Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho, a Brazilian architect who was born on December 15, 1907 in Rio de Janeiro. At the age of 21, he began work in his father’s typography house, and entered the Escola de Bellas Artes (School of Fine Arts) and graduated as an engineer architect in 1934. Though he graduated in financial difficulty, he worked for free in the architecture studio of Lucio Costa and Carlos Leao; his dissatisfaction with street architecture motivated him to work, as he believed he could make a difference there. Extending beyond art, Niemeyer joined Brazil’s Communist party, eventually becoming its president. Because of his leftist stance, under Brazil’s military dictatorship, his office was raided and he was sent into exile to Europe. When Brazil fell back under democratic rule in the 80s, Niemeyer returned to his home country. Today, he is still involved in over 100 various projects, and is one of the most notable modern architects today.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Oscar Niemeyer’s works are characterized by their spacious and voluminous forms, contain unconventional patterns and are often sustained by pilotis (columns, pillars or stilts). What makes his work so alluring is his use of positive/negative space, and form. Niemeyer’s works are all his own: they are unique in shape and style, and they are unmatched by many other modern architects today.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 (Above) Catedral de Brasilia: Illustrates form- supported by unique pillars that create positive and negative space.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             (Above) Museo Oscar Niemeyer Museum (NovoMuseu) Curitiba, Brazil: Illustrates gravity defiance.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               (Above) Palacio da Alvorada: Illustrates positive and negative space.   

Norman Foster is a world-renowned London based British architect. After being discharged from the Royal Air Force in 1956, he attended the University of Manchester’s School of Architecture and City Planning and went on to complete a fellowship at the Yale School of Architecture. In 1962 Foster established architecture group, Team 4, with his business partner Richard Rogers. After Team 4’s separation Foster created Foster and Partners and began building in the UK. Today the company collaborates with engineers to design buildings, which combine computer programs with physical laws like convection. An example of this is the Swiss re London headquarters, or 30 St Mary Axe, whose design allows for airflow throughout the building releasing the warmed air as it rises. Foster is known for his simple yet efficient designs reflecting a modernist outlook. In 2007 he received the highest architectural award, the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.

30 St Mary Axe, also known as the Gherkin, is a hard sight to miss among London’s financial district. Among the tallest buildings in London, this symmetrical design is sleek and yet dynamic with the pattern of windows creating a visual twisting effect. The high-tech appearance of the building is owed very much to the materials used repeatedly throughout the structure such as the windows and metal skeleton. The scale of the building itself is not too high, only 40 floors, yet compared to the scale of the surrounding areas looms over the city. The smooth lines and balance of the building are very aesthetically pleasing and unique in the landscape of the City of London.

Piano was born in Genoa, Italy in 1937.  All the men in his family were contractors but Renzo chose to be an architect.  He graduated from Milan Poitechnic Architecture School.  Some of his major influences throughout his learning and work careers have been: Franco Albini (whom Piano worked under), Louis I. Kahn from Philadelphia, ZS Makowski from London, and Pierluigi Nervi.  His first wife was named Magda Arudion and together they had three kids, two boys and a girl who is persuing an architectural career.  Piano’s first major commission was in 1969, the Italian Industry pavilion at Expo ‘70 in Osaka.  Together with Richard Roger (Rano-Rogers was their short lived company name) they designed Pompidou Centre in Paris. Throughout his career Piano designed forty major structures, including: museums, churches, shopping centers, bridges, airports ect..  Dominique De Menil (an art collector) commissioned Piano to design a museum for her collection.  His latest and largest project was the airport in Osaka, Japan that was constructed on an artificial island in the bay.  He has also won thirty prizes between 1978-2001 including: the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1998 and The Wexner Prize in 2001.  Renzo Piano - The Bubble - “Bolla” includes a greenhouse and aquarium inside where you can take tours.  This interested me particularly because I love science.  I chose this piece because I wanted to do something that did not have many sharp exact angles in it, and something that didnt necessarily look like a building. It is just very aesthetically pleasing and eco friendly :)   The color of the design, blends in this its surrounding, it is clear glass which  gives the building  natural light, and the inside has lush flora to blend with it’s environment.  It has radial symmetry and strong balance because it is round.  There is repetition with the panels of glass that make up the structure, and variety within the different shapes of the white canopies on the inside.  It has unity because it is a sphere and because it is balances!  There is both interior and exterior shape within and surrounding the structure and because of the structures on the inside and the main structure being clear, there is also negative shape created.

         The artist I chose was Renzo Piano.  He is an Italian architect.  He graduated from Politecnico di Milano in 1964 and shortly after began working with famous architects such as Richard Rodgers and Louis Kahn.  He is also very famous for buildings in New York City, Athens, Chicago and many others. 

I was especially impressed with his piece called, “Bolla” which is italian for “the glass bubble.”  ”Bolla” is placed on the bottom of the sea floor in Genoa, Italy.   It looks like a giant glass home floating on the water.  In “Bolla” there is an aquarium, a greenhouse, and animals.  In “Bolla” you will learn about biology from tour guides who are enthusiastic about science.   It is a place for learning and appreciation.         

