News: construction has started on a major extension to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), designed by Snøhetta to double the gallery’s exhibition and education space.
Outside glass-fronted gallery
Snøhetta’s design will provide SFMOMA with around 12,000 square metres of indoor and outdoor gallery space, as well as over 1000 square metres of public space filled with art.
An admission-free glass-fronted gallery on the ground floor of the new building will entice passers-by inside to explore large-scale installations.
Living wall on sculpture terrace
A double-height box on the fourth floor will host the museum’s programme of live art as well as film screenings and special events.
Exhibition space
An outdoor sculpture terrace on the third floor will be home to a huge living wall of native Californian plants, while a terrace on the seventh floor will offer views across the city.
Glass-fronted ground floor gallery with Richard Serra sculpture
Additional public entrances to the building will increase access, while a street-level pedestrian promenade will open a new route of circulation in the neighbourhood.
Performance space
The new building will be over 15 metres taller than the existing SFMOMA building, which was completed by Swiss architect Mario Botta in 1995.
News: architect Frank Gehry has warned that performances at his Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles could be ruined by the noise of a subway line planned nearby.
The new Metro line below the parking garage of the venue, which is one of the architect’s best-known buildings, is expected to open in 2020.
In an acoustic experiment conducted in April, subwoofers simulating the sound of a passing train could be heard in the auditorium.
“The test was several minutes long,” said Fred Vogler, a recording engineer who oversees concert-taping for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “Then they said, ‘Is anybody troubled by the train sounds?’ We said, ‘Well, we heard them, if that’s what you’re asking.’ It set off a lot of concerns.”
Tests of subway noise carried out nearly two years ago by Metro’s noise abatement consultants had led them to predict there would be no audible impact on Disney Hall, but Gehry has now called for this decision to be reviewed.
“The flag is up, and we should go over it and make sure,” he said.
However, Art Leahy, Metro’s chief executive, reassured concerned parties that nothing that might damage the hall would be approved to be built.
“We are not about to do anything which in any fashion, however slightly, impairs or damages … Disney Hall or any other feature in that area,” he said.
The Walt Disney Concert Hall was completed by Gehry in 2003 and designed to be one of the most acoustically sophisticated concert halls in the world.
Photographer Edmund Sumner has revealed initial images of the filigree-clad Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations (MuCEM) by architect Rudy Ricciotti, which is set to open next month on Marseille’s waterfront (+ slideshow).
Tying in with the French city’s designation as European Capital of Culture 2013, MuCEM is one of several civic buildings set to open there this year and will be dedicated to the history and cultures of the Mediterranean region.
Ornamental concrete shrouds the glazed exterior of the museum like a lacy veil, moderating light through to the building’s two exhibition floors. Meanwhile, an inclined walkway bridges out from the roof the building to meet Fort Saint-Jean – a seventeenth-century stronghold that will also house museum exhibitions – before continuing on towards the Eglise Saint-Laurent church nearby.
Rudy Ricciotti describes the building as a “vertical casbah”, referring to its arrangement on the harbour. “Open to the sea, it draws a horizon where the two shores of the Mediterranean can meet,” he says.
Architectural sketches and motifs are etched across the concrete walls of the Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin by Russian architecture collective SPEECH Tchoban & Kuznetsov.
Architects Sergei Tchoban and Sergey Kuznetsov of SPEECH Tchoban & Kuznetsov designed the building to house the collections of the Tchoban Foundation, which the architect founded in 2009 as an archive of architectural drawings from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Located on the site of a former brewery, the five-storey museum will be the foundation’s first address and comprises a stack of overlapping concrete volumes with a glass penthouse positioned on top.
Architectural reliefs cover all three of the yellowish-grey concrete facades and form repetitive patterns. The surfaces are also broken up into groups of gently angled planes, intended to mimic overlapping sheets of paper.
“This artistic touch is supposed to emphasise the function and contents of the exposition in the museum’s architectural look,” explain the architects.
The ground floor of the building accommodates an entrance hall, shop and library. The collections will be housed on the three middle floors and will only be accessible by appointment, while the the glass penthouse and roof terrace will function as an events space.
The Museum for Architectural Drawing is set to open in June and will present both a permanent drawing collection and loans from international collections.
Here’s a project description from SPEECH Tchoban & Kuznetsov:
Museum for architectural drawings of the Tchoban Foundation
The Museum for Architectural Drawings is meant for placing and exposing the collections of the Tchoban Foundation founded in 2009 for the purpose of architectural graphics art popularisation as well as for interim exhibitions from different institutions including such famous as Sir John Soane’s Museum in London or École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
For the construction of the Museum, the Foundation purchased a small lot on the territory of the former factory complex Pfefferberg, where the art-cluster is formed. Here are already located the famous architecture gallery AEDES, modern art gallery and artists’ workshops. The Architectural Graphics Museum that is being constructed will become a logical continuation to the development of the new cultural centre in a district Prenzlauer Berg that is very popular among Berlin residents.
