MIES 1:1 Das Golfclub Projekt © Frank Werthebach, 2013

In 1930, Mies van der Rohe, at the height of his European career, designed a golf clubhouse on the outskirts of Krefeld, Germany. While Mies’s design was never realized, this year Belgian architects Robbrecht en Daem and the Mies in Krefeld (MIK) Society constructed MIES 1:1 The Golf Club Project—a full-scale model of the clubhouse at the originally planned site in Krefeld. Based on sketches and plans from MoMA’s Mies van der Rohe Archives, MIES 1:1 was conceived as a site of investigation into Mies’s legacy and architectural language, his work in Krefeld, and the idea of the “model” in architecture and art.

On October 23, project curator Christiane Lange, architect and artistic director Paul Robbrecht, and curator Julian Heynen will give a series of related presentations about MIES 1:1. Lange will explore the historical background of Mies’s original design and the various meanings and public reception of the 1:1 model. Robbrecht will discuss his approach to the model’s source materials and how he approximated the 80-year-old designs. Lastly, Heynen will situate the 1:1 model within the broader context of architectural and artistic strategies.

Julian Heynen studied art history and literature and is currently Artistic Director at Large of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf. He was co-curator of the Shanghai Biennale in 2008 and commissioner of the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and 2005. In the 1980s and 1990s he was Director of Exhibitions at Kunstmuseen Krefeld, curating many shows of contemporary art at Haus Lange and Haus Esters, two villas designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1927-1930. Heynen has curated numerous exhibitions of the works of artists including: Bruce Nauman, Thomas Schütte, Franz West, Andreas Gursky, Juan Muñoz, Richard Deacon, Thomas Struth, Lothar Baumgarten, Luc Tuymans, Rosemarie Trockel, Stan Douglas, Thomas Ruff, Daniel Richter, Rodney Graham, Candida Höfer, Martin Kippenberger, and Roman Ondák, as well as many group exhibitions. He has written widely on contemporary art since the 1960s. Heynen is based in Düsseldorf and Berlin.

Christiane Lange holds master’s degrees in art history and history from the universities at Bonn and Regensburg. She is a founding member of “projektMIK,” Krefeld, Germany. Her research, exhibitions and films focus on the European work of Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich.As a member of the German Research Foundation, Lange catalogs all furniture designs, realized and un-realized, by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Lange’s most recent publication is titled Mies van der Rohe, Bauten für die Seidenindustrie (Berlin, 2011).

Paul Robbrecht received his degree in architecture at HSLI, Ghent in 1974. In 1975 he co-founded Robbrecht en Daem architecten with Hilde Daem. Since 1992 he has been Professor of Architectural Design at HSLI, Ghent. Robbrecht is a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts and an International Fellow of Royal Academy of British Architecture (RIBA). Robbrecht and Daem were finalists for the 2013 European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture / Mies van der Rohe Award for their project Market Hall - Reconstruction Korenmarkt, E. Braunplein and surroundings, Ghent.

This event is presented in partnership with the Goethe-Institut Chicago and the Mies van der Rohe Society at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Related Links
Projekt Mies in Krefeld
http://www.projektmik.com/
Robbrecht en Daem
http://www.robbrechtendaem.com/

The Graham Foundation is pleased to be part of Open House Chicago, a free public event organized by the Chicago Architecture Foundation that offers behind-the-scenes access to 150 buildings across Chicago. Since 1963 the Graham Foundation has been located in the Madlener House, a Prairie-style mansion built in 1901–02 by architect Richard E. Schmidt and designer Hugh M. G. Garden. The Madlener House was restored in 1963 to become the Graham’s headquarters and features two floors of exhibition space, original art glass windows, and a courtyard garden that showcases our significant collection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century architectural fragments. On Saturday and Sunday, October 19–20 from 9am–5pm, come tour the Madlener House, visit our current exhibition Environments and Counter Environments. “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape,” MoMA, 1972¸ and check out our new architecture bookshop conceived by Chicago-based designer Ania Jaworska.

Image: View of “Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry,” 2011, Graham Foundation, Chicago. Photo James Prinz.

For more information on the exhibition, Environments and Counter Environments. "Italy: The New Domestic Landscape,” MoMA, 1972, click here.

"National Home Advertisement," Life Magazine 37, 11 (September 13, 1954): 139.

Architectural historian Dianne Harris discusses her Graham-funded book Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Examining textual and visual representations of ordinary postwar houses in the United States, Harris uncovers the production of an extraordinarily powerful iconographic and cultural field that repeatedly equated ordinary single-family houses with middle-class and white identities to the exclusion of others, creating an invidious cultural iconography that continues to resonate today.

Please join us for a reception and book signing in the Madlener House library following the talk.