Like Piano, uses he background to work with his pieces.  I want to do the same.  I plan on using a picture I took of my cousin blowing a giant bubble and I want to have the bubble protruding from his face.   It will be round just like “Bolla” and it will also work with the scenery around it.  My version of the water/buildings will be his picture.  I want to have it so it looks like he is blowing a bubble and it is about to pop but really it will just be increasing and decreasing.  I would also somehow like to incorporate sound with it. 

Zaha Hadid

Brief Bio from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaha_Hadid

Zaha Hadid was born October 31, 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq. She received a degree in mathematics from the American University of Beirut before moving to study at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. After graduating she worked with her former teachers, Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, becoming a partner in 1977. 1980 she established her own London-based practice. During the 1980s she also taught at the Architectural Association. She has also taught at prestigious institutions around the world; she held the Kenzo Tange Chair at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, the Sullivan Chair at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture, guest professorships at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, the Knowlton School of Architecture, at The Ohio State University, the Masters Studio at Columbia University, New York and the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor of Architectural Design at the Yale School of Architecture, New Haven, Connecticut. In addition, she was made Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. She is currently Professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in Austria. In 2008, she ranked 69th on the Forbes list of “The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women”.

Structure Chosen for Inspiration

Mobile Art (for Chanel)

(Mobile Art- Hong Kong)

Financed by the French luxury goods company, Chanel Mobile Art is out of this world. The structure holds 7,500 square feet of futuristic-esque space. “Beyond its artistic mission, the pavilion is a provocative advertisement,” says Carol Vogel of The New York Times. “Chanel, the fashion brand, commissioned Ms. Hadid to create the traveling structure to house works by 20 hot contemporary artists.” Chanel required the artists to produce art inspired by the signature quilted handbag, “2.55” for “February 1955.” Pieces in the show included: “at the bottom” by Japanese artist Tabaimo, “The Sidewalk” by Leandro Erlich, “Fifty Years After our Common Era or Handbags’ Revolt” by Blue Noses, a film by Nobuyoshi Araki, and a room dominated by a “wishing tree” by Yoko Ono, a wall of pictures by Stephen Shore and a giant Chanel purse open to reveal a Chanel compact by Slyvie Fleury.

Some pictures of the key pieces and an awesome article can be found here: http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2008/3/23/lifearts/20705770&sec=lifearts

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/arts/design/24zaha.html

“The convergence of art, architecture and fashion is commonplace these days. A Louis Vuitton bag designed by the artist Richard Prince is constantly spotted on the streets of New York, Basel and London. The Japanese artist Takashi Murakami’s creations for Louis Vuitton were sold in a special shop that formed part of a Murakami retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. The architect Rem Koolhaas has helped define the look of Prada shops, and Frank Gehry recently designed a line of jewelry for Tiffany & Company.”

“Art is art. Fashion is fashion. However, Andy Warhol proved that they can exist together.”
-Karl Lagerfeld

Elements of 3D design

“In an interview in her London office, Ms. Hadid said that even though she has not yet designed a permanent building in New York, she liked the idea that the pavilion “lands, creates a buzz and disappears.”

The challenge, she said, was to create a pavilion that was both visually compelling and could be easily transported. Each piece had to fit together like a giant jigsaw puzzle.
Using computer software Ms. Hadid designed a 7,500-square-foot doughnut-shape structure with a central courtyard. Its lightweight panels can be packed in 51 shippable containers; no panel is wider than 7.38 feet.

Skylights admit natural light, and computer-generated lighting casts a rainbow of colors around the base of the exterior that glows day and night.
Visitors entering the pavilion will be given MP3 players. On a track created by the sound artist Stephan Crasneanscki they will hear the French actress Jeanne Moreau discussing everything from sex and love to the secrets at the bottom of a woman’s handbag.””
I love how this exhibit encorporates art on so many different levels. The structure itself is renown. The structure holds a complete show of contemporary art from around the world. Every aspect of this piece is pleasing to the eyes, ears and overall experience. Karl Lagerfeld noted that, “The most important [iece of art is the container itself.”

MISC Info

Because it worked so well for Chanel, Prada could not resist building its own mobile pavilion for art, The Prada Transformer

Late last year, Diesel operated “Brave,” a temporary exhibition gallery.

The Mobile Art exhibition for Chanel was supposed to be a two-year world tour, which would make stops in Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York, London, Moscow and Paris. Sadly, Chanel pulled the plug on the show after the “Orb of Insanity” landed in New York’s Central Park. “Considering the current economic crisis, we decided it was best to stop the project,” said a Chanel spokeswoman. “We will be concentrating on strategic growth investments.”

(Karl Lagerfeld and Zaha Hadid inside Mobile Art)

You can check out the website here:

Here’s a grool video about Mobile Art. (It didn’t allow me to embed it, sorry!)

