What do you do if a building is slated for demolition? If you’re the artist Doug Aitken and the building is your gallery, you devise a “time-based destruction installation.” Which is precisely what Aitken, who is known for wrapping the facade of the Hirschhorn Museum in with a 360-degree video installation to the tune of “I Only Have Eyes For You,” installing a video "land art" installation on the Seattle Art Museum, and the video “Sleepwalkers” projected on the facades of MoMA, “a cinematic art experience that directly integrates with the architectural fabric of the city while simultaneously enhancing and challenging viewers’ perceptions of public space” did. Aitken’s latest exhibition, which wrapped up at the end of March, entitled 100 YRS at Gallery 303 on West 21st Street was filled with word-based artworks such Plexiglas letters spelling “Art” with chocolate milk-like slurry cascading over the letters, black textured rock spelling “Sunset” and “Magic” featuring rear-lit images of the blowing up of Pruitt-Igo on each letter. Visitors were greeted by “Sonic Fountain” which is a round hole jackhammered out of the galley floor (since it was going to be destroyed anyway), filled with water from dripping pipes on the ceiling, and equipped with underwater microphones to amplify the dribbling sounds. The gallery walls and floors were gradually being destroyed around these artworks over the last week, not by construction workers, but by musicians. Three percussionists gently deconstructed the space climbing onto drywall, hacking away at rubble, and rising on scissor-lifts, making a music of sorts as they worked. The one-story building has been sold, and word from the gallery director Cristian Alexa is that Norman Foster has been retained to build a tower on the site.

Dialogues, the series of conversations between architects and artists that took place at the MAK Center in Los Angeles over the last couple of months, is finishing up tonight with an exhibit of the designers' work. The show features drawings, images, and models from a serious lineup at For Your Art on Wilshire Boulevard. Contributors include: Doug Aitken, Barbara Bestor, Escher Gunewardena, Fritz Haeg, Jorge Pardo, Linda Taalman, Xavier Veilhan, Pae White, Peter Zellner, and many many more. The show will be up until April 16.  

Lessons From Modernism is the smartest and most compelling exhibition ever mounted in New York (and maybe anywhere) on the influence of nature and the environment in architectural design. This Cooper Union exhibition looks at and analyzes 25 iconic modern buildings from architects like Le Corbusier, Paul Rudolph, Jean Prouvé, and Oscar Niemeyer. Conceived and curated by Cooper Union Professor Kevin Bone, Lessons From Modernism brilliantly demonstrates how these and other important modern architects integrated environmental concerns into their designs and "explores the extent to which these practices have produced environmentally performative and distinctive architecture." Staged in a school known for its formal architectural inventions it makes the case that environmental design has long been a a foregrounded consideration in the creation of architecture and not something created by by the United States Building Council and its LEED certification process. Professor Bone has created a valuable time line of major landmarks in the environmental design movement and directed his students to produce precise and beautiful models of these 25 buildings. The exhibition includes analytical drawings illustrating the sustainable design issues within each project in the show and includes texts by Professor Bone, Kenneth Frampton, Lydia Kallipoliti, and Carl Stein. The show runs through March 23 so run to see it before it vanishes.  

Think you could live in just 325 square feet? While Manhattan is already famous for its cramped quarters, micro-apartments are poised to take space efficiency to the next level with Murphy beds lurking behind sofas and roll-away walls concealing closets. You'll have a chance to test drive one of the tiny abodes at a new exhibition, Making Room: New Models for Housing New Yorkers, organized by the Museum of the City of New York and the Citizens Housing & Planning Council. Opening on January 23, the exhibition will include a full-scale, furnished mock-up of a micro-apartment, highlighting the changing ways city-dwellers live, especially as more and more choose to live alone. The sample unit will feature highly adaptable furniture by companies such as Resource Furniture that makes a micro-apartment lifestyle possible. Making Room will also unveil the top designs for Mayor Michael Bloomberg's adAPT micro-apartment design competition, showcasing proposals from various architects and developers for what will eventually be New York's first entirely micro-apartment building on East 27th Street. Organizers are also hosting an exclusive opening party the day before the exhibition opening, Tuesday, January 22, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm at the Museum of the City of New York, where you might see Honorary Exhibition Chair and New York City Planning Chair Amanda Burden, who has been vocally delighted with the concept.  Making Room runs through September 2013.

