.

And a building nicknamed the Haunted House is slathered in gold leaf, like an early Renaissance panel painting. (“A very cheap cladding material,” Koolhaas has insisted, “compared to marble or even paint.”)

“There is no difference between gold and rags,” Michelangelo Pistoletto, the veteran artist, once said. Pistoletto made his bones in the 1960s as a founder of arte povera, the Italian twist on post-minimalism. Writing in 2001, after Koolhaas’ Prada shop opened in downtown Manhattan, critic Herbert Muschamp noted Prada’s philosophical roots in arte povera.

Muschamp recalled how art povera consisted of “old bedding and tar-stained rope” displayed “in barren, out-of-the-way locations.”

Somehow, he added, “you always needed a private jet to get there.”

Up to a point, that describes the foundation, with its fetishized lowdown materials like chipboard and orange construction fencing and slightly out-of-the-way location, south of the city’s center.

Arte povera isn’t the only ghost of midcentury modernism inhabiting the project — there’s the twee cafe, with its Formica furniture and veneered wood paneling; the new tower restaurant, with its furniture bought at auction from New York’s Four Seasons; the cinema, with chairs imported from ‘70s-era Milanese movie houses; and the sun-baked, deeply shadowed squares, conjuring up de Chirico.

At the same time, there are the custom sheets of very modern translucent polycarbonate and aluminum handrails milled like Ferraris. There are the oak wood box-on-end pavers and the repurposed metal prison grates painted lime green, which serve as screens in the coat checks and bathroom stalls.

Some visitors have complained the layout doesn’t tell you where to go. You find your way around it. Like in a city. I think that is a virtue.

But until now the project was missing its cornerstone where the 200-foot-high, 22,000-square-foot tower, or Torre, was meant to rise. Delays in construction stretched three years. They ended up allowing time to refine the design.

The tower’s six, stacked gallery floors were created as full-time showcases for Prada’s private art collection. They’re reached through a small, open-air lobby like a disco ball, with flashing screens and a dizzying cutout in the ceiling to reveal the building core’s scissored stairs. One flight up, mirrored bathrooms, industrial sinks and a patterned floor summon to mind Pierre Chareau and Superstudio.

The galleries above are one to a floor, no two rooms alike, each taller than the last, their layouts shifting with the floor plates, the lowest gallery, 9 feet high; the topmost, 26 feet high.

The middle-floor galleries end up feeling the nicest, proportion-wise. But the whole building is one narrative. As Federico Pompignoli, OMA’s project manager, has said, the tower is “an attempt at the white cube defying its own boringness.”

Much credit here goes to him. He oversaw every inch of construction and it shows. Elevator cabs clad in backlit slabs of rose and green onyx suggest medieval reliquaries. I am told blacksmiths from a tiny shop outside Milan hand-tooled the restaurant’s exquisite bar, sliding doors and custom-embossed the anodized aluminum panels on the terraces that look like expensive Lego pieces. I kept running my hands over the tower’s concrete walls. Infused with Carrara marble and poured by construction workers who wore white gloves, they feel smooth as silk.

The big rectangular and wedge-shaped galleries, windows alternating between panoramas of the city and narrow views over the campus, accommodate best the large-scale works in the inaugural show, “Atlas.” It features Jeff Koons, Mona Hatoum, Michael Heizer and others. Check out the restaurant if you go. Works by Carsten Höller and Lucio Fontana are on permanent display.

From “Atlas,” I made my way through the loan exhibition about fascist art that has taken over the pavilion and stables, watching a few of the old news clips of cheering mobs and Benito Mussolini in the cinema.

Then I wandered into Anderson’s cafe and ordered what may be the most delicious sandwich I have eaten in my entire life.

Private museums are mostly vanity projects. Few invent social spaces. It may be the ultimate tribute to Koolhaas and OMA to say that the Prada campus works. The plazas are poetic. The galleries are practical and varied.

Prada should be pleased and maybe a little worried. It’s up to the foundation to program these spaces for generations to come.

