Displaying items by tag: Architecture

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Helsinki city officials announced details of an open international design competition on Wednesday for a proposed new 130-million-euro museum along the South Harbor of the Finnish capital.

It is the first time the Guggenheim foundation has sought a design through an open competition. Malcolm Reading Consultants is managing the competition, which will be judged by a jury of 11 architectural experts and headed by Mark Wigley, dean of the graduate school of architecture at Columbia University. The competition will be conducted in two stages with anonymous submissions for Stage 1 due Sept. 10. The jury will select six finalists from these submissions and all entries will be viewable online.

 Financier, philanthropist, and art collector Eli Broad is suing a German sub-contractor that was hired to create a unique, latticed facade for his forthcoming flagship museum. The Broad Collection, or The Broad for short, was slated to open in downtown Los Angeles by the end of 2014, but officials announced in February that the date had been pushed to 2015 due to construction delays. The $140-million institution will house approximately 2,000 contemporary artworks, including pieces by Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Cindy Sherman, Andreas Gursky, and Mark Grotjahn, from the collection of Broad and his wife, Edythe.

The lawsuit, filed on Friday, May 30 in Los Angeles Superior Court, accuses Seele Inc., an architectural engineering and fabrication firm based near Munich, of numerous infractions, including breach of contract, fraud, deceit, and unfair competition. Seele was brought on by Broad and the museum’s general contractor Matt Construction in late 2011 to create the institution’s “veil” -- a honeycomb-esque facade that wraps around the building’s exterior and is expected to be one of The Broad’s most distinctive features. Seele has helmed numerous projects in the U.S., including creating striking exteriors for the Seattle Central Library and the New York Times’s Manhattan headquarters.

The National Academy Museum and School has let go several members of its staff, including both its registrars, the marketing director, the building manager and senior curator Bruce Weber. Dr. Marshall Price, the museum’s contemporary curator, left on his own volition in March to become a curator at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. According to sources with knowledge of the situation, the National Academy’s director, Carmine Branagan, told the museum’s board that the reason the employees were let go was financial, but the real reason stems from disagreements within the institution over its future direction—namely, the promotion of Maurizio Pellegrin, a member of the school’s faculty, to the powerful position of creative director of both the National Academy School and its museum, which are located in a townhouse on Museum Mile.

Situated prominently at the eastern end of The Hague—not the city in the Netherlands, but a crescent-shaped inlet that feeds into the Elizabeth River as it passes through Norfolk, Virginia—the Chrysler Museum of Art’s newly renovated and expanded Italianate pile opened to the public again last week after 17 months of construction. Local firm H&A Architects designed identical, two-story porticoed gallery wings that flank the main entrance and added 10,000 square feet of exhibition space for American and European painting and sculpture and the museum’s renowned glass collection. The addition—which brings the total programmable space to 220,000 square feet—mimics the classical style of the original 1933 structure and a 1989 building project that unified the exteriors by removing asymmetrical and Brutalist additions completed in 1965 and 1974. “We wanted to maintain the balanced, palazzo house quality of the exterior,” explains museum director Bill Hennessey.

While the architecture may be conservative, not much else about the institution is, starting with its namesake, Walter Chrysler, Jr. The eldest son of the auto tycoon, Chrysler began amassing what would become a world-class art collection while still a student at Dartmouth in the early 1930s. Controversial dealings would eventually run the scion out of New York City, where he once served as the first chairman of the fledgling Museum of Modern Art’s library committee, and later the artists’ colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he maintained a museum in a former church building during the 1960s.

Massimo Vignelli, a preeminent figure in nearly all fields of design, passed away in his Manhattan home Tuesday, just several weeks after it was revealed to the public that he had a terminal illness. He was 83.

