Displaying items by tag: contemporary architecture

This year’s 14th Venice Architecture Biennale, which closed yesterday, was the most controversial architecture iteration of the festival in recent memory — and the most popular, according to statistics released by the Biennale over the weekend. A record number of visitors made their way through the Giardini and Arsenale from June 7 through November 23: 228,000 according to a statement released by the exhibition.

The expanded audience comes in response both to director Rem Koolhaas’s monumental presence in contemporary architectural discourse, but also to this year’s expanded length. In previous years, the Architecture Biennale only ran for three months; Koolhaas doubled that to six months, making 2014 the first year that the architecture display and art display have had equal run times.

The Centre Pompidou in Paris is currently hosting Frank Gehry’s first major retrospective in Europe. Gehry, who is best known for his expressive, sculptural buildings, is one of the most influential figures in contemporary architecture. Since opening his first office in Los Angeles in the early 1960s, Gehry has revolutionized architecture’s aesthetics, its social and cultural role, and its relationship to urban environments.

Shortly after opening his own office, Gehry fell in with the California art scene, befriending important artists such as Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, and Claes Oldenburg. Gehry’s relationships with these artists helped him develop his unique ability to bridge the gap between art and architecture. Additionally, Gehry’s encounter with the works of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns paved the way for a reconfiguration of his style all together.