Edgeless School: Design for Learning Center for Architecture 536 LaGuardia Place Through January 19, 2013 Edgeless School investigates how technology is changing education and how architecture itself is changing as a result. The exhibition takes a look at 19 newly completed schools throughout the country (eight are in New York City and the majority of the rest are in the Pacific Northwest) and sorts them by their degree of “edgelessness.” The Ethical Culture Fieldston Middle School in the Bronx, for example, softens the distinction between the built environment and nature by embracing outdoor space and using a connection with nature as an educational tool. The L.B. Landry High School in New Orleans, LA, on the other hand, blurs conventional distinctions between constituencies by encouraging students, educators, parents, and architects to work together to create a building that is designed to further the school’s pedagogical goals.

Just weeks after architect Lebbeus Woods' death at age 72, SFMOMA is getting the word out about a new exhibition of his work that will run from February 16th through June 2nd, 2013. The show, entitled Lebbeus Woods, Architect, will feature 75 pieces from the eccentric designer's portfolio—most of them mutating forms in pencil— including Nine Reconstructed Boxes (1999) and High Houses (1996), which are currently in the SFMOMA collection. From SFMOMA's exhibition description:

Acknowledging the parallels between society's physical and psychological constructions, architect Lebbeus Woods (1940 - 2012) depicted a career-long narrative of how these constructions transform our being. Working mostly with pencil on paper, Woods created an oeuvre of complex worlds—at times abstract and at times explicit—that present shifts, cycles, and repetitions within the built environment. His timeless architecture is not in a particular style or in response to a singular moment in the field; rather, it offers an opportunity to consider how built forms are transformative for the individual and the collective, and how one person contributes to the development and mutation of the built world.

See more images from the museum's impressive Woods' collection below.

Design studio Diller Scofidio+Renfro (DS+R) has certainly had a very good week. As we noted yesterday, the firm’s designs for the Columbia University Medical and Graduate Education Building in Washington Heights have just been released, and now today, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum has announced that DS+R will be working with museum staff on the redesign of the museum’s exhibition spaces that are currently under renovation on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The Cooper-Hewitt closed last July for an extensive, two-year face lift and is currently undergoing an extensive reprogramming that will increase the amount of exhibition space by 60 percent and rearrange the institution's functional divisions. Gluckman Mayner Architects, with executive architects Beyer Blinder Belle are responsible for the restoration and renovation of the institution's historic Andrew Carnegie Mansion and two adjoining row houses on 90th Street and Fifth Avenue. While the buildings are reprogrammed and historic features preserved, DS+R will be responsible for designing the new exhibitions contained in those spaces. Along with media designer Local Projects, DS+R is responsible for the visitor’s experience in both the permanent exhibition rooms on the first floor and the temporary exhibition spaces on the second and third floors. At this point in the process, neither the collaboration between Local Projects, DS+R, and the Cooper-Hewitt, nor the scope of the final product, has been decided.  Stay tuned to AN for updates on the new exhibition spaces as they emerge.

There were about as many ideas for development on Chicago’s high-profile real estate at Wolf Point as there are Chicagoans. One you didn’t hear about during Alderman Brendan Reilly’s initial public meeting was The Clean Tower—a supertall that would return filtered wastewater to the Chicago River beneath its slanted profile. The Clean Tower wasn’t actually on the table for Wolf Point, but it does occupy real estate on the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s model of downtown. That’s because it’s part of Unseen City: Designs for a Future Chicago, an exhibition of imaginative projects from Illinois Institute of Technology's “Hi-Rise, Lo-Carb” studio. Hi-Rise, Lo-Carb—led by Antony Wood of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), and Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture—begat six projects, including a vertical neighborhood in the Loop complete with “streets in the sky,” and a "Post [Waste] Office" that envisions the vacant Old Chicago Main Post Office as a sustainable waste management center with a rooftop arboretum. This is the first time the Chicago Architecture Foundation has opened up its model of downtown for use as an exhibit space, and Unseen City is an excellent start. The model’s urban context legitimizes the ambitions of these inventive projects — placed alongside existing institutions in the Loop, they inspire progressive thoughts. Glimpse the unseen city in the lobby of the Santa Fe building, 224 S. Michigan Ave., through November 4.

