Coney Island

After about an hour's travel on the subway you arrive at Coney Island. It was so different from NY. It was run down and neglected, but that just added to it's charm. As you leave the station Nathan's famous frankfurters are on your right and ahead of you is the approach to the beach and arcade promenade. When you reach the promenade you overlook the vast expanse of white beach with neon lifeguards. The arcade promenade sends you back to the 1950's with games like 'shoot the freak', a cart roller coaster and the wonder wheel. The only place I can relate Coney Island to in Britain is Blackpool, but Coney Island is so much better and more charming than Blackpool could ever be.

MOMA: Two designers

Matthias Megyeri:Has created a 'Sweet Dreams Security System'. He recreated objects you would relate to protection and security i.e. chains and glass objects into cute, lovable objects. His designs mess with the cold, harsh ways we restrict people i.e. glass embedded into walls and pad locks and creating a new way to represent these defensive objects in a sensitive way.




Jordi Canudas: Created the 'Less Lamp'. A beautiful lamp that is unique to every owner. The lamp is an plaster egg with a hammer so you crack the egg thus, creating a lamp that suits its specific location by controlling how much light and direction it's cast.

High Line

The High Line is an inspiring landscape. When you're walking up the street towards the High Line you start to see trees floating in the sky. When on the High Line you wander through buildings and different areas of planting, but whats really fun is as you walk you are parallel to advertising boards and you overlook the traffic below. High Line is inspiring because it's a new way to create green space in an urban environment by taking an above ground derelict railway and creating a green corridor across NY.

Rockefeller

My main reason to go up the Rockefeller Tower was the view of Central Park, and it was well worth the effort. The view of Central Park was outstanding and allowed me to understand the size of the park compared to the rest of NY. The view from the opposite side of the Tower was of the Empire State building and I could see the Chrysler Building (partially hidden by a Met life building) and the Hudson River.

P.S.1

P.S.1 is the Institute of Contemporary Art. It's an exhibition space for experimental art and emerging artists.
When I arrived, the courtyard was displaying 'afterparty' by MOS, the winner of the 2009 young architects' program. The design was basically a series of hairy shelters that keep people cool by induction. I'm not sure about the design, I like the idea of keeping people cool using chimneys and induction by creating breezes but I don't understand why it's hairy...


Another piece that was really fun was Leandro Erlich's 'Swimming pool'. A piece that allowed you to go under the surface of a pool whilst staying dry. It was a bazaar experience.

MOMA: Ron Arad exhibition

Ron Arad's exhibition 'No Discipline' was a huge collection of his work from models of architecture to lighting and chairs. The space was so dynamic with a central undulating form that created different themes and spaces to categorise his works and give the space an order/flow. His works are very dramatic either in shape/form or materials used, but all of his work is very natural with no sharp corners and is very curvy, representing movement.
Zion Square Sculpture was one of my favs in the exhibition. It looks really simplistically beautiful as a structure, but comes alive with the sun's movement.
The design's canopy is based upon 400 rectangular cells representing the different materials used to create paths. The structure is transformed with the sun's movement across the sky creating changing shadows throughout the day and year. The video below shows a model of the canopy and how the sun's movement casts dramatic shadows.



http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2009/ronarad/#/2/-1

New York

I went to New York for two weeks over the summer and the next set of blogs covers places, exhibitions and designs that I visited and enjoyed.

Serpentine Pavilion 09

Whilst working in Hyde Park I visited the temporary Serpentine Pavilion designed by Kazuyo Sejima & Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA. It was so different from last year's angular pavilion, the new pavilion was curvy and reflective. It brought the park in and reflected nature back out, it drew in it's surroundings rather than fighting against them, and having different layers meant that you were able to see how much detail had gone into creating the pavilion. It was beautiful.

http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2009/02/serpentine_gallery_pavilion_20_13.html

Hyde Park - Work experience

This year I did a six week stint at the Royal Parks working with the Landscape Department. It was a really good experience and I learnt a lot, from using software to undertaking playground surveys. I was involved in obtaining planning permission for up and coming events in the parks which was really interesting and a tad stressful. One thing that was fun was driving cross country around Richmond Park collecting info. on water fountains. I packed a lot into the six weeks, and I'm very thankful to the Royal Parks for letting me have this experience.

Walking in my mind - Hayward Gallery

I love the summer exhibitions in the Hayward Gallery, they're never just about viewing art, they're about getting down and dirty in art, being part of it, physically exploring it, which is so much better than being restricted by a white line in front of a canvas.
The exhib. was all about walking in the mind of the artist, each piece is meant to represent 'the mysterious mental processes of creativity' inside the artists head.
Each piece was radically different, from Keith Tyson's images on the wall to a cardboard cave representing the mind by Thomas Hirschhorn.
The exhibition was really interesting because each artist represented the theme in such a radically different way. Some pieces drew you in, captivated you to read every word, whilst others made you feel uneasy, and some were completely bizarre to the point that I didn't understand. Overall though it was a really good exhib. that gave me a mental work out.

http://walkinginmymind.southbankcentre.co.uk/index

Richard Long - Tate Britain

Richard Long: Heaven and Earth exhibition took place at the Tate Britain. It was interesting but I'm still unsure whether I enjoyed it.
I felt that the exhibition was based around him walking through nature and documenting it but not affecting it. So when I was walking around looking at his photographs some of the scenes looked very man made i.e. rocks standing upright in a line. Putting that aside all of his photos were really good and some of his written diagrams about what he came across on his travels were surprising but I was a bit nonplussed by the whole exhib.

Dalston Mill

Dalston Mill, part of the Radical Nature exhibition, was created by architects EXYZT. The site was based on the Agnes Denes 'Wheat field-A Confrontation' 1982 where she planted a two acre wheat field in Battery Park landfill, NY. Dalston Mill recreates this on a smaller scale in Hackney, taking over a disused railway line and waste ground and filling the site with a 20m long wheat field and mill.
When I entered the site it felt like a secret garden. I walked though an arch knocked out of a wall and then was in the mill where they were producing bread and serving drinks at the bar. Then I was drawn to the wheat field surrounded by disused building and a garage and realised I wasn't in a disused site, another area of waste ground, but was in an urban retreat, the new place to be in Hackney, with people sitting in deck chairs and talking round the bar.
The site is a brilliant precedent for what we could do and should do to abandoned spaces in London, and the the site showed that it worked by the amount of people that were there and interested. It showed that if we reused our waste grounds by creating places that are interesting and that draw people to them, they wouldn't be abandoned and ignored anymore.

http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=9311

Radical Nature

When I heard about the Radical Nature Exhibition I thought this could be really good and it didn't let me down. It was all about ways in which we can reverse or cope with issues of our ever changing planet i.e. climate change, concrete jungles, deforestation.
The exhib. was really interesting. It covered extremes (underwater city), abstract work and work that had been realised i.e. Agnes Denes' 'Wheatfield-A Confrontation' 1982. I loved how Denes takes a farm into the city, how Wolf Hilbertz created the Biorock and is now re-establishing coral reefs, and Thomas Saraceno's idea of putting gardens in the sky.


Wheatfield-A Confrontation 1982 - Agnes Denes


Flying Garden - Thomas Saraceno