Take a seat on one of Tanya Preminger’s grass-covered artworks, and you won’t be able to right the balance. The Isreal-based artist created immovable slants and indentations embedded in the land that seem like they should tip depending upon the amount of weight settled on either side. For each sloping piece, Preminger employed an excavator to dig a hole and pour the soil into a nearby pile. She then used a shovel, rake, and lengthy ruler to sculpt the slanted earth, covering it with sod at the end.
After seeing a footprint left in a bit of sand, Preminger wanted to express the relationship between give and take that’s inherent in nature. “In physics, an action is equal to its reaction,” she tells Colossal. “The project expresses in material form the philosophical law of balance between opposing sides of one essence.”
The artist produced the first oval impression in 1989 in the fields of the kibbutz Givat Brenner. When organizers of the Chemin d’Art asked her to recreate her original work for their 2008 festival in France, she designed “Round Balance,” altering her oval to a circle “to give a more universal meaning.” (via Design You Trust)
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With hundreds of millions of people currently in isolation or lockdown, Dezeen's India Block has selected 10 feature films that use architecture in exciting ways to watch as a distraction from coronavirus-induced boredom.
Parasite, 2019
The rich family's house in Korean director Bong Joon-ho's Oscar-winning dark comedy about society practically steal's the show. Sleek modernist lines and expensive furniture betrays little hint of the leech-black darkness below the surface.
Built by the fictional architect Namgoong Hyeonja, the mansion was actually the work of production director Lee Ha-Jun and was made up of multiple sets, cut together to look like one building.
Metropolis is a silent science-fiction film from the 1920s directed by director Fritz Lang, where a story of robots and class war takes place in a sinister city of skyscrapers.
Art directors Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut and Karl Vollbrecht created a visually arresting city for rich buisenessmen, powered by underground machines manned by oppressed workers. Buildings in art deco, gothic and the Bauhaus style are layered to create an arresting vision of the future.
Set in the future – Los Angeles in 2019 – Bladerunner's sci-fi story of a bounty hunter tracking robot replicants is set against a neon backdrop of a dystopian city that pays homage to Fritz Lang's metropolis.
Bladerunner is available to watch on Amazon and Youtube.
Ghost in the Shell, 1995
Mamoru Oshii's anime cyberpunk tale of a cyborg hunting down a hacker in 2029 Japan takes its architectural cues from 1990s Hong Kong, the most futuristic Asian city of the day.
Art director Hiromasa Ogura visited the city and produced scores of photographs, sketches and paintings that formed the basis of the moody landscape fictional of the finished animation.
Ghost in the Shell is available to watch on Amazon.
"[Zaha's work is] what I wanted people to feel for the modern architecture in Black Panther," Beachler told Dezeen. "Very voluptuous, very curvy, no hard edges and the spaces feel both very large and intimate at the same time."
French mime Jacques Tatischeff directed and starred in comedy Playtime, which pokes fun at an absurdly modernist Paris from the future.
Scenes were filmed on huge sets constructed specially for the film. Dubbed Tativille, these stages required their own power plant, although to save money some of the backdrops of famous Paris landmarks were simply blown up photographs.
Based on JG Ballard's 1975 novel of the same name, High Rise charts the descent into chaos of a 40-storey luxury tower block in London, where the residents lose touch with the outside world as class war erupts.
"In the architectural plan they had to put these pillars in to make the structure worked but they didn't give a fuck about that room, so someone was going to suffer and it was the poor bastard who had to stay in that room," Wheatley said.
"That kind of thinking went in to the rest of the High Rise building – it took no prisoners."
High Rise is available to stream on Hulu and Amazon.
Rear Window, 1954
Alfred Hitchcock's claustrophobic thriller Rear Window is told from the fixed perspective of a photographer stuck indoors with a broken leg who becomes fixated on snooping through his neighbour's windows.
Greenwich Village apartments set around a courtyard become a stage for murder, intrigue and voyeurism. The film was made on a massive set built at Paramount, complete with a lighting system that could recreate different times of day and night, and a drainage system to manage a pivotal scene in a thunderstorm.
Rear Window can be watched online via the BFI and Amazon.
2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968
Adored by architects and designers everywhere, Stanley Kubrick's sci fi journey to the moon 2001: A Space Odyssey has minimum dialogue and maximum visuals.
Spaceship interiors feature glowing white grid floors studded with cherry-red modernist furniture, and the film's distinctive aesthetic has launched a thousand homages and exhibitions.
2001: A Space Odyssey can be streamed on Netflix and Amazon.
Isle of Dogs, 2018
Wes Anderson's whimsical stop-motion animated tale of a boy and a quarantined island full of dogs is set in a dystopian Japan 20 years in the future.
Harrod also drew on Edo-period illustrations and Frank Lloyd Wright's lost Imperial Hotel in Tokyo to create the "hellish and beautiful" worlds of Trash Island and Megasaki City.
Daily coronavirus briefing: today's architecture and design coronavirus briefing includes a colourful message of thanks designed by Morag Myerscough, a social distancing-market and Cannes Lions news.
Morag Myerscough creates colourful thank you to health workers
British designer Morag Myerscough has collaborated with In Good Company to create "a message of thanks and love to our incredible dedicated frontline workers", which has been installed on a billboard in Leeds. (via Morag Myerscough Instagram).
Protestors light up New York skyscraper with "Send More Ventilators" projection
Art-activist group The Illuminator has protested the US government's response to the coronavirus pandemic by projecting calls to action onto a New York skyscraper (via Dezeen).
Google publishes changes in local travel during pandemic
Google is publishing a series of Community Mobility Reports that will chart movement trends in different communities during the pandemic. "Each Community Mobility Report is broken down by location and displays the change in visits to places like grocery stores and parks," explained the company (via Google).
Shift Architecture Urbanism designs social distancing into the food market
Dutch studio Shift Architecture Urbanism has developed a model for a street food market where people can buy fresh produce without coming into contact with one another (via Dezeen).
Video reveals inside of NHS Nightingale coronavirus hospital
Seven design-related Instagram accounts for a break from coronavirus news
With people self-isolating around the world, creatives and cultural institutions are using Instagram to entertain their bored followers. Social media assistant Daria Casalini has put together a list of light-hearted design and architecture accounts that offer respite from the news (via Dezeen).
London's Architecture Foundation launches 100 Day Studio
The Architecture Foundation has launched a series of hour-long online events, which will include lectures, interviews, building tours, panel discussions and quizzes. The events will take place from 6 April to 27 August during the coronavirus outbreak (via Architecture Foundation).
Columbia University's MFA students demand a refund for tuition fees
Students in the Visual Arts Program at Columbia University have called for a refund for their studio-based courses and a free additional semester, following the school's transition to online learning during the outbreak (via Art News).
Cannes Lions 2020 cancelled
Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, and the associated awards ceremony, has been cancelled. It was originally due to take place 22-26 June and had already been moved to 26-30 October, but organisers have now decided that the event will not go ahead (via Campaign).
Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit launches online marketplace
Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) has established a online market place for artists whose have been impacted by coronavirus to sell their works (via Art News).
Dubbed “a miniature home-gym for your mind”, the downloadable pack features arty things to do like making loo roll sculptures and designing monuments to key workers.
