Posts tagged gaudi
Breaking the box: 10 buildings from the past 15 years that bend the rules
Photographer: Micha L. Rieser»Go to Slideshow: 10 Buildings that Break the Box
“The straight line belongs to men, the curved one to God”—so said Antoni Gaudi, who in the late 1800s designed his mammoth stone church, the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, using a non-Euclidean geometry of hyperbolas, spirals, and curves. Over the course of the twentieth century, plenty of architects have toiled against the visual tyranny of right angles and straight lines. Frank Lloyd Wright urged architects to “break the box,” designing houses like Falling Water with the corners cut out, letting nature in through the window (and driving pragmatic homeowners crazy with a mosquito-friendly lack of screens).
The past 15 years have been especially interesting and productive (and controversial), as technology has allowed architects to squash the box, twist it, destroy it, deconstruct it, bend it, bury it, suspend it in the sky, or ignore it altogether.Go to Slideshow: 10 Buildings that Break the Box
Buildings featured:
Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain
Therme Vals, Switzerland
Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis, MN
Église Saint-Pierre, Firminy, France
Jewish Museum, Berlin
Seattle Central Library, Washington
City of Arts and Sciences, Valencia, Spain
CCTV Headquarters, Beijing, China
Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Spain
Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Center, Australia
Slideshow: Visionary Recycling
Quirky places where artists and dreamers turn trash into structural works of art
“Some people say this is sculpture but I didn’t go to no expensive school to get these crazy notions,” observes John Milkovisch, a retired upholsterer for a railroad who saved and collected over 50,000 aluminum receptacles to create his shiny Houston masterpiece, the “Beer Can House.” Creative reuse of scavenged materials is nothing new—in fact it seems to be a human instinct that, for some, can border on obsession. While there are trained artists—perhaps inspired by Gaudí’s early 20th-century mosaics or Marcel Duchamp’s readymades—who sculpt and construct large-scale artworks made from repurposed cast offs, many more are dreamers with ordinary day jobs who abhor waste, have a penchant for collecting, and seize upon an unstoppable urge to create something beautiful from the flotsam and jetsam modern life.
Some, like the beer can guy, hold onto their own trash until it reaches a critical mass of building material. Others seek out and collect bits and pieces that catch their eye on their daily meanderings (mailmen and those in the construction industry seem particularly susceptible). Unlike the hoarders portrayed on A&E, these visionary artists transform their trash stash into something much greater than the sum of its parts (though it makes you wonder if many of the compulsive hoarders are similar creatively motivated folks with grandiose, unrealized plans for their treasured cache of objects).
America is littered (in a good way) with art yards, trash houses, and found-object sculptures. A sense of whimsy and ingenuity pervades these 13 places, among them a sound sculpture made from demolished cemetery marble, a 10-story children’s wonderland built from salvaged industrial waste, houses made of wine bottles, a desert mountain of discarded tires…
Image courtesy of the City Museum
