"The artist has used items in his work that are very suggestive of interaction in normal, everyday use," LaBar said. "So they're semi-enticing to go up and use. I'm not surprised this happened."
"The premise is that the services for the building, such as ducts, sewage pipes and lifts, are located on the exterior to maximise space in the interior. The style originated with Michael Webb's 1957 student project for a Furniture Manufacturers Association building in High Wycombe.[1][2][3] Webb coi..."
"Jackson Pollock's painting Number 1, 1949, is a swirl of multi-colored, spaghettied paint, dripped, flung and slung across a 5-by-8-foot canvas. It's a textured work โ including nails and a bee (we'll get to that later) โ and in the nearly 70 years since its creation, it's attracted a fair bit of dust, dirt and grime."
"That's where conservator Chris Stavroudis comes in: His job is to clean the painting using swabs, solvents, and tiny brushes. For the last several months, he's been hard at work, once a week, in full view of the public, in a gallery at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles."
"Pollock used all sorts of paints โ oil paint, house paint, car paint, radiator paint โ and they all aged and got dirty in different ways. Working with the Getty Conservation Institute, Stavroudis did tests to see what kind of cleaning was needed."
"It is also not surprising that Trump the architecture critic has no love for FBI HQ, one of the most reviled examples of the maligned Brutalist style. In the public imagination, capital-B Brutalismโthe postwar fad named for bรฉton brut, French for raw concrete, and defined by its heavy, cast-concrete formsโtends to be lumped in with both the shoddy, underfunded modernism of public housing projects and the space-age experiments that followed. As Julia Gatley and Stuart King write in Brutalism Resurgent, a 2016 anthology, brutalist came to be โa pejorative term used to describe monolithic buildings of raw concrete construction that impose themselves on their surroundings.โ In the New York that shaped Trumpโs aesthetics, that description would have suited affordable housing projects like Waterside Plaza, River Park Towers, Chatham Towers, and Tracey Towersโthe antitheses of Trumpโs new brand. The far right appears to be leading a broader backlash against architecture self-evidently built with 20th-century technology. Such structures, in addition to their perceived deviance from the โWestern traditionsโ venerated by American fascists, represent the tastes and lifestyles of Americaโs treacherous urban elite. "
"Tim De Chant on why it's not a good idea to put trees on skyscrapers."