View of Spectacle with “Unbuilt City” by Feng Lu and Liu Yuyang (foreground), “Future of the Museum in China” by China Megacities Lab/GSAPP Columbia University, directed by Jeffrey Johnson (rear left), “Bias” by Yu Ting (rear center), and “Museum of Unknown” by Qiu Anxiong (rear right). Right as the quantity, quality, and scale of new museums in China are reaching an apex, Shanghai’s new Power Station of Art (PSA) is addressing this phenomenon with a well-timed exhibition, Spectacle: 12 Presentations of Contemporary Museum Architecture in China, which runs through July 18. The title comes from the curators’—Zhang Ming, Bu Bing,
The new East Building seen from Fine Arts Drive (north façade). As the only permanent structure built for the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis—an event which looms large in the collective consciousness of the city to this day—the Cass Gilbert-designed Palace of Fine Arts, later known as the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM), persists as a cultural and architectural icon. The handsome neoclassical pile sits atop a rolling hill in the town’s beloved Forest Park, where admission through its porticoed main entrance to view an encyclopedic collection has remained free for over a century. Needless to say, alterations to
On the evening of May 29, Toyo Ito accepted the 38th Pritzker Architecture Prize at Boston’s John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum on what would have been the president’s 96th birthday. Ito, who started his studio in Tokyo 42 years ago, had long been considered a leading candidate for the award. His ethereal architecture reexamines the relationship between structure and enclosure, as seen in his Sendai Mediatheque (2001), Tod’s Omotesando (2004), and his Tama Art University Library (2007). “Modernist architecture built a wall between itself and nature and relied on technology to create artificial environments with no connection to
Diller Scofidio + Renfro, H3 Hardy Collaboration, SHoP Architects, and SOM propose plans to relocate the famed New York City arena and redesign Penn Station. Penn Station 3.0Diller Scofidio + RenfroNew York City At a much-anticipated forum in Manhattan today, four firms presented plans for moving New York’s Madison Square Garden away from its current location above cramped and claustrophobic Pennsylvania Station. Their proposals included schemes for a new transportation hub that could rise on the station's site. Surprisingly, each firm chose a different location for the reimagined Garden. Diller Scofidio + Renfro placed their arena above the Farley Post
A confidant of I. M. Pei, Perry Chin was asked to consult on plans to give Pei’s East Building of the National Gallery in Washington new heating, cooling, security, and fire safety systems.
Kentucky Fried Chicken Restaurant, Los Angeles, Grinstein/Daniels Architects Just when you thought things couldn’t get any more tumultuous at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), which has been buffeted by a string of financial and personnel crises in recent years, a new brouhaha has surfaced. And this time it concerns architecture—to be precise, a significant controversy surrounding a planned MOCA exhibition called A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture from Southern California. The show is a major component of Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. (see page 59), a series of exhibitions running through the summer in venues across
What Le Corbusier’s only realized project in North America says to us today. The center’s iconic ramp is wonderful to walk on, but a drag from below. And the landscape is merely a leftover space. How fast the radical present becomes the historical past. This new-is-old transformation has struck again at Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard. The boldly sculpted reinforced-concrete building, the architect’s only realized project in North America and one of the final commissions before his death in 1965, turned 50 on May 28, two weeks before New York’s Museum of Modern Art would
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