Lebbeus Woods @ SFMOMA

A Drawing by Lebbeus Woods, at the SFMOMA Exhibition

 

The SFMOMA is currently hosting a retrospective exhibition of the work of architect Lebbeus Woods, who died in New York City last year during hurricane Sandy. This was one of the best exhibitions I've ever been to. There were loads of drawings and models, imaginative, speculative, fantastical, beautiful. This exhibit is a treat for anyone fond of architecture, illustration, sci-fi, movies and set design, and the politics of public space and urban post-war reconstruction. The drawings were big and plentiful, in pencil, ink, and mostly colored pencil, with a nearly air-brush quality.

 

His work was a predecessor to not only architectural movements like deconstruction, parametricism and topological design, but also to the animated forms and spaces of sci-fi cinema space, from Alien to Star Wars to 12 Monkeys. There were small sketches and big elaborate presentation drawings; some hard-line-drafted and some free-hand. Any ONE of these drawings was a world in itself, and could make a student or collector perfectly happy to stare at and contemplate for a good long while.

 

 

There are some drawings on the SFMOMA's related exhibition website (HERE) and many more on Google (HERE).

 

He was a classic paper architect who used drawing and design as a speculative exercise, to question existing orthodoxies, to dream, to propose alternate ways of occupying the world. He was a longtime teacher at Cooper Union in NYC, and as an architect executed a dozen installations and only one built project, an art type component within a larger project in China designed by American architect Steven Holl.

 

This exhibit on its own is reason enough to San Francisco.

 

Ireland Collages

This is a series of collages I made following a two-week journey across Ireland with my extended family. They are all 4" x 6.5".

Earthscapes and The Design of Sites

In the last decade, Google Maps, Bing, and Mapquest have brought aerial maps to every phone and computer, democratizing what was previously the domain of governments. Aerial maps are endlessly fascinating, and have incredible power - illustrating how we've changed the landscape, and influencing how we might continue to do so, as discussed so eloquently in the essay “Aerial Representation and the Making of Landscape” in Taking Measures Across The American Landscape by James Corner and Alex S. Maclean.

 

The Postal Service is catching up with Internet. They have recently issued a series of stamps called Earthscapes, containing aerial views of the country. The views are divided into three types: rural, agricultural, and urban. The photographs on the stamps are composed in such a way as to balance the beauty of an abstract color composition with the literal pictorial representation of the various earthscape scenes. The central-pivot irrigation in the Kansas farmland looks like a new surface pattern design from Orla Kiley. The Manhattan skyscraper appears like an intense textile pattern. The colors and patterns are equally stunning in each of the three categories.

 

From Upper left to lower right, the stamps depict:

1. The Bear Glacier of the Harding Icefield in the Kenai-Fjords National Park, Alaska.
2. The crater of the Mt. Saint Helens, Washington.
3. The Grand Prismatic Spring in the Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.
4. The Castle Butte in the Monument Valley, Arizona.
5. Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge on Maryland's Eastern Shore.
6. Salt/seawater evaporation ponds near San Francisco, California.
7. Log rafts made of harvested timber float toward a mill processor in Idaho.
8. Central Pivit irrigation, of Kansas farmland, "false-color" image.
9. A cherry orchard in Park Rapids, Michigan.
10. A cranberry bog in Massachusetts.
11. A suburban landscape in Nevada.
12. Towboats in Houston, Texas.
13. Locomotives turntable, Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
14. An apartment complex in Manhattan, New York.
15. A view of Interstates 95 and 395 crossing in Miami, Florida.

A further description of each stamp, with some further links, can be found here.

http://www.mountainstamp.com/2012%20New%20Issues/2012%20USA%20Earthscape.html

The new stamps reflect and acknowledge a growing awareness of maps, mapping, and the contrasts of natural and developed land patterns. They help illustrate the scope and vast scale of human intervention across the landscape of the earth, and the very close and ongoing working relationship we all have with the surface of the earth, whether or not our dayjob involves tractors or computer terminals.

Contemplating The Kimbell