The Passing of a Modernist Master: A Tribute to Oscar Niemeyer

Oscar Niemeyer, the prolific architect who gave form to Brazil’s twentieth-century sociopolitical optimism, died this Wednesday at a Rio de Janeiro hospital. He was 104. When news of his passing was confirmed yesterday evening, the world seemed almost ready to hear it. Obituaries had been written, Niemeyer’s extraordinary life ripe for reflection now for some time. Yet his death, justifiably, still aroused a profound sense of disbelief. The last surviving architect in a line of legendary master builders — including the giant personalities of Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe — Niemeyer was, in more recent times, a living reminder of a bygone era, of a modern epoch charged with hope and moved to action.

A native of Rio de Janeiro, Niemeyer attended the National School of Fine Arts, where he drew the attention of its dean Lucio Costa, a spirited practitioner bent on bringing modernism to Brazil, in part, through architecture. Two years after graduating, Niemeyer was hired by Costa to serve as a project draftsman in the design of the Ministry of Education and Health headquarters, a prominent 1936 commission that led to Niemeyer’s first collaboration with the then-foremost innovator in the field: Le Corbusier.

Working under Costa and Le Corbusier, Niemeyer exhibited an early self-confidence, proposing changes that were successfully adopted in the final proposal. The resulting building is a masterful work of civic design: a rectilinear mass sequined with brise-soleil sunshades and propped upon a forest of stone pilottis, forming a sheltered space through which pedestrians can freely pass. The structure is rational from a distance yet, at the human scale, enriched with poetic flourishes, including vibrant, large-scale mosaics and sculptural staircases. These expressive details would reappear in Niemeyer’s independent commissions, which reflect the architect’s fundamental questioning of modernism’s aesthetic tenets.

Through Costa, Niemeyer was later introduced to Juscelino Kubitschek, a prominent politician whose patronage would truly launch the young architect’s career. As mayor of Belo Horizonte in the 1940’s, Kubitschek hired Niemeyer to design a complex of buildings, including a church, casino, and yacht club, just outside the city. For the Pampulha Complex, as it was called, Niemeyer followed his divergent intuitions about modernism with full force, subverting the supremacy of the right angle by experimenting with curves rendered in concrete: Gamboling parabolic lines boldly outline the space of the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi, while snaking concrete ribbons weave in and out of the Casa de Baile dance hall.

To read more of this content at ArtInfo, click here.

Delhi's Modernist Architecture in Photographs

Delhi's Hall of Nations. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Veteran photographer Madan Mahatta took shots of some of the prominent buildings that defined the landscape of Delhi from the 1950s to the 1980s, as the city was embracing Modernist architecture. An exhibition of his work is on at the Photoink gallery in New Delhi till July 2, 2012.

Buildings photographed by Mr. Mahatta, who is from Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, include those designed by some of the best known architects of the time, including Habib Rahman, American architect Joseph Allen Stein and Jasbir Sawhney.

Read this content at the New York Times. Click here.

Videos: Evolution of Modern Art

Looked at with the right eyes, a chronological sequence depicting the evolution of modern art can be detected by moving from video to video.

Henri Matisse



Georges Braque



Paul Gauguin



Gustav Klimt



Filippo Tommaso Marinetti



Piet Mondrian



Jackson Pollock



Roy Lichtenstein



Andy Warhol



Mark Rothko



Barnett Newman

Meet the ultimate 'retro daddy'

Creative Commons image via Wikimedia

Americana expert Charles Phoenix relives road trips to Palm Springs, forays into thrift stores and date farms, and calls for the comeback of the chuckwagon.

DRESSED IN A CUSTOM-TAILORED SUIT and trademark rhinestone Colonel Sanders bow tie, Charles Phoenix flips through hilarious and sometimes bizarre slides of strangers and their homes and cars and families, taking a standing-room-only audience at Palm Springs Art Museum’s Annenberg Theater through a rip-roaring Technicolor look at yesteryear.