Architecturally speaking, there’s a lot to live up to.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

MICHAEL KIMMELMAN © 2018 The New York Times

via NewsSplashy - Latest Nigerian News Online

[crazy-figures-coll]

Five Stars Bought as a gift and greatly appreciate. Go to Amazon

one of my collections Stunning images and in-depth exploration of the real buildings like the Guggenheim™ or the Empire State Building, on which the LEGO Architecture series is based, provide you with a comprehensive look at the creation of these intricate sets. Learn why the LEGO team chose certain pieces and what particular challenges they faced. Read about the inspiration behind the creative processes and what designing and building techniques were used on various sets. Go to Amazon

Very impressed with this book. Good for all ages. Highly recommend this book. It is huge, and much more than what I was expecting. I have a six year-old son who loves architecture. Not only does this book have diagrams and pictures of the Lego models for the buildings, but it has information and photographs of the actual buildings as well as excerpts from the designers responsible for making the models. Go to Amazon

Just ok Just a rehash of what you get in the architecture kits themselves. Would not have purchased if I'd realized that. Go to Amazon

Lego Architects Book Ordered this magnificent publication as a gift for our ten year old grandson. It's an amazing book with photos of the models and the buildings themselves as well as thorough descriptions by the artists! The book comes in a heavy duty slipcase with stunning graphics. We are thrilled with this item! Even better than described, plus great price. Go to Amazon

Great Gift Was a Christmas gift for my 6 yr. old grandson, along with a Lego kit of the NYC skyline. He (and his mom) absolutely loved it! Go to Amazon

LEGO designs and quality book. My 14 year old grandson and I leafed through this book at one of our local bookstores. He loved the book but I choked at the price. I was very glad to find this book on Amazon as this was on his Christmas gift list. The price, quality and his love of Lego design made this a GREAT present. Go to Amazon

Awesome for all ages....not just lego fans This was a gift to myself for my birthday. I love architecture and this was so interesting! I first saw this at target for 40.00 and thought I can't spend that, so I checked out amazon and it was less than half.....You will want to build something with legos after the first chapter! Go to Amazon

you can enjoy many of them with this book's pictures Five Stars Five Stars Five Stars Five Stars Beautiful Legos Five Stars great!! Five Stars A huge lego architecture fan

[afortydegreeday]

State of the Collection(s) - May 2017

I’m going to start cataloging all of the things I collect, mainly as a sort of archive of what I have on hand. 

Legos:

I mainly collect the architecture series. I used to get the big creator sets, but two young boys and moving into a smaller house in TX put a end to that. This month I built the New York skyline to go with London, Berlin, and Sydney, and I bought the Guggenheim set.

Funko:

I’m not going to lie, I’m about 95 percent sure I’m going to sell off the vast majority of my Pop collection soon. Partly because I’m now focused on scale figures/statues, and partly because the community for especially Pop!s has become way too speculative and infiltrated with scalpers and just not a lot of fun anymore. I’ll still collect Dorbz, because I do think they are cute, and I’ll probably keep all of my Vegeta Pops and a couple of others. If you might be interested in some Pops drop me a line.

Scales:

This month I have Koto’s Spike and Megahouse’s Luffy coming in. I’m also slowly building up a complete set of Megahouse’s KnB scales, with Akashi and Kagami coming in this month. Oikawa and Iwaizumi’s nendos also come in this month (they aren’t scales, I know).

[thewomminecrafter]

Been gone a while to work on my art back now, all works in the photos are in chronological order from the eye to the lego works on the left. The Piet Mondrian styled works begin from the hourglass onto the separated screens.

CURATORIAL RATIONALE

The theme for the selection of this body of work for exhibition has been inspired by a collection of photographs of Bali taken by my father in 2002 and modern day Bali in 2017.

When comparing the differences in the images my father has taken I was struck by the sudden increase of hotels and businesses like massage parlors or bars, and how even rice fields that are of great cultural and social value are sold to supply the land needed to build more hotels or shops. I aim for the work that I have presented to portray a clear message of loss of culture or cultural infringement as Bali goes through this path of modernization.

The motifs and symbols I have explored throughout many of the works include chess pieces which represent the idea of a game and how everything is considered a pawn and easily moved around or removed if decided by someone in a higher position. The lego building blocks represent the desire or concept of construction to highlight the ongoing overdevelopment.

I have investigated hard edge painting and geometric abstraction exploring Destil and artist Piet Mondrian .The use of hard edged geometric shape and cut outs seek to present a message in which western culture is becoming more dominant and pervasive within Balinese life and architecture. Highlighting this movement away from traditional architecture. The colours used throughout much of the work relate both to the limited primary palette of De Stijl as well as referencing the solid block colors of Lego building blocks.

Surrealism played a major role in helping me to create and link my artworks in order to maintain my message throughout my use of the chess piece symbology.

