Here’s a really interesting, strange project we’ve come across: birdhouses made to look like Dictator’s Palaces. We’ve got examples of Stalin’s Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, Mussolini’s Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, and Ceausescu’s Palace of Parliament. What the hell is this, exactly?

First, what I took out of it: I like the sly idea of diminishing the self-important, repression-founded architecture of dictators by making such work into birdhouses. That said, the original pieces these birdhouses are based on aren’t automatically horrible or despicable just because their commissioners were. A lot has been said about Albert Speer and the fact that inherent within a kind of ‘Nazi Architecture’ is the inescapable idea of Nazism, which thereby invalidates the architecture. You can make the point, but then you have to make a different version of the same point about slaves and the Coliseum, for example. Within the spectrum of 20th-century architecture, there are actually some examples of fascist architecture here in Rome that I appreciate on a certain level.

But there’s always something (intentionally) brutal and cold about those buildings–a feeling amplified when walking around the rest of Rome and encountering some of the most comfortable, humane, welcoming urban spaces ever constructed. So I like the transposition into a nature reserve, attached to trees, fit only for the birds.

Secondly, it’s a comment on the style of birdhouses. While I’m sure very few people care about why birdhouses are usually modeled after cute little cabins or cottages, constructing birdhouses out of the exact opposite–a bunch of dictator palaces–makes us think about our normal birdhouse design: the country cabin full of friendly little animals, and why we consistently use that model in miniature. It’s kind of like making a child’s dollhouse in the form of a prison, in order to make us wonder about the ubiquity of the tiny little 3-level Victorian when it comes to that segment of the market.

Finally, it’s just fun design, taking these overbearing examples of state power, wrapping them around trees, and waiting for a series of little birdies to come along and make them into a home. If you’re up near the King’s Wood conservation area, check them out.

All photos are by London Fieldworks 2008. Their official text is here:

SUPER KINGDOM can be viewed as a social engineering experiment for animals – a new community in the making referencing despot’s palaces, gated community developments such as Alphaville in Brazil and the fortified exclusivity afforded to the wealthy and super-rich – all designed to keep urban reality at bay.

London Fieldworks propose SUPER KINGDOM as a series of site-specific interventions within the ancient woodland environment of Kings Wood, Challock in SE Kent for exhibition in autumn 2008 and will include the construction of show homes for animals. The show homes will be available for animal occupancy and will also function as a film set for a new video and animation work to be shot over winter 2008/9 for exhibition in spring 2009.

Considered as an enclave, a demarcated and protected area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, King’s Wood is an environment surrounded by encroaching urban development. Desire for new housing and increased local infrastructure is pitted against fears that the Stour Valley will be ecologically damaged by the unprecedented growth planned for nearby Ashford. The environmental ramifications of massive new development in the ecologically sensitive Thames Gateway are also a concern. This contention has focussed interest on the parallel story of changing habitat and shifting animal populations in King’s Wood, within the larger context of mass migration, porous borders and current speculation that for the first time the world’s urban population is about to outnumber its rural one. .

SUPER KINGDOM is a Stour Valley Arts commission supported by Arts Council England, Henry Moore Foundation, Arts and Humanities Research Council and London Southbank University in collaboration with Consarc architects, Webb Yates Engineers and Setsquare Staging Limited.

Art and science are not so difficult to associate with one another since there is so much technology involved in creating art. But the marriage between art and science is about more than just the creation, it’s about inspiration meeting functionality. Artists have been taking queues from science for years. Art consistently meets science in the techno-colored photographs taken of the universe as it expands. It can be found in the way that cells, micro organisms and ice crystals form the most precise yet masterfully chaotic of patterns. A certain aesthetic beauty can even be found in the MRI of a human brain.

Model of Human Heart formed from MRI Images.

Recently, science has found compatibility within the textile industry. The University of the Arts in London and a few Nobel Prize winning scientists and research fellows from Central Saint Martins College have combined forces in order to form Nobel Textiles. Each artist has been paired up with a scientist for inspiration and will put their work on display at London’s Design Festival on 14-21 September 2008.

Nobel Textiles

This is a truly unique event. Five textile designers and five scientists have been formally paired up, neither one really knowing much about the other. The result is some of the most innovative and functional textiles that have been created in a long time. A few of the artists-scientist couples include:

Rachel Wingfield is introducing “Metabolic Media.” She takes her inspiration from studies in ATP energy conversion done by John E. Walker, and more recent work done in the areas of architecture, agriculture, sensor technologies and geotextiles. Using lace and weaving techniques, she hopes to create small structures from all new composite materials that will enable and promote urban gardening. Examples will include specially designed stakes for plants to grow along and even small collapsible greenhouses which can save space, protect plants and enable gardens to grow virtually anywhere.

Rachel Wingfield's "Metabolic Media" inspired by John E. Walker

Rachel Kelly inspired by Tim Hunt’s “Now You See It – Now You Don’t” report delves into how Cyclin B appears and then disappears leaving a memory imprint on the DNA of cells. He made this discovery through the study of sea urchin eggs. Rachel is focusing on a unbounded circular theme. She will be using new specialized drawing and printing techniques on a medium of paper lanterns and transparent wallpaper.

Rachel Kelly inspired by Tim Hunt.

Philippa Brock’s work is motivated by Sir Aaron Klug’s research on viruses. Klug discovered that a three-dimensional virus model could be created based on information obtained by studying two-dimensional viruses. Philippa Brock has been experimenting with the creation of three-dimensional textile structures by folding and weaving two-dimensional pieces upon themselves.

Philippa Brock inspired by Sir Aaron Klug.

Kristin Von Glasow has created a documentary on the scientist-designer collaborations which can be viewed from the Nobel Textiles website. The festival will be held at the ICA and Saint James’ Park.

Fresh off the theme of yesterday’s Whitney Biennial article, in which contemporary visual artists tried their hand at t-shirt design, let’s take a look at another example of an artist (an architect, in this case), justly famous in his own medium, testing a new mode of expression.

Frank Gehry’s buildings are widely known and celebrated worldwide, with his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain taking a large piece of the credit for that city’s newly achieved prominence on the world stage (photo courtesty kurtxio).

Although designing a line of jewelry for famous NY-based jewelers Tiffany & Co. might seem odd at first, the pairing turned out a success. Gehry often designs the preliminary ideas for his buildings in messy, rough sketches, eventually transformed into buildable models by his staff (with his input throughout), and the process was likely similar for the jewelry.

His buildings are already complex, curving, shiny, unpredictable structures, and his jewelry doesn’t disappoint here. While I can’t claim to be an informed critic on modern jewellery design, several of Gehry’s concepts appeal in the same strange way his buildings do. Tiffany describes most of his pieces as containing an “inner energy”, and while it’s hard to apply that description to all of them, the label certainly fits when Gehry’s jewelry is contrasted with what you’d normally find in a Tiffany’s store.

Have a particularly noteworthy example of an artist successfully branching out to a new visual medium? Share it!