Archivo de la etiqueta: writer

A Dramatic Look at Marriage, With the Help of Richard Meier

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Photo via Phillyburbs


When Richard Meier sent three glass skyscrapers shooting into the sky in New York’s West Village, the Pritzker-winning architect probably did not imagine that of all his work, these residential towers would be the first to inspire a play. To be more specific, Meier’s famously transparent modernist adaptations were seen by writer Jon Marans as the perfect setting and spatial analogy for marriage. Marans stumbled across the buildings on Perry Street and found inspiration for his play “A Raw Space,” but not after disguising himself as a wealthy potential buyer in order to explore Meier’s interiors. As he told Phillyburbs, “They’re raw space apartments, so they’re just concrete with 360 degrees of floor-to-ceiling windows.” He described the apartment as a “giant fish bowl,” pointing to the double edge of owning one of Meier’s “floating kingdoms” while also living life in curtainless open exposure. More after the break.

Photo: Scott Norsworthy

Photo via Phillyburbs

To the playwright, Meier’s stark spaces were the perfect framework to tell the story he wanted to tell, a non-linear story about two married couples. The plot revolves around an architect going through an artistic slump. Not only is he determined to turn one of Meier’s raw apartment spaces into a home, but he is persuaded by his wife to engage in a private design competition with her best friend’s husband, who is consequently a younger architect.

Not only does architecture weigh heavily in the plot of the story, but Meier’s glass apartment gave Marans “the freedom to let us see more and more of the intimate moments between couples, the raw moments.” As director Susan Atkinson explained, “at one moment, you see one side of a conversation and then you go back in time and see the other side of the same conversation. You see things happening in different spaces at the same time.” To Marans, Meier’s glass box is almost designed for on-stage drama: “It’s like a three-dimensional chess game that’s going on,” he explains. “It’s strictly what theater lets us do.”

A more glamorous look inside one of Richard Meier's Perry Street apartments. Photo via Troy McMullen.

“A Raw Space” runs through Feb. 19 at the Bristol Riverside Theatre, 120 Radcliffe St., Bristol, PA.

“White Elephant”: Hard on the Outside, Soft on the Inside

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All images: “White Elephant (Privately Soft)” by Jimenez Lai via

In his decadent fin de siècle novel, Against Nature, the writer Joris-Karl Huysmans describes, with great fetish and imagination, the home of his fatally eccentric protagonist Des Esseintes, who wastes away his days in a decaying estate just outside of Paris. Of particular interest is the curious construction of the house’s dining room, which is encapsulated in a small room inserted into the study. Sealed off by a “padded corridor” from the rest of the room, the vaulted chamber “resembled the cabin of a ship…[and] like those Japanese boxes which fit into each other…” Porthole windows on both sides of the room, one which could be covered up or opened to circulate air, while the other faced the window in the outer wall to let in light. Wedged in this in-between space was a long aquarium of mechanical fish, into which Des Esseintes poured drops of colored liquids, dyeing the water (and light) with “tones similar to those of rivers which reflect the color of the sky, the intensity of the sun, the menace of the rain. . . When he did this, he imagined himself in a brig, between decks.”

Jimenez Lai’s project “White Elephant (Privately Soft)” is a building-within-a-building that similarly captures the feeling of inhabiting the middle-spaces that Huysmans so dexterously renders. The 10′ by 10′ by 10′ object, which falls “somewhere between a super-furniture and a small house,” can be flipped along its multifaceted body to create new spatial orientations. Continue.

Interestingly, Lai’s piece acts as a portable room, one which, through all its possible derivations, simultaneously occludes and multiplies the space of the room it occupies. While Des Esseintes’ dining cell was fixed to the floor and walls, more or less reliant on external devices to modulate its constituent environment, the “White Elephant” intercepts the flow of space, swallows it, and regurgitates it in fractured form. In the artist’s own words, the mico-building/macro-furniture “obstructs the continuity of interior spaces like an elephant in a room.”

While its outer shell is hard and impenetrable, the object’s inner recesses are soft, lined with cow-hide so as to foster a cozy place to sit or rest. Here, the user’s bed or sofa is figuratively and physically extended in all directions, engulfing them in a cavernous pocket of padded walls. If lit from the inside, as Geoff Manuagh suggests, the object achieve a relative spatial autonomy that somewhat “invalidate[s] the walls around it.” Archinect has more photos which illustrate how the piece is tumbled and turned.

Michael Jantzen’s Transmutation Pavilion

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Artists and designer Michael Jantzen has shared with us his latest utopian pavilion concept, The Transmutation Pavilion. Read more about Jantzen in his insightful 2009 interview with Archinect writer Katya Tylevich.

Project Description:

The Transmutation Pavilion is a design proposal for a large, solar powered, interactive, public, functional art structure. The structure consists of three interlocking cylindrical forms, supported by four horizontal planes, which in turn are supported by eight vertical columns. Each of the cylindrical forms are different sizes, and are woven together one inside of the other, in different directions. Each of the cylindrical forms is fitted with two large, overlapping, sliding curved panels. These panels can be completely closed and/or opened around each of the cylinders so that two of the interwoven spaces can be completely opened, closed, and/or set at hundreds of positions between completely open or completely closed. The center cylinder i…

SimCity Creator Envisions New Ways to Interact with the World

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Will Wright, creator of SimCity and The Sims.

In Tom Bissell’s hybrid of video game criticism and deeply personal exposé Extra Lives, the author speaks of squandering entire days fixed in front of an Xbox 360 and opting to exterminate zombies instead of watching the live inauguration of President Obama. With a writer’s charm, Bissell gets even a non-gamer audience to come around and embrace his obsessive habits with an odd mixture of self-deprecation and self-acceptance. I actually found myself trying to weigh the experientially enriching benefits of these time-sucking video games with their obvious social drawbacks.

