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Architecture

What a MacArthur Win Means for Women in Architecture

By Eva Hagberg on

A few months ago, when the MacArthur grants were announced, we were more or less pretty much surprised to see that Chicago architect Jeanne Gang had won the well-beloved genius award, to the tune of $500K. The first architect in eleven years to win the award — Diller + Scofidio (now Diller Scofidio + Renfro) won in 1999 and Rural Studio founder Sam Mockbee the year after — Gang had, until then, been an inside-baseball nod within the architectural community, and hardly on the fame level of, say-it-all-together now, Zaha Hadid. The architecture-focused Pritzker Prize (which Hadid won) is one thing (although we wonder if they won’t start running out of eligible architects soon?) but the MacArthur — which transcends disciplinary boundaries — is quite another, and seems to be gathering rather than losing any sort of clout-related steam. And so, we’d like to take a moment to wax a little lyrical about what this means: for Gang, for women, and for women who make buildings. … Read More

Architecture

Better Off Dead: A Collection of Really Embarrassing Buildings

By Eva Hagberg on

We all have our dark shameful pasts, secrets we’d rather let lie in the closet of our yearbook photos, haircuts that need never see the light of even dusk. The great thing about being completely un-famous, though, is that our pasts, while they may buy cialis online now uk

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aunt us on Facebook, aren’t physically built. No one has to live in our embarrassing high-school mistakes, and no one has to work in them. The ten architects behind the projects that follow, however, don’t have such a luxury of anonymity. Herewith we present ten projects either explicitly rejected by their designers or so tremendously equivalent to a killer side-scrunchie with Keds, that they probably should have been. Take a spin through the glory that is our Schadenfreude, and let us know about any metalmouths we’ve overlooked. … Read More

Architecture

10 Buildings That Could Possibly Destroy You

By Eva Hagberg on

We’ve always been fans of architecture around here and in life, generally. We’re used to looking at houses and marveling at their livability; at skyscrapers and feeling awe at their immense strength; at office buildings and relishing their floor are buy cheap cialis

a ratio. What we are not used… Read More

Art

Behind the Scenes of an Infinite Jest-Inspired Art Show

By Eva Hagberg on

When novelist David Foster Wallace died in September of 2008, the world pretty much went apeshit. Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote about him, citing a lawyer-loving therapist-avoiding affair. Time called his demise the Death of a Genius. And around university campuses across the world, sophomore dudes wondered just how, without being able to introduce them to this brand-new underground author known as DFW, they were going to impress the freshmen girls. By now, Wallace is a meme and his biggest and arguably best-loved novel Infinite Jest: A Novel a trope, to the point that an MFA student at Columbia has just put together a show based on something so inside-baseball as the complete filmography of James O. Incandenza, father of tennis prodigy Hal, Wild Turkey guzzler, and suicide-by-microwave victim.

A Failed Entertainment opens today at the LeRoy Neiman Gallery at Columbia University. Organized by Sam Ekwurtzel, the show encompasses twenty-two films, sculptures, and paintings loosely inspired by the entirely fictional but somehow necessarily believable — as the rest of the mind-blowing, earth-shattering, world-changing novel — was. Eva Hagberg spoke to Sam about Wallace, fishing boats, and the particular magic of Infinite Jest. … Read More

Architecture

Architectural Projects That Seemed Like a Great Idea at the Time

By Eva Hagberg on

Architecture! At its best, visionary, innovative, mold-breaking. At its worst, cheesy, overwrought, and ill-timed. The recent architectural follies of Dubai present a fairly good case for prudence in the building arts: a Marvel superhero-themed park is a questionable expenditure even in boom times; as for the world’s largest LED structure, a new opera house, a revolving “dynamic” tower, and an experimental resort dubbed “The Cloud,” well, it’s beginning to look like Gomorrah in Abu Dhabi. But as we know all too well, the current financial crisis is a global situation, which is why we’ve rated six new developments and their associated levels of what-were-they-thinking-ness. Follow along after the… Read More

Music

Exclusive: Made Event’s Laura de Palma and Mike Bindra Unleash Electric Zoo Festival

By Eva Hagberg on

After a stellar run of putting on focused DJ sets, Laura De Palma and Mike Bindra’s Made Event company is bringing Electric Zoo—a multi-DJ cross-genre electronic festival — to Randall’s Island this Labor Day weekend. Recovering trance-a-holic Eva Hagberg talks to them about the impetus behind the festival, the breadth of the lineup, and the good old days of… Read More

Books

Exclusive: Q&A with Brian DeLeeuw Author of In This Way I Was Saved

By Eva Hagberg on

Debut novelist Brian DeLeeuw just published In This Way I Was Saved, a chilling mystery that isn’t a terrifying genre tale; a work of sublime fiction that isn’t a look inside the author’s worldview. (Think human porosity, epic loneliness, and tyrannosaurus spit.) DeLeeuw, currently working as an editor at Tin House, talks to Eva Hagberg about coming up with ideas, writing what you know, and the existential crisis of… Read More

Books

Exclusive: Q&A with Rachel Cohen Author of A Chance Meeting

By Eva Hagberg on

Rachel Cohen, who will be reading on the theme Progress and Process at tonight’s Happy Ending series at Joe’s Pub, wrote a book, A Chance Meeting, about the “intertwined lives of writers and artists.” Striking in its thoroughness and enthralling in its liveliness, A Chance Meeting is about what happens when artists and writers talk about their work; what happens when they encourage or discourage one another; and what happens when they happen to run into each other over the bar. We talked to Cohen about creative myths, professional envy, and the utter felicity of it… Read More

Design

Why Another Book About Frank Gehry?

By Eva Hagberg on

Take one Paul Holdengraber (fabulously accented — and generally fabulous — director of LIVE from the New York Public Library), add 80-year-old architect Frank Gehry, count on outgoing LA Philharmonic conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, and throw in a dash of Barbara Isenberg, and you have a highbrow Monday night at the Celeste Bartos Forum. … Read More

Art

Open Letter to the Turner Selection Committee: Matt Groening Might Have Been a Better Pick

By Eva Hagberg on

Last week Mark Leckey — the only male artist on the shortlist — won Britain’s Turner Prize. We didn’t know who he was — but that’s part of the point of the Turner Prize, to give airtime to artists we don’t already know —  so we decided to find out what we could. In order of impressions: he speaks a bit like Russell Brand, he seems to think very very slowly, and this is either an elaborate and ground-breaking piece of performance art (possible) or a sign that his work is actually all over the place (likely). … Read More