15 projects from nine countries have been selected for the second Bicycle Architecture Biennale, which launches on Monday in Amsterdam
Continue reading...Category Archives: Art and design
Berlin’s Alexander Haus regains its soul after painstaking restoration
Lakeside house where a Jewish family lived before fleeing the Nazis spans a century of German history
Elsie Alexander called it her “soul place”, the lakeside house on the outskirts of Berlin where her family had spent long happy summers before they were forced to flee the Nazis.
Eighty-three years on, her grandson, Thomas Harding, along with members of the local community, reopened it to the public on Sunday after a painstaking restoration process in which the house by the lake – the subject of his bestselling 2015 book of the same name – was saved from demolition and turned into a educational meeting place for young Europeans.
Continue reading...‘They didn’t look old enough’: who filled a French art gallery with fakes?
Last year, a museum dedicated to the work of Étienne Terrus revealed most of its paintings were probably not by him. How did it get there?
Odette Traby was dying. It was the summer of 2016 and the sun baked the terracotta roofs of her hometown, Elne, in the south of France, as she lay in bed. Weeks earlier, the 78-year-old had been diagnosed with stage IV cancer. This grande dame of Elne town life had refused all treatment and chosen to tough it out alone. “She was someone who wanted to grapple with, to face up to, death,” says Dani Delay, her niece.
Traby had one consolation. She had spent the previous months trying to secure the future of her life’s work, the town’s art museum. It was dedicated to the work of the local artist Étienne Terrus (1857-1922), a friend of Henri Matisse who had been largely forgotten by the time Traby established the museum in the mid-90s. When nearly 60 Terruses came on to the market in 2015, Traby rallied two local historical associations to raise tens of thousands of euros, securing at least 30 of the works. As her life ebbed, at least Traby could tell herself that her beloved museum was closer to gaining the “Musée de France” status that would give it priority state funding and resources.
Continue reading...UK rights advocate co-owns firm whose spyware is ‘used to target dissidents’
Exclusive: Yana Peel co-owns NSO Group that licensed Pegasus software to authoritarian regimes
A leading human rights campaigner and head of a prestigious London art gallery is the co-owner of an Israeli cyberweapons company whose software has allegedly been used by authoritarian regimes to spy on dissidents, the Guardian can reveal.
Yana Peel, the chief executive of the Serpentine Galleries and a self-proclaimed champion of free speech, co-owns NSO Group, a $1bn (£790m) Israeli tech firm, according to corporate records in the US and Luxembourg.
Continue reading...Unbuilt Tokyo: ‘depthscrapers’ and a million-person pyramid
Had the creators of the underground skyscraper had their way, the Japanese capital might have looked very different indeed
Protected by cylindrical walls of reinforced concrete, the steel and glass “depthscrapers” extend hundreds of metres underground. Only a single floor of each inverted 35-storey skyscraper is visible at ground level.
Giant mirrors mounted directly above the central wells reflect sunlight to the apartments below. Prismatic glass ensures even light throughout the day, while fresh, conditioned air is pumped down from the surface.
Continue reading...The big picture: Miguel Rio Branco captures incongruous city life
Decay and renewal are encapsulated by fresh pastries on a banger’s bonnet
This picture is taken from a book called Maldicidade by the Brazilian photographer Miguel Rio Branco. The title translates literally from the Portuguese as “malice”, but it carries too the echoes of the words “city” and “cursed”. Rio Branco grew up the son of a diplomat, citizen of the world and for half a century his camera has given him similar licence. Though earlier work, photo essays for National Geographic for example, focused on very specific communities – the young fighters of the Santa Rosa Boxing Academy in Rio de Janeiro or the prostitutes and street children of Salvador de Bahia – he has come to reject expected labelling of time and place.
The photographs in Maldicidade are uncaptioned, drawn from a lifetime of wandering the backstreets of New York, Havana, Barcelona and beyond. Rio Branco looks for those contrasts between grimy decay and daily renewal that are the universal fascination of city life. This picture, of a tray of fresh pastries served under the open bonnet of a beaten-up car, depicts exactly the kind of incongruity that his camera waits for. The colour and sweetness of those cakes contrast with the greys of the car and the street.
