Survey of Reaction: “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream”

Reality Check: Developers React to MoMA’s Show, “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream”:

But during a panel on March 8 at the museum sponsored by the Forum for Urban Design, two developers, an architecture professor, and a real estate lawyer reacted soberly to the adventurous and optimistic schemes. Though the panelists agreed that the foreclosure crisis will lead to major changes in suburban development, they all thought new patterns are less likely to be brought about by a revised American dream than by economic and demographic factors. And all said it would be very difficult to change zoning laws to permit denser new development patterns, especially in existing “inner-ring” suburbs.

Financing suburban architecture:

My main beef with the show is that it’s far too utopian and impractical. That’s par for the course when it comes to museum architecture shows, but I was hoping for more realistic proposals in this particular case, just because the foreclosure crisis is so real and urgent.

Dream Deferred: The Museum of Modern Art’s “Foreclosed” exhibit is long on art and short on reality.

Any honest attempt to fix the suburbs has to start with facing up to why so many Americans live in the suburbs in the first place, and who those Americans are. Suburban families are bigger than urban families; they like their space; and they like living in places where they’re a good distance from their neighbors and a long way indeed from people of other social classes.

Aaron Draplin at the Walker Art Center

Installation: MÖBIUS

Peter Wegner’s campus creations play with words, color & Split-Flaps!

Peter Wegner’s campus creations play with words, color – Framework – Photos and Video – Visual Storytelling from the Los Angeles Times:

By that time he had just made his big break as an artist, thanks to a flurry of gallery shows: at Todd Hosfelt in San Francisco, CRG and Mary Boone in New York, and William Griffin in Los Angeles, all within a two-year period. One breakthrough series, also a study in color, consisted of canvases made to look like commercial paint chips and actually covered in house paint, complete with names like “blue horizon” and “fragile blue dusk” (“poetry written by commerce,” he calls it).

But when he looked into the idea of doing a flip-digit piece, the European companies who had the technology seemed unwilling. Having more connections in Europe this time around, after showing his work there, helped.

He ultimately found a company outside of Bern, Switzerland, willing to manufacture the piece for him. And he found an animation expert in Long Beach to help him program the piece using a mix of off-the-shelf and proprietary software.

He spent months perfecting the 80 different colors in each spinning module (picture a mini-Rolodex with colored polycarbonate flaps instead of white paper cards) that makes up each cell on the grid. He also drew numerous storyboards — even quick images on the back of envelopes — to map out key sequences in the artwork.