As would be expected, the opening of the New Acropolis Museum has re-ignited the debate about the return of the Parthenon’s so-called Elgin Marbles to Athens.
The marble for this stunning octastyle, peripteral, Doric temple (with Ionic architectural elements), came from nearby Mount Pentelikon. It was designed to house a huge statue of Athena Parthenos ( 26 cubits tall, or just over 36 feet in height) which Phidias sculpted in ivory and gold. Indeed, the statue of Athena wore enough removable gold plate to operate as something of a bank. As Neils points out in The Parthenon Frieze, “Given all this gold (44 talents) this statue was the symbolic if not physical embodiment of the Delian Treasury.” Photo courtesy of the British Committee of Reunification of
New York City’s legendary Four Seasons restaurant, now celebrating its 50th anniversary, has embarked on the restoration of its famed Philip Johnson-designed interior in the Seagram Building, completed in 1958. Phyllis Lambert, the architect and patron who convinced her father, Samuel Bronfman, owner of the Seagram Company, to choose Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Johnson as the architects of his new headquarters building on Park Avenue, guided the selection of Belmont Freeman, FAIA, as the new architect for the restoration of this culinary outpost.
The mere thought of a high-profile architect designing a shop for a well-known fashion designer raises the old question: Will the container dominate the contained—i.e., the clothes?
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the completion of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York—a landmark structure often condemned by artists but extolled by architects. It also marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Wright, who had unfortunately missed the opening on October 21, 1959. He passed away six months prior at the age of 91.
RECORD's Suzanne Stephens visits the unusually named Ghost International Architectural Laboratory. The design-build workshop in Nova Scotia celebrated its tenth session in 2008.
Architects discuss strategies for staying alive. John Lahey, AIA, chairman and principal in charge of design at Solomon Cordwell Buenz (SCB), in Chicago, says that after having been through the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s, he finds it better to lay off architects than offer a four-day work week. “People who are raring to go don’t like working four days a week,” he says. When SCB, known for its privately sponsored residential construction, was affected, “We reduced the staff, even though painful, ” says Lahey. Its head count now totals 130 after losing between 25 to 30 people to
Architects discuss strategies for staying alive. Layoffs. Each week the numbers of layoffs grow as architects frantically attempt to curtail the fallout from the current recession, when projects are killed, postponed, or don’t materialize. Few firms want to shed their trusted, well-trained architects, and few firms want to talk about it with the not-so-trusted members of the press. As Andrew Bartle, AIA, puts it (nicely), if the press sticks to its current role as harbingers of doom, won’t it only exacerbate the problem by keeping clients ultra-nervous? In spite of such suspicions, Bartle—whose firm, ABA Studio, is known for private