Surrealist techniques such as distortion of scale to create the feeling of unease and repetition have been applied throughout many of the works. This can be seen within series of photographs in which chess pieces are used to distort the reality and are also used as motifs for people being one piece of a game which affects us throughout our life. The use of sky as one of my main subjects is a traditional surrealist technique also used by surrealist artists Magritte and Jerry Uelsmann.

An exploration into positive and negative space influenced by looking at the distorted shadows in the work of Surrealist painter Giorgio De Chirico allowed me to highlight ideas about the movement away from villages into cities and show how crowded the cities have become.

My pieces related to my time spent here in Bali - David Salle, and Jerry Uelsmann styled works - have all incorporated some physical part of bali or aspect of balinese life. This can be seen in my david salle inspired work in which I use a traditional Balinese rice field. This is then further shown in my Jerry uelsmann inspired works where by Balinese beaches and monuments were used, however, with the exception of two pieces “samabia” & “Horizon” Although the styled works did not contain a direct connection to Bali. I’ve position these pieces in chronological order of development and making in order to show both the progression of my own work and how even the message seeking to be portrayed flows through each of the works and slowly gives more and more meaning to each piece as they are viewed one after another.

By the end of the exhibition I intend to have the viewer thinking about the influence of western concepts and ideas on Balinese culture and traditions. A further step although not directly linked to the exhibition would be gaining public support for the Tolak Reklamasi movement going on throughout Bali; as the research behind the movement was also a key player in sparking my interest and thoughts behind coming to this general theme.

WORD COUNT 632

THE ALL VISIBLE OVERDEVELOPMENT Acrylic on cardboard 108cm x 80cm

The use of symbols convey the message of overdevelopment as shown by an eye which was used to witness this current change. The ricefield was used as a symbol of Balinese farming and traditional life that is currently under threat due to the increase of industry and development. I have used monochromatic tonal painting techniques, use of grid to structure the composition, and juxtaposition of dark and light to create contrast. These are techniques used by Neo Expressionist painter David Salle.

CHECKERED DREAM Inkjet print on photographic paper Size: 76 x 76cm

In this series of work I have used photographs I have taken while visiting well known beautiful locations in Bali. I have used digital editing and photoshop techniques to integrate the chess piece and board which when placed into the image disrupt the natural beauty, and reminds me of how industrialization is associated with developing states like Bali.

OCEAN HORIZON Inkjet print on photographic paper 76cm x 94 cm

The sky and ocean within this series is used to present the calm atmosphere of Bali however the distorted scale of the chess piece represents tourism and how it is out of place within the environment. I have used a single piece within each image in order to portray the idea that there is still hope to retain the beauty of these locations by effectively managing and regulating development and modernization.This body of work was informed by the investigation into surrealist photographer Jerry Uelsmann.

THE DE STIJL MASHUP Acrylic Paint, Paper Collage on wooden board 145 x140

This series of work uses repetition of colour and shape and explores hard edged painting techniques similar to that of Piet Mondrian and De Stijl. The use of line and colour has been abstracted from the subject of the lego blocks represent the idea of building and construction. The idea of shape is further emphasized through the irregular edges and removal of pieces from the board. Exploring the DeStijl philosophy that the artwork should extend out beyond the confines of the canvas space.

WELCOME TO THE CITY Acrylic paint, paper collage on wooden board Size: 121cm x 91cm

One of the motifs I have used for the symptom of Bali’s path to modernizing itself is the cityscape as this will eventually be Bali’s final destination. In order to create this piece a variety of shapes were used to create different sized cityscapes and skylines composed of cutouts which were later layered onto board. Tonal blues creating atmospheric perspective, as well as two and three point perspective has been used to create a sense of depth. Positive and negative space and contrast has been explored in order to highlight the idea of elevation and overcrowding.

ONCE A RICE FIELD… NO LONGER A RICE FIELD Inkjet print on photographic paper 21 x 107.5cm

This piece illustrates how Bali has changed over the years from being an island of ricefields and few buildings to an island of poorly maintained ricefields and large towns/cities. The photos portrayed in this piece span from 2001-2017. The first photo on the left was taken by my father when first visiting Bali, the second a few years later and the third rice field photograph is from this year. I have appropriated these images and digitally manipulated them, adding lego structures to show the overdevelopment of Bali and how even traditions have slowly began to lose value.

