Ai Weiwei, China’s most famous living artist, is not a licensed architect, but he sure acts like one: He designs buildings, creates gigantic site-specific installations, organizes art exhibitions, and makes works of art constructed like houses.
Playful yet menacing, the fangs of a grinning dragon greet you as you enter @Large, dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s extensive installation at Alcatraz, the notorious former prison in San Francisco Bay.
Collective memory was the driving force behind the latest incarnation of the annual, temporary Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron and Chinese artist-activist Ai Weiwei. To build a kind of manufactured archaeological site based on the previous 11 pavilions, the team created a drawing that fused the foundations of those structures into a single digital rendering, and then carved this form out of the ground.
Marlon Blackwell's St. Nicholas Eastern Orthodox Church in Springdale, Arkansas has won the World’s Best Civic and Community Building award at this year's World Architecture Festival in Barcelona. We featued the project on the cover of our November 2011 "Made in America" issue. Read the press release from the festival, which runs through Novmeber 4, and watch our video tour of the project after the jump.
