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"I attach importance to fineness. I am more nervous." Ryuji Nakamura is comparing himself to Jun Aoki, the Tokyo-based architect for whom he worked prior to opening his eponymous studio in 2004. That attitude has produced interiors and furniture that are literally featherweight, and whose delicate features require tireless curiosity to fully comprehend.   MORE >>

"I attach importance to fineness. I am more nervous." Ryuji Nakamura is comparing himself to Jun Aoki, the Tokyo-based architect for whom he worked prior to opening his eponymous studio in 2004. That attitude has produced interiors and furniture that are literally featherweight, and whose delicate features require tireless curiosity to fully comprehend.
 
Although Nakamura's birthplace, Nagano, is home to the famous Buddhist temple Zenko-ji, Nakamura says the everyday houses he encountered walking to and from school turned him on to architecture. He first pursued an education in the discipline there, too, but "It was rather too free," he says. Even in his student days, he contrasted the freewheeling academic atmosphere with a precise aesthetic that allows no excess.
 
Atmosphere, scenery commissioned by the Tokyo Chamber Opera Theatre for the György Ligeti end-of-the-world opera "Le Grand Macabre," shows those proclivities still in development. For the two-night performance in February 2009, Nakamura suspended 242 strands of furry polyester ribbon from battens in the theater's fly gallery. The swags are arranged in a skewed grid that amplifies the sense of perspective; operating from catwalks high above the stage, crew members moved 10 battens at a time, further transforming the distorted landscape below and forcing the singers to move with it in tandem. The ribbons' catenary curves may represent apocalyptic wreckage, but the benefit of extreme minimalism, Nakamura says, is that the audience can project any number of symbols onto the stage.
 
For Blossom (2009), a cosmetic redo of a Nagano wedding venue's dining room for which Nakamura changed only one wall, sharp eyes are as necessary as an elastic mind. To exploit the little daylight that enters the space, the architect clad the wall in a sheet of stainless steel laser-cut into 12,000 flowers and painted white. The heat of fabrication caused the infinitesimally thin metal to warp just enough so that each shape projects outward slightly differently, creating a remarkably diverse, yet subtle, pattern of changing shadows.
 
In pursuit of fineness, Nakamura has particularly devoted research to a wave-like form that looks something like the mouth of a goldfish. "The wave can fill a big volume with little material," he explains, and the 38-year-old has laser-cut the shape in aluminum to produce the garden stool Nukegara 2 (2009). Working in vulcanized paper, he has made the lounge chair Hechima 4 (2008) as well as Kuma (2006), a teddy bear that seems beyond Nakamura's anxious personality -- until he explains that it is really a totem meant for healing. "It makes one feel grounded," he says of the animal. "I can look at it for a long time" -- which could also be said about his newest work Colorful (2010), a 3-D grid of multicolored corrugated paper that changes hue according to the viewer's position.
 
Even Nakamura's most substantial works appear ready to be whisked away by a gust of wind. In one of several spaces he has designed for the eyeglass chain Jin's Global Standard, a series of paneled corridors is folded into funhouse proportions. Elsewhere, to hold eyeglasses, he invented a tiny vulcanized-paper shelf that looks like a curling Post-it. "I would like to design a house, museum and church," Nakamura says. When he does, expect the building occupants to appear hardier than the structures themselves. ryujinakamura.com   << LESS

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With the opening of the Tampa Museum of Art, Floridians gain not just a new cultural center, but also an ethereal digital sunset courtesy of New York artist Leo Villareal. With a series of multicolored LED fixtures tucked between two layers of perforated aluminum panels in the museum’s facade, Villareal's installation, named "Sky (Tampa)," transforms the building at night into a 300-foot-long, 45-foot-high ribbon of pulsating, colored light.   MORE >>

With the opening of the Tampa Museum of Art, Floridians gain not just a new cultural center, but also an ethereal digital sunset courtesy of New York artist Leo Villareal. With a series of multicolored LED fixtures tucked between two layers of perforated aluminum panels in the museum’s facade, Villareal's installation, named "Sky (Tampa)," transforms the building at night into a 300-foot-long, 45-foot-high ribbon of pulsating, colored light.

Albuquerque-born Villareal, 43, is fast becoming the art world’s most accomplished magician of large-scale light fields. In 2008, he created "Multiverse," a wall and ceiling installation involving 41,000 computer-controlled LEDs at Washington DC's National Gallery of Art, where a 200-foot-long hallway billows with illuminated data clouds. In 2007, he completed "Microcosm" for the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas -- a 12,000 LED pixelated kaleidoscope that hangs above the museum's entrance. The San Jose Museum of Art will exhibit a survey of Villareal's rapidly expanding portfolio this August, and he's also at work on what is sure to be an enlightening installation for New York's Broadway-Lafayette subway station.
 
Villareal, a graduate of New York University's brainy Interactive Telecommunications Program, dabbled in virtual reality technology before finding art. He derives the patterns that play out across his architectural installations from custom software and patient experimentation. "I started out working with rules, different structures and code," he says. "Then I started thinking about patterns you’d find in nature, like waves, and boiling them down to their essence." He also pulls freely from math and science, exploring everything from mathematician John Conway's Game of Life to Sir Isaac Newton's law of universal gravitation to create patterns that appear to come from Mother Nature.
 