Twenty years ago, this self-proclaimed “retro daddy” found a shoebox full of vintage Kodachrome slides in a thrift shop marked “Trip Across the United States 1957,” and his obsession with midcentury Americana was born. Today, he lives by this mantra: “Get in touch with your inner Americana, embrace it, have a sense of humor about it, and proudly share it with the whole wide world.”

Phoenix — author of seven books, including Southern Californialand: Mid-Century Culture in Kodachrome (Angel City Press, 2004) — travels the country with his retro slideshow. Palm Springs Life caught up with him during Modernism Week.

Click here for the interview.

Top Ten "Ugly" Buildings to Visit

Ontario College of Art's Sharp Centre for Design. Image via Wikimedia Commons

It's always nice when Toronto makes a top ten list....even this one!

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At the United Nations, Updating a Modernist Icon

United Nations General Assembly Hall. Image via Wikimedia Commons

At the tall iron gates of the United Nations Headquarters in New York, Marian Miszkiel, a Canadian engineer who has previously rebuilt bombed-out buildings in Kosovo, hands me a hard hat and leads me through security and toward the entrance of the General Assembly building. We haul open the heavy silver and nickel front doors, designed by the formidable Canadian modernist Ernest Cormier, into an airy lobby with balconies curved like massive white bones. Boomerang-shaped, the five-storey Assembly is a marvel of mid-century design, a mostly unsung hero of 1950s architecture conceived during that fragile postwar era by a prestigious board of design consultants nominated by member governments, including the legendary architects Oscar Niemeyer and Le Corbusier, the project’s chief architect, Wallace K. Harrison, and Cormier.

Read more here.

Erik Nitsche: The Reluctant Modernist

The life and work of the quietly pivotal Swiss modern design Erik Nitsche, who's clients ranged from the MOMA to RCA in a career that spanned the 20th century.

Eric Nitsche may not be as well known today as his contemporaries, Lester Beall, Paul Rand, or Saul Bass, but he is their equal. Almost 90 years old, this Swiss born graphic designer is arguably one of the last surviving Modern design pioneers. Although he never claimed to be either a progenitor or follower of any dogma, philosophy, or style other than his own intuition, the work that earned him induction last year into the New York Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame, including the total identity for General Dynamics Corporation from 1955 to 1965 and the series of scientific, music, and world history illustrated books, which he designed and packaged during the 1960s and 1970s, fits squarely into the Modernist tradition.

Yet Nitsche’s approach was not a cookie-cutter Modern formula that so many designers blindly followed at that time. It was a personal fusion of early influences (classical and otherwise) and contemporary aesthetics based on fast pacing and dramatic juxtapositions. Rather than adherence to Modernist orthodoxy, Nitsche insists that the methodology that most closely resembles a Modern manner, clean, systematic, and ordered, developed because of his restlessness at doing mostly illustrative work during the early part of his career.

Although he might not own up to the fact that he had played a formidable role in the Modernist legacy, Nitsche does not deny that he was as good - certainly as prolific, if not more so - than any other designer of his age. He also speculates that had it not been for his asocial tendencies ("I preferred to do the work, not talk about it") and a few poor business decisions along the way (he says he turned down a job at IBM that later went to Paul Rand), he might be as well known today as any of the other acknowledged pioneers. In fact, he worked for many of the same clients, including Orbachs, Bloomingdale’s, Decca Records, RCA Records, Filene’s, 20th Century Fox, The Museum of Modern Art, Container Corporation of America, the New York Transit Authority, Revlon, and more. Judging from the sheer volume of work bearing his signature or type credit, there are few others who can make this claim.

Read more and view samples of Nitsche's work, click here.

Video: Bauhaus - Graphic Design Art Craft Painting Drawing Drawings Sculpture

Marks & Spencer launch retro lingerie for Queen's Jubilee

This image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Marks and Spencer has released a collection of 1950s-inspired lingerie to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.

