Since 1985, the Whitney Museum of American Art has presented three separate expansion plans for its 42-year-old home in Upper Manhattan—all of which have fizzled. Once again, the institution is trying to increase its square footage, with hopes that an entirely new strategy will make the fourth time a charm.
Studio Pei-Zhu Designs Museum for Iconic Chinese Artist While the devastating Sichuan earthquake in May left a large portion of Western China in ruins, signs are emerging that some notable building projects in the area are pushing forward. One of these projects is the Art Museum of Yue Minjun, designed by Beijing-based Studio Pei-Zhu, a 2007 Design Vanguard winner. Image courtesy Studio Pei-Zhu Located near the Qingcheng Mountains, and adjacent to the Shimeng River in Sichuan Province, the 10,700-square-foot museum will house the work of Yue Minjun, a Chinese contemporary artist known for his repetitive images of large, smiling figures.
The owner of an abandoned—and reportedly haunted—sanatorium in Louisville, Kentucky, wants to turn the five-story building into a boutique hotel. Charlie Mattingly and architect Kevin Milburn, of a firm called Urban Designz, hope to raise $18 million to transform the Waverly Hills Sanatorium into a 78-room hotel with a spa, fitness center, and meeting area, according to the Courier-Journal. “My intent is for this to be first class all the way,” Mattingly told the newspaper. A “mecca for ghost hunters,” the old tuberculosis hospital regularly appears on lists of America’s most haunted places. Last fall, it was featured in a
The Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Palmer House in Ann Arbor, Michigan, acclaimed by historians as one of the architect’s best residential projects, has been put up for sale by the family of the original owners.
For architects Winfried Brenne and Franz Jaschke, restoring the 80-year-old ADGB Trade Union School, in Germany, was a case of subtraction. “The building was not in worse condition than others we had worked with,” Brenne says, “but it was more hidden under changes made over time.”
Image courtesy Art Institute of Chicago Wellington “Duke” Reiter, FAIA, has been named the new president of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Wellington “Duke” Reiter, FAIA, a respected architect, urban designer, and educator, has been named the new president of the venerable School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Reiter succeeds Tony Jones, who held the position for 18 years. Jones will become school chancellor for a year and then retire. Reiter takes the helm on Aug. 25. He most recently was dean of the College of Design at Arizona State University. During his five-year tenure,
Terry Brown, an architect with a unique vision and craft-based practice, was killed in a highway accident on June 28 in Rosebud, Texas. He taught at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and practiced from the 3 Horses Ranch near Rosebud, where he had lived and raised Texas longhorns since 2005. He also maintained a practice in Cincinnati, where he resided for more than two decades. He was 53 years old.
With the Beijing 2008 Summer Games starting today, journalists from around the globe have descended upon the fast-growing city. In addition to stories about pollution and traffic problems, newspapers this week have been filled with reviews of Beijing’s innovative new architecture. Chris Hawthorne, architecture critic for the LA Times, penned a five-part series of articles on the changing face of China’s capital, calling the city’s Olympic-inspired building boom a mixture of “daring design with a totalitarian theme” and noting the role of Western architects in many of the recently finished projects (RECORD, July 2008). The highly publicized stadium designed by
Photo courtesy Platt Byard Dovell White Paul S. Byard Paul Spencer Byard, FAIA, a partner in the firm of Platt Byard Dovell White Architects in New York City, and the director of the historic preservation program at Columbia University, died on July 15 of colon cancer. He was 68 years old. Born in 1939 in New York City, Byard long advocated a modern approach to preservation and restoration, as his book, The Architecture of Additions, Design and Regulation (1998), convincingly reveals. In the book Byard argues that innovative expressive design can enhance the older, original, and often historic structure to
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