Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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Tag: installation

  • Three nights only

    For this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, artist Carsten Höller collaborated with Fondazione Prada to create a 3-night-only pop-up club called, The Prada Double Club Miami.

    By time you read this post, the pop-up is likely to be over. But it is an interesting space nonetheless.

    The installation made use of an old 1920s film studio and was comprised of two distinct spaces – hence the double club reference. 

    The interior bar and dance floor were entirely monochromatic.

    Höller wanted all color to instead come from participants within the space. 

    The exterior bar, on the other hand, was “hyper-polychromatic.”

    Perhaps some of you might find inspiration here for your next condo sales office. That would be fun.

    Photography: Casey Kelbaugh, courtesy of Fondazione Prada and via The Spaces

  • Hive by Studio Gang

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    As part of the National Building Museum’s Summer Block Party, Studio Gang created an installation in the Great Hall called Hive. See above picture. Note the human for scale. 

    Hive is an interactive series of spaces built exclusively out of lightweight and recyclable paper tubes – apparently 2,700 of them. The tubes have a polished silver exterior and bright magenta interior (love that part), and vary in size from several inches to over 10 feet. They are notched together to create a self-supporting structure.

    The installation is beautiful in its own right – especially against the museum’s 19th century interior – but the idea is that each “sound chamber” within the Hive has different acoustic properties. The small chambers create a more intimate setting. And the main chamber is more grand and public. Think group yoga class or concert.

    For more photos of Hive, click here. Below is also a time-lapse of the Hive’s construction. If you can’t see it, click here. (Don’t worry about turning on your sound.)

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvJV7m0JOF0?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

    Image: Tim Schenck

  • This river I step in is not the river I stand in

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    I was over at the Riverside Bridge yesterday taking photos and I was reminded of Eldon Garnet’s installation called, TIME: AND A CLOCK (1995). 

    The work spans a few physical sites, but perhaps the most well known component is the line of text on the west side of the bridge, which reads in 18″ high letters: “This river I step in is not the river I stand in.” (Photo above from Garnet’s website.)

    If you’re from Toronto, you may be already be familiar with this installation. But I love the message and I think it’s an important one. So I thought I would reiterate it here on the blog. 

    The text is derived from the thinking of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Its meaning is a simple one: change is fundamental to the universe. 

    Neighborhoods change. Cities change. Industries change. We change. The river you first step into, is not the same river that you’ll be standing in. That initial river has come and gone, replaced by a new river. In the words of Heraclitus, “No man ever steps in the same river twice.”

    As people, organizations and cities age, there can be a tendency to resist change. I believe in fighting that tendency. 

    Because that’s how established rich companies get destroyed by young poor companies. They – the incumbents – underestimate the importance of change. They forget that the river is constantly flowing.

  • AMYGDALA — An installation that converts social media sentiment into audiovisual art

    It’s becoming harder and harder to think of tech as a distinct silo. Tech is embedding itself into so many traditional industries that, one day, every company will probably be a software/technology company in some regards. 

    It’s for this reason that I often think and write about tech and its impacts on the built environment.

    An interesting example of this phenomenon is a recent art installation by fuse* called AMYGDALA. What it does is translate collective social media sentiment (specifically from Twitter) into an audiovisual art installation housed within an urban space.

    Here’s how they describe the project:

    “The news and thoughts of users spread across social networks in real time. And so an event with worldwide implications immediately involves millions of people sharing their own opinions and emotions: happiness, anger, sadness, disgust, amazement or fear. Thus, imagining Internet as a living organism, we might think that its emotional state may be given by the overall emotions shared by users at any given time. AMYGDALA listens to shared thoughts, interprets states of mind and translates the data gathered into an audiovisual installation capable of representing the collective emotional state of the net and its changes on the basis of events that take place around the world.”

    And here’s a video of it in action (click here if you can’t see it below):

    [vimeo 154049756 w=500 h=281]

    What I like about the project is how it takes something digital and ephemeral and then both aggregates and translates it into something physical within the urban environment. It’s a perfect visual representation of how technology and networks are – for better or for worse – seeping into our daily lives.