A PHOTO WITHIN A PHOTO… WITHIN A PHOTO? Inkjet print on photographic paper Size: 30x65

This piece is composed of 3 different photographic developments and explorations. The first exploration was that of distorting lego pieces, these were later projected onto white boxes to create shadow and further distortion. These photographs were then turned into three dimensional boxes using photoshop and placed within another three dimensional space, a ricefield & kite room. The photo editing techniques explored here are similar to surrealist photographer Erik Johansson. The aim of this piece is to highlight how overdevelopment and building has become a serious issue within Bali.

TANAH REKLAMASI Wooden sticks, photographic inkjet print and sand 45x90

This sculptural piece consists of three repeated De Stijl style triangular based pyramids placed into an hourglass shape and laid on top of a designed monopoly board filled with hotels and services in Bali only to be covered in sand from the hourglass. The techniques explored here were traditional hard edged painting, carpentry & photo manipulation. The aim of this piece is to convey the idea of land reclamation and how it can be achieved united over time.

BALIOPOLY Photographic inkjet 45x90

This photography body consists of a self created monopoly board wrapped around a balinese tradition this tradition is then surrounded by western architecture and services. The photo editing techniques explored here are similar to that of neo expressionist artist Madi Bayak. The aim of this piece is to highlight how overdevelopment has become a serious issue and is a threat to traditions; Also seen as a culture on fire.

[mylegoarchitecturecollection]

Sydney Skyline

[mylegoarchitecturecollection]

London Skyline

[mylegoarchitecturecollection]

Berlin Skyline

[mylegoarchitecturecollection]

Shanghai Skyline

[newssplashy]

MILAN — The lambent new tower of art galleries Rem Koolhaas and his Rotterdam-based firm, OMA, have designed for the Prada Foundation is a chameleon.

From the east, the elevation presents a slim, unadorned, milk-white concrete block, nine stories high, punctured by loggias — a signpost, like the traditional village bell tower, rising above a low, scruffy neighborhood.

To the north, where the facade meets Milan’s skyline and becomes mostly glass, cantilevering over the street, the block breaks into a zigzag of shifting floor plates, rectangles and trapezoids, the whole building wedged onto a triangular plot.

The south end makes plain how the structure stands up. An ensemble of enormous cables encased inside a giant beam counteracts the thrust of all those heavy, cantilevered concrete decks. Like a sword in a stone, the beam angles from the top of the tower through the red-tiled roof of an adjacent former warehouse, anchoring in the floor below.

In the Arthurian legend, the wizard Merlin put the sword in the stone. Koolhaas must be Merlin, I suppose. That makes Miuccia Prada, the Lady of the Lake.

The tower completes the arts campus OMA has spent the past decade conceiving for the Prada Foundation. An offshoot of the global fashion conglomerate, dedicated to contemporary art and culture, the foundation commissions new art, presents exhibitions and organizes film festivals and other events. It also oversees the vast art collection that Prada and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, have put together. For years, it operated in far-flung locales.

In 2008, Koolhaas and a partner, Christopher van Duijn, were enlisted to reimagine a former, turn-of-the-century distillery Prada owned as the foundation’s permanent home. Walled-in, abutting a weedy stretch of railroad tracks, the distillery was a picturesque assortment of dilapidated stables, a bottling facility, a carriage house, some offices and warehouses.

The architects cleared away some of the old buildings, refurbished others. They built new ones. The tower was the last piece of the puzzle.

Without it, the site first opened to the public in 2015. It featured about 120,000 square feet of new or reconfigured exhibition space; a new cinema; a new two-story Miesian pavilion of wide open gallery spaces, called the Podium, the whole building clad in light, shimmery panels of foamed aluminum, an automotive and medical industry material also used for bomb blast absorption that looks a little like rough stone. There was even a 1950s-style Italian cafe straight out of a Wes Anderson movie.

That was because Wes Anderson designed it.

Chameleons themselves, Koolhaas and Prada made natural confederates. She was the famous communist turned high-fashion mogul whose empire evolved from bags and backpacks constructed out of an industrial nylon lining material. He was a prophet of global cities who declared the countryside his real passion after everyone else jumped on the urbanist bandwagon.

Her clothes always seemed less about what men desired than what whet her creative appetite. He was once invited to propose an expansion for the Museum of Modern Art and thumbed his nose at the selection committee by suggesting a billboard that said “MoMA Inc.” They were both contrarians and closet optimists.

And they shared a sense of humor. At one time it was rumored that Prada might back the Dutch architect for a seat in the Italian Parliament.

