Biber Architects

Things that are 100

Sun, 05 May 2013 10:57:17 -0400

The Woolworth Building

Grand Central Station

Aston Martin

The Oreo

Tour de France

The Apollo Theater

Girl Scouts

Camel Cigarettes

Richard Nixon

Things that are 100

Painter Talking In 1972 Robert Rauschenberg sat on a ladder,...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 06:03:00 -0400

Painter Talking

In 1972 Robert Rauschenberg sat on a ladder, drink in hand (and probably quite a few already downed) to talk about painting. The ladder was in his studio, the chapel of a former orphanage in a place not yet called Noho.

Just knowing that it might still exist, and living nearby in the 1990’s, I was thrilled when I thought I might have found it; I parked my car in a Lafayette Street lot, spying a bit of the gothic windows. Turns out I was right.

When I visited Christy MacLear at the Rauschenberg Foundation last month I had forgotten about it, but it knocked me out when she opened the door and we sauntered into his studio. Exactly as he had left it, but no longer in black and white.

It’s a beautiful space with even more light than when Rauschenberg drawled to Emile de Antonio, as the buildings behind were removed to make…a parking lot.

I met Rauschenberg only once (here it comes) at the White House new year’s eve celebration in 2000. We talked about his studio near Cooper Union, where Carin went to school at precisely the time of the film. In an evening of bold face names (including, of course, Bill and Hill) Rauschenberg may have been the only genius. And it felt electric to stand in his studio, even 5 years after he permanently departed it.

EUR 1 & 2 4 Mar 2013 a nation of poets, artists, heroes,...

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 22:07:37 -0400

EUR 1 & 2
4 Mar 2013

a nation of poets, artists, heroes, saints, philosophers, scientists, navigators, travelers…of dissemblers and disassemblers

Richter Scales

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 15:57:00 -0400

For my birthday we went to Rome, a place that makes everyone seem young, and had dinner in the Ghetto at a restaurant our friends suggested. Piperno is unchanged by time, the only thing in a tiny piazza on Monti de Cenci. Whether it is really Jewish Roman food can be debated, but whether it is sublime cannot be. Plus, it was around the corner from our hotel.

When I stepped out to use the bathroom our friends asked Carin if they could order a small birthday cake and she agreed I could bear the temporary embarrassment. Later the lights went out and for a moment we thought it was a power outage, but it was just my cupcake of a celebration entering the room and everyone there sang (incredibly as it was Rome) “Happy Birthday”. Including the table next to us where Gerhard Richter was having dinner.

Now that Gerhard Richter has sung “Happy Birthday” to me, I am hoping this is just the beginning of celebrity participation in my life’s events. Here are a few of the next random appearances I would like to request:

Keith Richards: colonoscopy
Michael Bloomberg: tax audit
Lena Dunham: facial
Elvis Costello: suit alteration
Tina Fey: Mother’s 90th birthday
Stephen Hawking: my nephew’s graduation
Ricky Jay: the next Bar Mitzvah I am forced to attend
Barney Frank: choosing my next cellphone plan
Robert Caro: really long plane flight
Woody Allen: Netflix queue rearrangement

Please see what can be arranged.
Thank you.

Mad Maxxi The brilliance of Bilbao, and you know I mean the...

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 02:55:42 -0500

Mad Maxxi
The brilliance of Bilbao, and you know I mean the museum, not the town, is that under all that sumptuous shrouding is a very sensible and usable museum. Despite what some say about the original Guggenheim and its offspring they are both remarkable places to view art. The Wright building for its continuous storyline, always with a view to the whole space; and the Gehry for its equally imaginative collage of museum typologies united by the skin that spawned the Bilbao Effect. They both, for entirely different reasons, are buildings that actually like art.

Rome’s MAXXI seems so resentful of the fact that it must contain ‘other’s’ art, that it does its best to make that experience subservient to the real art on display; Dame Hadid.

