Barbara and Michael Leisgen are a couple of German artists working at the intersection between photography, performance art and land-art since the … [Read more...]
“The Road”(1958): An Antimonument by Oskar Hansen
"The Road" is an unbuilt project by Polish architect Oskar Nikolai Hansen (team leader) with Zofia Hansen, Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz, Edmund Kupiecki, … [Read more...]
Perspective Corrections, by Jan Dibbets (1967-1969)
Between 1967 and 1969, Dutch conceptual artist Jan Dibbets created a series of works, consisting of photographs of walls, floors and lawns, titled … [Read more...]
Earliest Land-Art: Herbert Bayer and Fritz Benedict’s Green Mound and Marble Garden (1954-1955)
''I believe that the artist must achieve creative control over the whole of his environment.''- Herbert Bayer : New York Times, October 21, … [Read more...]
Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Reality Properties: Fake Estates” (1973)
Starting in the summer of 1973, artist Gordon Matta-Clark purchased fifteen lots in the city of New York, fourteen in Queens and one in Staten Island. … [Read more...]
Ettore Sottsass Jr.’s Metaphors (1972-1979)
"He starts leaving discrete signs in the landscape, almost invisible traces, he continues building real architectures or metaphors of the … [Read more...]
Atlas Photographique de la Lune (1899)
This moon atlas was published by L'Observatoire de Paris in 1899 and edited by Maurice (Moritz) Loewy. The following are the Cover, the Title Page … [Read more...]
Barents Lessons: Teaching and Research in Architecture
Laba (Laboratory Basel), a satellite studio of the Institut d’architecture et de la ville (IA) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) … [Read more...]
“Taking Measures Across the American Landscape” by James Corner and Alex McLean
James Corner, internationally renowned landscape architect and forerunner of the landscape urbanism movement, was author in 1996 of "Taking Measures … [Read more...]
The Territory as an Abstract Cartography
Waiting to find some time to write a more extensive post, we leave you with the marvelous details of early geological maps from the 19th and 20th … [Read more...]
Oscar Newman’s Underground City Beneath Manhattan
The architect and city planner Oscar Newman, better known for his dreadful "Defensible space theory", (pdf here) also fostered in 1969 the bizarre … [Read more...]
Duga-3, a Giant Abandoned Radio Structure Within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone
Just a few miles away from the exploded nuclear power plant of Chernobyl, stands a huge Soviet abandoned rectangular antenna made by an array of … [Read more...]
Poles of Inaccessibility
A pole of inaccessibility is an extreme point of Earth which is hard to reach due to its remoteness to geographical features that could provide … [Read more...]
When Mathias Rust landed on the Red Square, Building an Imaginary Bridge on the Iron Curtain
In the autumn of 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan met in Reykjavík, Iceland, to talk about nuclear disarmament. The summit was a … [Read more...]
David Gissen’s Reconstruction of the Mound of Vendôme
David Gissen, teacher at CCA, author of Subnature and editor of HTC Experiments, proposed a project of radical reconstruction, a pragmatic statement … [Read more...]
Day One, (a World Without Objects), by Microcities
Day One is our proposal for a new park in Grønmo (Norway). A former waste disposal site, the new Grønmo is not just a park but a new territory … [Read more...]
A phrenology of the artist’s mind: Grayson Perry‘s 2004 “Map of an Englishman”
Exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Grayson Perry's 2004 "Map of an Englishman" is a 120 x 150 cm psychogeographical exploration of the … [Read more...]
Removing / Extending Manhattan
Some time ago we posted an interesting 1975 map entitled "Removal of Manhattan Island", by Robert Grosvenor. The operation (see below) of disposing of … [Read more...]
Ruins of the abyss
Ethel Baraona, whose always interesting articles and links we particularly missed during these two weeks of no-internet, points towards this post on … [Read more...]
“Smithson and Serra: beyond modernism” documentary
An out-of-circulation documentary about the work of Richard Serra and Robert Smithson, produced in the UK for television. Streamable and downloadable … [Read more...]
Landscape Futures. Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions
"Landscape Futures" is an exhibition curated by Geoff Manaugh of BLDG BLOG, on display at the Nevada Museum of Art through February 12, 2012. The … [Read more...]
Teaching environmental sculpture to children
In 1975 John Lidstone and Clarence Bunch unveiled the pedagogic potential of environmental actions, specializing ideas of artist like Ant Farm, Otto … [Read more...]
Plan as map: The Funambulist on Miralles
"The architect that creates the most expressive ambiguity between the architectural plan and the map seems to be Enric Miralles (1955-2000)." … [Read more...]
Samantha Lee, AA Diploma 6: “Sacred Anomalies: Infiltrating Landscape Surveys”
The Australian mineral trade inspired Lee’s work, which intends to "explores the space of the mining survey as a parallel site for intervention, where … [Read more...]
