Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was born today July 12, 1895.
R. Buckminster Fuller, ca. 1917.
Lesson / Koan : Do more with less.
CUPtopia has always been a fan of Bucky’s spirit and his environmental attitude.
BTW,
At 116 years old, Bucky is as fresh as ever…as so is his utopia of ideas.
NOTE :
Fuller published more than 30 books, inventing and popularizing terms such as “Spaceship Earth“, ephemeralization, and synergetics.
As July 4th just passed, remember that the summer is not really even a month old.
Lesson / Koan : Spaceship earth knows herself well.
Get outdoors and truly enjoy the summertime.
CUPtopia is about to hit the road again soon.
Cuptopia’s staff came across the interdisciplinary visual artist Yulia Pinkusevich during today’s search for Utopia.
"Global Utopia of Futures Past" Paint, chalk, and light bulb. 18 ft x 22 ft.
Lesson / Koan : Draw your dreams.
Some search for Utopia, others build their Utopia only to give it away.
BTW,
Could Yulia Pinkusevich’s title ”Global Utopia of Futures Past” suggest the cyclical nature of life on Spaceship Earth?
Pinkusevich’s drawings are performances.
Architects should be required to perform in public more often.
NOTE :
“The Great Temple of Fallen Civilization” charcoal, ink, tape and climbing holds on wall 40’ ft x 17’ ft (Permanent Installation at Warehouse 21, Railyard Art District, Santa Fe, NM).
Yulia Pinkusevich is an interdisciplinary visual artist. Born in Kharkov, Ukraine (former USSR) Yulia holds a Bachelors of Fine Arts from Rutgers University and is currently a Masters of Fine Arts candidate at Stanford University. She has also studied at School of Visual Arts, Parsons School of Design, Cooper Union School of Art (in New York) and California College of Art. In 2010, Yulia completed Harvard’s Graduate School of Design: Career Discovery Program in Architecture. Yulia’s works have been published and reviewed in numerous magazines including Adbuster, THE Magazine, Starved Magazine, and FlankStak. She has exhibited primarily in New York, Santa Fe and San Francisco in venues include Christie’s, Chashama, Emergency Arts, SOMArts, Alphonse Berber Gallery and Warehouse 21. Yulia’s works have been placed in private and public collection across the US, Europe and South America.
Industrial Scars is an aesthetic look at some of our most egregious injuries to the natural systems that sustains Spaceship Earth.
Lesson / Koan : Referring to the surface level is beauty in reverse.
Herbicide, Luling, LA, 2010 Herbicide manufacturing plant by J. Henry Fair.
Roberta Smith (art critic for the New York Times and a lecturer on contemporary art.) writes: “The vivid color photographs of J. Henry Fair lead an uneasy double life as potent records of environmental pollution and as ersatz evocations of abstract painting.”
BTW,
“My work is a response to my vision of society.
Bottom Ash, New Roads, LA, 2010 Bottom ash disposal pond at coal-fired power planby J. Henry Fair.
Lightning Rods, Fort McMurrary, Alberta, Canada , 2009 The inside of a holding tank at an oil sands upgrader facility by J. Henry Fair.
I see our culture as being addicted to petroleum and the unsustainable consumption of other natural resources, which seems to portend a future of scarcity. My vision is of a different possibility, arrived at through careful husbandry of resources and adjustment of our desires and consumption patterns toward a future of health and plenty. To gear our civilization toward sustainability does not necessitate sacrifice today, as many naysayers would argue, but simply adjustment. There are many societies existing at present that have a standard of living at least as high as ours while consuming and polluting a fraction of what is the norm in the United States.
As an artist with a message, one asks oneself: how do I translate my message to my medium such that it will effect the change I want?
At first, I photographed “ugly” things; which is, in essence, throwing the issue in people’s faces. Over time, I began to photograph all these things with an eye to making them both beautiful and frightening simultaneously, a seemingly irreconcilable mission, but actually quite achievable given the subject matter.
These are all photographs of things i have found in my explorations.
Other than standard photographic adjustments of contrast, they are unmodified.” – J. Henry Fair
NOTE :
“Abstraction of Destruction,” is J. Henry Fair’s exhibition at the Gerald Peters Gallery, a strange battle between medium and message, between harsh truths and trite, generic beauty.
portend |pôrˈtend|verb [ trans. ]be a sign or warning that (something, esp. something momentous or calamitous) is likely to happen.
3000 students at Ryan International School in New Delhi, India participate in the first Global Art Project Visible From Space. 350 refers to the maximum parts per million of carbon we can tolerate in our atmosphere if we want to survive global warming. Climate change is of course the "elephant in the room" which world leaders continue to ignore.
The number 350 represents the upper limit of a safe amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere.
The Earth presently surpassed that number according to the 350.org‘s website.
This year of 2010 is certain to rank among the three hottest years in recorded history.
Lesson / Koan : The word Earth has always had ART inside it.
How climate change is impacting our planet and what creative solutions will get Spaceship Earth to 350ppm.
BTW,
In New York City, USA, artist Molly Dilworth, famous for painting a mural in the new Times Square Plaza, created a “Cool Roof” for a school by painting a lightly colored representation of the New York and New Jersey coastline after a 7 meter rise in sea levels.
For environmental activist Bill McKibben, change needs to happen on a grassroots level. He co-founded 350.org, a global movement to make politicians recognize an issue that, in his words, is one of the most important facing the planet — and yet rarely a top news story. To bring attention to a large-scale issue, earth.350.org encourages large-scale creative demonstrations, visible from space, many of which can be found on their Flickr site.
NOTE :
Red Polar Bear by Bjargey Ólafsdóttir Photograph by Christopher Lund for Earth 350.org project…Painted with red organic food dye on Langjökull Glacier, Iceland (the second largest glacier in Iceland)…Size approx 50×90 meters.
“Urbanism in the House” - (cover designed by Åbäke)
“Urbanism in the House”…Order it online at Stupido.
Lesson / Koan : Very few buildings sing for the public…too many buildings sing solely for the architect.
A video below with music and narration made for the NEWLY DRAWN exhibition. It’s a double track affair combining “the history of urban planning in 2 minutes and 33 seconds set to music” in the form of U = Utopia and the low carbon club anthem More = Less, based on NOW office’s work for Low2No / Sitra on sustainable urbanism.
BTW,
Tuomas Toivonen is a Helsinki-based architect, performer and musician. Whether constructing analog monoliths in a club setting or giving musical lectures in art galleries, his musical work investigates the structural, suggestive and communicational potential of music, voice and text. The lyrics are compact observations and analyses, and read like spoken diagrams, narrative perspectives, or musical manifestos.
Tuomas Toivonen @ SNOWBALL Architecture - presentations | Helsinki, Feb12 2010
NOTE :
Tuomas Toivonen should be invited to architecture schools around the globe. On many levels his practice, theories & collaborations are a model for designers concerned with spaceship earth.
NOW is a Helsinki-based practice operating in the joint fields of architecture, urbanism, strategy, design and communication. The scale and scope of the work extends from city to object, from strategy to detail.
Meredith is discussing. 
I saw him perform this live at the Nordic House opening for Common Grounds (they also play the record as part of the exhibition) in NYC a few weeks ago. He also has a song listing names of architects who are “in the house,” displaying his/her photograph while listing the names. While he was singing, the crowd was dancing and laughing. Maybe the biggest crowd of smiling designers to date?