For my inflatable project, I want to make my own Mobile Art show. Get hyped.

-Meggle$

The body has a value and is measured compared to other bodies.  In society we value thinness as a good strength in the female body.  In the male body we value size and strength. We receive all of these values through the media. Studies even show that tinnier females on television are more likely to be in a romantic relationship in comparison to their larger costars. “The body is a sign in a language of social meaning.”  Thinness does not always function as sexual but also as a sign of bulimia, anorexia or fitness obsession.   The theme in Collier Schrorr’s art  is the fluidity of gender and sexual identity.  In the specific photograph: a body is depicted as a sexual/erotic object and the gender is ambiguous.   Using the body symbolically like Schorr did is not unusual, the ancient Egyptians made sculptress, paintings etc that showed the pharaoh as stronger and bigger than ordinary mortals.  Art that deals with the body uses a “metonym, a part that symbolizes the whole.” http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/schorr/index.html 

Time is an incredibly broad topic that can be expressed in a variety of ways, thus offers artists a wealth of options for portraying it. Because it is such a broad theme, pieces that portray time are particularly interesting, engaging, and thought provoking. ( NEW PARAGRAPH ) There are two main ways in which time can be portrayed in art. The first is representation. According to the text, “representation is the symbolic process by which an artwork refers to a subject beyond itself” (Robertson 36). Representation is more about catching/portraying one snapshot in time. The subject can be about any theme in combination with the theme of time. Robertson states in the text that this piece, called Demo, by Heide Fasnacht, “represents the explosion of a building as a suspended moment in time” (Robertson 34). Photography was a key development in representing time, as it allowed for artists to show an extracted moment from real time (Stopping Time: Bullet through Apple). ( NEW PARAGRAPH ) The second way in which time can be portrayed is through embodiment. Robertson defines embodiment as the integration of time itself in to the actual piece. There is more than one way in which time can be integrated into the piece. While less common, static pieces can portray time by showing time as a theme (Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali), or the incorporation of old objects that evoke a feeling of antiquity, as shown in various Whitfield Lovell’s pieces).  Another way to embody time into art is through the use video pieces that demonstrate fluid or kinetic change over time.  ( NEW PARAGRAPH ) Because time can be illustrated in such a variety of ways, I believe that it is not only one of the most interesting themes, but also one of the most important themes to address. Time is inevitable, leaving artists with a wealth of ways in which to express their feeling of it: through embodiment or representation, with the use of kinetic or static pieces. It encompasses many all forms of art, from 3d pieces to videos to painting. The theme is all-inclusive, making it an almost necessary topic for every artist to address.

Chapter 6 deals with the use of language as both a way to describe art and a way to actually be art. Throught history, many different cultures have viewed language as art in different ways. Arabic and Chinese writing have always been more more artistic in the sense that the way the symbol looks in terms of how it was written is just as important as what the symbol means. In fact the Chinese would even use their writing as the backgrounds to paintings they did because of the artistic way that they viewed their writing.

However in English, language literally changed shape in order to become art, which is called shaped, or concrete poetry. This shaped or concrete poetry eventually bled into the more languageoriented art we know today such as the pieces by Jenny Holtzer which only use a single line placed atop a photo. Or the repetitive works of artists such as Bruce Nauman.

Due to some technical difficulties, (more like my lack of technical savvy-ness) this blog discussion is a little bit late. My sincere apologies.

Chapter 5 discussed the use of The Body. The book stated, “The human figure is one of the oldest and most significant motifs in art in most cultures.” This opening line really struck me. While I don’t have a vast knowledge of art history, (such as Megan Brauch,) I do know a little bit about art. Some of the oldest art known to man, such as Egyptian art, emphasizes the human body.

There are many portraits and sculptures in existence from a multitude of cultures and times that focus solely on the body. Why is this? What does this mean? Well, after reading our textbook, I found out that the body is a sign. Different cultures depicted the body in a variety of ways. The size of a body, or a specific part of the body, could signify strength. Many cultures have emphasized that the body is a beautiful and phenomenal thing.

The book discussed Figurative Art. I found that figurative art, or figurativism is artwork that is representational of the human figure. Some of the most famous figurative artists include Rembrandt, Michelangelo and the like. These artists have many focused their art on representations of the human body.

The emergence of neo-expressionism pushed figurative art to the forefront of artistic movement. Artists such as Sandro Chia and Mimmo Paladino helped to expand the movement of neo-expressionist painters by focusing on representations of the human body.

The part of the chapter that I found most interesting was the use of the body to express sexuality. Artists used figurativism to express sexual pleasures, desires and even violence. Certain body parts can be highlighted to express specific issues. I had never really thought of using the body to convey a specific message until I read this chapter.

The chapter included an artist profile on Shirin Neshat. Here is a youtube clip on the artist:

(I tried to embed the code, but if it doesn’t work, check it out here