The new Museum building will flank the firewall of the adjacent four-storey residential house. Such neighborhood and the location under the conditions of the current development implied the irregular space-planning arrangement of the Museum. The volume that is compact in terms of design rises up to the mark of the neighboring roof ridge, forming five blocks clearly cut in the building carcass and offset in relation to each other.
The upper block, made of glass, hang over the whole volume of the building in cantilever. The façades of the four lower blocks are made of concrete and its surfaces are covered with relief drawings with architectural motives, repeating on every level and overlapping each other as sheets of paper. This artistic touch is supposed to emphasise the function and contents of the exposition in the Museum’s architectural look.
On the first and third floors from the side of Christinenstrasse, the flat surfaces of the massive concrete walls alternate with large glass panes accentuating the building’s main entrance and a recreation room in front of one of the graphic cabinets. On the first floor there will be the entrance hall – library. Two cabinets for drawings exposition and archive are located on the upper floors. The levels are connected by an elevator and stairs.
Address: Christinenstraße 18a, 10119 Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, Germany Customer: Tchoban Foundation. Museum for Architectural Drawing
Authors: Sergei Tchoban and Sergey Kuznetsov of SPEECH Tchoban & Kuznetsov, Moscow Planning and project management: nps tchoban voss GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin Architects: Philipp Bauer, Nadja Fedorova, Katja Fuks, Ulrike Graefenhain, Dirk Kollendt
Spanish architecture studio Sol89 has converted a former slaughterhouse in the historic town of Medina-Sidonia into a school for training chefs (+ slideshow).
Constructed in the nineteenth century, the building previously featured a series of outdoor paddocks and a large courtyard, used for storing livestock before the slaughtering process. As part of the renovation, Sol89 has extended the building into these spaces to create kitchens and classrooms.
Like most of the town’s architecture, white-painted walls surrounded the perimeter of the slaughterhouse site and now enclose both the new and old sections of the building.
The original pitched roof is clad with traditional clay tiles, but the architects used modern flat ceramics to give a vibrant red to the asymmetric gables that make up the roof of the extension.
“If we observe Medina-Sidonia from a distance, it seems to be a unique ceramic creation moulded by the topography of Medina,” explain architects María González and Juanjo López de la Cruz. “The Professional Cooking School uses this idea of the moulded ceramic plane to draw its geometry. This roof lends unity to the built complex and interprets the traditional construction of the place.”
The original arched doorway remains as the entrance to the school and leads in via the old structure. Inside, the architects have replaced the original flooring with exposed concrete that skirts around a set of historic columns in the main hall.
The kitchens are lined with tiles on the floors and walls. High level windows help to bring light in from above, while small glass courtyards are positioned at intervals to provide areas for students to grow vegetables and herbs.
Medina is a historic town in the hills in Cadiz. Its houses are known for their whitewashed walls and their ceramic roofs. The project involves adapting an ancient slaughterhouse, built in the XIX century, into a Professional Cooking School.
The ancient slaughterhouse was composed of a small construction around a courtyard and a high white wall that limits the plot. If you are going to act in the historic city you must adapting, taking shelter, settling in its empty spaces. The density of the architecture of the ancient slaughterhouse, where brick walls, stones and Phoenician columns coexist, contrasts with the empty space inside the plot, limited by the wall. The project proposes catching this space through a new ceramic roof that limits the new construction and consolidates the original building.
If we observe Medina Sidonia from a distance, it seems to be a unique ceramic creation molded by the topography of Medina. The Professional Cooking School uses this idea of the molded ceramic plane to draw its geometry. This roof lends unity to the built complex and interprets the traditional construction of the place, ceramic roofs and whitewashed walls. Some little courtyards are inserted, working as ventilation shaft, and are cultivated with different culinary plants which are used by the students to cook.
At the original building, ancient floors were replaced by slabs of concrete with wooden formwork that recognise traditional building forms, walls are covered with white and rough lime mortar which seeks material memory of its industrial past, and the existing Phoenician columns, displaced from the disappeared Temple of Hercules, have been consolidated. All of those materials, even the time, built this place.
Context sketch
Architects: María González y Juanjo López de la Cruz. Sol89 Team: George Smudge (architecture student), Jerónimo Arrebola (quantity surveyor), Alejandro Cabanas (structure), Insur JG (building services), Novoarididian SA y Rhodas SL (contractors)
Barcelona’s new design museum is an angular metal-clad structure designed by local studio MBM Arquitectes (+ slideshow).
