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Joe Goode (23 March 1937 - 22 March 2025)

After studying under Robert Irwin at the Chouinard Art Institute, Joe Goode made a name for himself among a generation of Los Angeles painters who muddied the waters of abstraction by moving toward the representation of ordinary objects.

His abstractions of unmade beds, torn cloud canvases, and unusable staircases demonstrate this exploration of the mundane and typify Goode’s interest in subverting the quotidian by offering the viewer an impossible and unexpected viewpoint.

In his Staircase series which began in 1964, replicas of ordinary stairsteps made of wood and cheap carpeting are usually propped up against a wall or fitted into a corner. Yet they lead to nowhere, surreally altering an otherwise unremarkable subject.

Joe was an innately gifted painter, able to produce the most gorgeously painted works while his subject matter often remained prickly .

He questioned the authenticity of experience through his color-saturated world-view. He wanted the viewer to remember that no matter how beautiful the painting, you are looking at a man-made image.

Rest in Power !

Image: Stairs, c. 1968, Wood and carpet, 43 x 49 x 49 in. (109.22 x 124.46 x 124.46 cm)

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Gaetano Pesce (8 November 1939 – 3 April 2024) 

Pescetrullo, Carovigno, Italy,

Italian artist Gaetano Pesce was commissioned to interpret a hectare of olive trees in Carovigno countryside, in Puglia, Italy by creating a series of playful holiday homes.

Commissioned by Caterina Tognon of Caterina Tognon Arte Contemporaneo, the two mini houses are the portrait of the gallerist and her husband with faces full of expression – pink for her and blue for him.

Together with architects Gabriele Pimpini and Cosimo Cardone of Studio Talent, Gaetano Pesce created a playful example of contemporary architecture in a context saturated in history, effortlessly straddling the worlds of visual art and contemporary design.

The houses are clad in tinted polyurethane, a versatile material readily used for insulation purposes. Pesce’s work has often concentrated on the research of new materials, having experimented with polyurethane since the 1970s.

‘Pescetrullo’ has become one of the most innovative examples of polyurethane used in a permanent architectural setting, which affords the houses with passive thermal properties. As a result, they require virtually little heating during winter and conversely, cooling in summer.

Rest in Power !

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Antoine Samuel Predock, FAIA (June 24, 1936 – March 2, 2024)

Mr Predock was an American architect based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was the principal of Antoine Predock Architect PC, the studio he founded in 1967.

Mr Predock first gained national attention with the La Luz community in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The first national design competition he won was held by the Nelson Fine Arts Center at Arizona State University.

Mr Predock’s work includes the Turtle Creek House, built in 1993 for bird enthusiasts along a prehistoric trail in Texas, the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, and a new ballpark for the San Diego Padres, the Petco Park. He also worked on international sites such as the National Palace Museum Southern Branch in Southern Taiwan and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Ricardo Bofill Leví (5 December 1939 – 14 January 2022)

Ricardo Bofill founded studio RBTA in 1963. Its best-known projects include Walden 7 and the brightly coloured La muralla Roja housing estate in Manzanera.

Other key projects from Bofill’s six-decade-long career include the Les Espaces d'Abraxas housing complex near Paris and, in Spain, the Castell de Kafka and La Fábrica – a repurposed cement factory containing the RBTA headquarters and Bofill’s family home.

More recently, his studio completed the sail-shaped W Barcelona Hotel in Spain and Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Morocco.

Bofill received a number of awards for his work, including the Ciudad de Barcelona Prize of Architecture for La Fábrica and The Israelí Building Center’s Life Time Achievement Award.

He was also an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Architects and the Association of German Architects.

In tribute to his immense body of work, we revisit ,La Muralla Roja (lit. ‘the Red Wall’), a postmodern apartment complex in Manzanera, Calpe, Spain.

It was designed by Ricardo Bofill for Palomar S.A. in 1968 and fully constructed by 1973. It has been ranked among “Ricardo Bofill’s 10 Most Iconic Works”.

In designing the building, Bofill referenced the architecture of North African casbahs and Arab Mediterranean architectural styles. It reinterprets the casbahs in an avant-garde fashion while incorporating the traditional elements like plazas (courtyards), staircases and bridges that connect all the apartments to one another.

As a residency, it holds several amenities such as two commercial stores, a sauna and a restaurant all on the first level. On roof terraces there are solariums and a swimming pool exclusively for use of its residents.

Richard Rogers (July 23, 1933 - December 18, 2021)

Pioneer of high-tech architecture, British-Italian architect, Richard Rogers has passed away at the age of 88.

Mr Rogers received several awards during his career that spanned five decades, including the Pritzker Prize in 2007, the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1985, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Medal in 1999, the Praemium Imperiale for Architecture in 2000, among others.

He earned a reputation for creating prefabricated structures, representing structural simplicity, what would later be referred to as high-tech architecture.

His high-tech approach is most evident in the Pompidou Center (1971–77) in Paris, which he designed with the Italian architect Renzo Piano. He gained more international attention for his spectacular Lloyds of London skyscraper (1978–86) and led to other commissions, including the European court of Human Rights (1989–95) in Strasbourg, France; the Channel 4 Television Headquarters (1991–94) in London; 88 Wood Street (1994–99), an office development in London; and the Daimler Chrysler building (1993–99) in the revitalized Potsdamer Platz, Berlin. Rogers’s work reached its greatest audience when he designed the Millenium Dome (1996–99; later the O2 Arena) in Greenwich, England. Among Rogers’s later works is Terminal 4 (2005) at Madrid Barajas.

Rest in Power!

88 Wood Street, London,

Centre Pompidou (1971–1977)

Lloyd’s building,

Lloyd’s Register in London, UK,

33 Park Row, Manhattan, New York,

Millennium Dome, Greenwich,

3 World Trade Centre, New York,

Virgil Abloh (September 30, 1980 - November 28, 2021) “Figures of Speech, “ is the concept that anyone is capable of anything so long as they don’t hinder their own flexibility by subscribing to one point of view, one career path, or one idea. Museum...

Virgil Abloh 

(September 30, 1980 -  November 28, 2021)

“Figures of Speech, “ is the concept that anyone is capable of anything so long as they don’t hinder their own flexibility by subscribing to one point of view, one career path, or one idea.

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Designed by Samir Batal

Rest in Power, Virgil 

Umberto Riva (June 16, 1928 - June 25, 2021)

Italian architect, designer and painter Umberto Riva was a much loved figure of Milanese architecture and design, a discreet creator with an artist’s vision and ‘a curiosity that cuts across boundaries’

Casa Amoruso Lonoce, Brindisi, Italy (2002)

moodboardmix: “ Remembering Paulo Mendes da Rocha (October 25, 1928 - May 23, 2021) Paulo Mendes da Rocha, one of the world’s last great modernists, as well as one of his country’s most important architects to-date, has passed in Brazil at the age of...

moodboardmix:

Remembering Paulo Mendes da Rocha (October 25, 1928 - May 23, 2021)

Paulo Mendes da Rocha, one of the world’s last great modernists, as well as one of his country’s most important architects to-date, has passed in Brazil at the age of 92. 

Blending beautiful, powerful architectural forms while looking at issues of social engagement, Paulo Mendes da Rocha turned his hand to anything from private housing, large-scale, public architecture and furniture; always with a profound sense of materiality, and a flair for creating architecture that is both functional and emotive, defined by bold yet sensitive moves.