Displaying items by tag: design

The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation has announced plans to build a major museum honoring the Bauhaus School in Dessau, Germany. Founded by the modernist architect Walter Gropius in 1919, the Bauhaus stands as one of most influential design schools in modern history.

Gropius established the Bauhaus School in the city of Weimar, Germany, with a singular mission -- to “reimagine the material world to reflect the unity of all the arts.” In Gropius’ manifesto, Proclamation of the Bauhaus, he explains his vision for reversing the split between art and production by returning to the crafts as the foundation of all artistic activity and design. Gropius established the Bauhaus School and developed a craft-based curriculum to educate and train artisans and designers, giving them the tools needed to create functional and beautiful objects for the rapidly-modernizing world.

David Bennett has been named to the newly-created position of worldwide chairman of international jewelry at Sotheby’s, the auction house announced on March 5.

In the Geneva-based role, Bennett will design and implement a strategy for the continued expansion and development of Sotheby’s global jewelry business, which the auction says is one of its fastest growing categories, achieving $600 million in sales in 2014.

A retrospective of one of America’s most famed and cherished fashion designers, Oscar de la Renta, will make its world premiere in San Francisco next year, bolstering the Fine Arts Museums’ reputation as a venue for blockbuster fashion — including the Vivienne Westwood, Yves Saint Laurent, Balenciaga and Jean Paul Gaultier retrospectives — since 2007.

The exhibition, to be mounted at the de Young Museum from Feb. 27 to May 30, 2016, will feature 100 ensembles from the designer, who died late last year of cancer.

Marc Chagall's drafts for the famous stained-glass windows at the St. Stephen Church in Mainz, Germany, designed in 1982 will go on display in the city next week before joining the permanent collection of the Diözesanmuseum (Diocesan Museum) in Tübingen, "Art Magazin" reports.

The hand-sketched plans for the magnificent blue windows were purchased for €70,000 ($78,000) by a group of local businessmen and the chairman of the Board of Trustees of the St. Stephan Church. The plans became available after they failed to sell at a Sotheby's auction in New York last year.

On the lunar landscape that is Saadiyat Island, the shape of the Louvre Abu Dhabi is gradually emerging from the sand. On the gigantic shorefront site, work continues around the clock. The 5,000-strong workforce is expected to swell to 7,500 over the coming months. “We shall deliver the building at the end of 2015,” its architect Jean Nouvel tells "The Art Newspaper." “Then a few months will be needed to set up the inner structures and hang the works,” he says. The museum’s official opening date, which has not yet been set, will be in 2016.

The building first has to meet the criteria of “excellence” shared by the architect, the Louvre and the emirate, meaning that the safety of the collections is ensured under extreme climatic conditions.

Frank Gehry’s 1987 Winton Guest House will go up for sale at auction on May 19, according to the seller, the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. The building currently stands on a 180-acre site in Owatonna, Minnesota, that the university sold to a health clinic last summer; the seller has until August 2016 to move the house from the new owner’s land. Chicago auction house Wright is organizing the sale, and is noted for previous sales of historic architecture — in particular for the successful 2006 auction of Pierre Koenig’s 1959 Case Study House #21 in Los Angeles.

Mike and Penny Winton commissioned Gehry to design a guest house on their lakeside property near the Twin Cities in 1982, in close proximity to a 1952 Philip Johnson brick-and-glass house that stood nearby on the same plot of land. Completed in 1987, Gehry’s structure is noted for geometric rooms arranged like individual homes; they project from a central 35-foot-tall pyramidal living room, and the entire house covers 2,300 square feet.

During the early twentieth-century, mass-production dominated how products were manufactured in the United States. Automated factories churned out huge amounts of standardized products, including everything from automobiles to furniture. In response to this widespread conformity, many American designers began creating works grounded in historic traditions, favoring the handcrafted over the machine-made, the unique over the commonplace.

The Delaware Valley and Pennsylvania’s bucolic Bucks County became centers for the production of these thoughtfully-made works. In the 1940s, the Japanese-American woodworker George Nakashima settled in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where he established a studio and a reputation as a leading member of the first generation of American Studio furnituremakers. Nakashima was joined by a swathe of iconic craftsmen, including Phillip Lloyd Powell, Paul Evans, and Robert Whitley, all of whom produced custom-designed functional furniture that blurred the lines between craft, sculpture, and design.

The curvy Coca-Cola bottle is celebrating its 100th birthday, and an art museum is exploring the origins and influence of a bottle design that's so recognizable, you'd know the brand if you held it in the dark.

"The Coca-Cola Bottle: An American Icon at 100" opens Saturday at Atlanta's High Museum and is set to run through Oct. 4. Visitors can see original design illustrations, a prototype of the 1915 design and the work of artists who have been inspired by the now-classic design.

Coca-Cola is headquartered in Atlanta.

A highly-anticipated permanent replacement for the University of Iowa’s flood-devastated Museum of Art building now has an architect on board.

Project developer H+H Development Group of Iowa City has identified BNIM Architects of Des Moines and Kansas City as “architect of record” for the new museum, the university announced Monday.

The firm was chosen, in part, for its “wide range of notable projects, both nationally and internationally,” according to Rod Lehnertz, interim vice president of finance and operations and director of planning, design, and construction for UI Facilities Management.

On February 27, 2015, an unprecedented exhibition will open at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. Organized in partnership with Paris’ Galerie Patrick Seguin, the show will feature sculptures by the American artist John Chamberlain in visual conversation with two prefabricated houses by the French designer and architect, Jean Prouvé.  According to a press release from the Gagosian Gallery, both men were “twentieth century innovators who harnessed the strength and suppleness of metal to new potential in their respective fields.”

Since its opening in 1989, Galerie Patrick Seguin has collected demountable houses by Prouvé -- one of the most influential designers of the modern era.