There are great architects who work with established conventions, elevating them masterfully. And there are great architects who work without regard to conventions, establishing their own way of building. Shigeru Ban is this kind of architect. His innovative structures employ industrial cardboard tubes as structural framing elements. Collected in last year’s book Shigeru Ban: Paper in Architecture, these projects seem especially meaningful right now, as we rebuild after earthquakes in Haiti and Chile and search for an architecture that’s practical, inexpensive, and beautiful.
     Like Frank Gehry houses of exposed wood studs and plywood, and Tadao Ando’s buildings in poured concrete, Ban’s structures take an everyday building material and transform it with ingenuity and grace. Ban has studied these tubes for decades, working closely with engineers and lawmakers in Japan to establish standard construction methods, details, and metrics. He single-handedly advanced their technology and developed their vocabulary, one that’s on the verge of a new kind of architecture.

Mexico’s treasured Nortec Collective is a puzzle with a myriad of individual musicians and artists pieced together to create a larger masterpiece. One of these pieces is Jorge Verdin, better known as Clorofila. Harnessing the Nortec sound without sounding like another Tijuana Sessions Vol. 3 is no small feat, considering the accolades showered on the 2005 release, but Verdin is up to the challenge. Though known as a graphic artist — he has a degree in design, after all — Verdin has been recording so-called “weird sounds” since he was a kid. Whereas the collective traditionally draws on the norteno sound, on his corridos — which are popular folkloric songs about gangsters and drugs — Clorofila presents a banda blowout loaded with bass and brassy notes. As a hidden saxophone jabs through the soundscape, string arrangements ease into 8-bit sounds before giving way to accordion squeezes for an invigorating pastiche of tracks.

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Somewhere along the line luxury became a dirty word, and Karl Marx had probably less to do with it than Tom Ford. Contemporary consumer culture now champions oversexed logo-ed bling over subdued elegance. But there exist designers who aim to produce garments that are neither cocaine cocktail dress or the power suit. Rather, they are interested in making clothes that are real, not role-play, while conserving artisanal techniques that are slowly fading away as mass-production gains speed.
    Lost & Found, a small fashion company whose design studio is hidden in the Tuscan countryside, was founded by Ria Dunn, a Canadian expat, in order to produce clothes based on the organic relationship between the maker and his craft. According to a statement on her website, “This intimate work is designed and made entirely in Italy and is produced by the old hands of those still carrying with them the spirit of ‘hand made’ craftsmanship.”
    This intimacy is evident in the men’s and women’s garments Dunn produces, from carefully selected natural materials, such as cashmeres and wools interwoven with hemp and linen fibers, down to hand-finished stitching. The results feel earthy and organic. The textures are neither overly soft nor rough. This combination lured Karlo Steel, the buyer from Atelier, to Lost & Found.

Loomstate Organic, an ecologically minded clothing company based in New York, brings Earth Day back to its psychedelic roots with a unique celebration of the environmental holiday’s 40th anniversary this Wednesday.
      Forty drummers — led by Hisham Akira Bharoocha of Soft Circle and including musicians from the bands Aska, Oneida, and Lichens, among others — will take part in a drumming ceremony to commemorate the occasion, followed by DJ sets by Chris Taylor of Grizzly Bear. Opportunities to explore a “twenty-foot-tall pyramid interactive psychedelic installation” abound alongside carnivalesque offerings such as face painting and psychic readings.
     All interested Earth lovers in NYC can celebrate forty years of Earth Day in the free-wheeling atmosphere of its original decade with free shuttle service from the Bowery to the event location in Midtown.
     Our Magnificent Earth will take place at Good Units on Hudson, 356 West 58th St (between 8th & 9th Ave.) this Wednesday, April 14 from 7-10 p.m. All interested in attending should notify RSVP@loomstate.org for free bus pick-up every 30 minutes from 6:30-9 p.m. from Rogan Store, 330 Bowery St. (corner of Bond).

Henri Cartier-Bresson, the famous French photographer, had an incredibly prolific career as a photojournalist and portraitist. He traveled the globe for fifty years, from Mexico to Indonesia, obsessively freeze-framing the world, turning the ephemeral into the permanent. The new Cartier-Bresson retrospective at the MoMA, opening on April 11, is the first since the photographer’s death in 2004. It aims to put together a comprehensive summary of his illustrious career.
    The exhibit contains three hundred photographs dating from 1929 to 1989, one fifth of them previously unpublished. Divided into twelve chapters, it highlights Cartier-Bresson’s biggest accomplishments, most notably as the pioneer of the photo-essay genre. Among these are his trips to Communist China and the USSR, places that were not the most welcoming to Western photographers.
    It is not the photojournalism, however, that is the most moving part of the show. The middle of the exhibit is devoted to a selection of exquisite portraits that captures the essence of its subjects. There is a beautiful picture of Henri Matisse, the famous painter, serenely contemplating his pigeons. The well-known image of Albert Camus, the cigarette in his mouth and the collar of his coat upturned, the very picture of un homme is juxtaposed against the photo of Jean Paul-Sartre, his great existentialist friend and enemy.
    Cariter-Bresson once said that his aim was to engage the world. Of course, we’ve long known that he succeeded, and the MoMA exhibition is a testament to that, in case we had forgotten.