The collection features a "stunning regal purple" bra and knicker set alongside a conical bra and retro teddy to emulate the glamour of the 50s, the retailer said.

Materials include vintage-inspired silk and lace and combinations of satin and mesh.

M&S lingerie designers delved into the company archives to take inspiration from original 1950s designs, where they came across the the conical bra and "big knicker" shapes.

The designs, which include corsetry, have been transformed into "more wearable" items for today's consumers.

Read more at The Belfast Telegraph. Click here.

Art Gallery of Alberta Celebrates 50 Years of Alex Janvier

Morning Star by Alex Janvier. (Creative Commons Share-Alike).

EDMONTON - Aboriginal history is rife with references to the four directions; Alex Janvier’s compass is more complex, like any good hunter’s.

“It’s a lifelong quest,” Janvier says over the phone. “I’m alive, I’m above ground. As long as I’m capable of handling that brush, I’ll be doing something.”

In the coming months we’ll be able to experience the artist’s impact with unprecedented perspective. The Art Gallery of Alberta’s show title Alex Janvier is perfectly chosen. The new show, which opens to the general public on Friday, is a survey, though that’s like saying Elk Island Park is a checklist of wildlife.

Mapping a truly significant lifetime of experimentation, we’ll see Janvier’s childhood oils on Masonite recontextualizing Catholic iconography; the gorgeous early development of his signature style in black and white — his name signed with his treaty number, 287; colourful movement to his famous white backgrounds; work mirroring his masterpiece dome in the National Gallery; map-based protests to land abuse; impressionistic portraits of the Bill Reid and the so-called Indian Group of Seven. Like an ancient summit, the show gathers more than 90 pieces from private and gallery collections continentwide, and includes never-before-displayed early experiments bursting with aggressive colour, borrowed from the artist’s collection.

“The importance of Alex historically,” AGA curator Catherine Crowston explains as the paintings are being hung, “is that he is one of those artists who moved aboriginal art out of the margin — out of the idea of being a decorative, craft-based tradition — moving aboriginal art into the art mainstream culture.”

Read more at The Edmonton Journal. Click here.

Own and build Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye modernist house in cardboard

Wikimedia commons image by Andreas Praefcke

Fancy owning an iconic modernist home? Well, if you are prepared to put in a bit of work, you can pick up Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye modernist house for a fraction of the price of the original.

Of course, there's a catch. This one is the iconic 1930s house in miniature and in cardboard. You also have to put it together yourself. But on the plus side, you'll not have to travel to Poissy, on the outskirts of France, to enjoy this version. It will just be there, sat in your home or office.

A company called Paper Landmarks sells kits of various iconic builds, all of which are made out of a stiff cardboard. You just buy the pre-cut or printed sets (the latter requiring cutting) and follow the instructions to create it. If you want one, you can secure one online for $25 / $39. Alternatively, the Barbican Art Gallery and Bookends in London are listed as retailers. See the site for retailers in other locations.

Read more at Retro To Go. Click here.

Like These Lovely Links!

From HuffPo's George Hobica, Touring America's Iconic Modernist Homes.

An Edmonton prize that once belonged to Wayne Gretzy is the subject of 60s Gem a Labour of Love by Scott McKeen in The Edmonton Journal.

The almost-inexplicable surge in demand for modern art continues unabated as this article, Record Night At Christie's For Calders Amid Post-War Art Mania confirms.

You can't miss these amazing photos from the BBC: In Pictures: Modernist Delhi.

Sad, but true. Demolition Derby for Tel Aviv's Modernist Buildings.

In Pictures: Modernist Delhi

Beautiful images. You must click here!

Advertising Clutter has no place on Chicago's Skyline

With its curving green glass wall echoing a bend in the Chicago River, 333 W. Wacker Drive is one of Chicago's most beloved skyscrapers, a renowned example of architecture that simultaneously draws inspiration from its surroundings and upgrades them.

