Studio | Page 5 | The Common

Photographing the New Nature

July 14, 2014 Studio

We were back in the Hudson Valley, in the marvelous town of Beacon, to make some images of a new park on the solstice. I found Brooklyn photographer James Ewing stalking the faint pre-dawn, about 5:15AM. A golden haze that had built behind the Hudson Highlands, in an instant, crested over to illuminate this little riverfront peninsula. We scrambled to make the most of the sun, searching out the best views, the right moments. The whole Saturday passed this way, really, though with less urgency than those first minutes. All across Beacon’s Long Dock Park, in a bit of solar sport, we either laid traps ahead of or chased just behind the light.

A Living Infrastructure

March 28, 2014 Essays, Studio

By SCOTT GEIGER

Oysters in the Raritan Bay, courtesy of SCAPE Landscape Architecture

Next week Thursday, April 3, the amazing Rebuild by Design competition concludes in New York City. The finale event on Vesey Street in Manhattan is open to the public, and I think it well worth attending, even if you’re only just now learning about the competition. I’ve wanted to write about this competition since its launch last summer, and now as it comes to a close I can speculate a little about its significance.

Sound City

March 7, 2014 Studio

Artist: EMEKA OGBOH

Emeka Ogboh | Bus

Lagos, Nigeria is growing fast but travels slow. The city, which is Africa’s largest, has doubled in population within the past seventeen years, crowding its roads and bridges with many millions of people – too many for the city’s recent infrastructure investments to keep up. Traffic jams, called go-slows, ensue. But while Danfos, the yellow minibuses that are public transportation in Lagos, tend to get stuck, its passengers don’t. While buses crawl, Lagosians move: playing street music, revving engines, hawking products, shouting directions and taking phone calls.

What Is RiverFirst?

February 28, 2014 Essays, Studio

By SCOTT GEIGER

The Mississippi River meets only one waterfall on its wayward transcontinental course. It comes early, in the northern Midwest, at a site the Sioux knew as a place that was part real world, part spirit world. Seventeenth-century adventurers rumored about a “pigmy Niagra” called St. Anthony Falls. Pioneers from the young United States reached these waters early in the nineteenth century; they established simple mills for grist and lumber just as soon as property rights could be legally defined.The mills grew and industrialized over decades, triggering the rise of Minneapolis. A feature of nature became a technology servicing the city. The names Gold Medal Flour and Pillsbury still loom in enormous metal type on opposite sides of the historic railway bridge leading into Minneapolis that was new when F. Scott Fitzgerald was a boy. The historic mills themselves have gone, though, and today Stone Arch Bridge belongs to pedestrians, cyclists, and the students of the University of Minnesota. Looking north from the bridge they see an amphitheater of a spillway, tall gray waters pouring between a research lab and hydroelectric plant on the east side; a lock-dam barge elevator run by the Army Corps of Engineers on the west.

Sidney Waugh, Monuments Man

February 7, 2014 Studio

Curated by PAMELA RUSSELL and SHEILA FLAHERTY-JONES

Sidney Waugh was a twentieth-century sculptor best known for architectural and large-scale works on the one hand, and for smaller designs for glass and medallions on the other. As lead creative artist at Steuben Glass in New York, he elevated glass to a fine art medium, while also designing many public and private monuments on the East Coast of the United States.

A Pilgrimage to 5 Pointz

January 28, 2014 Studio

By MARIA TERRONE

From the elevated train in Queens, I’d glimpse the phantasmagoria that was 5 Pointz. A riot of color and occasional faces covering every inch of the old, block-long factory, it felt hallucinatory. In a minute—not enough time for the eye or brain to take it all in—the images vanished and the train rumbled underground, heading to Manhattan.

Two “Luckless Dears” of Ancient Rome

January 10, 2014 Studio

sarcophagus

Today we’re delighted to feature this close-up of a gorgeous recent acquisition by the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College.

Made in Italy of Carrara marble in the third quarter of the 2nd century CE, this ancient Roman sarcophagus features sea nymphs riding on the backs of sea centaurs while cupids fly overhead. It has “exceptional visual impact,” says Pamela Russell, the Mead’s head of education, “due to its impressive scale, lively marine subject, and pleasing symmetrical composition.”

The Misadventures of Wenamun

December 19, 2013 Studio

Adapted by ROLF POTTS
Illustrated by CEDAR VAN TASSEL

One enticing thing about travel tales from distant centuries is the way they suggest so many more stories that haven’t been told. While we assume that Marco Polo was a pioneer in his journey to the Far East, for example, we learn from his own narrative that he encountered other Europeans – Germans, Lombards, Frenchmen – in the cities of China. Polo’s contemporary, William of Rubruck, traveled across Asia and found Greek doctors, Ukrainian carpenters, and Parisian goldsmiths working in the Mongolian capital of Karakorum. As intriguing as these thirteenth-century accounts of Marco and William are, imagine a rich trove of unknown travelers’ diaries stretching far deeper into antiquity.

Martha Willette Lewis: An Unreal Atlas

December 11, 2013 Studio

Work by MARTHA WILLETTE LEWIS, Curated by JEFF BERGMAN

Our relationship with maps has changed drastically in the last ten years, from the pinpoint ease of Google Maps to global positioning systems rendering us a blinking blue beacon on a grid of streets. Rarely are we explorers in the completed cartography of our planet. Visual artist Martha Willette Lewis has given us new, unreal spaces to explore by combining diagrammatic drawings, biological systems, and topographical forms. These spaces manifest as works on paper that are often folded, crumpled, or bisected. Lewis takes visual cues from systems that are usually not in contact and, in doing so, creates a skewed sense of reality. Hers is a hybridized vision shared by artists and technological innovators. The paper and drawing are real, but the vision is of an impossible place.

Across Gymnasium Bridge

November 22, 2013 Essays, Studio

By SCOTT GEIGER

“We have the mind, body, and the mind/body all organizing this building,” offers architect Chris McVoy, metaphorically describing the Campbell Sports Center that opened this fall at Columbia University. The building is the outward expression of an athlete’s inner journey. In a short film, McVoy and his partner and mentor, Steven Holl, discuss their design intentions and the character of experience they’ve created.