On view: February 16 –March 10, 2002
Opening Reception: February 16, 5 - 8pm

Architecture at fivemyles

James Rossant: New York Live - the installation

New York Live simulates and celebrates the city that never sleeps. This is the first in a series of three exhibitions concerned with space as a human construct. The architect James Rossant has created a walk-in installation that embodies the breathless and ongoing evolution of New York City. Competing forms, geometric and tubular, fill the gallery. Here, the tidy geometric order of existing urban structures is assaulted by chaotic forms suggesting a future of exuberant sprawl. New York Live presents Jim Rossant’s affectionate tribute to the city of continuous birth and eternal infancy.

Rossant served as the master planner for the cities of Reston, Virginia and of Dodoma, Tanzania, as well as for New York’s Lower Manhattan Plan. He has designed numerous award-winning buildings, and his paintings and drawings have been shown in museums and galleries in New York, Tokyo, Paris and Mexico City.

  • The second exhibition in this series, Architecture for One, looks at personal space as defined by visual artists. Among the work exhibited will be the model for a pristine chapel by Stephen Antonakos, a structure that objectifies our imperceptible inner spaces; the model for a quilted oval house by Marcia Hafif, where intimacy and suppleness blend with the portability of a nomad’s tent; a paper construction by the young Korean artist Si-yeon Kim that imparts her longing for her home town; and a model for a Black Hair Salon by Nigerian-born architectural designer Atim Anette Oton.

  • For the third exhibition, Pulpit, Karl Jensen will construct an extraordinary pulpit from which he symbolically shouts out his disenchantment with the withering austerity of twentieth centurybuilding. At the same time Jensen’s pulpit retains the keen regard for construction that defined that century’s architecture.

Of interest in this series is the presentation of three separate points of view concerned with architecture; from the work of an established architect to the architectural constructs influencing visual artists, to the explorations of a young architect/sculptor who believes that architecture has lost its capacity to reflect the profounder aspects of life.

DIRECTIONS:

Take 2, 3, or 4 trains to Franklin Avenue. Walk two blocks against the traffic on Franklin. Walk ¾ block to 558 St. Johns Place. FiveMyles is within easy walking distance from the Brooklyn Museum.