Spiral Jetty Entropy Report

It is Spiral Jetty week at Greg.org, with a second entry about the newly cleaned-up sculpture in Utah. Because Robert Smithson is one of our heroes, we are unable to resist any post about him (although we were conveniently...

Nam June Paik, 1932-2006

Video pioneer Nam June Paik died Sunday, January 29th, 2006. A memorial service will be held in Manhattan on February 3. Details at his website. Tipped off by Archinect....

Another Gold Scrim

Continuing Tropolism's theme of, er, shiny gold buildings: 8 woningen Kettingstraat in The Hague, by the Dutch architecture office Archipelontwerpers. A shimmery, totally-doing-the-Gehry-thang scrim at a revitalized section of the historic urban fabric. What is of more interest to...

Spiral Jetty Cleanup Report

Crack art sculpture journalist Greg Allen does actual follow-up fact-finding for a post about a cleanup project around Robert Smithon's iconic work, Spiral Jetty. Special bonus add-on side bar: space imaging of Spiral Jetty (pictured above)....

Friday: Architectural Photography Day

Yesterday we elided over a gem of a database of freely accessible architectural photography called Galinsky. It is not unlike the Japanese one we scouted last year. Freely accessible architectural photography: truly open-source architectural experience. It's music to our...

Toyo Ito's Structural Awesomeness

The good folks at Architechnophilia have reported on yet another Zaha Hadid design that did not win a high profile international competition. Until she does another gold-brick-lego building, we're over reporting that stuff. Of interest to us was the...

The View From Above

If you know how to use a computer and log on to the World Wide Internets, you've seen the series by Olivo Barbieri called "Site Specific". Metropolis publishes, and we blog. But we cannot pass this up. For anyone...

Ken Smith: Master

Our friends at Archinect report that Ken Smith has been awarded the title (prize?) of Master Designer of the Orange County Great Park. His takeover of Manhattan, now complete, he has skipped to the other coast to begin a...

Architecture That Defies Death

Much like Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the artist-itect couple Arakawa and Madelaine Gins never seem to fade away. They just build bigger and more outrageous projects. This we can respect. Brand Avenue points us to an interesting article in the...

Alluvial Art

BLDGBLOG's interlude on Alluvial Terrains reminded me of an invitation I'd received to the opening of the Jokla Series by Olafur Eliasson, at Kunsthaus Zug. Then, on Olafur's site, I discovered I can download the entire grid in one...

SANAA Scores

Mr. Ourousoff's review of the design for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, by SANAA, appears today in the New York Times. Unlike his previous love letters (to Zaha, for example), he is back to his articulate and fact-supporting...

Draw Something

Open-source computer-generated drawing program from artist Rob Myers. It's only a matter of time before someone turns this into a plug-in for SketchUp, or AutoCad. Click 'continue reading' to see Tropolism's first non-authored drawing....

Wood Clad Frenzy In San Francisco

Despite the complaining we read on other websites, we here at Tropolism say "Tropolism means imitation is the highest form of flattery." In this case it is both the entry we are linking to and the content of that...

Opening and Closing in Los Angeles

Some interesting shows opening and closing this week for those of us on the West Coast: This is the final weekend for a Julius Shulman : Modernity and the Metropolis at the Getty Center. The exhibit covers images shot...

Fashion Exhibitions Duet

New York is home to not one but two fashion shows that are not at the Costume Institute at The Met. Special Correspondant Barrett Feldman gives us her take: "I went to two thoughtfully curated shows on Fashion: The...

The New Real City, Future Architects Edition

I went to SCI_ARC's Thesis presentations this weekend. It appears that Maya-, Nurbs-, and Script-based form making have established a strong place in the visual language of the school. The majority of the work has a quietness, a demur...

The New Real City

Google is already such a wonderful companion to The City. We are now able to amble about town unprepared and google stuff on our mobile devices whenever we need to know something about where we'd like to go. In...

Steven Holl In Kansas City

Speaking of Luminarias, our friends at Archidose gives us some wonderful in-progress photos of the Nelson-Atkins Museum expansion by Steven Holl, now named the Bloch Building. The building continues on the glass channel system theme, seen in his Helsinki...

What My Dog Saw On His Walk This Morning, 19th Street Edition

Wrapping up our Curbed-inspired "Chelsea Condo Fridays" theme today, we bring you pictures of the startlingly lovely Chelsea House under construction on 19th Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues (please note typo in the title of their webpage). Designed...

What My Dog Saw On His Walk This Morning, 21st Street Edition

One of the two huge construction cranes on 21st Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, has been busy since yesterday with steel erection for the penthouses at the O'Neill Building (warning: annoying flash intro with music). No gold-leafed onion...

Art Everywhere

Xpekt (it pains me to type that. there are two kinds of architecture firms: ones with names, others with formulas-as-neologism) is a Dessau-based group whose projects make art or art spaces out of abandoned or worn out buildings. Our...

New Orleans Plan Revised, Unleashed

After revising the really dumb parts of their resettlement plan, the commission charged with doing the master plan for New Orleans has released their plan. The New York Times reports on it, and as bonus visual we have a...

Water Cube: Beijing

Wacky in a way only state-sponsored architecture can be is the National Swimming Center in Beijing, going up right next to another of H&DM's stadiums (no, not this one). The center is enclosed by what appears to be a...

NY Times Trifecta: Future, Present, Past

Newspapers are such wonderful organizations. They are like huge mechanical writing machines, that create sets of articles with unintended synchronicities. Take, for example, this week-end's fare, neatly summarized by the staff here at Tropolism as Future, Present, Past: (click...

Thomas Heatherwick

Rounding out a week of Interviews With Artist-itects, we direct your attention toward an interview with Thomas Heatherwick by Tokyo-based PingMag. The image above is his proposal for a temple in Kyoto. After my quick survey of Kyoto's temples...

Big Thinking For Rebuilding New Orleans

Ask, and Tropolism shall receive. A big government solution: create financial infrastructure to support the redevelopment of neighborhoods, covered by the New York Times. Our favorite part: "the federal corporation would have nothing to do with the redevelopment of...

The Word On Rem In Dallas

Tropolism means no gossip. Speculation and behind-the-scenes opinions, however, are very welcome. Which is why we enjoy reading Do You Want Some Coffee?: they stay full of wonder while balancing academic conversation, critical conversation, conversations about the personalities in...

Jon Kher Kaw

Jon Kher Kaw, artist-itect, has been interviewed by the fine folks over at Post. Tropolism is wary of when models are taken from science and spread over cities, like peanut butter on bread, because we went to the GSAPP...

From Today's Correspondance

"You should have a contest: who is worse at sharing credit, architects or God?" Tropolism means sharing the credit. No design effort is without a team, yet no design effort is without moments of individual inspiration. When the product of...

Interstate 10 Over Lake Pontchartrain: Almost There

We here at Tropolism loves us some highways. Engineered beauty! So it's with great delight, yet without much surprise, that we discovered our first news item of the day: the New York Times reporting that the repairs to the...