MIA MASSIVE

June 16, 2010

Architecture & Art of Illusion

Architecture & Art of Illusion: Mind-Boggling Wall Mural « Dornob: "As your eye drifts right across the image, a strange sense of vertigo arises as a dull, familiar and repetitive gray concrete-and-glass facade gives way to a mind-blowing montage of eccentric proportions – an information overload that short-circuits our built-in mental pattern recognition software (and just imagine it at full size).

No, you have not gone insane … though you might if you look too long at this giant 10-by-40-foot wall mural by EVOL, part of an art exhibition in Paris. The little potted plants in front of the ‘building’ give you some sense of scale, but not much.

The combination of rough-textured surface materials, spilled gray paint and clipped window photographs make this piece convincing even up close – except for the odd outlet sticking through here or there … or most notably: the giant crunch-point created where an existing steel ceiling beam seems to have dropped in through the roof."

Creative Modern Home + Contextual Design Approach = « Dornob

Creative Modern Home + Contextual Design Approach = « Dornob: "It is one thing to design an outstanding modern home, but quite another to make a contemporary modernist design like this unique house also fit with a less modern neighborhood. This house is an excellent example of a structure built with its own strong sense of personal identity and modern functionalism but that also relates to its surroundings in a respectfully contextual way.

Seen from virtually any angle this house has something of a modernist aesthetic to offer, from abstract slits to asymmetrical facades. It is even constructed of concrete – unlike its 1920s brick-built adjacencies. Nonetheless, looked it with a broader lense it seems to fade into the background and below to the street wall of similar stand-alone buildings from another era.

Within the confines of the complex surrounding the structure, the ground plane is also extremely modernÂ with repetitive wood laid out in two tones – a flat contrast to the vertical walls of the building itself. Inside, the home is dominated by white, wood and concrete, bringing together simple warmth and a small scale with modern surface treatments."

Patchwork old and new

Patchwork Orange: Art of Fixing Buildings with LEGO Blocks « Dornob: "A missing brick here and chipped stone there show the normal marks of wear and tear on the structures and streets of a city, but filling them in with multi-colored LEGO bricks makes them stand out in sharp relief with their surroundings – especially in a place like Berlin.

Titled ‘Dispatchwork’ (a linguistic play on ‘dispatching’ and ‘patching’ the holes), this is part urban art installation, part historical highlighting (since many of the gaps date back to World War II) and part method of calling attention to buildings that could use some help.

Jan Vormann has been toying with LEGO pieces for a long time in various artistic capacities – as well as infilling structural holes with mirrors and other attention-getting materials.

It may look haphazard at first, but there is an art to the process: identifying gaps is naturally subjective, and filling them in is both a creative and crafty act that can involve turning corners and working with existing structural details.

He started this project himself but (surprise!) many people stopped and signed themselves up to lend a hand when they saw what he was doing, grasping handfuls of LEGOs to help fill building voids and remodel life-sized brick-less spaces with miniature toy bricks of many colors."

Walls Closing In: The Art of Remixing Interior Spaces « Dornob

Walls Closing In: The Art of Remixing Interior Spaces « Dornob: "Walls, as we know them, define interior spaces. Most walls create unique spaces. These walls, however, disrupt, permeate, infiltrate and invade them. They challenge ideas of architecture, interior, exterior and place – these additions interfere, obscure, distract and contradict.

The installations of Krijn de Koning are created in all kinds of contexts, from galleries and museums to homes and forests. Some are small scale and seen by few, others are large and placed in highly public spaces.Where he goes, he turns places upside down and inside out.

Using bright colors and simple geometries, this incredible installation artist sets up stark juxtapositions between old and new, permanent and impermanent, functional and artistic.Â Whether you call it art, architecture or interior design his works are worth experiencing."