This is a building nearly consumed by the most sinuous and confounding circulation route ever devised since Norman Bel Geddes designed the Futurama building at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. But Futurama was entirely about the trip. It was a ride, literally, through time, scale, space and narrative that began at the winding ramps outside and ended in a full scale intersection in the New York of the future.

MAXXI, on the other hand, attempts to create a future through style rather than content, a feat that will age as surely as Rome has endured. The insult is made even more confounding by the remarkable exposition in the architectural model exhibition currently (permanently?) on display. There the losing entries in the international competition show us what might have been, making it even clearer that the winner was to be more art than art museum, more brand image than content.

While ZH may deserve a paean for any number of reasons, why must it impersonate an art museum? Perhaps because it is less dangerous than imitating a Fire Station…though some artists may disagree.

Inside Outside Inside The Villa Guilia is, even more than the...

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 01:20:15 -0500

Inside Outside Inside
The Villa Guilia is, even more than the Glass House or Jacque Tati’s film “Playtime”, about transparency, layering and the ambiguity of inside and outside.

Without the technical option to use glass as a literal transparent membrane, or the ability to span large spaces without massive vaulting or domes, the rooms of the Villa Guilia depend instead on the genius of form in light. Designed by, among others, Michelangelo, the villa employs a robust grid and a deft manipulation of scale (two of his favorite architectural tropes). In the end they are as finely wrought and structurally explicit as anything by Mies and as spatially layered and sequenced as anything by Le Corbusier.

And they manage, as Colin Rowe noted in 1950, all this modernity (and mannerism) a mere 400 years before any of the above.

EUR 4 Mar 2013

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 00:13:54 -0500

EUR
4 Mar 2013

Rome 3.3.2013

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 00:11:27 -0500

Rome 3.3.2013

Roma Senza Papa 2 Mar 2013

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 15:55:55 -0500

Roma Senza Papa
2 Mar 2013

Pyramid of Cestius : Cone of Starn Rome 12 BC : 2013...

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 12:49:00 -0500

Pyramid of Cestius : Cone of Starn
Rome 12 BC : 2013 AD

Location Location Location Action

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 00:09:00 -0500

Steven Soderbergh’s new movie “Side Effects” was shot in a pile of NYC locations, including the Pentagram Design offices we designed when I was a partner. Watching the movie I lapsed into ‘close reading’ mode, as in Nicholson Baker’s 1995 piece “Books as Furniture” in which he analyzed the prop books on the shelves behind pajama models looking for deep structure and psycho-historical meaning…

…which poster by which partner was cropped and relocated to which stand-in bathroom; which stack of books was propped on the partners mezzanine; which carpet needed replacement, and other meaningless imponderables. Plus the fun of stars inhabiting your space as their own; Rooney Mara as Emily sitting at Emily Oberman’s desk; Polly Draper occupying a conference room as her office; Jude Law meandering down the stair to confront a series of fake pharma-ads (by Emily Oberman) all taking on the feeling of looking in on renters living in your home. Very famous and beautiful renters.

Contrast, in this movie, Soderbergh’s naturally lighted, real spaces (along with the occasional set) with Kubrick’s highly contrived and imagined sets. Kubrick imbued the set with all the emotion and weight of another character in the movie. For Soderberg they are merely places; real, but mere context.

Photo

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 16:00:50 -0500

LA, Disaster Zone

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 01:59:00 -0500

LA, Disaster Zone

Kubrick at LACMA There is so much design at the LACMA Kubrick...

