Rapidly expanding Olson, the largest advertising agency in Minneapolis, enlisted Gensler to design their 125,000 sq. ft. offices within Minneapolis’s historic Ford Center building, while maintaining the industrial character of the space. All elements were considered: from work flow to brand rooms to client-focused food and beverage service system. However, it is the treatment of the environmental graphics that I am focusing on here. They support and further the architectural concept, becoming an essential part of the design. Innovative use of super graphics enliven the building’s public spaces, yet continue to respect the building’s original character. The type treatment is bold, fun, and super creative, with giant floor numbers made out of colored string and nails, as just one example. The firm’s name is boldly and amorphously displayed on the ceiling of the top floor, to be clearly read from the street looking up. The staircases and bathrooms continue with large painted signage and even the wall graphics and colorful furniture scream bold, assertive, and fun.

Photos by Pete Sieger

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Canadian artist Michel de Broin adopts a critical and playful attitude towards common objects and ideas. For the Luminato Festival, going on currently in Toronto, Broin created his installation One Thousand Speculations, a 7.9 metre in diameter ball made up of 1000 mirrors that will be lifted 80-feet above the ground of David Pecaut Square each night of the Festival. The largest disco ball in the world will spin, twinkle, and reflect against the buildings around the square for the duration of the festival. Fun!

Photos courtesy Luminato Festival and Damn Cool Pictures.

Peruvian-born, NYC-based artist Grimanesa Amoros uses sculpture, video, and light to create works that “illuminate our notions of personal identity and community.” Light is one of her primary materials because it creates “presence without physicality.” Earlier this month Amoros unveiled her latest site-specific commission at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum in Beijing. The work, titled The Mirror Connection, consists of a huge waterfall-like scribble of LEDs that pulsate in their white and yellow colors giving a sense of liquid flowing through tubes. The lights bounce off the walls and reflect off the metal domes they emanate from as well as intermittently casting shadows around the space. The sheer scale of the piece at a height of 33 feet—evident by the minute size of the people wandering the museum gallery in the photos—must be breathtaking. You can see the piece in action on the top left corner on this page.

Photos courtesy of the artist and news.cn

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The University of British Columbia (UBC) invited Vancouver-based architecture and design firm Public together with landscape architects Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg to revitalize the courtyards between the existing Buchanan buildings, home to the Faculty of the Arts. Their solution: two dynamic spaces; one for contemplation and relaxation and the other for gathering and performances. At its center is a striking and twisty concrete pavilion, a sculpture in itself, which rests in a reflecting pool that contains typeset quotations in radiating rings mimicking the logo for The Arts whose identity was also designed by Public. In addition to being a visually pleasing place to spend time, by including the new reflecting pool the designers solved a chronic storm water management problem that plagued the space.

Photos courtesy of Public. Second photo by Stephan Pasche for Fast+Epp

This past March, during an ordinary week, a giant wooden cube seemingly crashed through the roof of Galleri Fisk in Bergen Hordaland, Norway, with the largest part of the cube occupying the building’s interior, and approximately one quarter of it sticking out from the rooftop. Then, after three days, it suddenly disappeared. There was no actual crash but, instead, environmental artist Hidemi Nishida’s installation Fragile Invasion took over the gallery. Nishida creates temporary shelters to make people aware of their surrounding environment, often organizing happenings in these shelters. In the case of Fragile Invasion, the happening seems to have been the installation itself.

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A couple of weeks ago I went out to Rockaway Beach for the first time since last fall/winter when the post-Sandy ravaged beach looked like it would never quite bounce back with its boardwalk blown to bits, its playgrounds’ asphalt erupting like lava from a volcano, and the large parking lot near 105th St. practically invisible under the mounds of sand that had made its way two blocks in from the shore. But bounce back it has—though not quite 100%—clearly through an amazing amount of effort, work, and expense by countless numbers of people and organizations.

The boardwalk is still MIA but right away I noticed new, crisp signage clearly marking each beach name and street, as well as temporary concrete islands (designed by Sage and Coombe Architects) emblazoned with colorful supergraphics also displaying the corresponding beach numbers. Not surprisingly, I have since found out, perusing the Pentagram website, that the environmental graphics are the handy work of Paula Scher and her team of designers. Scher previously developed the identity and signage standards for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, which manages and maintains the city’s beaches, and the beach graphics are an extension of that program, utilizing the logo but changing the fonts and colors.

In addition, the graphics have been applied to the mod ‘pods’ designed by Garrison Architects that contain the lifeguard and comfort stations . These look a little more futuristic and slick in the renderings than in reality, but in truth, they weren’t completely finished when I was there.

Impressive work all around, from clean-up, to graphics and architecture. By July 4th weekend it should all be in full-swing again, with many concession stands opening then. New Yorkers are a pretty invincible bunch.

Photos and renderings courtesy of Pentagram & Garrison Architects.

Imagine a theater made almost exclusively made of recycled paper and other recycled materials. That’s what Paris-based architecture and scenography practice Studio Andrew Todd did. Their design has been selected for exhibition at the 2013 World Stage Design event in Cardiff, opening in early September. The exterior scaffolding structure is used to erect and brace a massive wall of paper bales. The center oculus gets pulled up via cables and bamboo purlins are fixed at the top. A double layer of recycled circus tent roofing is then placed on top of the bamboo and the interior is finished with bamboo and cardboard with natural light streaming through the roof’s center. Should be very cool, not to mention sustainable.

All images ©Studio Andrew Todd.

