An Occupation of Loss

An Occupation of Loss, an installation and performance piece designed by OMA/Shohei Shigematsu in collaboration with artist Taryn Simon, runs at New York's Park Avenue Armory from 13 to 25 September 2016. 

Photo: Naho Kubota

World premiere at Park Avenue Armory, NY: "Each night at sundown, more than thirty professional mourners populate Simon’s sculptural installation, broadcasting their lamentations. The status of the lamenters as professionals—performing away and apart from their usual contexts—underscores the tension between authentic and staged emotion, spontaneity and script. Open during the daytime, visitors are invited to activate the sculpture of inverted wells with their own sounds.  A subtle drone created from distilled recordings of the mourners’ rituals provides a white noise that echoes the evening performances.

The resulting work blends sculpture, sound, architecture, and performance in a monumental exploration of the boundaries of grief between living and dead, past and present, performer and viewer."

Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955–1980

Don't miss this great exhibition at MoMA, New York. Only two weeks left - on view until July 19, 2015. 

“Latin America in Construction” recalls a not-so-distant time when architects and governments together dreamed big about changing the world for the better. From Cuba to Chile, Mexico to Argentina, cities in the region boomed. The task of providing everybody with homes ultimately proved unmanageable: proliferating slums outpaced new construction; poverty rose. By the 1980s, a pitiless neoliberalism swept aside much of the abiding faith in public largess and its social agenda. 

Even so, what got built through the 1970s in places like Havana and Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Lima included some of the most inspired architecture of the modern age. The show is an eye-opener, rectifying a long-skewed, Eurocentric worldview, shedding light on a period neglected for generations outside the region. It’s the sort of exhibition MoMA still does best." NYTimes Review

Lina Bo Bardi

Lina Bo Bardi at 100: Brazil’s alternative path to modernism 

Lina Bo Bardi's buildings are shaped by love, people are at the center of her projects. At Sesc Pompeia, her masterpiece, old men play chess and children play with building blocks. People sunbathe on a boardwalk called “the beach”. 

Viva Lina! An Italian in Brazil

So much passion, love, life! Lina was on constant pursuit of the essential and the functional, the ability to innovate and the place people the center of every project. 

Brazil is on my radar! Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955–1980, will be on view at MoMA March 29–July 19, 2015. Looking forward the exhibition.