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 22:47:00 -0500

Kubrick at LACMA

There is so much design at the LACMA Kubrick show it’s hard to know where to start: the incredible Ken Adams sketches, models, drawings; the models of the 2001 sets; Barry Lyndon costumes; drawings and recreations of the Clockwork Orange Milkbar set pieces; The Shining labyrinth; a wall of posters from all his films; his own photographs for Look Magazine; the Olivier Mourgue Djinn chairs…

Guggenheim in Black & White

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 23:42:00 -0400

It costs $22 to enter the Guggenheim. Compare that to $25 at MoMA, or a suggested $25 at the Met and, as they say, it doesn’t scan. Shows are often a let down, even if the building is almost always thrilling. Maurizio Cattelan and Tino Sehgal were fun and engaging and now Picasso in Black and White offers another reason to return.

Sometimes Pablo seems like a team of artists. How else could you explain the gargantuan output? Filling a museum with paintings in shades of grey (mostly. there are a few debatable ones) is just a tiny slice of his work, but there is a huge payoff. The idea of painting in black & white seems like the idea of black & white photography, except it’s not. B&W photography was a technological limitation, while painting in B&W is a deliberate reductivist technique. It may come from sketching, etching and charcoal (all dry media) being translated to a wet one, but it is more than that. While B&W modern films and photography is inevitably referential, B&W painting is about abstraction, not nostalgia.

The exhibit is a chronological display that starts at the bottom with pieces from the beginning of the last century, and ends with some familiar tropes, but the middle is filled with unpredictable paintings that are a revelation. The invention of cubism makes sense in sketch form, though the early dates are simply startling. Thinking of cubism being coincidental with the Model T is a battle of what still looks modern with what may have never looked modern.

The postwar paintings grow out of the Guernica style solidified just before the war. Even the very last painting in the show, a 1969 self-portrait ‘kiss’, grows out of that tradition. But between the wars the style is pure search and invention.

Photography is prohibited, and most aren’t in the catalog, so hike up the ramp to be surprised by the artist you think you knew better than any other. And the museum you know so well has made a subtle yet powerful change to the painting displays in the rotunda - by pulling the walls forward of the ‘skylit’ recesses that Wright created, everything is improved.

Go see Wright, go see Pablo, and see what the world would look like in B&W.

Oh Sandy In what must be the most ironic aspect of today’s...

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 23:10:00 -0400

Oh Sandy
In what must be the most ironic aspect of today’s ‘weather event’ I am sitting in an apartment in Battery Park City, which, in addition to being in the A zone (mandatory evacuation), is now an island unto itself. Everything around us is dark, flooded, wet and windy. The ballfields were beautifully underwater, darkened towers surround us, lit with a glow from somewhere we can’t see, but we haven’t lost power, haven’t lost heat, water or even 500 channels of cable TV. And at 11:00 on Monday night it looks as though the worst is over. We are one of the refuse-niks who opted to stay and managed to avoid the worst of the storm in the most vulnerable part of the city. The worst parts were the shrill and often hysterical reporters with little to say except just how much really bad shit we were missing.

Towers of Light The finest, most elegantly elegiac tribute to...

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 21:49:00 -0400

Towers of Light
The finest, most elegantly elegiac tribute to 9/11 that has been created was conceived within days of the event: a pair of ghostly beams shining for a few short nights on each anniversary of the day. They are everything the billion dollar memorial is not; optimistic, weightless, made of light and silent. They take up no physical space, while occupying vast territories of sky and heart. They illuminate small flocks of birds passing through the beam with a sparkle and sense of life that is the closest thing to heavenly ascension that this atheist has ever witnessed.

Dutchess County Fair 1, Rhinebeck, NY August 2012 (or it could...

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 10:35:22 -0400

Dutchess County Fair 1, Rhinebeck, NY
August 2012 (or it could be August 1962…)

Dutchess County Fair 3, Rhinebeck, NY August 2012 (or it could...

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 10:35:00 -0400

Dutchess County Fair 3, Rhinebeck, NY
August 2012 (or it could be August 1972…)

Dutchess County Fair 2, Rhinebeck, NY August 2012 (or it could...

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 10:35:00 -0400

Dutchess County Fair 2, Rhinebeck, NY
August 2012 (or it could be August 1952…)