Investment includes plans to include a 1500-seat theatre, a 1000-seat performing arts venue, a four-screen cinema and a 670,000 square foot creative co-working space, as well as two hotels, shops, cafes and a “jazz-club style restaurant and venue”. When completed in 2023, the site is projected to attract up to £9m in consumer spending and 10 million visitors to the borough each year. – Arts Professional
Month: September 2019
Architects Explain How Those Super-Tall, Super-Skinny New York Apartment Towers Stand Up In The Wind
“As the wind goes around the building, it accelerates, and it creates vortices that alternate, causing the building to move from side to side. Sometimes we can use that phenomenon, cutting openings for the wind and converting it to energy with turbines. Here, we’re not trying to bring the wind through the building; we’re managing it, shaping the notches to optimize wind flow.” Justin Davidson talks with the designers of the 130-story Central Park Tower. – New York Magazine
Street Theatre With Giant Moles
“These tufty mammals are the stars of Philippe Quesne’s The Moles, which ran at N.Y.U. Skirball over the weekend and kicked off with a Friday afternoon parade through the West Village. A rock concert, a nature mockumentary, a collective hallucination and a goof on the idea of underground theater, The Moles welcomes audiences, wordlessly, to Caveland, a stalactite-studded subterranean lair that the moles invade and then enjoy, sometimes in the company of a neighborly purple teddy bear.” – The New York Times
Architecture That Redefines The Relationships Between In And Out
Whether any of these gestures will mitigate the pressing problems of global warming and rising sea levels is still unknown — the fix likely requires more than what one landscape architect calls “boutique wetlands.” But projects debuting this fall suggest that hard barriers between the designed environment and the natural one are softening — maybe for good. – The New York Times
Scans Of Artists Painting Using Their Feet Show The Brain Rewiring Itself
In typically developed people, the “foot” part of the map is a solid region, with no distinct representation of the toes. But in the brains of Tom Yendell and Peter Longstaff, there were clear toe areas, arranged in order. – The New York Times
Diversity, Gender Equity, Innovation — Here’s A Ballet Company That’s Living Up To The Ideals
“With just 10 dancers, [Ballet X is] a model of what is possible for small contemporary ballet troupes — and it embodies many of the ideals that larger companies are striving for today. It commissions lots of women. Half of the company members are dancers of color. The work pushes ballet in new directions, whether through innovative story ballets or genre-bending collaborations. It’s deeply rooted in its Philadelphia community, and has fostered an open company culture rarely found in ballet.” – Dance Magazine
Three Trans-Gender Opera Singers Talk About Their Careers
Baritone Lucas, who decided to keep singing with her booming, low-voice type after her physical transition rather than trying to retrain her voice to sing soprano or mezzo roles, is rising to the very top of her profession. In May, she became the first trans singer to perform a lead role in a classic operatic work in the U.S. when she starred in “Don Giovanni” with the Tulsa Opera in Oklahoma. In October, she will play a lead role with the English National Opera in London. – KQED
The Entire ‘Creative Industries’ Construct Is Hurting Artists, Not Helping Them
“The accompanying political narrative was that the creative industries would champion the social utility of arts and culture as progressive realms to engage fractured communities, realise progressive values and create a more sustainable economic world. … Now it seems impossible to doubt the economic success story that is the creative industries,” at least in terms of the size of their contribution to the economy. “The trouble is that all this ‘success’ has come at the expense of any cultural, artistic or creative integrity that the sectors once had before they were herded into a single political concept.” – Prospect (UK)
Harlem Nonprofit Providing Art Education In Public Schools Expands To Two More Cities
“As the 2019 school year gets underway, ProjectArt, an initiative founded by Ardash Alphons in Harlem in 2011, is expanding to New Orleans and San Francisco, bringing arts access to two cities with large communities of homeless young people and giving the organisation a presence in a total of eight cities across the US (By 2021, ProjectArt plans to be in ten cities.)” – The Art Newspaper
MIT Invents A Black Even Blacker Than Vantablack
Three years ago, the invention of Vantablack, a carbon nanotube coating that absorbs up to 99.965% of all light, made headlines, especially when artist Anish Kapoor acquired exclusive rights to its use in artworks, infuriating other artists. Now MIT scientists have discovered — by accident, they say — a carbon nanotube material that absorbs 99.99% of light. And to demonstrate, they’ve coated a $2 million yellow diamond with the stuff. (Meanwhile, BMW has made a car coated with Vantablack.) – Newsweek