Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Tag: architecture

Benjamin Sack draws imaginary cityscapes that recall historical metropolitans and motifs that have graced the Earth for millennia. His hyperdetailed approach not only shows a command of varying structural textures but also a power over perspective. (Sack was last featured on HiFructose.com here.)
Matias Bechtold uses cardboard, plastics, and objects found around a home to erect intricate cityscapes. One of the most dazzling aspects of Bechtold’s work is how he’s able to use packaging materials and even vacuum cleaners to create texturally convincing skylines. In an architectural sense, the artist is also playing with what’s possible within the future of that industry.
Michael Jantzen's "Mysterious Monuments" series of public art proposals have no actual meaning behind them, but are designed "to inspire stories in the minds of the visitors about the meaning behind the construction." The designer is known for blending elements of architecture with sustainable design and fine art. The status of this series, in particular, is unfortunately “unbuilt.”

Stranger Things

Illustrator/architect Boryana Ilieva recreates the floor plans of her favorite films and TV shows, labeled as a “poetic survey of cinematic architecture.” The project is called “Floor Plan Croissant,” and began three years ago, when the Bulgaria-based artist began “walking backwards the process path of the production designers in films.” Using the structures and architecture provided, she creates a logical floorplan.
Decktwo’s absorbing drawings combine influences from architecture and an organic energy that powers urban environments. Thomas Dartigues is the actual name of the artist, who is a former street artist who switched to crafting massive works in markers. Decktwo is based in Paris.
Portland illustrator Song Kang blends architecture and natural structures in both her intensely detailed drawings and her absorbing sculptures. The latter even uses the inherent forms of the animal kingdom as foundations for her designs. The "Vernacular" series has works created from wood, paper mache, plaster, fiber, recyclables, and other materials.
Eric Wong’s vision of “a truly United Kingdom” is conveyed in the project “Cohesion.” Wong, a graduate of the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, crafts a response to the Rockefeller Foundation's challenge to 100 cities to build stronger and more inclusive economies for the good of all.
Vasco Mourao, who goes by the moniker Mister Mourao, describes himself as “an architect turned into an artist with a tendency for obsessive drawing.” In his new series, “Ouroborus,” he combines mediums for renderings of buildings that flow in continuous loops. These structures neither begin nor end, offering countless points of entry.
Scott Tulay is an artist and architect based in Amherst, Mass., crafting ghostly drawings that play with light, shadow, and a distorted version of familiar structures. Tulay's command of space and design bring an engrossing order to his otherwise otherworldly creations. And whether it's ink, charcoal, pastel, graphite, or a combination of all, his drawings offer vibrant arrangements that loom like vivid apparitions.
People complain a lot about Los Angeles: It's too big, too spread out, and the traffic is terrible. But local artist Susan Logoreci sees a different side of her city that she conveys in her large-scale mosaic-like colored pencil drawings. Her images of the urban sprawl are drawn by hand and without a ruler or projector, giving her work a hand-made or in her words, "elastic", quality that breaks the first rule of drawing architecture.
Diana Al-Hadid once described her work as "impossible architecture", created by embracing her gut instinct and seeing where it takes her. The Brooklyn based, Syrian born artist's work can be difficult to describe, monumental and ethereal mixed media works with a myriad of references throughout art history: her captivating installations, sculptures and paintings feature elements of figures from the Renaissance and classical imagery, forms that appear to be disintegrating into a "dripping" tower.
Specializing in the Japanese art form of paper architecture, Amsterdam-based artist Ingrid Siliakus creates incredibly detailed architectural masterpieces from single pieces of paper. In order to achieve a final result with the complexity and beauty that she intends, Siliakus may produce anywhere from 20 to over 30 prototypes: “Paper architecture does not bare haste, it is its enemy,” she says. “One moment of loss of concentration can lead to failure of a piece.”
Making art wasn't the only creative outlet for Penland based sculptor Dustin Farnsworth growing up. His high school drama program helped instill in him an affinity for the theatrical: his sculptures feature mixed media figures and life sized heads adorned with headdresses that resemble theaters and architectural spaces. Also the son of a carpenter, his father, who built marionettes and a medical illustrator, his mother, it would seem that his work is the perfect combination of his upbringing.
Originally hailing from Germany, New York based artist Daniel Rich creates meticulous acrylic paintings of an empty, man-made world. Although completely devoid of human presence, his paintings are not without character. Rich chooses to celebrate the rich vibrancy and design of architectural structures, which appear smooth, intricate and appealing. The absence of people also brings out an eerie quiet and calm to what should be bustling urban cities. They are failed utopias- Rich's ideas about what the future of human civilization could look like.
Based in Marseille, French artist Etienne Rey creates sculptures and installations using light and mirrors. His site-specific installations respond to their physical spaces, creating unique situations. Rey's sculptures alter the conditions of their environments, changing, reflecting and refracting the light and sense of space. Motivated by a curiosity about the consciousness and science of direct experience, Rey uses his artworks to question and reveal the intricacies of human interaction and organization. As moving objects, Rey's sculptures are also bodies in space and one must negotiate how to move among these objects in the same way one approaches or avoids other persons.
