Annabelle Selldorf was an obvious choice to renovate the venerated museum of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, home to a stellar collection of European and American paintings.
Lasting Impression: Since it opened in 1955, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute has drawn 200,000 visitors annually to see its French Impressionist paintings among 9,000 works of art.
Last month the Clark completed a $145 million campus expansion on its 140-acre site in the Berkshire mountains of Massachsetts. Included is a new visitor center by Tadao Ando Architect & Associates and a renovation of the existing museum by Selldorf Architects.
Catalytic Converter: A new art museum transforms an old coal-conveying platform into a different kind of power generator, jump-starting the redevelopment of an industrial part of Shanghai.
A coal-conveying platform from the 1950s and a parking garage from the first decade of the 21st century act as unlikely form-givers to Atelier Deshaus’s new Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai.
Delfina Entrecanales is an unusual cultural philanthropist, her Delfina Foundation in London is an unusual place, and the architectural concept underlying it was born of an unusual international collaboration.
The artist toiling in solitude has long been a romantic ideal. But it rarely holds in reality, especially for those who work at the civic scale, making pieces that straddle the blurry boundary between art and architecture. These artists rarely work alone, typically relying on a host of collaborators to realize their visions, including studio assistants, fabricators, and even city officials.
Alex Schweder practices what he calls “performance architecture,” installation and event-based work that explores how people comprehend the built environment and how that perception shapes their bodies, social relationships, and desires.
Allyson Vieira builds monuments—but she uses unexpectedly humble material. Take her 2013–14 exhibition The Plural Present. There, the New York–based artist filled a gallery with Classical ruins: The City Wall, 2013, delimited the space with a colonnade that framed Beauty, Mirth, and Abundance, 2013, three figures striking acontrapposto that echoes the famed Greek statue of the three graces at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Andreas Angelidakis is not sure why millions of people are obsessed with cat videos. “It’s a curious thing, what captures people’s attention,” he says. “Architecture is a lot slower than that kind of exchange of images.”