Articles
Reviews
What Design Can’t Do: Essays on Design and Disillusion by Silvio Lorusso. Set Margins’, 352 pp., $24.
Designers, Silvio Lorusso stresses, have not properly plumbed the depths of their own uselessness.
The Robert Olnick Pavilion at the Magazzino Italian Art museum in Cold Spring New York, was designed by Alberto Campo Baeza and MQArchitecture. It opened last fall.
Conceptual art and contemporary architecture lack the beguiling allure I find in brazen displays of Americana.
Perfect Days, directed by Wim Wenders, was given a limited North American release in February.
What should we expect from narratives about civic infrastructure?
Old Buildings, New Ideas: A Selective Architectural History of Additions, Adaptations, Reuse and Design Invention by Françoise Astorg Bollack. RIBA Publishing, 176 pp., $48.
Our built heritage should not become fossils enshrined in amber, but fertile, motley canvases on which to build anew.
Beyond Digital: Design and Automation at the End of Modernity by Mario Carpo. MIT Press, 208 pp., $30.
Beyond Digital has an epochal story to tell.
The Advanced School of Collective Feeling by Nile Greenberg and Matthew Kennedy. Park Books, 176 pp., $40.
Funny ideas hitch a ride on rivulets of sweat.
Sleep No More is on at the McKittrick Hotel through May 27.
The cast changes; the choreography stays the same; what holds infinite interest at Sleep No More is being there.
Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines, organized by Branden W. Joseph and Drew Sawyer with Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez and Imani Williford, was on view at the Brooklyn Musuem from November 17, 2023, to March 31, 2024.
Black-and-white xeroxed collages given away for free, or highly-curated, glossy magazine–style publications, or anything in between.
Paris Is Not Dead: Surviving Hypergentrification in the City of Light by Cole Stangler. The New Press, 304 pp., $27.
The City of Light still has some fight left in it.
After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek. Verso, 288 pp., $27.
Do you believe in life after work?
Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face by Julia Bryan-Wilson. Yale University Press, 352 pp., $60.
The World Outside: Louise Nevelson at Midcentury by Shirley Reece-Hughes. Yale University Press, 208 pp., $50.
For Louise Nevelson, imitation was an affirmation that her style was worth repeating.
Los Angeles: The Development, Life, and Structure of the City of Two Million in Southern California by Anton Wagner, Edward Dimendberg (ed.), and Timothy Grundy (tr.). Getty Research Institute, 384 pp., $70.
To read Anton Wagner reflexively means to engage with his Los Angeles not as a product of its historical context, but a refraction of our own.
ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN, curated by Christophe Cherix with Ana Torok and Kiko Aebi, ran at the Museum of Modern Art from September 10, 2023 to January, 13, 2024. The exhibition opens at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in April.
What is it that we want from Ruscha? What does New York want from the idea of LA?
Visions2030: Earth Edition Festival ran from September 15 through 24 at the California Institute for the Arts.
For the team behind this eco-futures festival, optimism is radical. But is it enough?
Catalyst: In Collaboration with EPOCH Gallery ran from June 16 to August, 26, 2023, at Honor Fraser Gallery.
Here’s another thing about gamification: It doesn’t work.
Sphere, designed by Populous, opened in Las Vegas in October 2023.
Without its umbilical connection to the Venetian Expo, at any time this Sphere might just roll away.