NEW HAVEN, CONN.
Ecology Design Synergy
Yale Art + Architecture Gallery
Through Feb. 1, 2008
The German firms Behnisch Architekten and Transsolar Klimaengineering are gaining renown for environmentally responsive architecture. They have produced artificial landscapes, solar chimneys, and interiors shot through with subway trains. They also designed the Allston Science Complex for Harvard, a Senscity Paradise Universe in Las Vegas, and the Arizona State University Gateway Project in Tempe.
Next up is RiverParc (shown above), a bold mixed-use development for Pittsburgh, with a plan for vertical gardens inside apartment buildings and elevated parks leading to the river. The proposed garden city comes with a projected price tag of $460 million. Plans show no iconic building forms, but a master plan that impressed a jury for the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. The architects promise it will be one of the first LEED-certified neighborhoods in the country.
The exhibition, which is funded by the Goethe Institute, is aimed at a wide rather than a professional audience. It looks at sustainability as a relationship between human beings and the environment rather than as a technical analysis of recyclable building parts. As such, the exhibition draws on the five senses experienced daily by school children and decision makers. www.yale.edu
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Black Maps: David Maisel
National Academy of Sciences
Through Dec. 5
California photographer David Maisel records the impact of human activity through large-scale aerial photography. His images have been called maps of ecological disaster. Maisel landscapes bear witness to strip mines, clear-cut forests, cyanide-leaching fields, and tailing ponds. But the artist's perspective is coolly abstract rather than overtly accusatory. www.nationalacademies.org
LOS ANGELES
Michael Maltzan Architecture: Dark Side of the Moon
SCI-Arc Gallery
Trough Dec. 9
Since 2002, the SCI-Arc Gallery has invited internationally recognized architects to create site-specific installations, working with a team of SCI-Arc students. For the fall exhibition, Los Angeles architect Michael Maltzan has decided to explore concepts of inhabited space through the construction of a “fifth façade”—plaster surfaces that flow and roll across the 1,400-square-foot gallery while creating capsules in which a captive audience can find themselves, or not. His firm's regular work includes the Getty Information Institute Digital Library, the Billy Wilder Theater for UCLA's Hammer Museum, and an education complex for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. At SCI-Arc, Maltzan has said his goal is to create “an intense simultaneity” among visitors who find themselves in two curvilinear spaces at once. Prepare for takeoff. www.sciarc.edu
ITHACA, N.Y.
Dennis Maher: Eternal Returns
Cornell
Nov. 11–24
Dennis Maher is a demolition expert. He reuses what others destruct. The painter/professor, who studied architecture, gathers old building elements and incorporates them into new constructions. “Restoration is redemption,” he has said. His work strives to give “afterlives” to wasted elements of cities. Window frames, paneling, tiles, and other debris become materials for reflection and key elements in his work, which blurs the line between sculpture and painting. www.aap.cornell.edu