Although we’re in the tail-end of the worst financial crisis in years, it doesn’t feel like many lessons have been learnt. Just another global case of plus ca change…? With many people blaming the banks and the financial system in general for bringing the world economy to its knees, dozens of aid organizations have joined forces to kickstart a new campaign in the UK: The Robin Hood Tax.
     Under the slogan “Turning a crisis for the banks into an opportunity for the world”, what the men in green propose is very simple: levy a 0.005 percent tax on all banking transactions — eventually rising to 0.05 percent — to tackle global poverty and climate change. The proposed stamp duty doesn’t sound like much, but at the lower rate, they claim, it could raise £3,000,000,000 (three billion pounds) a year in the UK alone, and at no cost to ordinary people. And if the tax went international, they say it can generate hundreds of billion of dollars, which gives you an idea of the kind of money swimming around the financial ocean.
     A strong grassroots campaign is already in full swing (150,000 facebook fans) and boasts alleged support from some pretty important names, like Gordon Brown, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, George Soros, and Warren Buffett, to name a few. The Merrymen’s media campaign features heavyweight actors Ben Kingsley and Bill Nighy playing squirming bank executives in a series of slick little films. Check them out after the jump.

Last Thursday saw the riotous opening party — complete with psychedelic light show — of Thirty Days NY, an event series in a pop-up space in Tribeca. Curated by David Jacob Kramer and Sammy Harkham (LA natives might recognize them as the minds behind the Family Bookstore, a curated collection of published works of art, text, design, and performance), the project mashes together incredible artists, writers, and thinkers from all walks of life — and offers all events for free and open to the public. This past weekend, performances by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore and even Fred Armisen of SNL fame gave us an enticing taste of the caliber of talent slated to appear in the weeks to come.
     Highlights of the program include A.M. Homes reading Sean Wilsey; Art Spiegelman in discussion with experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs; a presentation by Aaron Rose of never-before-seen VHS short film footage by the artists he represented in the heyday of his legendary New York gallery; psychedelic light shows by Joshua White — who invented the shows in the sixties and performed at New York’s infamous Fillmore East with the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and The Doors — together with Gary Panter, who built the sets for Pee-wee’s Playhouse in the ’80s.

Break out the old Singer, fiber art is back. Sewing meets its urban counterpart in San Francisco-based artist Steve MacDonald, whose fervid creativity is made manifest in the unlikely medium of stitching and needlework. Even on a good day, embroidery and pop culture make strange bedfellows, but in the deft hands of MacDonald (aka Ramblin Worker) it just works. Combining typography, painting, and sewing with a bold and graphic aesthetic, each illustrative piece is like an eccentric home-ec project gone wonderfully awry. MacDonald cites folk art, fantasy, mythology, urban settings and Japanese nature scenes as just a few of his influences, making his own landscapes something of a limitless fantasy world. Obsessive attention to detail (did you notice all the different trajectories of stars in the sky?), tongue-in-cheek humor, and the strange recurrence of roaring tigers render the handmade intricacies all the more refreshing. More than ever in an increasingly digital age, where some fear nostalgic methods could be going the way of the dinosaur, or in MacDonald’s case, the way of the dragon.

The Last Dragon opens at the Fuse Gallery in New York on April 24 and runs through May 15.

The world lost an icon like no other yesterday when Malcolm McLaren passed away from mesothelioma in Switzerland. He was 64 years old. Of course, he was best known for forming and managing the Sex Pistols and Bow Wow Wow, but through the ’70s and ’80s McLaren wielded influence in realms well beyond punk rock, bringing hip hop and world music to greater notoriety in Great Britain with his own solo work and radicalizing the realm of fashion alongside longtime partner Vivienne Westwood.
     McLaren and Westwood ushered in a renaissance of Edwardian fashions with their clothing shop Let It Rock, which opened in 1971. Traveling to New York the next year on business, McLaren met the New York Dolls whom he would soon manage. That partnership lasted just a few years, culminating in McLaren’s controversial decison to drape the Dolls in Soviet-themed leather regalia for a concert — the backlash of which contributed to the band’s breakup. In the meantime, McLaren reinvented his fashion business under the monicker SEX, which sold S&M styles and certainly influenced Agent Provocateur, the lingerie retailer co-founded by McLaren and Westwood’s son Joseph Corré.
     McLaren’s management roles came to involve the band the Neon Boys (which included future Television founders Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell) and the Strand, who would soon be renamed the Sex Pistols, after a green-haired chap named John Lydon was discovered while wearing a shirt on which “I hate Pink Floyd” was scrawled.