parks + public spaces

With the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in DC finally moving forward, that left just one endless, mired in controversy project to wait on. Fortunately, it looks like these have been good days for memorials, as ground was finally broken this weekend on the Flight 93 Memorial in rural Pennsylvania. You might recall our reporting over these last few years as the project was held up with controversy over both its crescent design ("too similar to Islamic iconography") and if its designer, Paul Murdoch, had stolen his ideas. There had been some movement at the start this year when the National Park Service started buying land to develop the memorial space, but in the nine months since, we'd seen little momentum. Fortunately, with the 10th anniversary of September 11th right around the corner, the push in the right direction seems to have occurred, judging from this recent groundbreaking and construction beginning as soon as this week.

As if swine flu weren't bad enough, now the unholy enemy of all who stand upright has landed on our shores. Of course, we are talking about tripping. But this time it has nothing to do with Bilbao, bridges, or Santiago Calatrava. Instead, it's the still relatively-new High Line in Manhattan, about which Gothamist has received word that a woman has decided to sue the city for $2 million over the park's uneven walkways, which caused her to trip, fall, and break her ankle. Before you scoff, this has apparently been a fairly typical issue, with loads of uneven paths and steps eagerly awaiting their next helpless victims. However, one could also argue that maybe if people were watching where they were walking, instead of trying to get a peek at all the naked attractive exhibitionists

(Photos: Lisa Sigal and Paul Ramírez Jonas)

Art and tacos! Just two more reasons to visit New York's High Line, the elevated railway turned idyllic skypark. The innovative art/taco pairing comes courtesy of "Specials," a roving art project by Lisa Sigal and Paul Ramírez Jonas commissioned by the new High Line Art initiative. "'Specials' serves multiple functions, some formal, some social, and some culinary," explain the artists, who constructed a mobile taco stand from a couple of utility carts backed by a ten-foot-by-four-foot wall. From one side, they serve up (at no charge) assorted varieties of homemade tacos, and on the flip side, they exhibit artwork by the likes of Robert Gober and Allan McCollum. "With each manifestation of this project, a new taco is created, and a new show is curated."

Last week, Sigal and Ramírez Jonas wowed the crowd with artworks by Fiona Tan and Regina Silveira and fed them potato and corn croquettes with red cabbage and avocado tacos. "Specials" returns to the High Line next Thursday, October 1, with a menu of work by artists who participated in the 1993 Whitney Biennial— including Glenn Ligon, Kiki Smith, and Fred Wilson—paired with squash and mushroom tacos topped with specially blended hot sauce. Follow the art-hungry mob to the 14th Street passage, just south of the 14th Street stair to the High Line, between 4 and 8 p.m.

Previously on UnBeige:

We love the Public Art Fund. You love the Public Art Fund. And so news of the extraordinary Rochelle Steiner's resignation from the directorship of the non-profit arts organization sent us into a funk: humming a dirge (TLC's "Waterfalls") and deliriously searching Manhattan for rare, possibly imaginary penguins. But things are looking up. The Fund's board of directors has chosen a worthy successor in Nicholas Baume (at right), who has served as chief curator of Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art since 2003 (and counts among his publications a fantastic book on Sol Lewitt's Incomplete Open Cubes). "New York has always fired the artistic imagination," said Baume. "Public Art Fund has played a key role in making the City itself a platform for contemporary artists. I'm thrilled to have the chance to build on that legacy, connecting new art and diverse audiences to harness the creative energy of our moment." Baume will assume the roles of director and chief curator of the Public Art Fund on September 21.

Chinese artist Xing Xin is treating the Venice Biennale crowds to an exhibition with a David Blaine-meets-Ghandi-meets-Marina Abramovic flair. Last week, with the help of a blowtorch-wielding accomplice, Xin sealed himself inside an iron box on Murano Island, where he will spend 49 days in protest of China's one-child policy. "Maybe because of the loneliness in my deep heart, I want to tell something," said Xin of his project. "Or maybe because I am [an] only child, I want to show off my uniqueness."

The box—which is just under seven feet long, three feet wide, and three feet tall—is equipped with a pair of waterproof TVs that beam live footage from cameras inside the box to viewers outside. What will they see? An insolated Xin at work on the task he has set for himself: counting the characters in an 150-part set of Chinese school books. He will not be freed until completing the task. In the meantime, the box allows Xin to receive food and water as well as "deal with bodily functions."

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Just give the giant green rabbit your garbage and nobody gets hurt. The five-foot-tall bunnies stationed through September at London's Covent Garden and Holland Park actually come in peace, bearing trash bags. Toss in your garbage and their ears light up. The bunny bins were designed by the multitalented Paul Smith as one of 15 projects commissioned for London by the city's Design Museum. "I tried to keep my idea simple and hopefully interesting. I am always amazed how bad people are about litter and how they are so thoughtless," said Smith. "My exhibit is hopefully a tiny step towards making people be better with their rubbish."

While Smith injected his trademark whimsy into rubbish bins, David Adjaye smartened up London's bus shelters, Thomas Heatherwick gathered up quotidian lampposts into a "chandelier" bouquet, and Zaha Hadid, well, she whipped up an entire vision for the city of London. Other top designers who answered the museum's call to give something back to London include Tom Dixon, Neville Brody, and Ron Arad. All 15 projects are on view through October 4 in the Design Museum's "Super Contemporary" exhibition, which is co-sponsored by Beefeater gin. You'll need to remember that last part when the guards give you trouble for drinking gin—make that Beefeater 24 "luxury gin"—in the museum. Just tell them the green bunnies made you do it.