The seven-storey Museu del Disseny de Barcelona is located on the edge of Plaça de les Glories, next door to Jean Nouvel‘s Torre Agbar office tower. Due to the level changes across the site, the building has part of its volume buried beneath the ground and has public entrances on two of its floors.
MBM Arquitectes divided the form of the building into two halves. The bottom section is a bulky volume with glazed walls and a grass roof, while the upper section is a top-heavy structure clad with pre-weathered aluminium panels on every side.
Set to open in spring 2014, the museum will combine the decorative arts, ceramics, textiles and graphic design collections of four existing museums, which have now closed their doors.
The main exhibition hall will be housed in the lower part of the building, while additional exhibitions will take place in galleries on the museum’s upper floors. Other facilities include a large auditorium, a small hall, a public library, education rooms and a bar and cafe.
The area surrounding the museum has been made into a lake, while the grass roof serves as a new public lawn overlooking the water.
The building is the work of MBM Arquitectes, the architecture studio formed by Josep Martorell, Oriol Bohigas and David Mackay, together with Oriol Capdevila and Francesc Gual. The edifice is made up of two parts: one underground (which takes advantage of the slope created by urban development of the plaza) and another which emerges at 14.5 m (at the level of Plaça de les Glòries).
Construction below the height of 14.5m: Most of the surface area of the building is situated below the 14.5m level and is where the more significant installations are housed. They are distributed over two floors and a gallery, and include the main exhibition hall, rooms given over to management and preservation of the DHUB’s collections, the main offices, Clot public library, the documentation centre (DHUBdoc) and rooms for research and educational activities, in addition to high-traffic services such as the bar, restaurant and store. Though below ground level, the basement floor receives natural light from a trench which is worked into the different ground levels and which features a huge lake, creating a dialogue with the outside. Lighting is reinforced with six skylights that look out over the public space and can also be used as showcases for the centre’s contents and activities.
Construction above the height of 14.5m: This part of the building projects over the width of Carrer d’Àvila and has the shape of a slanted parallelepiped. In accordance with the general urban plan it occupies a minimum footprint, primarily in order not to reduce the space earmarked for public use, but also because the vicissitudes of plans to demolish the elevated road and change the tramline route severely limit the space available. The building cantilevers out towards the plaça, enabling the construction potential to be met while at the same time establishing a display of urban architecture over the motorway. This block will house the venues for long- and short-term temporary exhibitions, as well as a small hall and a large auditorium.
Entrance to both parts or bodies that compose the DHUB headquarters is gained through a single vestibule with two points of access: one in Carrer d’Àvila and another in Plaça de les Glòries. Passage through this part of the building is almost inevitable, as it forms a kind of corridor connecting Plaça de les Glòries, the 22@ technological district and Poblenou.
All of the services situated in the basement area can be reached from this semi-public plaza, as well as those on the upper floors by means of a system of escalators, staircases and lifts. While the different spaces have diverse dimensions and architectural characteristics, overall they form a conceptual whole in which the auditorium stands aloft as a fundamental and crowning feature.
Only two materials are used in the building’s exterior, zinc plates and glass, bestowing an industrial feel with metallic accents on the building. The green carpet of the artificial flooring and bright graphics on the pavement are two of the primary components of the outside surfaces. In both cases, the elements employed (natural and manufactured) ensure sustainability and ease of maintenance. The lake, in addition to visually highlighting the work, creates a link between the different levels.
This family of concrete artist and designers’ studios by Chinese office AZL Architects is located amongst the marshes of the Xixi National Wetland Park in Hangzhou, China (+ slideshow).
Conceived by Zhang Lei of AZL architects as a small village community, the Xixi Artist Clubhouse is a cluster of five similar buildings with translucent walls and branch-like arms that stretch out towards one another.
Each building is designed to house artists- and designers-in-residence and contains a mixture of studios and living quarters within a Y-shaped central plan and two Y-shaped arms.
The two-storey central structures are constructed from concrete and feature glazed end walls. Each one contains double-height studio spaces and staircases that lead up to indoor balconies.
The single-storey arms have a steel-framed structure and are clad with translucent polycarbonate panels to bring light into kitchens, bedrooms and smaller studios.
A pathway winds through the site to connect the buildings and a series of small lampposts help residents find their way around after dark.
