New York : Nov. 2nd

The Noguchi Museum in Queens is ten blocks from the train but is well worth the walk. It is dedicated to the work of the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, and is housed in a renovated cluster of industrial buildings. The architecture and the artwork mesh perfectly, an antidote to the warehouse or supermarket feeling I often get in other museums or galleries. Noguchi's best work wasn't there; his public sculptures, parks and playgrounds are his best work. My favorite thus far, Moerenuma Park, was posthumously built in Japan.
Link to Noguchi Museum.

Moerenuma Park, Sapporo, Japan

Link to Photo Album above.

I hoofed it around Chelsea for an hour and concluded that the mortgage crisis had hit the galleries.
The Storefront for Art & Architecture in Soho had a giant Lego model by the Danish design consortium "Big". The small exhibit was concerned with ideas of modular architecture, and the synthesis of architectural systems and social order in regards to housing. The fallacy of all of the models was that if architecture becomes more modular, cheaper, faster and more user-directed, that the results will resemble crystal formation, and not something messier, more chaotic and provisional. However, the Lego model was a playful and impressive depiction of the kind of society described in E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops".
Vito Acconci's design of the facade of the gallery is really engaging. Embedded in the outside wall are several interlocking, rotating panels. This makes the gallery an extension of the street, which creates the need for the gallery attendant to continually go from model to model cleaning them of street grime and particulate pollution with a can of compressed air and a brush; An amusing consequence of the design, if you're not the one cleaning.
Link to the Storefront for Art & Architecture.

Link to Photo Album above.