above/below> concept model for new washington redskin football stadium
trending and talented danish architect bjarke ingels hit the air ways today on 60 minutes to talk about another big – bjarke ingels group concept, this time a spec proposal for a new football stadium for the washington redskins.
in the past 24 months sports stadium proposals have been sensitive topics [ zaha hadid: national stadium tokyo ] and the architect did himself no favors with a presentation that could be construed as flip: surfing in a stadium-surrounding moat.
“the stadium is designed as much for the tailgating, like the pre-game, as for the game itself,” ingels tells 60 minutes.” tailgating literally becomes a picnic in a park. it can actually make the stadium a more lively destination throughout the year without ruining the turf for the football game.” tailgating is integral to football and off-season multi-purposing an economical and engaging concept though some of the proposed activities do seem better suited for california or hawaii. somewhere in the back of my mind, ingels may be messing with mad-hatter redskins owner, daniel snyder, but then again, maybe not. that said, early on notions to ingels preliminary concepts can be just that as they are imagination-shaping and he’s expert at it, in a signature big way. this would be the first sports stadium designed by big. please, in the next iteration, consider a dome (a super bowl bid) and maybe eschew a beach.
all ‘the spiral’ images courtesy of bjarke ingels group / tishman speyer
this property would do well as select luxury residences. [ big ]
Designers and artists in New York have only a few days left (until July 6) to see a landmark construction just north of the Williamsburg Bridge shoreline.
Kara Walker’s giant sculpture at the Domino factory ruin in Brooklyn is the art work of the summer. It is formally titled “A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant”.
The “Marvelous Sugar Baby” is a 35-foot-tall figure suggesting a black woman as sphinx that evokes racial and sexual stereotypes. Think Mammy or Aunt Jemima conjoined with primitive Venus figures or other sexual cartoons.
It suggests the Great Sphinx of Giza and other sphinxes of art, pondering questions and prophecies. The figure appears to show a sense of erosion by wear and time. As a oversized figure inside a huge structure it can also read as sacred statuary in a temple: Athena in the Parthenon or Lincoln in white inside his memorial in Washington.
It is about the process by which dark sugar becomes white refined sugar at the hands of dark people working for white people. In the Caribbean during slavery the process meant literally working slaves to death.
But it also touches on many other meanings of sugar and race. A sphinx with the head of Aunt Jemima, the piece teams with plays on racist clichés. The face is “mammy” in all her complex cultural roles. (Aunt Jemima, one of the oldest American household trademarks, goes back to 1893 but continues to exist–refined and almost undetectably racist—at least by comparison with Washington Redskins or Cleveland Indians team garb.
The back of the Walker figure also possesses dramatically animal haunches and genitalia. I thought of David Bowie in man/dog guise on the Diamond Dogs album cover. The figure could be sibyl as well as sphinx, one of Walker’s sketches suggests.
It recalls a classic overscale American roadside attraction, notably Mammy’s Cupboard near Vicksburg, Mississippi, photographed by Edward Weston in the 1930s. After a while, so much white sugar also suggests so much granulated salt. The salt of tears and sweat by the workers, a woman of salt like Lot’s wife, or the desert salt flats.
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