The foundation became their love child. It is unlike the eye-popping art gallery Frank Gehry designed for the Louis Vuitton Foundation beside the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, with its billowing glass sails, conjuring up flounces of silk and memories of Bilbao. The Prada campus feels, by comparison, world-weary, sneakily luxurious and — especially with its new tower — a mini-city, fragmentary, full of craft and secrets. Cities enshrine history and agitate for change. They’re forever unresolved.

This has been Koolhaas’ mantra. It is reflected in a foundation that’s neither a preservation project nor a tear-down-and-build-new venture. Its mode is bricolage. More is more. Both is better.

Cities are theaters and shape-shifters, too. I’m vaguely reminded of the old Cinecittàstudios outside Rome, where Fellini worked and Anderson has made films. A stable house in the former distillery now resembles the cabinet rooms in old master museums. A tiny, Alice in Wonderland door opens onto an immense warehouse, 60 feet high and 200 feet long.

And a building nicknamed the Haunted House is slathered in gold leaf, like an early Renaissance panel painting. (“A very cheap cladding material,” Koolhaas has insisted, “compared to marble or even paint.”)

“There is no difference between gold and rags,” Michelangelo Pistoletto, the veteran artist, once said. Pistoletto made his bones in the 1960s as a founder of arte povera, the Italian twist on post-minimalism. Writing in 2001, after Koolhaas’ Prada shop opened in downtown Manhattan, critic Herbert Muschamp noted Prada’s philosophical roots in arte povera.

Muschamp recalled how art povera consisted of “old bedding and tar-stained rope” displayed “in barren, out-of-the-way locations.”

Somehow, he added, “you always needed a private jet to get there.”

Up to a point, that describes the foundation, with its fetishized lowdown materials like chipboard and orange construction fencing and slightly out-of-the-way location, south of the city’s center.

Arte povera isn’t the only ghost of midcentury modernism inhabiting the project — there’s the twee cafe, with its Formica furniture and veneered wood paneling; the new tower restaurant, with its furniture bought at auction from New York’s Four Seasons; the cinema, with chairs imported from ‘70s-era Milanese movie houses; and the sun-baked, deeply shadowed squares, conjuring up de Chirico.

At the same time, there are the custom sheets of very modern translucent polycarbonate and aluminum handrails milled like Ferraris. There are the oak wood box-on-end pavers and the repurposed metal prison grates painted lime green, which serve as screens in the coat checks and bathroom stalls.

Some visitors have complained the layout doesn’t tell you where to go. You find your way around it. Like in a city. I think that is a virtue.

But until now the project was missing its cornerstone where the 200-foot-high, 22,000-square-foot tower, or Torre, was meant to rise. Delays in construction stretched three years. They ended up allowing time to refine the design.

The tower’s six, stacked gallery floors were created as full-time showcases for Prada’s private art collection. They’re reached through a small, open-air lobby like a disco ball, with flashing screens and a dizzying cutout in the ceiling to reveal the building core’s scissored stairs. One flight up, mirrored bathrooms, industrial sinks and a patterned floor summon to mind Pierre Chareau and Superstudio.

The galleries above are one to a floor, no two rooms alike, each taller than the last, their layouts shifting with the floor plates, the lowest gallery, 9 feet high; the topmost, 26 feet high.

The middle-floor galleries end up feeling the nicest, proportion-wise. But the whole building is one narrative. As Federico Pompignoli, OMA’s project manager, has said, the tower is “an attempt at the white cube defying its own boringness.”

Much credit here goes to him. He oversaw every inch of construction and it shows. Elevator cabs clad in backlit slabs of rose and green onyx suggest medieval reliquaries. I am told blacksmiths from a tiny shop outside Milan hand-tooled the restaurant’s exquisite bar, sliding doors and custom-embossed the anodized aluminum panels on the terraces that look like expensive Lego pieces. I kept running my hands over the tower’s concrete walls. Infused with Carrara marble and poured by construction workers who wore white gloves, they feel smooth as silk.

The big rectangular and wedge-shaped galleries, windows alternating between panoramas of the city and narrow views over the campus, accommodate best the large-scale works in the inaugural show, “Atlas.” It features Jeff Koons, Mona Hatoum, Michael Heizer and others. Check out the restaurant if you go. Works by Carsten Höller and Lucio Fontana are on permanent display.