“Massimo had an incredible eye for all things,” longtime friend and collaborator Richard Meier told ARTINFO in a phone conversation yesterday. Vignelli, best known for his graphic design, did all of the architect’s books, and they shared not only an office building on the far-western reaches of midtown, but an aesthetic ideal. “The reason we enjoyed working together so much is that we sort of had a similar vision of what architecture should be in the 21st century. It had to do with a certain modernity, attitude, light, and space, and how it relates to nature.”

Slightly more than a year after the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art announced its plan to charge tuition, a group of professors, admitted students and alumni filed a lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court on Tuesday against the school's board of trustees.

The plaintiffs' aim: to stop the school from introducing tuition next fall and to prompt a court investigation into how the board has managed school finances.

The plaintiffs—a group called the Committee to Save Cooper Union Inc.—are represented by the law firm Emery, Celli, Brinckerhoff, & Abady, which has previously litigated high-profile cases seeking to halt city plans at places including the High Line and the Atlantic Yards.

One of the nine Usonian homes built in Ohio by the celebrated American architect Frank Lloyd Wright has just been put on the market. Located in Willoughby Hills, the 1,800-square-foot Louis Penfield House comes with two cottages on nearly 19 acres of land and carries a price tag of $1.7 million. Completed in 1955, the house was commissioned by Louis Penfield, a high school art teacher.

Wright began designing his Usonian homes in 1936. The houses, which erred on the smaller side, were made with middle-income families in mind. The homes were typically one story, flat-roofed dwellings without a garage and little storage space. The abodes usually featured overhangs or carports (a term coined by Wright) to protect parked vehicles. Wright’s Usonian houses were constructed using native materials and featured a strong visual connection between exterior and interior spaces. In total, Wright created around sixty Usonian homes, which served as the predecessor for the ranch-style houses that dominated residential architecture during the 1950s.

From May 27 – 31, 2015, Reed Exhibitons will bring FIAC, one of the world’s leading international art fairs, from Paris to Los Angeles. A convergence of FIAC’s forty year history of dynamic growth and the city’s rise as a cultural capital, under the stewardship of Director Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts, FIAC LA will establish a new paradigm for the international art fair. Set against the backdrop of one of America’s fastest growing neighborhoods, FIAC LA will bring a program of modern masters, contemporary art, architecture and design to Downtown’s Los Angeles Convention Center.

FIAC was founded forty years ago as a fair for gallerists by gallerists, with an aim to present a curated vision of contemporary art to a wider public. Over the years Reed Exhibitions, has invented, explored and expanded the fair. during the last decade, fiac has become one of the three most important art fairs in the world. In 2013, FIAC welcomed more than 75,000 visitors and over 100 international museum groups to the Grand Palais.

Christopher W. Mount, former Architecture and Design Curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, announced that he will open two eponymous galleries -- one in Los Angeles and another in New York City. The California outpost is housed in the Pacific Design Center, a multi-use facility for the design community, and will open to the public on Friday, May 23. The New York gallery, located on the Upper West Side, will be open by appointment only. Both locations will specialize in architecture and design-related material. 

Mount, a curator, writer, and educator specializing in 20th- and 21st-century architecture, design, and graphics, is an active member of the Los Angeles design scene. Last year, he organized the Museum of Contemporary Art’s (MOCA) troubled exhibition, “A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture from Southern California.” The show faced multiple delays, which Mount said was the result of mismanagement at MOCA. The exhibition took place while the museum’s controversial director, Jeffrey Deitch, was still at the helm.

Frank Gehry has been bestowed with Spain’s prestigious Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts. The Canadian-American architect was chosen as the award’s 34th laureate “for the relevance and impact of his creations in numerous countries, via which he has defined and furthered architecture in the past half century.”

“His buildings are characterized by a virtuoso play of complex shapes, the use of unusual materials, such as titanium, and their technological innovation, which has also had an impact on other arts,” stated the jury.  “An example of this open, playful and organic style of architecture is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which, in addition to its architectural and aesthetic excellence, has had an enormous economic, social and urban impact on its surroundings as a whole.”