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An Appreciation of Ada Louise Huxtable
Ada Louise Huxtable, who died last week at the age of 91, liked good buildings. She didn't care what style the designer used, she had very little patience for theory, and she wasn't waiting for utopia. She just wanted structures that were well made, respected their environments, delighted us with inventive spaces, and otherwise enhanced our experience of the human-made world, and especially of the urban environment. As she once said, "If there are any basic ground rules for architecture-watchers, they should be, first, don't look for something pretty; and second, look again." Once those structures appeared, Huxtable wanted them to endure and to continue to be used, rather than being torn down or misused.Read More
A Transformative Experience?
At a time when fashion uses art to transform itself into high cultural statement, and art uses fashion to insert itself into the broader commercial world, the Prada Transformer in Seoul perfectly captures the convergence of the two. It is a tetrahedral event space, a cross-shaped gallery, a rectangular cinema or a “domestically scaled” circular fashion theater, depending on how four cranes rotate this 60-foot-high, 120-ton misshapen tent on its concrete base. Consisting of a polyurethane membrane stretched over steel scaffolding, the Transformer currently occupies the grounds of Gyeonghui Palace, where it opened with a long-traveling exhibition of Prada skirts titled “Waist Down” [Apr. 23-May 24]. As its architect, Rem Koolhaas, ack… Read MoreOr
Currently on view in the group show "Redux" at New York's Cristin Tierney Gallery (through Feb. 4) are two works by Joe Fig, both related to his 200