Dianne Harris is director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) and professor of landscape architecture, architecture, art history, and history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She holds a PhD in architectural history from the University of California, Berkeley.  Her scholarship, which has a broad temporal and geographic reach spanning from 18^th-century Lombardy to the postwar United States, is united by a constant interest in the relationship between the built environment and the construction of racial and class identities. In addition to her numerous scholarly articles, her publications include the co-edited volumes Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Sites Unseen:  Landscape and Vision (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007). She is editor of a multidisciplinary volume titled Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), which won the Allen Noble book award from the Pioneer America Society.  She is the author of The Nature of Authority: Villa Culture, Landscape, and Representation in Eighteenth-Century Lombardy (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), which received the Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Award from the Society of Architectural Historians in 2006 and of Maybeck’s Landscapes: Drawing in Nature (William Stout Publisher, 2005). She is also the recipient of a 2006 Iris Foundation Award from the Bard Graduate Center, New York for outstanding scholarly contributions in the history of art, decorative arts, and cultural history. Harris is a past-president for the Society of Architectural Historians, for whom she also served as editor-in-chief of the Mellon Foundation-funded digital humanities initiative SAHARA and she is series editor for the University of Pittsburgh Press. Harris currently serves as chair of the Advisory Board for the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University and she is a board member for the International Built Works Registry, a project co-developed by Columbia University’s Avery Library and the ARTstor Digital Library.

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians.

Related Links
Society of Architectural Historians
http://www.sah.org/about-sah/sah-news/2013/09/25/dianne-harris-talk---little-white-houses-race-space-and-the-ordinary-postwar-home

Lampo and the Graham Foundation are pleased to welcome Ben Vida, who will screen a new video work and premiere a four-channel electronics piece created especially for the event. In Tztztztzt Î Í Í…Vida presents the video realization of his long form sound poem of the same title, voiced by Sara Magenheimer, Tyondai Braxton, and Vida himself. Combining images of the vocalists’ performance with synthesized translations of these vocalizations, Vida explores the relationships between video and audio inputs and outputs. By doing so, his work aims to recalibrate the viewer’s senses, drawing attention to the processes by which we receive and decode information, and as Vida writes, “the brain’s ability to create order out of multi-sensory distortions.”

Vida will also perform Damaged Particulates, a new composition for fixed and live electronics presented in four-channel-expanded stereo. Organized into eleven short movements, Damaged Particulates derives its compositional strategy from the concept of “Particulate Systems Construction,” emphasizing the morphology and spatialization of single and dual-voiced sonic particulates. Although minimal in elements, Vida’s composition is at once sonically dense, grossly visceral, and disjunctively rhythmic. Here, sound objects take on an almost physical presence within the performance space, allowing spatialization to become a compositional material and discordant sonic composites to complicate traditional compositional logic.

Ben Vida (b. 1974, Dubuque, Iowa) is an artist, improviser, composer, and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. He has been active in the international experimental music scene for the past seventeen years with a long list of collaborations, bands, and releases to his credit. He is the co-founder of the group Town and Country and has worked as a solo artist, releasing records under his own name and the moniker Bird Show on labels including PAN, Alku, Thrill Jockey, Drag City, Amish, Bottrop-Boy, Hapna, and Kranky. Vida has presented his work in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, South Korea, and Japan. Recent activities include performances at the Kitchen in New York with David Behrman, the debut of the Tyondai Braxton/Ben Vida Duo at the Sacrum Profamun festival in Krakow, a solo performance at Electrónica en Abril festival in Madrid, and the publication of his long form sound poem Tztztztzt Î Í Í ... by Shelter Press. Vida’s first solo exhibition, Slipping Control, opened at Audio Visual Arts in New York this past spring. He is currently an Artist in Residency at ISSUE Project Room and at the Clocktower in New York.

This performance is presented in partnership with Lampo. Founded in 1997, Lampo is a non-profit organization for experimental music, sound art, and intermedia projects. Visit www.lampo.org.

Theater Dome under construction, 1966

Drop City is the first feature-length documentary film about the artists who created a community of iconographic dwellings from the scrapheap of a wasteful society. Drop City's practices of art, architecture and sustainable living influenced a generation. Inspired by new theories and performances by Allan Kaprow, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and others at Black Mountain College, the Droppers created a form of conceptual art based on performance, random interactions, and found materials. Their experimental buildings and creative practices became a model for alternative communities throughout the world. In 1966, Buckminster Fuller honored Drop City with his Dymaxion Award for "poetically economic structural accomplishments." The Droppers were at the forefront of what is now called "techno-culture"—a do-it-yourself ethos of decentralized technology. The story is told through a stunning array of film footage, photos, and interviews with Drop City's former residents, including artists, poets, inventors and activists.

Joan Grossman is visiting professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. She is a media artist whose work spans public radio, documentary film, and video installation. Her work has been screened and broadcast in more than twenty countries. Her award-winning film The Port of Last Resort was broadcast by HBO.

Tom McCourt is an associate professor of media at Fordham University. He is the author of Conflicting Communication Interests in America: The Case of National Public Radio (Praeger, 1999) and coauthor (with Patrick Burkart) of Digital Music Wars: Ownership and Control of the Celestial Jukebox (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). He first encountered the story of Drop City more than twenty years ago and has researched its history and significance for several years.

Print Source: 7^th Art Releasing

Related Links
Drop City
http://grahamfoundation.org/grantees/207-drop-city

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