The shape of a church is indefinitely sketched into the landscape in the latest project by architecture duo, Gijs Van Vaerenbergh. Comprised of Belgian architects Pieterjan Gijs and Arnout Van Vaerenbergh, their series of see-through churches, "Reading Between the Lines," are not intended to be functional as shelter. They are more like sculptures that borrow design inspiration from local churches' architecture in the area. See more after the jump!
Going through Randy Hage’s “New York Storefronts” series of photographs had me admiring them as photographs for all the reasons you admire a great photograph; color, composition, a story... until I read the captions: "1/12th scale sculpture of a bodega in Brooklyn..." These storefront miniatures could be thought of as time capsules of a potentially endangered species, capturing the delicate beauty of aging architecture. Hage has been creating sets, models, and props for the TV/Film and small scale hobby industries for over 25 years and has an upcoming solo show at Flower Pepper gallery October 10th, 2015.
Lebanese photographer Serge Najjar notices geometric patterns in his day-to-day surroundings. Based in Beirut, his photographs capture instances of minimalist architecture with an emphasis on symmetry and repetition. But despite its focus on clean designs, his work includes evidence of human inhabitants in these austere edifices. With people peaking out of their doors and windows, the buildings come alive. The people in his work add individuality and quirkiness to his otherwise highly stylized presentation of Beirut, where cultural context is stripped away to highlight the city's modern, architectural elements.
In 2013, Australian architecture firm Studio505 completed the Lotus Building, a community center set atop an artificial lake in Wujin, China. The city government commissioned the sculptural building to serve as a public park and multi-use space with exhibition and conference rooms that are open to the public. The building extends two stories under water and visitors must enter it from below and ascend to a cathedral-like peek with large windows that allow for plenty of natural light. A creative architectural creation, the Lotus Building is a modern-day landmark in an age when architecture is typically minimalistic and functional.
Interested in the intersection between tech and architecture, interdisciplinary design studio Loop.pH (composed of Mathias Gmachl and Rachel Wingfield) creates interactive, site-specific installations that allow the public to engage with budding technologies and scientific concepts in novel ways. One of their latest works, "Atmeture," was on view at the Letchworth Fire & Fright Festival, which took place on October 28 through November 6 in Letchworth, UK. "Atmeture" invited viewers to walk through an illuminated, porous tunnel in which fibers inflated and deflated with a breath-like motion. Though a bright, visual spectacle on the outside, the breathing work of art fostered a calming, meditative space in its interior.
Alex Chinneck is frequently praised as an architectural wizard for his unusual interventions, which he creates with the help of engineering experts and legions of volunteers. In 2013, he transformed a multi-story home in Margate, UK into a steep slope that resembled a skate ramp (see our coverage here). Earlier this year, he made Covent Garden's Market Building levitate, creating the illusion of the 184-year-old edifice floating off its foundation. For his most recent work, Chinneck built a brick house made entirely out of realistic, wax parts for London's Merge Festival. The piece, titled "A Pound of flesh for 50p," was put up in early October and left to endure the elements. Over the course of the past few weeks, the house has perplexed passersby as it melted and collapsed. Chinneck recently tweeted a photo of the house in its current state. Take a look at the melting house's progress below.
Originally built by architect Andre Bloc in 1949, La Maison Bloc is an unusual, geometric house owned by curator and collector Natalie Seroussi. Viewers must enter the dwelling's sculptural interior through a hidden hollow in its wooded surroundings in Meudon, France. Seroussi has been inviting artists to create architectural interventions and installations in and outside the structure since 2008. Her latest guest artist, Didier Faustino, altered the space with a bright, rust-colored entrance in the shape of a "Pow!" visual onomatopoeia. The outdoor work (which brings a loud, blatant pop culture reference into the quiet forest) leads the way into a sound installation composed of whimpering voices. A neon arrow sign sculpture illuminates the interior, further alluding to comic book imagery.
South African designer Justin Plunkett’s “Con/struct” series has more in common with the digitally-fabricated renderings of speculative architecture than documentary photography, but it illustrates an eerie collision of both formats. The images are built from a combination of photography, 3D modeling and substantial post-production editing, to form street-level perspectives of futuristic urban fantasies.
When Yeats wrote that "love comes in at the eye,” he could have been thinking of the work of Vienna-based Atelier Olschinsky. It doesn't matter who the client is. It doesn't matter what the medium is. You walk away from this creative studio's work with a clear understanding of why we call the visual arts visual. You also realize how art has its own language. A language made up of nothing more than the arrangement of color, line, shape, space, and texture. We marvel at how Shakespeare worked with nothing more than 26 letters. In a similar vein, Atelier Olschinsky creates startling compositions with nothing more than muted color, dynamic, abutted shapes, and clashing lines. With great dexterity they blur the gap between art and design.
Though we have developed a culture that places us at the center of the universe, the forces of nature will continue to exist with our without mankind. This is a notion that Japanese sculptor Ocoze explores in his mixed-media works where trees and plant life appear to overtake man-made objects and architecture. The small-scale, refined works use combinations of plaster, steel and resin with found objects. At times Ocoze's miniature structures appear to be thwarted by the burgeoning plant life, while in some pieces buildings are sculpted in what looks like a symbiotic relationship with the trees. One of Ocoze's recent works, in which a castle rests atop a moss-covered skull, brings home the message that life is impermanent and nature will ultimately prevail.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List