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Four years ago, during a three-month artistâs residency in Brooklyn, Andi Schmied, a photographer from Budapest, visited the Empire State Building and was surprised to see so many taller skyscrapers. She immediately wanted to shoot photos from their top floors, but she quickly learned that these glass minarets were mostly new luxury residencesâprivate in the extreme. âWhat is my way to get in?â she wondered.
Schmied, then thirty, decided to impersonate a prospective buyer or renter, a Hungarian billionaire named Gabriella Schmied. (Gabriella is her middle name, so her passport sufficed as I.D.) To fill the role of husband, she recruited a friend from Budapest, an art and book dealer named Zoltan. She worked up a backstory: Gabriella, architect, moving to the States with toddler son, owing to Zoltanâs work. She invented an imaginary assistant named Coco, blew her art-residency materials budget on a credible outfit, made a list of f
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VI PER Gallery announces an international open call for exhibition projects. The winning proposal will be realized at VI PER in late 2021.
VI PER Gallery based in Prague, Czech Republic, is a non-profit institution focused on architecture in the broadest sense, together with its relations and points of intersection with contemporary art, urbanism, design, and media, as well as the political, legal, social, economic, ecological, and spatial contexts, which help to shape architecture and the built environment.
The call is opened for architects, artists, designers, researchers, curators, critics (induviduals or teams) of any nationality and country of residence. Submitted projects may fall into a wide range of genres – associated with architecture, art, design, and other disciplines – and should reflect on the relevance of architecture to respond to contemporary issues and discourse. We welcome original projects that demonstrate new and innovative ideas, critical and experim
Ever wonder what the views are like from New York’s most expensive condominium towers? Hungarian artist Andi Schmied devised an elaborate ruse to gain entry into some of them.
Schmied created a fictional identity for herself as an ultra-wealthy homebuyer, and agents ate it up, Curbed reported.
Still and subtitles from a video Schmied shot in Time Warner Center. (Andi Schmied)
Schmied was able to access high-rise units at 25 of the city’s tallest and priciest towers, photographed those incredible views and put them into a new book: “Private Views: A High-Rise Panorama of Manhattan.”
Although she went to great lengths to dress the part of a wealthy European buyer, including creating a fake personal assistant named Coco and a fake husband, Schmied may not have needed to do so.
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