“It was during my uni days,” the Tokyo-based architect said Thursday during a conference at Paris contemporary art fair FIAC. “I was fascinated by the beauty of the sights, almost shocked.”
This week in the Jardin Tuileries, ostensibly the front lawn of the Louvre, Fujimoto erected a new installation to coexist with the various centuries-old sculptures dotting the Catherine de Medicis-founded garden.
“Many Small Cubes,” 2014, marks the architect’s first work in Paris, and the launch of Paris gallerist Philippe Gravier’s “Small Nomad House” series, commissioned demountable follies that down the line will include works by Claude Parent and Ricky Ricciotti. The TK-foot-high structure consists of a matrix of steel supports cladded with sheets of anodized steel. According to Fujimoto’s vision, the resulting cluster of 16 or 30-centimeter-tall floating cubes (the same dimensions as the strikingly similar 2013 Serpentine Pavilion) would offer a fragmented shelter to the dwelling area meant to go inside, as well as staggered levels of integrated furniture garnished with a few potted trees here and there.
“It’s not quite finished,” though, Fujimoto explained. “It’s too heavy to be nomadic,” and at the moment is behind a sign that says “Please do not touch or climb.” While he and Gravier fine-tune the details, the non-nomad, non-house “Many Small Cubes” is at least a sculptural gem. The aluminum surfaces create colored light and shadow compositions that shift throughout the course of the day, orange at dusk and dawn and bright white during moments of intense sunshine. During our visit on a partly cloudy day, the shades of white and gray would transform minute by minute in response to the varying sun exposure. At night they become something else entirely, the canvas for French lighting artist Patrick Rimoux’s projections.
Shots taken a few minutes apart. Instagram by @janellezara
For the more architecturally and less artistically inclined, “Many Small Cubes” gives Paris a succinct introduction to Fujimoto’s vision of unity and integration between various opposing themes: geometric and organic form; simplicity and complexity; and above all, nature and architecture.
“For me, both have similar fundamentals,” Fujimoto said, “and I treat them as equals.” A clear continuation of his previous works, including the ephemeral Serpentine Pavilion in London or 2010 House NA in Tokyo, the small right-angled units, which Fujimoto actually refers to as the “artificial geometries and orders,” assemble to create a single organic, amorphous form. These cloud varying densities erases the hard line between the exterior and the interior. “It’s a gradient situation.” Fujimoto explained. “It lets nature inside.”
The Harlem Renaissance was the epicenter of new movements in dance, poetry, painting, and literature, and its impact still registers in all those art forms. If you want to trace the Harlem Renaissance, though, best look to Harlem itself.
Many if not most of the buildings in Harlem today rose between 1900 and 1940—and a new mapping tool called Urban Layers reveals exactly where and when. Harlem boasts very few of the oldest buildings in Manhattan today, but it does represent the island's densest concentration of buildings constructed during the Great Migration.
Thanks to Morphocode's Urban Layers, it's possible to locate nearly every 19th-century building still standing in Manhattan today. That's just one of the things that you can isolate with the map, which combines two New York City building datasets (PLUTOand Building Footprints) and Mapbox GL JS vector technology to generate an interactive architectural history.
So, looking specifically at Harlem again (with some of the Upper West Side thrown in for good measure), it's easy to see that very few of the buildings that went up between 1765 to 1860 still stand today. (Morphocode)Toggle the data parameters by a few decades and you see when some pockets of Harlem that still exist start to come into view. (Morphocode)Then construction in Harlem explodes from 1900 to 1940, corresponding with the arrival of migrants from the South. Building slows in subsequent decades before picking up again very recently. (Morphocode)Here's the more or less complete architectural history of Harlem, represented on one map. (Morphocode)Now, for any Harlem resident, this might seem like the most intuitive discovery in the world. It makes sense that the Harlem Renaissance also made for an uptown building boom, one whose footprint can still be traced there today. The beauty of Urban Layers is that it provides a pretty immediate answer to questions like this one: How old is Harlem?
There are some limitations to Urban Layers, as you might expect: The "year-built" code doesn't appear to be accurate for every building, as Morphocodeexplains. In the map showing all construction through 2013, the gray tiles represent the properties for which no "year-built" data are available: about 2 percent of the footprints for Manhattan's 46,000-odd buildings. Seeing when those buildings were constructed at the parcel level with a simple slide of a rule is a real advance in data mapping.
So many questions! Why did it take New York so long to take to build up around Central Park after its completion in 1857? There was an enormous building boom following the consolidation of the cities of New York and Brooklyn in 1898, just after the end of the rule of the Tammany Hall machine. Is the rise of much of modern Manhattan related to the formal consolidation of the five boroughs?
Manhattanites will all start with the same question: How old are the buildings on my block? With Urban Layers, now there's a map for that.
En el marco de las JORNADAS ARGENTINAS DE PALEONTOLOGIA Y ARQUEOLOGIA URBANAS (JAPAU), el 28, 29 y 30 de octubre de 2014,
el arq. Pablo López Coda dará la charla: "Arqueología Histórica en las Galerías Pacífico: Descubrimientos y Desapariciones"
La misma se dará hoy Martes 28 de Octubre de 2014 a las 14:30hs, en el Auditorio del Espacio Cultural de la Biblioteca del Congreso de la Nación, Alsina 1835, Subsuelo.
Allí se mostrará material inédito sobre los trabajos de rescate patrimonial realizados entre 1989 y 1992.
