Walking through Louis Kahn’s Center for British Art—where sunlight streams in from skylights, and concrete, wood, metal, and stone combine in precise yet monumental ways—leaves one yearning for the days when museums, quite honestly, weren’t so sterile.
Though the scaffolding on the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s new building on the Mall in Washington, D.C. has been down for some time, allowing the public full view of its three-tiered, crown-shaped exterior of bronze-colored cast-aluminum panels, on Thursday, a small group of journalists was given a tour of its nearly complete interiors, where installation of exhibits has already begun.
When it was founded in 1935, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) occupied one, then two floors of the War Memorial Veterans Building in the Hayes Valley neighborhood before moving into its purposebuilt, Mario Botta–designed home in nearby SoMa in 1995.
Eclectic and eccentric, with influences that range from Islamic to Celtic to Japanese, the Veteran’s Room at the Park Avenue Armory was reopened to the public in March as an intimate space for lectures and recitals.
While the Yale School of Architecture is one of the leading architectural education programs in the country, it is—probably to the surprise of many—much younger than similar programs at universities with whom it shares top billing.