Continue reading...Gaudí’s Sagrada Família wins a building permit – 137 years after work began
Spanish architect’s masterpiece still unfinished but there’s now a chance its central towers will be completed
Property owners have a new yardstick for measuring their frustration over building permit requests that are lost in the labyrinth of local government bureaucracy.
Barcelona city hall has finally issued a work permit for the unfinished church designed by the architect Antoni Gaudí, 137 years after construction started on the Sagrada Família basilica.
Continue reading...Hull works towards securing its City of Culture legacy
Residents hope regeneration will continue long after funding runs out
“Change is happening.” You can’t miss the three-word slogan that is plastered over the bright green building hoardings near Hull’s Humber Street Gallery. It feels like an apt one too. Modern townhouses are being built in the area next to the city’s dockside, which is being sold as “Hull’s new modern and exciting regeneration development”. There are temporary gallery spaces, workshops and dance classes, and cheap artist studios are being built. It is the kind of arts-led regeneration that has come to urban areas like the Northern Quarter in Manchester, Williamsburg in Brooklyn and Chueca in Madrid.
But this is different. This is Hull. A place whose name alone supposedly conjures images of “unspecified post-industrial misery”, king of the so-called “Crap Towns” and the bete noire of property expert Kirstie Allsopp – who deemed Hull the UK’s worst place to live in 2005. But Humber Street is a sign of progress and a rebranded city: a place buoyed by successful, year-long City of Culture celebrations that happened in 2017. If Hull has its swagger back, there’s good reason.
Continue reading...Naked protesters condemn nipple censorship at Facebook headquarters
Demonstrators cover bodies with stickers to ensure nipples on display are ‘male’, in line with Facebook policy
Some were hairy. Some were pointy. Some were dark brown, some a pale pink. But the hundreds of nipples on display in front of Facebook’s New York City headquarters on Sunday were technically “male”, despite some being on female protesters.
More than 100 people lay nude on the sidewalk to call for a change to the company’s censorship policies. The action, called #wethenipple, was organized by the artist Spencer Tunick and the National Coalition Against Censorship.
Continue reading...Lewis chessmen piece bought for £5 in 1964 could sell for £1m
Missing walrus tusk warrior was purchased in Edinburgh and stored in a drawer
A small walrus tusk warrior figure bought for £5 in 1964 – which, for years, was stored in a household drawer – is a missing piece from one of the true wonders of the medieval world, it has been revealed.
The Lewis chessmen were found in 1831 in the Outer Hebrides and became beloved museum collections in London and Edinburgh. They have also become well known in popular culture from Noggin the Nog to Harry Potter.
Continue reading...Shen Wei’s best photograph: a naked self-portrait on a Chinese stage
‘Not knowing if anyone would walk in gave me energy and inspired my powerful stance’
On a trip through Jiangxi province in south-east China two years ago, my friend and I were wandering around one of the area’s many small villages. It was tiny and empty apart from a few old men and women sitting in front of their houses.
There was a single street which all the doors of the village opened on to. One had a normal black door with a sign above it that said something like “club” or “meeting hall”. It was the only indication of it being non-residential, so I pushed it open. We found an empty theatre with two raised stages. Chairs were stacked on one and on the other was this set: two chairs and a table, draped in red fabric. I instantly knew I had to take a photograph.
Continue reading...Italy’s new ruins: heritage sites being lost to neglect and looting
Overgrown and weathered, many historical monuments are disappearing as public funds for culture fail to match modern Italy’s inheritance
Legend has it that the grotto hidden among the craggy cliffs on San Marco hill in Sutera in the heart of Sicily holds a treasure chest full of gold coins. In order to find it, three men must dream simultaneously about the precise place to dig.
