On the hompage of the Washington Posts website there is the following story!
Click here to veiw the photos!
Illustrating That Looks Aren't Everything
NEW YORK — Sometimes, all it takes to make good art is to point a finger — or a camera — at our world's most telling peculiarities. That, at least, is how many leading artists feel these days: They believe that content, presented as transparently as possible, is what ought to matter most; artsy form can only interfere. Photographers Andrea Robbins and Max Becher have made a career of such telling transparency. Their razor-sharp photographs seem like nothing more than windows open on the strangeness in the world. It's an effect that in itself demands an artful eye.
The Washington Post on 770’s Around the World
On the hompage of the Washington Posts website there is the following story!
Click here to veiw the photos!
Illustrating That Looks Aren’t Everything
NEW YORK — Sometimes, all it takes to make good art is to point a finger — or a camera — at our world’s most telling peculiarities. That, at least, is how many leading artists feel these days: They believe that content, presented as transparently as possible, is what ought to matter most; artsy form can only interfere. Photographers Andrea Robbins and Max Becher have made a career of such telling transparency. Their razor-sharp photographs seem like nothing more than windows open on the strangeness in the world. It’s an effect that in itself demands an artful eye.
A few years ago, the pair showed us photos of middle-class Germans who spend their weekends and vacations dressed as Native Americans.
A new project called “770,” showing at Sonnabend Gallery in New York, traces a single piece of undistinguished Brooklyn architecture that has cloned itself around the world.
770 Eastern Pkwy. is the address of the Brooklyn headquarters of the Lubavitcher movement, the largest group of ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jews. The modest brick structure, in a banal neo-Gothic style, once housed a doctors’ clinic. In 1940, however, it was bought by Lubavitchers for their sixth rebbe, Yoseph Yitzchak Schneerson. After his death in 1950, it was taken over by his much-venerated son-in-law, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh rebbe, who passed away in 1994. (Some of his followers believe him to be the Messiah, and therefore still “alive.”)
Because of that man’s fame and his reputed holiness, when Lubavitchers set up shop in other places, they often duplicate his home to house new centers for the faithful.
Robbins and Becher show us a “770” in Sao Paulo, where this little bit of Brooklyn in Brazil has somehow grown an understory parking bay, and sits dwarfed by neighboring high-rises.
In Milan it has been squeezed into a tighter space, between two neoclassical palazzi .
In Los Angeles, the bays of the original facade have multiplied to make the building nearly fill a city block, while at a camp near Montreal it has been shrunk to almost clubhouse size.
Archaeologists of the future, digging up these structures, might imagine that it was their repeated form that held some special meaning and attraction. They’d be wrong: These buildings are all about the content one of them once held.
770 At Sonnabend Gallery, 536 W. 22nd St., New York, through Oct. 21. Call the gallery at 212-627-1018 or visit http://www.robbinsbecher.com/ to see further images of this and other projects by Robbins and Becher.
Leo
Amazing. Thanks for the great news clippings. It makes us feel good to be recognized evn by the non-jews.
Thanks for a great job.
shliach
this is the times of moshiach to be on the front page of the washington post
To Leo:
I beleive most reporters for the Post are Jewish.
@@
he didnt mention the one in Kfar Chabad, Israel. but yeah intresting article.
Sara
Wow! How amazing to see something like this in the Washington Post. Klal Yisroel is an "or lagoyim" in every aspect of our lives, even our architechture. Is this story in the newspaper also, or just on the online edition?
Meir
this is the link the the original page with all the images (including Kfar Chabad etc.)
http://robbecher.www4.50meg…
————-
Webby – mabe make this a clickable link!
Myron
Hm,
The original article has some intyresting 770-Chabad Houses.
israeli
ther are still a few more that they missed like in kfar chabad or ramat shlomo in jerusalem and another one i dont rem where
cleveland
they forgot to add the 770 in cleveland
770-s
Hey, well if you want to to start naming all the ones they missed, than youv’e got:
Kfar Chabad, Ramat Shlomo-Jerusalem, Rutgers University-NJ, Celev-land!Ohio, and i think there’s another one somewhere else in Israel, and there’s also at least 5 other places in the world that have it in planing (some russian city …hallandale FL, and abunch of other places that i cant remember at the moment).
Max Becher
Hello, my wife and I took those pictures. On our website http://www.robbinsbecher.co… you can see the full series. We photographed all the ones you mention, if they existed at the time we did the project. We also photographed the cleveland 770, but it was still under construction. We mention it in the text. We would love to go to the 770 in Dneprodzerzhinsk, Ukraine. Is it finished, I heard it was started on?