After a two week hiatus I’m back in New York and that meant that Saturday was time to hit up a couple of art galleries with Wendy.

We kicked off the day by visiting Sebastian & Barquet, a store a block from us that was showcasing their favourite pieces of 20th century furniture design from their permanent collection.  Among the highlights was a copy of Marc Newson’s Lockheed Lounge-one of these just sold for $968,000 at Sotheby’s:

They also had an incredible desk by Max Ingrand that was originally for Pierre Peugeot (yes, that Peugeot).  There were only three of these ever made-and no one knows where the third one is:

Across the street, the Gagosian Gallery was showcasing some of Marc Newson’s recent works.   He’s been using a CNC milling machine to cut furniture out of continuous blocks of marble.  The effect is stunning:

From there it was down to Battery Park where Ugo Rondinone has made plastic casts of cork trees and named them “air gets into everything even nothing & get up girl a sun is running the world.”  I don’t make this up:

The last stop on our little tour was the Shrinking Cities exhibit at the Pratt Institute.  The exhibit focused on different regions that are shrinking-Detroit, Ivanovo (Russia), Liverpool/Manchester and Halle/Leipzig-and the impact this has on the planning and architecture of the region.  Incidentally, each of these regions is effectively shrinking due to an emphasis on one industry that was subsequently destroyed by globalization.  Click each name of each city to read the full details.

The exhibit featured various studies by architects about what could be done to deal with the fact that buildings were being abandoned.  The best was a project called Exterritories, a fake documentary about turning Halle/Leipzig into a Chinese special economic region and resettling South Africans to Detroit, Turks in Ivanovo and Indians to Liverpool.  The project unfolded as a series of news articles reporting on the event from the future.  Here’s a sample: