Deane Madsen | Articles

Burning Man Exhibition Opens at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery

On April 2, 2018

Sculptures by HYBYCOZO, the team of Yelena Filipchuk and Serge Beaulieu, fill a gallery within the Renwick with patterns of light and shadow. | © Deane Madsen

The Renwick Gallery hosts “No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man,” through January 21, 2019. Below is excerpted a portion of an article for Architectural Record.

Over the next nine months, an artful taste of the Nevada desert experience that is Burning Man will occupy the Renwick Gallery and its surrounding neighborhood in the heart of Washington, D.C.’s Golden Triangle. In “No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man,” the Renwick Gallery—which is the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s branch dedicated to contemporary craft—plays host to a wide variety of artworks ranging in complexity and scale from jewelry and clothing to oversized sculpture and a virtual reality walkthrough of what Burning Man attendees affectionately refer to as “the playa.”

Every year since 1986, Burning Man has set up a temporary city for a weeklong festival; since 1990, these have been held in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert (except in 1997, when it was held in the Hualapai Desert, a few miles northwest of Black Rock). These transient desert conclaves, hosting some 70,000 annual visitors, occupy pentagonal sites, with an arched plan that centers on the Burning Man—an anthropomorphic wooden sculpture that is burned at the conclusion of the event in keeping with a “leave no trace” ethos that serves as one of the festival’s 10 guiding principles—and a temple, which is likewise constructed of wood and subject to conflagration.

A visitor steps on a pad to activate Shrumen Lumen, a kinetic light sculpture by FoldHaus Art Collective in the No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man exhibition. | © Deane Madsen

“The idea that you create the world that you want to live in is something that we really ought to be talking about here in our nation’s capital,” says exhibition curator Nora Atkinson. She explains that the show pulls its title from another playa tenet: “No spectators” refers to the idea that all visitors should be fully involved, present, and active contributors to their experiences, as opposed to mere observers of them.

Read the full story at Architectural Record.

Sculptor David Best worked with a team of artists to install a Burning Man temple within the Renwick Gallery’s grand salon. | © Deane Madsen

‘Almost Home’ by Do Ho Suh Opens at Smithsonian American Art Museum

On March 17, 2018

by Deane

Installation view of Do Ho Suh: Almost Home at the Smithsonian American Art Museum | © Deane Madsen

In one of the more memorable exhibitions I’ve seen in quite some time, the Smithsonian American Art Museum presents “Do Ho Suh: Almost Home,” through August 5, 2018. Below is an excerpt from a piece for Architectural Record:

Some people who want to remember the places they’ve been collect souvenirs, refrigerator magnets, tchotchkes, or other pocket-sized signifiers of place; others create albums full of photos taken on whatever cameras were available during their stay. Not so for Do Ho Suh, whose ability to recall and reproduce places makes him perhaps the most compelling architectural artist alive.

Suh’s exhibition, “Almost Home,” which opens today at Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), explores the intersections of space, time, and memory as they relate to the most intimate places he has inhabited. Details rendered perfectly in hand-stitched, translucent fabrics lend an air of absolute authenticity to his “Specimens,” which are ethereal takes on quotidian household objects such as doorknobs, thermostats, circuit breaker boxes, and radiators. These articles—some hardware, some appliances, each more exquisite than the last—line the walls of the exhibition, categorized by the places where Suh lived and observed them.

“My own personal experience of trans-cultural displacement is what motivates my inquiry into the motion of space,” Suh says at the exhibition’s opening lecture. He speaks of his upbringing in Seoul, in a house that was itself a replica of a scholar’s cottage; and of his immigration to the United States at the age of 29, in 1991. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, and earned his graduate degree at Yale, before settling in New York, where he lived for 20 years. In those two decades, he began to do rubbings of his dwelling, putting to paper the imprints of the space in which his daughters would learn to crawl as patterns to be cut, stitched, and reassembled into full-scale cloth replicas of that apartment.

Read the full story at Architectural Record.

Installation view of Do Ho Suh: Almost Home at the Smithsonian American Art Museum | © Deane Madsen

Do Ho Suh: Almost Home at SAAM | © Deane Madsen

Installation view of Corridor, Wieland Strasse, 18, 12159 Berlin, Germany, 2013, by Do Ho Suh

Christopher Hawthorne Departs LA Times for Mayor’s Office

On March 14, 2018

by Deane

It’s the end of an era of architectural criticism from Christopher Hawthorne, who announced via a column in this week’s L.A. Times that he’s leaving his position with the newspaper for a newly created role as Chief Design Officer for the Mayor of Los Angeles.

