A readymade building with an Australian origin is first off the block at the MoMA’s Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling in New York, by Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier: Burst*008 in New York is designed to be assembled on site from laser-cut pieces. The Burst house is a computer-designed remake of the typical prefabricated box. Working from a formula that automates on the computer the specific pieces needed to create the house desired, the project is based on a system that can be adapted to a changing set of criteria. The 2003 prototype of the Burst*003 project, built on Australia’s northeast coast, won the Royal Australian Institute of Architects 2006 Wilkinson award; Burst*008 is a prototype developed for MoMA. From ArtDaily.org

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Ruark Lewis is showing his latest installation at Chalk Horse: you’ve got until 2nd August to catch it.

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Most of the sculptures in the Jardin des Tuileries are what my colleagues used to call “plonk art” - sculptures located in formal garden-like settings as if they had dropped from the sky - and the Tuileries is the mother lode of this kind of public art. However in one corner there is a jungle which surrounds this most intriguing example of art which takes its inspiration from the environment, and which re-creates a wild park-like environment of an absolutely distinctive kind. This work, Arbre des voyelles by Giuseppe Pennone, (1999) takes its origin from the wind storm that swept this part of the world in the 90s which overturned thousands of ancient trees and forests across Europe. Thus the fallen tree in this part of the Tuileries is a bronze cast of an oak tree - one of the casualties of the storm - and at each extremity of its branches is planted a new tree, now all healthily reaching skywards. Magical. Click the thumnails below to see more. Or see how it looks in winter here…

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Sorry, Jean, it’s not the work of an architect. It is the work Hommage a Arago by Jan Dibbets. It is a piece consisting of 135 medallions which stretches from the north to the south along the Paris Meridian, and commemorates the famous (but absent) scientist and astronomer Francois Arago. His bronze statue was melted down by the Nazis during the occupation of Paris, and was never replaced. Except, conceptually, by Dibbets, one of whose medallions is to be found on the plinth. Not all the medallions have survived… But as we have noted, Paris respects its axes… From this one at the Palais Royale you are lured towards a Daniel Buren, and then…

a Pol Bury. Rich pickings, eh?

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See how a work of art can be monumental without being a monument. This is the Richard Serra piece Promenade in the Grand Palais.

Plus some subtle illusionism: it sits lightly on the ground? I think not.

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Here’s an arresting self-portrait by Cesar as Centaure in the 6th in Paris. It presses all the right buttons as public art for me… Clearly whoever makes the decisions about what is to be seen in the public domain in Paris gets their criteria right! And the face is Cesar, the mask is Picasso - work that out!

No doubt in Australia this has elements the police would have to “evaluate”…

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See what’s happening at the Tate. Waldemar Januszczak at The Times thinks it’s a wank: “watching an organisation as institutionally snobbish as Tate Modern trying to get down with the kids is already a ghastly sight. The art world is crazy about street art just now. And Street & Studio [the photography show inside] was mounted, I suggest, in a deliberate attempt to up the tone of the external graffiti.”

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This prize-winning pavilion sits underneath the three hundred year old plane trees of Bedford Square, just outside the Architectural Association. In making no false claims for its status beyond design excellence, it entirely avoids the use of hyperbole. And it’s popular! You can sit on it!

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Contact: Between Memory & History is the annual photography festival in Toronto with 150 venues across the city. Here is the contribution of the Italian Embassy: works by Raffaelo Mariniello. More later…

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this impulsive device is a work by Olafur Eliasson, who currently has light and movement works all over the MoMA. It’s nice to imagine the shape of the invisible anti-monument thus created…

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