Treasure or no treasure, the grotto itself is an archaeological gem, its walls adorned with a multi-coloured Byzantine-esque 16th-century fresco depicting Jesus, the Virgin Mary and Saints Paulinus, Luke, Mark and Matthew.
Continue reading...The rise and fall of Las Vegas motels – in pictures
Photographer Fred Sigman’s latest book, Motel Vegas, documents the vernacular roadside architecture that at once dominated the Nevada city’s skyline
Continue reading...Now kids, help us to kill Bin Laden! The dark side of Washington’s spy museum
The bugged shoes and poison brollies are fun and fascinating. But why are the sections about state-sponsored torture and assassination so uncritical?
Sitting in a glass case, standing out against a backdrop of deep red, there’s an ice axe that still bears a rust mark, the consequence of a bloody fingerprint left on it decades ago. One day in 1940, this axe was hidden inside Ramón Mercader’s suit jacket, suspended by a string, as he walked into the office of Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary living in exile in Mexico, having been sentenced to death as an “enemy of the people” in his home country.
Mercader slipped behind Trotsky’s desk and brought the axe down with tremendous force, penetrating two-and-three-quarter inches into his skull. Trotsky died 26 hours later. Mercader served 20 years in prison then returned to a hero’s welcome in Moscow. On his deathbed in 1978, his last words were: “I hear it always. I hear the scream. I know he’s waiting for me on the other side.”
Continue reading...Headless self-portraits from a face everyone knew – Luchita Hurtado review
Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London
Marcel Duchamp massaged her feet and Leonora Carrington built her kids a house. But the work of the 98-year-old Venezuela-born painter is every bit as extraordinary as her life
For a period while living in Chile with her artist-husband Lee Mullican in the late 1960s, Luchita Hurtado painted inside a walk-in closet, standing there and looking down over her breasts and belly to her feet and the floor below. Sometimes a bar of light came in through the slats of the door. She included this in her painting, too. She looks down at the rug, or into a woven basket, that streak of light picking out the weave of the basket, momentarily brightening the pattern on the Navajo rug.
In one painting she drops a strawberry into a bowl on the floor. It hangs in mid-air in the half-lit gloom. Sometimes there seem to be two, three or even four people in there: eight feet on a gorgeous rug, green apples big as bowling balls, inexplicably huge and vivid against the dyed lozenges of the rug, every nub in the rug’s structure picked-out in paint. The painting evokes the feel of the rough texture against naked feet. In another it is all flat zigzags and pattern, interrupted by naked mellow skin.
Continue reading...The 20 photographs of the week
Conflict in Syria, shocking pink fashion at Cannes, and a seal pup making a splash – the last seven days, as captured by the world’s best photojournalists
Continue reading...In pictures – IM Pei’s finest works
IM Pei, one of the most celebrated and prolific architects of the 20th century, has died aged 102. The son of a prominent Chinese banker, he favoured stone, steel and glass in his creations that bore his hallmark geometry and reverence for light
Continue reading...Titian masterpieces to be displayed together for first time since 1704
The 16th-century paintings will be shown as a series in London, Edinburgh, Madrid and Boston
One of the most important groups of high Renaissance paintings is to be brought together for the first time in more than 300 years.
A partnership between galleries in London, Edinburgh, Boston and Madrid was announced on Thursday which will allow five of Titian’s greatest paintings to be seen as they were intended – together as a series.
Continue reading...Rooftop pool? Notre Dame proposals defy traditionalists
Designs from architects around world also suggest glass, crystal and metal spires
An architecture firm has proposed replacing the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral with a swimming pool, as France prepares to launch an international competition to restore the fire-damaged gothic edifice to its former glory.
After the roof and spire of Notre Dame were damaged in a fire watched worldwide in April, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, said he was open to a “contemporary gesture” in rebuilding it “more beautiful than before”, and the prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, called for a new spire “adapted to the techniques and the challenges of our era”.
Continue reading...Boards not borders: Gaza youth skate in search of fun – in pictures
Calling themselves the Gaza skate team, a group of young Palestinians get together to skate and rollerblade amid deprivation and high security
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