Last month at the Frieze Art Fair, I came across Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury’s piece Scratch, a small sculpture made with rollers and hairpins (or curlers and bobby pins) and the simplicity, as well as the fun choice of objects, made me smile. Fleury, based in Geneva, typically uses fashion and luxury products in her work. Her art, at first glance, may seem like an affirmation of our consumerist society but, if you look closer, it’s quite the opposite. Her series of Scratch sculptures is no exception, playfully using objects, in this case hair rollers, that focus on superficial beauty.

Photos courtesy of the artist and Frieze.

Sonos Playground Deconstructed, an immersive and interactive installation by Red Paper Heart (previously here) — currently at the Museum of Moving Image here in NYC in conjunction with Spectacle: The Music Video exhibition — brings minimalist art to life using five detached walls suspended above a reflective floor. Each of the walls has been painted with 27 1-inch wide white lines and 26 2-inch wide black lines. By mapping the white lines set between black lines the studio was able to create a more immersive and surreal environment. Visitors are able to select any song from an iPad and watch a visualization of the music projected onto the surrounding walls. Through motion-capture technology, they can interact with and manipulate the animation through movement.

Take a look at it in motion in the video below:

Sonos Playground Deconstructed (deconstructed because it was originally installed in a 250 sq. ft shed at the Sonos Studio at the 2013 SXSW festival) is on view at the Museum of Moving Image until June 16, 2013.

Photos courtesy of Red Paper Heart and MoMI

What if the keyboards that we use incessantly all day would work in reality? If you could escape something by a push of a button? Delete anything by a flick of a finger? Or format your surroundings to your liking? These are the questions that Israeli designer Yossi Wallner is posing with his recent street art project around Tel Aviv. He has placed these function keys in random locations surely piquing the curiosity of those who come across them. I’ve never seen a ‘Sleep’ or ‘Wake’ key (must be a pc thing) but those make for interesting messages too. You can see more images of the project on his flickr page.

Photographer Chema Madoz finds the surreal in the everyday. Not suprisingly Madoz is from Spain, where surrealism seems to run thick in the veins with predecessors like Dali and Buñuel setting a similar tone and sensibility years back. Madoz’s photographs make you do double-takes, with seemingly unrelated objects he fuses together in the most surprising ways that somehow make sense and often make you smile. All in black and white, with each one more clever than the next.

You can see many more of his photographs on his website.

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I went to galleries on the Lower East Side this weekend here in NYC, and had it not been for my friend Eric, I would have definitely walked on by the Mulherin + Pollard gallery having glanced through the window quickly and seen a room full of oversized photographs of classic sculpture. Once inside, there was something a little off about these photos. Fortunately, one of the gallery owners came over explained the process behind the images, which I ended up really liking. Iconoclashes, as this series of works is called, was created by artists Erik Berglin and Clement Valla at Art Hack day (an event that had intrigued me at the time) a few months back. Berglin and Valla used images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s public web archive that were tagged with the keywords ‘God’ or  ‘Religion’. Using an algorithm in Photoshop, the works were randomly grouped and digitally merged, resulting in surprisingly odd, and in some cases surreal, statues. Because the Met shoots all of its art with the same background and lighting, the melding of the objects is more believable. The clashing of these objects from various time periods and cultures make for some very interesting and unlikely artworks. Even the white space on the right of the images is a result of a clash between vertical and horizontal images, confusing photoshop into leaving an irregular edge.

I found the whole concept fun, as well as technically curious, and, at least that top image, makes a nice sculpture in its crazy combination.

Iconoclashes showed  at Mulherin + Pollard through June 9th, but you can see many more of these visual mash-ups here and here.

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In preparation for his 5th solo exhibit at New York’s Eli Klein Gallery titled Mask,  Liu Bolin (previously here and here) had a live performance where visitors could witness the creation of a new photograph in his Hiding in New York series. Emma and Daniela went over to check it out with some friends and took a few photos of the process. The performance started with Bolin wearing a pre-painted suit with matching images of the rifles and peg holes on the wall behind him. With assistants all around him busy at work for the whole two-hour period, Bolin’s suit was touched up and perfectly positioned to blend in with his backdrop before they moved on to his vaseline-covered (or so it appeared) face where they painted each detail for the final disappearance.

The show Mask opens today at the Eli Klein Gallery in Soho and runs through July 21, 2013. We assume the in-progress rifle photo will be included in the show along with many more of his Hiding in the City series and the JR collaboration that took place last year.

Photos of Liu Bolin by Ana Slade. All other photos courtesy of the artist and Eli Klein Fine Art.

Currently Berlin-based, Lithuanian-born artist Paulius Nosokas has a touching and inspiring childhood story, braving it independently from an early age and coming to the US at the age of 18 where he worked in, and learned on the job, graphic design and screen design. He combines these skills in his art being a firm believer that behind every good work of fine art is good design.

In his series of works titled SPAMspace, Nosokas collected 3-year’s worth of actual spam subject heads that appeared in his 5 email inboxes. He took a small fraction of them and designed them into stripes of color, dividing them into 7 sets — one for each day of the week — placing each line on its side, taking on a graph-like appearance. Together, they tell a story of the power of the written word to seduce, and become a clear representation of the internet and its invasion of privacy. Nosokas chose sexual spam, but could have just as easily  chosen non-sexual lines. SPAMspace is designed to fit in the space at hand, traveling up and across walls. I’d like to see this as a wallpaper selection. Maybe in the pastel tones of pink and blue. Maybe even in a baby’s room! Just kidding…

You might want to check out the rest of Paulius Nosokas’s work that ranges from light drawing to beautifully animated geometric shapes.

All photos courtesy of the artist.