Public Art: The Latest Architecture and News

Winter is hardly the high season for Toronto's waterfront. Nevertheless, the annual design competition Ice Breakers aims to draw people back to the outdoors, populating the frozen harborside with installations celebrating the winter. This year's winning designs are currently on show, centering around the theme "Signal Transmission."

For a third year in a row, Ports Toronto and the Waterfront Business Improvement Area (WBIA) partnered to produce this 2019 exhibition. Out of hundreds of international submissions, the winning designs include an illuminated starlight house, kaleidoscopic mirrors, and arches of bells, now on display until February 24.

See all five winning installations with descriptions by the architects below.

Design a spectacular renewable energy landscape for Masdar City.

$40,000 First Place Prize

LAGI 2019—Return to the Source—invites you to create an iconic work of art for a landmark site within Masdar City, Abu Dhabi. Your artwork will use renewable energy technology as a medium of creative expression and will provide on-site energy production consistent with the master plan of the city.

Learn more here.

To celebrate the 150th Anniversary of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, AREA4 and Suchi Reddy of Readymade Architecture and Design collaborated with the Prospect Park Alliance to create a public art exhibition that features more than 7,000 pinwheels. Called The Connective Project, the installation covers the Rose Garden in the northeast corner of the park with yellow pinwheels that include art and written work submitted by the public. Influenced by the vision of the park’s 1867 designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, Reddy's aspiration for the project was to create a playful urban retreat that sparks a conversation about the value of public spaces.

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Since our founding in 1995, the Design Trust for Public Space has solicited project proposals from government agencies, nonprofit organizations, community groups, and individuals through an open Request for Proposals (RFP).

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We’re commissioning an artist, or artist led team, to design and deliver a major public artwork – an Urban Oasis in the heart of one of Australia’s bustling tourist cities.

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Discarded planks, doors, floorboards and furniture become colorful geometric faces in Stefaan De Croock’s street murals in Belgium. De Croock (also known as Strook), preserves the color and texture of the scavenged wooden pieces, cutting them into geometric shapes and piecing them together to form colossal faces.

"The whole process of making such a recycled artwork is really interesting; the search for wood, cutting and making the pieces, placing and building it,” Strook said. “I really like working with the old patina of discarded wood. It’s like a footprint of time; every piece has it own story and comes together in a new composition and forms a new story.”

View photos and learn more about two of his recent projects – Elsewhere and Wood & paint – after the break.

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A curved street grate becomes an umbrella for a shepherd and his sheep, and a construction site is transformed into a fortress for mop-wielding guards in the interactive street art of French artist Charles Leval, better known as Levalet. Seeking inspiration from the Parisian streets, Levalet is known for his site-specific, India ink drawings that playfully interact with their surrounding architecture. “Topography is very important for me, this is why I always check a place out before I work on it,” Levalet said in an interview with Underground Paris. “I try to mix the world of representation with the real world by playing on the physical cohesion of the situations I put up. Architecture supports my work. Then I work on staging the artwork with photographs.”

See a selection of Levalet’s work after the break and check out his personal website and Facebook page to learn more.

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The Flamengo landfill in Rio de Janeiro was recently host the world's largest urban art GIF. Created by anonymous artist INSA, the work consisted of a huge floor painting that underwent minor changes recorded by the satellite 430 miles above the earth.

Sponsored by Scotch whiskey brand Ballantine, the painting - 619,000-square-feet of yellow and pink hearts - was produced by a 20-person team over the course of four days. With each new picture, the team altered the illustration so that, by the end of the process, the recorded images created an animated GIF (as seen above).

Spirit of Space has shared with us their most recent collaboration with Phil Enquist of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: Art in the City. Pairing powerful quotes with imagery from the Chicago’s most prominent works, the film "expresses the vitality and vibrance that public art can bring to the urban environment by experientially including the viewer in the making of place.” As Spirit of Space describes, “The art is a reflection of the City, the art becomes a part of the City, the art is instrumental in making the City.”