From “Atlas,” I made my way through the loan exhibition about fascist art that has taken over the pavilion and stables, watching a few of the old news clips of cheering mobs and Benito Mussolini in the cinema.

Then I wandered into Anderson’s cafe and ordered what may be the most delicious sandwich I have eaten in my entire life.

Private museums are mostly vanity projects. Few invent social spaces. It may be the ultimate tribute to Koolhaas and OMA to say that the Prada campus works. The plazas are poetic. The galleries are practical and varied.

Prada should be pleased and maybe a little worried. It’s up to the foundation to program these spaces for generations to come.

Architecturally speaking, there’s a lot to live up to.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

MICHAEL KIMMELMAN © 2018 The New York Times

via NewsSplashy - Latest Nigerian News Online

[newssplashy]

Opinion: A microcity of secrets is complete

MILAN — The lambent new tower of art galleries Rem Koolhaas and his Rotterdam-based firm, OMA, have designed for the Prada Foundation is a chameleon.

From the east, the elevation presents a slim, unadorned, milk-white concrete block, nine stories high, punctured by loggias — a signpost, like the traditional village bell tower, rising above a low, scruffy neighborhood.

To the north, where the facade meets Milan’s skyline and becomes mostly glass, cantilevering over the street, the block breaks into a zigzag of shifting floor plates, rectangles and trapezoids, the whole building wedged onto a triangular plot.

The south end makes plain how the structure stands up. An ensemble of enormous cables encased inside a giant beam counteracts the thrust of all those heavy, cantilevered concrete decks. Like a sword in a stone, the beam angles from the top of the tower through the red-tiled roof of an adjacent former warehouse, anchoring in the floor below.

In the Arthurian legend, the wizard Merlin put the sword in the stone. Koolhaas must be Merlin, I suppose. That makes Miuccia Prada, the Lady of the Lake.

The tower completes the arts campus OMA has spent the past decade conceiving for the Prada Foundation. An offshoot of the global fashion conglomerate, dedicated to contemporary art and culture, the foundation commissions new art, presents exhibitions and organizes film festivals and other events. It also oversees the vast art collection that Prada and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, have put together. For years, it operated in far-flung locales.

In 2008, Koolhaas and a partner, Christopher van Duijn, were enlisted to reimagine a former, turn-of-the-century distillery Prada owned as the foundation’s permanent home. Walled-in, abutting a weedy stretch of railroad tracks, the distillery was a picturesque assortment of dilapidated stables, a bottling facility, a carriage house, some offices and warehouses.

The architects cleared away some of the old buildings, refurbished others. They built new ones. The tower was the last piece of the puzzle.

Without it, the site first opened to the public in 2015. It featured about 120,000 square feet of new or reconfigured exhibition space; a new cinema; a new two-story Miesian pavilion of wide open gallery spaces, called the Podium, the whole building clad in light, shimmery panels of foamed aluminum, an automotive and medical industry material also used for bomb blast absorption that looks a little like rough stone. There was even a 1950s-style Italian cafe straight out of a Wes Anderson movie.

That was because Wes Anderson designed it.

Chameleons themselves, Koolhaas and Prada made natural confederates. She was the famous communist turned high-fashion mogul whose empire evolved from bags and backpacks constructed out of an industrial nylon lining material. He was a prophet of global cities who declared the countryside his real passion after everyone else jumped on the urbanist bandwagon.

Her clothes always seemed less about what men desired than what whet her creative appetite. He was once invited to propose an expansion for the Museum of Modern Art and thumbed his nose at the selection committee by suggesting a billboard that said “MoMA Inc.” They were both contrarians and closet optimists.

And they shared a sense of humor. At one time it was rumored that Prada might back the Dutch architect for a seat in the Italian Parliament.

The foundation became their love child. It is unlike the eye-popping art gallery Frank Gehry designed for the Louis Vuitton Foundation beside the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, with its billowing glass sails, conjuring up flounces of silk and memories of Bilbao. The Prada campus feels, by comparison, world-weary, sneakily luxurious and — especially with its new tower — a mini-city, fragmentary, full of craft and secrets. Cities enshrine history and agitate for change. They’re forever unresolved.

This has been Koolhaas’ mantra. It is reflected in a foundation that’s neither a preservation project nor a tear-down-and-build-new venture. Its mode is bricolage. More is more. Both is better.

