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This Week in Social: Terrazzo Foam Has a Moment, Eero Saarinen and Josef Albers Are Reunited, and Zaha Hadid's Clique

By Katherine Wisniewski

Rem and I yesterday in Moscow x Stella #RemKoolhaas @garagemca #garagemca Image by @maryamccartney

A photo posted by Stella McCartney (@stellamccartney) on



1. Moscow's Garage Center for Contemporary Culture has finally vacated its Shigeru Ban-designed temporary pavilion, trading in one Pritzker Prize-winning architect for another. Modest by starchitect standards, its replacement is a hulking 8,000-square-feet, polycarbonate sheathed OMA-designed museum that hovers a mere six feet over Moscow's Gorky Park. Above, Rem and Stella McCartney goof around in Yayoi Kusama's inaugural installation.


2. Light a candle and say a prayer—John Hopkin's University is contemplating demolishing the Mattin Center, an early-career work by Billie Tsien and Tod Williams. No architects should have to protest the demolition of two of their buildings in the span of two years, but so it goes. Billie and Tod's plea to save the center is surprisingly measured and civil, although they aren't above throwing some shade at MoMA. Here's a choice quote, "This is unlike the MoMA issue, where a cultural institution seemed to deny its mission as a protector of art, architecture, and design."

3. Between Jonah Takagi's Colosseum intervention at Collective Fair and Assemble's Brutalist playground, it's safe to say that terrazzo foam is having a moment. Both projects are a tongue-in-cheek homage to modernism's favorite material: Concrete. Famously decried for being harsh, inhuman, and bleak, it's taken a turn for the soft and playful. To quote Curbed editor Asad Syrkett, "At least midcentury modern has something cushy to land on in its fall from grace."

A photo posted by Víctor (@sanzserif) on



4. Spring has sprung, which means that there's a brand-spankin'-new Serpentine Pavilion around the corner. Each year, one designer is fairy godmother'd into architectural notoriety by London's Serpentine Gallery. The prize? Erecting an in-situ installation in Kensington Gardens. Past winners include Jean Nouvel, Ai Wei Wei, Herzog & de Meuron, Sou Fujimoto. Construction on this year's SelgasCano-designed folly has already commenced.

5. The week's top #TBT was courtesy of Blair Kamin, architecture guy at the Chicago Tribune who seems to have a sixth sense for a well-timed archival photo.


6. Bjarke Ingel's design for 2 WTC represents just another chapter in a long, long battle about who owns a city's monuments. We all watched as Norman Foster was fired and unceremoniously replaced in favor of a much more fitting, media-savvy prince for Murdoch's growing empire. Fred Scharmen reminds us of a August 2004 Wired article that finds Rem Koolhaas at an interesting crossroads: Does he design China's CCTV or 2 WTC? In hindsight, that moment heavily foreshadows the current state of architecture.

7. You might know Hermann Zapf, who passed away this week at the age of 96, as the guy who designed the type on the Maya Lin-designed Vietnam War Memorial. That is, if you know him at all. During his lifetime, Zapf was a standard-bearer for computerized typography, worked tirelessly to invent over 200 typefaces and fonts, and his legacy extends to both Adobe and Apple. The New York Times accurately calls him, "Designer Whose Letters Are Found Everywhere."


8. In case you haven't been following the redevelopment of Eero Saarinen's 1962 Bell Labs complex in Holmdel, New Jersey, please take a moment to refresh yourself. The big news this week comes from Interior Design magazine, who reports that a Josef Albers carpet adorns the first floor of the complex's previously empty atrium. This makes loads of sense. Eero and Josef were on the faculty together at Yale, it's thought possible that the two already collaborated on earlier floor coverings, and, well, everyone loves a midcentury power couple.

9. We really couldn't have said it better ourselves.

∙ All This Week in Social posts [Curbed]

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