So I was deeply dismayed last week to get a reader's email alerting me that workers were installing a big "NUVEEN" sign (left) at the top of the 36-story office building.

Guess who was even more upset? The architect of 333, New York's William Pedersen.

"My God," Pedersen said after I showed him a picture of the white-lettered, off-center Nuveen sign — a blot on 333's exquisitely symmetrical riverfront facade. "It is poorly proportioned. It is poorly placed. The sign seems to have little impact other than it just messes up the building."

These warts in the sky are proliferating, bringing ad clutter where it doesn't belong — to Chicago's world-famous skyline.

With the economy still struggling and with office vacancy rates still high, building owners who want to attract or retain tenants may feel they have no choice but to cave in to demands to turn skyscraper tops into advertising billboards.

"To see these signs on these beautiful buildings — they don't belong there, but in today's environment, in today's economy, when you're trying to get a big tenant, that's a real incentive," said Marilyn Lissner, an executive director at Cushman & Wakefield, the global commercial real estate firm.


To read more of this content at The Chicago Tribune, click here.

Imploding the Pruitt-Igoe Myth

Accepted wisdom will have us believe St. Louis' infamous Pruitt-Igoe public housing development was destined for failure. Designed by George Hellmuth and World Trade Center architect Minoru Yamasaki (of Leinweber, Yamasaki & Hellmuth), the 33-building complex opened in 1954, its Modernist towers touted as a remedy to overcrowding in the city’s tenements. Rising crime, neglected facilities, and fleeing tenants led to its demolition—in a spectacular series of implosions—less than two decades later. In the popular narrative, bad public policy, bad architecture, and bad people doomed Pruitt-Igoe, and it became an emblem of failed social welfare projects across the country. But director Chad Freidrichs challenges that convenient and oversimplified assessment in his documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, opening in limited release January 20.

He makes a compelling case. Drawing heavily on archival footage, raw data, and historical reanalysis, the film reorients Pruitt-Igoe as the victim of institutional racism and post-war population changes in industrial cities, among other issues far more complex than poor people not appreciating nice things. But while Freidrichs opens a new vein for discussing Pruitt-Igoe, he doesn't totally dispel the titular myth about it. There's a passing mention of the project’s failure being one of Modernist planning, that such developments "created a breeding ground for isolation, vandalism, and crime." And of course there's an invocation of Charles Jencks' famous declaration that the death of Pruitt-Igoe was "the death of Modernism." But Freidrichs never adequately addresses Pruitt-Igoe's place in the history of urban design.


To read more at The Architectural Record, click here.

Discard or Recycle? Pondering the Fate of Coca-Cola Canada's Iconic Modernist HQ Building

Coca-Cola Canada is moving downtown and out of its Toronto headquarters on Overlea Blvd. in Thorncliffe Park, and the future of the structure is unknown, despite it's iconic status.

“It is one of the best remaining examples in Toronto of a suburban corporate headquarters, which was a new and important building type during the postwar period,” Robert Moffatt of Moriyama & Teshima Architects told The Toronto Star. “It’s a classic, clean-lined modernist design, executed with high-quality materials and workmanship, and immaculately maintained in original condition.”

Designed by Mathers and Halenby, a long-standing Toronto architecture firm whose work included The Eaton Centre and the National Library and Archives in Ottawa, the building was opened July 22, 1965.

Equally uncertain is the fate of the HQ building's beloved bronze landscape sculpture of Coke bottles by Walter Yarwood. "We are doing research to find out whether it belongs to the community or it belongs to (Coca-Cola),” Tova White, Coke HR VP told The Star. “It is obviously an iconic piece that was created especially for this building, so it will be entrusted in some way to either the community or our new facility.”