Cities are theaters and shape-shifters, too. I’m vaguely reminded of the old Cinecittàstudios outside Rome, where Fellini worked and Anderson has made films. A stable house in the former distillery now resembles the cabinet rooms in old master museums. A tiny, Alice in Wonderland door opens onto an immense warehouse, 60 feet high and 200 feet long.

And a building nicknamed the Haunted House is slathered in gold leaf, like an early Renaissance panel painting. (“A very cheap cladding material,” Koolhaas has insisted, “compared to marble or even paint.”)

“There is no difference between gold and rags,” Michelangelo Pistoletto, the veteran artist, once said. Pistoletto made his bones in the 1960s as a founder of arte povera, the Italian twist on post-minimalism. Writing in 2001, after Koolhaas’ Prada shop opened in downtown Manhattan, critic Herbert Muschamp noted Prada’s philosophical roots in arte povera.

Muschamp recalled how art povera consisted of “old bedding and tar-stained rope” displayed “in barren, out-of-the-way locations.”

Somehow, he added, “you always needed a private jet to get there.”

Up to a point, that describes the foundation, with its fetishized lowdown materials like chipboard and orange construction fencing and slightly out-of-the-way location, south of the city’s center.

Arte povera isn’t the only ghost of midcentury modernism inhabiting the project — there’s the twee cafe, with its Formica furniture and veneered wood paneling; the new tower restaurant, with its furniture bought at auction from New York’s Four Seasons; the cinema, with chairs imported from ‘70s-era Milanese movie houses; and the sun-baked, deeply shadowed squares, conjuring up de Chirico.

At the same time, there are the custom sheets of very modern translucent polycarbonate and aluminum handrails milled like Ferraris. There are the oak wood box-on-end pavers and the repurposed metal prison grates painted lime green, which serve as screens in the coat checks and bathroom stalls.

Some visitors have complained the layout doesn’t tell you where to go. You find your way around it. Like in a city. I think that is a virtue.

But until now the project was missing its cornerstone where the 200-foot-high, 22,000-square-foot tower, or Torre, was meant to rise. Delays in construction stretched three years. They ended up allowing time to refine the design.

The tower’s six, stacked gallery floors were created as full-time showcases for Prada’s private art collection. They’re reached through a small, open-air lobby like a disco ball, with flashing screens and a dizzying cutout in the ceiling to reveal the building core’s scissored stairs. One flight up, mirrored bathrooms, industrial sinks and a patterned floor summon to mind Pierre Chareau and Superstudio.

The galleries above are one to a floor, no two rooms alike, each taller than the last, their layouts shifting with the floor plates, the lowest gallery, 9 feet high; the topmost, 26 feet high.

The middle-floor galleries end up feeling the nicest, proportion-wise. But the whole building is one narrative. As Federico Pompignoli, OMA’s project manager, has said, the tower is “an attempt at the white cube defying its own boringness.”

Much credit here goes to him. He oversaw every inch of construction and it shows. Elevator cabs clad in backlit slabs of rose and green onyx suggest medieval reliquaries. I am told blacksmiths from a tiny shop outside Milan hand-tooled the restaurant’s exquisite bar, sliding doors and custom-embossed the anodized aluminum panels on the terraces that look like expensive Lego pieces. I kept running my hands over the tower’s concrete walls. Infused with Carrara marble and poured by construction workers who wore white gloves, they feel smooth as silk.

The big rectangular and wedge-shaped galleries, windows alternating between panoramas of the city and narrow views over the campus, accommodate best the large-scale works in the inaugural show, “Atlas.” It features Jeff Koons, Mona Hatoum, Michael Heizer and others. Check out the restaurant if you go. Works by Carsten Höller and Lucio Fontana are on permanent display.

From “Atlas,” I made my way through the loan exhibition about fascist art that has taken over the pavilion and stables, watching a few of the old news clips of cheering mobs and Benito Mussolini in the cinema.

Then I wandered into Anderson’s cafe and ordered what may be the most delicious sandwich I have eaten in my entire life.

Private museums are mostly vanity projects. Few invent social spaces. It may be the ultimate tribute to Koolhaas and OMA to say that the Prada campus works. The plazas are poetic. The galleries are practical and varied.

Prada should be pleased and maybe a little worried. It’s up to the foundation to program these spaces for generations to come.

Architecturally speaking, there’s a lot to live up to.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

MICHAEL KIMMELMAN © 2018 The New York Times

source https://www.newssplashy.com/2018/06/opinion-microcity-of-secrets-is-complete_15.html