Displaying items by tag: redevelopment

Barely a month in office, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) has shelved a plan to turn the former Franklin School downtown into a contemporary art museum and has begun seeking other companies interested in redeveloping the building.

Dani Levinas, a local art collector who was selected a year ago by then-Mayor Vincent C. Gray to turn the crumbling brick building into a home for contemporary art exhibitions, said that despite being told by economic development staff shortly after Bowser took office that the project was being reviewed, he was stunned by the decision.

Buoyed by some of the largest donations in the city's history, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston will unveil a $450 million project today that envisions its campus as the cultural heart of the city.

The plan includes two new buildings designed to complement the existing structures in a way that will enhance the experience of looking at art.

he project, by Steven Holl Architects, is the most exciting in the institution's 90-year history, board chairman Richard Kinder said. The plan, named the Fayez S. Sarofim Campus, is so transformational that in five years Houstonians might not recognize the 1000 block of Bissonnet.

London's Royal Academy of Arts (RA) has been awarded a grant of £1 million from the Clore Duffield Foundation for the new Clore Learning Center, which forms part of the major redevelopment to transform Burlington Gardens and enable the RA to share and interpret its heritage for a broad 21st century audience.

The Burlington Project is the Royal Academy of Arts’ most ambitious transformation since its move to Burlington House in 1868. The Masterplan, led by the award-winning architect David Chipperfield CBE RA, will see the major expansion of the RA’s current visitor and learning facilities, including a new central link between Burlington House and Burlington Gardens (the former Museum of Mankind), a grand double-height lecture theater, and a Clore Learning Center within Burlington Gardens.

After numerous false starts, the City of Miami Beach is now proceeding apace with the renovation of its Convention Center, which has hosted Art Basel for more than a decade despite its dated design and creaking infrastructure. The $500 million renovation, which is being planned to start when Art Basel in Miami Beach 2015 closes and is due to be completed before the 2017 edition of the fair, replaces a previous, much more ambitious redevelopment scheme designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas.

Art Basel will continue to take place in the center, the oldest parts of which date from the late 1950s, throughout the revamp. “We are very confident that the refurbishment will be phased in a way that will enable us to continue operating to Art Basel standards,” says a spokeswoman for the fair.

Everyone knows by now that rents across Los Angeles are shooting up wildly, but the story with the nonprofit Santa Monica Museum of Art at Bergamot Art Station is something else altogether: the museum's landlord has more than tripled the rent because he disagrees with their employees about a major redevelopment of the site. Per Santa Monica Next, the museum currently rents its space from a nearby gallery owner, who is not just the building's owner but was also, until a few weeks ago, part of one of the three teams vying to give Bergamot a major overhaul. SaMo's economic development department recommended a competing plan that happened to also receive a glowing endorsement from the SMMoA's director. Now the museum's rent has increased to $22,000 a month (it had been $7,000 rent) and the landlord is asking the museum for $53,000 in back-rent as well, "in response to what he considers its disruptive and unneighborly vision for Bergamot Station," the LA Times reported.