THE POZNAŃ-BASED publisher Zupagrafika documents Brutalist, prefab, and other concrete structures throughout Europe, focusing on their minimalist patterns and colorful flourishes. Their newest volume, Concrete Siberia, is a companion to last year’s Eastern Blocks (see our review here), focusing on Russia’s vast far north.
FRIEDENSREICH HUNDERTWASSER (1928-2000) WAS an artist, architect, and activist known for his holistic, all-encompassing embrace of nature and ecology in both his life and work. While on the surface his artistic and personal style would seem to place him squarely in the freewheeling hippie milieu of the late 60s, he also possessed a rigorousness and discipline that made him more monk than hedonist.
Mount Misen is the highest peak on Miyajima, a small semi-tropical island located a short ferry ride from Hiroshima. The island is sparsely populated, and deer roam freely through the forests and streets at lower altitudes. The particular latitude of the island gives it a unique biome in which coniferous trees coexist with lush jungle plants and wildlife, including monkeys and poisonous snakes.
IMMEDIATELY UPON ITS completion in 1970, Berlin’s Haus der Statistik (which stood north of Alexanderplatz in the shadow of the just-built Fernsehturm) took its place as one of the central organs of the GDR state apparatus. With the collection of data and statistics for all of East Germany as its goal, the eleven-story complex housed numerous bureaucratic units, including several floors of Stasi offices. Its street-level businesses were the ultimate in urbane GDR style, hosting two lounges (Jagdklause and the fabulously named Mocca-Eck), a hunting/fishing shop, and Natascha, a boutique offering the latest Soviet imports.
FOR THE PAST decade, journalist Ciarán Fahey has been documenting Berlin’s abandoned places: factories, train stations, hospitals, power stations, shuttered embassies, decaying villas, and everything in between. On his website Abandoned Berlin he documents these disappearing places in photos and words, focusing on the stories hidden behind crumbling walls and boarded-up windows. The human side of these modern ruins lies at the heart of his project: as the site’s welcome message says, “every crumbling building, creaking floorboard, fluttering curtain and flaking piece of paint has a tale begging to be told.”
BARBARA LONDON’S VIDEO/ART: The First Fifty Years is both a personal memoir and a history of an artistic medium from its genesis to the present. The effortlessness with which these two undertakings coexist is a testament to London’s lifelong commitment to her subject matter: as the founder of NY MOMA’s video programs, she was instrumental in bringing a once-underground art form into the broader establishment.
New York in the 1970s was arguably the global epicenter of the fledgling new art form, with artists such as Nam June Paik, Beryl Korot, and Mary Lucier at the forefront.
DURING ITS FOUR-plus decades of existence, the GDR was a unique geopolitical paradox. Its place at the heart of the Cold War conflict belied the simple, day-to-day lives of the vast majority of its citizens. This paradox manifests itself visibly in the architecture of the former GDR, where often-cosmic abstract and geometric tendencies exist alongside the drab and mundane.
TOWERING CONCRETE SCULPTURES inlaid with bright tiles, Brutalist housing blocks adorned with intricate patterns: the structures of post-Soviet Central Asia are a study in east-west contrasts, and include some of the stranger relics of the Cold War era.