If your interested in how many people viewed Christian Marclay's The Clock exhibition at the Centre Pompidou (6,996 for its three day run) in 2011 then The Art Newspaper's yearly round up of the top exhibitions makes great reading. This year the list breaks out Architecture and Design exhibitions and New York's MoMA is the clear winner. In the list of top ten exhibitions three are from MoMA and two from Rome's MAXXI museum. The top ten architecture and design exhibitions in the world (with daily admission numbers and total attendees in parenthesis) are as follows:

1. Talk to Me (4,942 / 518,934) MoMA
2. Counter Space (3,750 / 82,145) MoMA
3. Small Scale, Big Change (3,346 / 311,188) MoMA
4. How Wine Became Modern (1,855 / 231,579) SfMoMA
5. Frontiers of Architecture III & IV: Living (1,596 / 200,165) Louisiana (Northern Zealand, Denmark)
6. Peter Zumthor: Serpentine Gallery Pavilion (1,493 / 161,292) Serpentine Gallery
7. The Art of the Automobile (1,446 / 152,678) Musée des Arts Décoratifs
8. Dominique Lemieux: Imagining Characters (1,203 / 113,631) Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (Monterrey)
9. Framing Modernism (1,180 / 59,661) MAXXI
10. Space & Art and Architecture from the Collection (1,159 / 236,427) MAXXI

Pedro E. Guerrero: A Retrospective WUHO Gallery 6518 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles Through April 25 At age 22, Pedro E. Guerrero made a spontaneous visit to Taliesin West to meet Frank Lloyd Wright; upon seeing his portfolio Wright immediately gave Guerrero the position of principal photographer. Guerrero’s relationship with Wright would define his career; nearly all publications about Wright include his work. Moving to New York, Guerrero went on to work for journals including Architectural Record and Vogue, documenting the works of modernists like Saarinen and Breuer. His photography approaches architecture as sculpture, displaying an eye for composition and form that led to close personal and working relationships with Alexander Calder and Louise Nevelson.

Let There Be Light: Low Line Exhibit Mark Miller Gallery 92 Orchard Street Through April 29th, 12-6pm The team of innovators continues to push forward with a proposal for the Delancey Underground, transforming an underground trolley terminal into a public park for Manhattan’s Lower East Side. An exhibit detailing the proposal for the so-called “Low Line” will be running throughout April at the Mark Miller Gallery. The show entitled Let There Be Light was organized by Delancey Underground co-founders James Ramsey and Dan Barasch in an effort to engage the public directly with the ideas and innovations underpinning the project. The design seeks to reclaim the abandoned Williamsburg Trolley Terminal beneath Delancey Street, transforming the derelict space with the use of innovative solar reflectors and fiber optic cables into a sunlit subterranean park teeming with plant life. The show offers an opportunity to examine in close detail this elegant solar technology as well as early design prototypes, sketches and 3-D renderings of the proposal. Visitors are also encouraged to provide comments and suggestions for the scheme which will be reviewed by the designers as the project progresses. The month long display is part of a larger effort to move the design forward, the next key stage of which will be a full-scale installation of a segment of the park at the Essex Street Market to be completed in September. This will allow the community to inhabit and experience the park as it may some day feel. The proposition is an admirable and earnest reuse of the city’s urban infrastructure and an unexampled way of considering public space. Initiatives such as this may help maintain enthusiasm and momentum for the project among supporters and continue the public dialogue. Editor’s note: A Kickstarter campaign to build a demonstration segment of the Low Line has entered the final stretch with only a few hours left to contribute to the project, which has already substantially exceeded its goal of $100,000.

Last Thursday, we visited the opening of the A+D Museum's new show, Drylands Design. While politicians squabble about oil and other resources, the show drives home the point that water is the reserve that will become the most fraught in the future as populations increase and climate change worsens. The Arid Lands Institute at Woodbury University culled the exhibit from the winners of their Drylands Design Competition, which encouraged architects, engineers, and urban designers to respond to the challenges of coming water scarcity. While some were a bit too complex for the average museum-goer, most proposals could improve aesthetics and quality of life while also addressing water issues. Professional Honor Merit Award Winner, Tom Kasbau, proposed re-introducing "vernal pools," nutrient-rich wetlands, along the LA River corridor and near freeway underpasses and other infrastructure. Solar panels along such infrastructure (i.e. the river's banks) would power desalinization systems, returning freshwater into the city's reservoirs and into adjacent farms. Student Honor Merit Award winner Rebecca Lederer proposed "New Man's Land," a system of wetlands, treatment facilities, riparian community spaces, and groundwater wells along the length of the US-Mexico Border. The focus will be on 14 "sister cities" along the border, which would share water resources and, just as important, create a sense of community across the international divide. To see more of these proposals visit here or better still go to the A+D Museum before the show closes on April 26.