SkyDome and Expo '67 architect Rod Robbie dead

The architect for two of Canada’s most famous buildings – the SkyDome in Toronto and the Canadian Government Pavilion at Expo ’67 in Montreal – has died at 83 in Toronto.

Roderick “Rod” G. Robbie died Wednesday morning in St. Michael’s Hospital where he’d been admitted Christmas Day for treatment to alleviate the restriction of blood flow to his small intestine. Until shortly before this hospitalization, Mr. Robbie visited the offices of Robbie Young + Wright/IBI Group Architects daily.

Toronto city councillor Adam Vaughan, a long-time family friend, described the architect, an Officer of the Order of Canada since 2003, as “one of the most extraordinary craftspeople that’s ever graced the industry in this country . . . When my dad [Colin, now deceased, a former Toronto councillor and architecture partner with Mr. Robbie] talked about Rod Robbie, he talked about the best person he’d ever practised architecture with, bar none . . . The guy was just brilliant, as close to a genius as anyone, I think, in Toronto, the way he could transform ideas onto paper and from paper into reality.”

A native of England where he obtained degrees in architecture and town planning, Mr. Robbie immigrated to Canada in 1956, eventually becoming an associate at the highly influential modernist firm of Peter Dickinson Associates, Ottawa. In 1966, he moved to Toronto as partner in Ashworth, Robbie, Vaughan & Williams Architects and Town Planners.

It was this firm that secured the commission, in 1966, to design the now-legendary inverted pyramid, called Katimavik (Inuit for “meeting place”), that served as the Canadian pavilion for the Universal and International Exhibition in Montreal. The largest pavilion at Expo ’67, the structure was a huge hit and became a symbol of sorts for the maturity, poise and confidence that the fair represented for Canadians as they marked the country’s centennial.

To read more of this content at The Globe and Mail, click here.

A throwback to the high-octane days of modernist gas station design

The mostly scrubbed-off window signage revealed the vacant west suburban building was a small florist's shop in a recent life.

But for anyone old enough to drive in the 1960s and 1970s--or able to peek out the back window of his father's 1970 Buick Electra 225 ragtop--the rakish inward tilt of the building's glass front wall and the angle of its roof could only mean one thing: Before it was a little shop of flowers it was a Clark Super 100 gas station.

Looking back at the old Clark stations now--and they do turn up here and there--they were clever, efficient little buildings. The tilted glass and angular roof suggested modernity, just as the tailfins and billet-like window schemes of many of the cars of the day. The design was also a perfect way to reinforce the element of speed, given Clark's product was 100 octane premium gasoline--the only kind of gas the stations sold until the 1970s.

To read more of this content at WBEZ91.5, click here.

Marilyn throws a curve at traditional Toronto condo design

When the wraps came off Yansong Ma’s design for the foxily curvaceous Absolute condominium tower in Mississauga almost six years ago, applause rang out from every quarter. Critics at home and abroad hailed the project as a landmark breakout from cereal-box modernism, and home buyers snapped up the product. Popular demand to live in Marilyn Monroe – as pundits instantly dubbed the slinky building – was so feverish, the developers (Fernbrook Homes and Cityzen Group) quickly put its young Beijing-based architect to work on a second, adjacent high-rise in the same style.

Noting recently that the original 56-storey Marilyn was finished and her shorter sister mostly done, I fell to wondering what Mr. Ma, now 35, thought of his early handiwork. Marilyn was his very first tower, after all, and it launched him on a career that has gone from strength to strength since the spring of 2006. He has crafted imaginative hotels, museums and commercial and residential high-rises across China, and is now at work on his first European commission, in Rome.

But before I could pick up the phone, I discovered that Mr. Ma was flying into Mississauga to attend a special presentation about the Absolute buildings at the sprawling suburban city’s annual urban design awards ceremony. So, it was that the Yale-trained architect and I met in a Mississauga restaurant just under the elbow of the first Marilyn.

To read more of this content at The Globe and Mail, click here.