The City College of New York (CCNY) is a bit like an academic Acropolis. Situated in Upper Manhattan on one of the island’s highest points, its collection of early 20th-century neo-Gothic buildings, by George B. Post—and more recent additions by architects that include Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Rafael Viñoly—sit high above the surrounding neighborhood of townhouses and low-scale apartment buildings.
In developing the ceramic facade for a revamped studio-art wing for Macalester College’s Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center, the architects at Minneapolis-based firm HGA started to feel as if they had enrolled in an art class of their own.
Eleven billowing white fiberglass panels, each stretching more than 65 feet high, fold around the front of Christian de Portzamparc’s flagship store for Christian Dior in Seoul." A narrow gap in the draped facade reveals the glazed entrance framed by a delicately perforated metal skin.
Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, created a buzz in museum circles earlier this year when he expressed an interest in acquiring canonical, Midcentury Modernist houses for his institution's collection.