But what if the addictive, immersive experience of a video game could facilitate interaction with the outside world instead of distracting you from it? In an interview on VentureBeat, SimCity and The Sims creator Will Wright outlines the premise of his latest project: HiveMind, a game that customizes itself for each individual player by considering a complex range of real-life situations as elements of the game. Read on.


SimCity 4

“Rather than craft a game like FarmVille for players to learn and play, we learn about you and your routines and incorporate that into a form of game play,” says Wright. Inspired by an unexpected run-in with a group of likeminded car buffs in a 1950s-style diner, Wright began to contemplate ways to seek out such unplanned social connections, envisioning a “system that understands enough about you and gives you situational awareness.” In essence, the game would mine your personal data to, in Wright’s own words, “make reality more interesting to you.”


Jawbone‘s UP wristband and iPhone application strive to “make healthy living fun & social.”

Wright is of course aware of games that have set out on a similar path, such as the fitness programs on Ninento’s Wii Fit and even Jawbone’s latest iPhone-connected wristband that monitors exercise habits, sleep cycles and eating decisions to gather real-time information about life and behavior and store it in quantifiable digital form. He has also considered the scope of augmented reality and games like Foursquare. But Wright wants to take all of these notions even further, asking, “what if…an application could tap into something as personal as your dreams?”


Foursquare turned voting into even more of a monitored competitive sport.

Though there are plenty of Wii owners who plug into a game of virtual tennis from time to time and Foursquare users who are eager to garner badges and gain mayoral status, Wright believes that such games have yet to tap deep into gaming psychology to really motivate a player to do something. And for Wright, that something is engaging with the real world. In his new game, players would be compelled to seek out friends to solve problems and attain goals with the same force that compelled Tom Bissell to slavishly trade much-needed work and sleep for the twisted fantasies of Grand Theft Auto. HiveMind will blur “entertainment, lifestyle, and personal tools,” says Wright. “With that data, the world and the opportunities for entertainment within it become more visible to you.”

For more, visit VentureBeat.

Bruce Beresford to Direct Frank Lloyd Wright Biopic ‘Taliesin’

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Veteran filmmaker Bruce Beresford has signed on to develop and direct Taliesin, a film about fabled American architect Frank Lloyd Wright from writer Nicholas Meyer.

Finally! I’ve been wondering for years why a movie about FLW hasn’t yet been developed.

An actor hasn’t been named yet. Who is your vote?

A House Tour with Matthew Weiner, Creator of “Mad Men”

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The New York Times recently took a tour of the eccentric 1930’s Spanish Colonial owned and furnished by Matthew Weiner, the force behind “Mad Men.” Inside Weiner’s Los Angeles home, you’ll find Emmys on the mantelpiece, props saved from shows the writer has worked on, a symmetrical turquoise master bath, and Weiner’s prized re-enameled period stove parked in a pastel, tiled kitchen. Click through for more photos.

The interiors reflect a bit of the writer’s compulsive neatness, attention to detail, and nostalgia for the past, qualities evident in his notoriously exacting set designs. Weiner reveals how he gave up his office for his children (with seeming reluctance), so when he has writing to do, it’s done on the bed. And if you look hard, you might find scripts for the show, which Weiner says he hides around, even in his own house. Sound a bit like Don Draper? Weiner actually prefers to identify with Holden Caulfield, though he admits to fantasizing about Don’s 1962 Cadillac.


All photos via The New York Times Magazine

Peter Zumthor Hortus Conclusus Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2011

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Hardcover, £20

Designed by world-renowned Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2011 is the 11th in the Gallery’s annual architecture series. This catalogue captures, in glorious photograph detail, Peter Zumthor’s unique architectural design, carefully illustrating Zumthor’s evocative play on scale, colour, material and light with the Pavilion’s surroundings.

Peter Zumthor has stated that his design “aims to help its audience take the time to relax, to observe and then, perhaps, start to talk again – or maybe not.” With a refined selection of materials he has created a contemplative space that evokes the spritual dimension of our physical environment, successfully emphasising the role the sense and emotions play in our experience or architecture.

With an essay by German filmmaker and writer Alexander Kluge, plant index and an exclusive text by Peter Zumthor.

Motopia: A New Age of Modular Construction / USC School of Architecture

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Motopia: A New Age of Modular Construction, an event put on by USC’s School of Architecture, will bring together today’s most creative designers of mobile architecture and examine solutions to current economic, social and environmental concerns in the housing industry; identify emerging technologies and trends; and synthesize recent advancements in design, manufacturing, materials and systems. The event takes place on November 2nd, 2011 from 5-8pm. More information on the event after the break.

Architecture today rolls, flows, inflates, breathes, expands, multiplies, contracts and searches for its next user. And yet, such architecture is not merely building or product design, but rather recognition of the fluidity of circumstances—the mobility of demographics and information. This event will feature real-world practitioners and multidisciplinary scholars who are preparing for a future continuously on the move.

A range of creative forces behind mobile architecture will come together to examine solutions to current economic, social and environmental concerns in the housing industry; identify emerging technologies and trends; and synthesize recent advancements in design, manufacturing, materials and systems. We will host five eminent practitioners who will discuss strategies that can be adopted or adapted into our own larger communities and lives. Participants will include Allison Arieff, contributing writer for The Atlantic Cities and contributing columnist for The New York Times; Stephen Kieran, partner at KieranTimberlake; Robert Kronenburg, architect, author and Roscoe Chair of Architecture at the University of Liverpool; and Michael Webb, founding member of Archigram and professor at Cooper Union.

For more details on the event, including guest speakers, please visit their website here.