"Leo's work is not just the sum of the lights that are used," says Leigh Conner, owner of Washington DC's Conner Contemporary Art gallery, which represents Villareal. "The actual artwork is the digital code." And even though bits and bytes represent a distinct departure from paintbrush and palette, Conner knew she was witnessing something important the first time she saw Villareal's creations in 2002: "I thought, 'This is it -- this is the new way of abstract painting.'" Only this time, the compositions refuse to sit still. villareal.net   << LESS

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Knowing the ropes of breaking into fashion photography all too well, London-based gallery Spring Projects—housed in the same building as esteemed photo house Spring Studios—used its February exhibition, “Oh! You Pretty Things,” to celebrate the UK’s most promising emerging stars. Creative agency Six Creative and Spring Studios’ Mark Loy collaborated with the gallery’s director Andree Cooke to choose five artists—Alice Hawkins, Daniel Jackson, Josh Olins, Angelo Pannetta and Jacob Sutton—whose work solidifies the new generation of shooters who transcend conventionality by commenting on glamour, perfection, sex and pop culture.   MORE >>

Knowing the ropes of breaking into fashion photography all too well, London-based gallery Spring Projects—housed in the same building as esteemed photo house Spring Studios—used its February exhibition, “Oh! You Pretty Things,” to celebrate the UK’s most promising emerging stars. Creative agency Six Creative and Spring Studios’ Mark Loy collaborated with the gallery’s director Andree Cooke to choose five artists—Alice Hawkins, Daniel Jackson, Josh Olins, Angelo Pannetta and Jacob Sutton—whose work solidifies the new generation of shooters who transcend conventionality by commenting on glamour, perfection, sex and pop culture.

“Fashion photography, like all art forms today, is evolving with intense variety,” Cooke says. Take Hawkins, who has shot beauty pageant contestants in their native environments to examine the definitions of beauty, or Olins, who adopts an over-styled aesthetic to interpret his childhood icons.

What bonds the seemingly disparate quintet is an approach that exemplifies how the industry has changed. “There’s a feeling of dissatisfaction with overly manipulated imagery, and an appetite for work that has a feeling of genuineness,” Sutton says. “Photography has never been the deliverer of truth, but good photography always gives the viewer the perception of it.” springprojects.co.uk
 
Photos copyright: Josh Olins, Jacob Sutton/Hana Al-Sayed, Jacob Sutton, Daniel Jackson   << LESS

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The day before his inauguration, Barack Obama made an appearance at the Washington, DC, homeless-youth center Sasha Bruce House, pulling down a stubborn curtain and rolling cerulean paint on the walls according to a redesign by New York-based architecture firm HWKN. And while studio namesakes Matthias Hollwich (the HW) and Marc Kushner (KN) admit their $1,500 scheme merely created cleaner and more private spaces, the outpouring of responses to the project pegged it as revolutionary. Scores of TV viewers contacted their SoHo office to learn how they, too, could construct a more socially responsible reality.   MORE >>

The day before his inauguration, Barack Obama made an appearance at the Washington, DC, homeless-youth center Sasha Bruce House, pulling down a stubborn curtain and rolling cerulean paint on the walls according to a redesign by New York-based architecture firm HWKN. And while studio namesakes Matthias Hollwich (the HW) and Marc Kushner (KN) admit their $1,500 scheme merely created cleaner and more private spaces, the outpouring of responses to the project pegged it as revolutionary. Scores of TV viewers contacted their SoHo office to learn how they, too, could construct a more socially responsible reality.

Since 2006—when Hollwich, a 38-year-old German, and Kushner, a New Jersey-born 32-year-old, met in the office kitchen of progressive Berlin-based architect Jürgen Mayer—the partners have wanted to get more people talking about their craft.

That method entails making observations. Instead of performing a typical young-architect renovation, in 2008 HWKN lined part of a 4,000-square-foot Manhattan apartment with built-in storage that changes volume to accommodate an extensive Judaica collection and other trappings. Although built from familiar materials such as MDF, cork and bleached ash plywood, the so-called Wall Unitizer articulated its homeowners' lifestyle more expressly than the foyer table, breakfront and desk they had originally requested.

Their method also means taking positions. For the annual Evolo Skyscraper Competition in 2006, HWKN's Skygrove tower features multiple legs resembling a mangrove tree, which can better withstand flooding from rising seas. "It's too late to avoid global warming, so it heightens awareness of that reality," Hollwich says. Indeed, Skygrove personifies HWKN's concept of "econic" design—creating green-minded icons that galvanize people to embrace sustainability in every aspect of their lives.

But the pair's growing body of work is not limited to the physical realm. "Architecture is about communication," Kushner says. "And to communicate, every tool is at your disposal." Their latest tool is Architizer, an online social networking site and project database for the architecture community. Echoing a familiar theme, Kushner says, "It's a way to reach a greater population, to show them what we do and to make architecture consumable instead of an out-of-reach art form."

Following a 2009 commission at LA's Virgil Skilled Nursing Center, the pair has set its sights on geriatric environments. In addition to overseeing the mid-April New Aging Conference at UPenn, HWKN is on track to complete a retirement facility in Africa's Ivory Coast for elderly priests in 2012. Residences are arranged in a village configuration, an on-site school allows priests to teach the local population and other radically communal gestures all banish the ascetic spaces that today define the end of life. It promises to position the duo as architects who are as sensitive as they are fearless. hwkn.com   << LESS

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