Years ago, then-coworkers Jessica Rubenstein and Kriston Capps produced a map of architecture critics and their respective full-time newspapers on the occasion of Inga Saffron’s Pulitzer Prize win for her work in the Philadelphia Inquirer (image reproduced below but also linked above—just in case). Although Hawthorne makes a strong case for preservation of the L.A.t Times’s architecture critic position in a recent interview with Curbed urbanism editor Alissa Walker, it remains to be seen whether or not the L.A. Times will continue to hold an architecture critic position.

One would hope that, at the very least, the retained position would serve as an editorial check on Hawthorne’s new role, which he descries as being “an effort to produce better architecture, urban design and what we once called ‘public works’ for Los Angeles.” [Hawthorne’s colleague, Carolina Miranda, assures him she’ll be calling him for comment.]

Hawthorne, for his part, wrote that he sees his mandate within the city government as one of ensuring high quality designs with low costs for the benefit of citizens: “If there’s one message I want to underscore in my new position, as I’ve tried to do in this one, it’s that good design, even ambitious design, can be a mechanism for efficiency. For saving money, not wasting it.”

Exactly five years ago, I wrote a short piece about Hawthorne, who had appeared on a local broadcast to lambast L.A. leadership on its failure to connect LAX to the rest of the city via public transit. Now, he’ll be tasked with working with the same leadership to produce better outcomes for the city. If his 14 years of service to the city by virtue of his architectural criticism are any indication, L.A. is in for a decade of prosperity, and, above all, good design.

Former Memphis Distribution Center Gets Platinum Makeover

On February 25, 2018

by Deane

Crosstown Concourse in Architectural Record’s March 2018 issue

Declines in U.S. manufacturing and industry have led to a reverse hermit-crab effect, wherein companies are leaving behind empty shells of buildings that are too large for other companies to inhabit comfortably. But within these husks lies an amount of embodied energy so great that the environmental impact—not to mention financial cost—of demolishing them is also too big to bear. While adaptive reuse of industrial facilities is hardly new behavior, the scale and environmental consciousness of a recent redevelopment in Memphis called Crosstown Concourse serves as a demonstration of how cities can turn empty warehouses into communities of symbiotic entities beneath a single roof. Below is an excerpt from an article that appeared in the March 2018 issue of Architectural Record.

In 1993, when retailer Sears, Roebuck closed its mail-order catalogue business, it also shuttered distribution plants around the country, including one in Memphis that just sat abandoned. A quarter of a century later, the 1.3 million-square-foot facility has been transformed into the Crosstown Concourse, an innovative mixed-use property designed by the local firm Looney Ricks Kiss (LRK) in collaboration with the Vancouver office of DIALOG.

The project, completed last year, was the brainchild of artist Christopher Miner and University of Memphis art history professor Todd Richardson. Crosstown Concourse is home to a health center, arts and education groups, a high school, and 265 apartments.

When LRK principals Tony Pellicciotti and Frank Ricks first visited the site, the building was in serious disrepair. Since the closure of the distribution center, no money had been spent on upkeep, but the 1920s building itself was in solid shape. Its all-concrete frame had been designed to support live loads of 250 to 300 pounds per square foot. A 1960s steel-column-supported addition suffered though, in large part due to thieves who undermined the structure in search of copper flashing. Because of its significant mass, the center was too expensive to demolish, but the right redevelopment formula proved elusive until Richardson and Miner stepped up to form Crosstown Arts.

Read the full article at Architectural Record.

Architecture and Design Film Festival Kicks off at NBM

On February 24, 2018

by Deane

The Architecture and Design Film Festival held its opening reception at the National Building Museum last night. Attendees heard introductions by NBM executive director Chase Rynd, AIA CEO Robert Ivy, and ADFF founder Kyle Bergman. Following the remarks, guests were invited to watch one of three separate screenings of the 2017 documentary BIG Time, which chronicles five years of work and headaches in the life of Bjarke Ingels, founder of BIG.

BIG Time was an easy choice to open the festival, Rynd said, as the museum and the firm have collaborated on many occasions, most notably with the installation of the Building Museum’s first Summer Block Party installation, the BIG Maze, in 2014, and again with a comprehensive look at the firm’s oeuvre, HOT TO COLD, in 2015. The festival features 19 films, some with multiple screenings, over the course of four days. The NBM’s auditorium and Pension Commissioner’s Suite serve as smaller theaters, and a large screen has been installed within the museum’s central hall; due to acoustic concerns, the latter venue offers individual, wireless headsets to guests for audio portions of the films.

The ADFF continues through this weekend, and its full schedule is available through the National Building Museum website. Most screenings require advance ticketing.

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