Sure, a tree grows in Brooklyn, but in the Bronx, they talk—one in the voice of starchitect Daniel Libeskind. Or at least they will beginning this Sunday, when artist Katie Holten transforms the Bronx's Grand Concourse into a "tree museum" as part of a year-long centennial celebration of the thoroughfare designed by Louis Risse. Commissioned by local organizations including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Holten's Tree Museum will consist of 100 "talking" trees along the four-and-a-half-mile path: each will be designated with a unique phone number that passersby can dial to hear a recorded voice of Bronx history. Jim Dwyer previewed the leafy voices in a recent New York Times article:

Tree No. 39, a honey locust at Marcy Place, will feature Jose Ortiz of the percussion group BombaYo. At another honey locust, No. 52, at 175th Street, Lurry Boyd, who grows peaches and strawberries in a community garden, will narrate. In Poe Park, a London plane tree (No. 75) will connect listeners to the story of the park, a former apple orchard that is now home to a cottage where Edgar Allan Poe lived. People often danced around the park's bandstand at night, as Lloyd Ultan, the Bronx borough historian, tells it, including two sisters named Clooney. One of them was the singer Rosemary Clooney, aunt of the actor George Clooney.

Our world is spinning because we just discovered we are right in the thick of a controversy that we had no knowledge of whatsoever (and probably neither does anyone else, which is good reason to bring up this red hot scandal). We randomly stumbled across this interview with landscape architect Olaniyi Kehinde which is entitled "How I Coined the Name Millennium Park." The Millennium Park he's talking about here is the one in the city of Abuja in Nigera. Being in Chicago, where the other (see: "real") Millennium Park exists, reading that this smart aleck was claiming he'd come up with the name immediately made this writer raise his fisticuffs. That's our park! You can't claim "I suggested that since there was a new Millennium coming why don't we call it Millennium Park and everybody agreed" because we already have one of those! Get your own name! But then, instead of this writer's usual style of flying off the handle without doing any real research, we decided to lower the temper for a second and see what we could find. Turns out, the Abuja Millennium Park opened in 2003. Ours had its opening night a year later, in 2004. So are we the true thieves here? And does it matter that we started ours back in 1997? When did they start theirs? We can't find an answer anywhere, yet we demand closure! Who is the real name swindler here? Who should rightfully be forced to change their name to Y2K Park? If you have the facts, let us know. In the interim, please read that interview with Olaniyi Kehinde because it's really interesting, shows how landscape architects and city planners can make a difference, and it will make us feel better if you do after we've spent the last three hundred words picking on this one trivial detail. Thank you for your time.

We've read on countless occasions how difficult it is to keep a city afloat post-Olympics after those massive crowds leave and all that stuff it constructed for the past decade still remains. It's certainly not an easy thing to do and in our limited memory, it seems like Turin is the only city to have really pulled it off and come out okay these many years later. Though the case is usually a surprise after the fact, not a cry of warning beforehand. But such is the case with London 2012, which finds one of the chairmen of the review panel for the city's Olympic Park, Paul Finch, saying the plans as they are now are likely to lead to another embarrassment like the infamous Millennium Dome and has refused to sign off on the layout until things are changed. Here's a bit:

The design for the [International Broadcast Centre] showed a "paucity of imagination," it said, which could even blight the Olympic legacy, while more work was needed to improve the "large monolithic block" of the [Main Press Centre].

"Unless there is a fundamental rethink, then people could be forgiven for wondering why sheds have been removed from the Lower Lea Valley in the name of high quality urban regeneration, only to be reinstated at a much larger scale," it said in a statement.

(Photos: Prada)

Now that its spooky Marfa outpost has been co-opted by Gossip Girl, Prada is stepping up its public art game with a highly anticipated "Transformer." More than meets the eye? You bet. A robot in disguise? Don't rule it out. Designed by Rem Koolhaas and his Office of Metropolitan Architecture, the Prada Transformer is a shape-shifting event space nestled beside the 16th-century Gyeonghui Palace in Seoul, South Korea. Beginning tomorrow and over the next five months, it will host a series of exhibitions, screenings, and live events in the realms of fashion, art, film, design, and performance.

First up is "Waist Down" (pictured at right, inside the Transformer), the splendid exhibition of skirts designed by Miuccia Prada that has already impressed the pants off of viewers in Tokyo, New York, and Los Angeles. In addition to skirts from the first ever Prada show to the present, the show will feature skirts created by Korean fashion design students. Come June 26, the four-sided structure (hexagon, cross, rectangle, and circle) will be transformed in more ways than one. A crane will flip the elastic-encased Transformer so that the rectangular side forms the ground plan, and it becomes a cinema showing a series of films selected by Babel director Alejandro González Iñárritu and critic Elvis Mitchell. Subsequent events include an art installation by Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg (on the cross side, it will open on July 30) and a hush-hush culminating "special event" that will take place in the round, when the Transformer is flipped onto its circular base in October.