Here’s a little more information from AZL Architects:
Xixi Artist Clubhouse / AZL architects
Located in Xixi wetlands in west of central Hangzhou, the Xixi Artist Clubhouse is organized as a village structure with five building units, 800 m2 each as studio for artists & designers in Hangzhou. Each cluster relies on three Y-shaped volumes, one in six by six and two in three by three meters square frameless openings, creating panoramas view of surrounding wetland landscape in different directions. Contrast to cubic outside geometric volume of building, twisting fiberglass installation redefines internal spaces. Walls, floors, and ceilings are integrated in continues surface, refers to different program.
Site plan
The six meter tall structure is in concrete, while two smaller sections in steel structure introduce translucent white PC panels as cladding to diffuse direct sunlight. During dark night, one could see a group of beautiful lanterns floating on the water of wild wetland horizon.
In a board meeting yesterday, the museum’s directors heard that design studio Diller Scofidio & Renfro had been selected to oversee MoMA’s expansion and explore the option of integrating the former American Folk Art Museum into the plans.
Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA’s director, told trustees and staff that the architects wanted to consider “the entirety of the site, including the former American Folk Art Museum building, in devising an architectural solution to the inherent challenges of the project.”
Diller Scofidio & Renfro said the institution’s directors had given the design team “the time and flexibility to explore a full range of programmatic, spatial and urban options.”
“These possibilities include, but are not limited to, integrating the former American Folk Art Museum building, designed by our friends and admired colleagues, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien,” the studio said in a statement.
In its initial announcement last month, museum officials said the bronze-clad building had to be pulled down because its facade did not match MoMA’s glass aesthetic and its floors would not line up with MoMA’s.
Designed by US architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the American Folk Art Museum opened its doors just 12 years ago but was sold to MoMA in 2011 to pay off a $32 million loan.
The museum’s collection of paintings, sculptures and crafts by self-taught and outsider artists now resides at a smaller site on Lincoln Square, further north in Manhattan.
MoMA’s initial decision to tear down the building was met with disappointment by Tsien, who told the New York Times it was “a loss for architecture”.
Art galleries are held inside an illuminated glass tunnel and balanced high above the ground at this museum by Steven Holl, the centrepiece of an architecture complex in a forest near Nanjing, China.
Set to open later this year, the Nanjing Sifang Art Museum forms part of the Chinese International Practical Exhibition of Architecture (CIPEA) programme that will see buildings by both Chinese and foreign architects populate a site within the Laoshan National Forest Park. As well as the museum by Steven Holl, the park will feature a conference centre by Arata Isozaki, a hotel by Liu Jiakun, a leisure centre by the late Ettore Sottsass and a total of 20 houses.
The museum sits at the entrance to the park. Formed of two halves, the building has a two-storey black concrete base that is partially submerged into the site and a translucent glass upper level that is suspended above on a set of chunky columns.
Galleries will occupy all three floors of the building, providing a new home for the Nanjing 4Cube Museum of Contemporary Art. Exhibitions on the lower levels will be accommodated in a series of separate rooms, while on the top floor artworks can be displayed in a continuous sequence that finishes with a view towards Nanjing’s city skyline.
Holl was interested in the difference in the use of perspective between Western and Chinese painting when designing the jolting snake-like form of the building. “The museum is formed by a ‘field’ of parallel perspective spaces and garden walls […] over which a light ‘figure’ hovers,” says the studio.
A monochrome colour palette was used throughout. The black tones of the concrete are stains left by its bamboo formwork, which has also left a ridged texture.
A courtyard is contained at the centre of the plan and features paving stones recycled from old hutong neighbourhoods in Nanjing.
The CIPEA project was first conceived back in 2003 as a showcase of modern architecture. Many of the buildings are set to open later this year and even the houses will be used as galleries, meant to be visited but not inhabited. See pictures of Blockhouse by Zhang Lei of AZL Architects in our earlier story.
Photography is by Sifang Art Museum, apart from where otherwise indicated.
Photograph by Li Hu
Here are more details from Steven Holl Architects:
Nanjing Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, China 2003 – 2013
Perspective is the fundamental historic difference between Western and Chinese painting. After the 13th Century, Western painting developed vanishing points in fixed perspective. Chinese painters, although aware of perspective, rejected the single-vanishing point method, instead producing landscapes with “parallel perspectives” in which the viewer travels within the painting.
Photograph by Li Hu
The new museum is sited at the gateway to the Contemporary International Practical Exhibition of Architecture in the lush green landscape of the Pearl Spring near Nanjing, China. The museum explores the shifting viewpoints, layers of space, and expanses of mist and water, which characterize the deep alternating spatial mysteries of early Chinese painting. The museum is formed by a “field” of parallel perspective spaces and garden walls in black bamboo-formed concrete over which a light “figure” hovers. The straight passages on the ground level gradually turn into the winding passage of the figure above. The upper gallery, suspended high in the air, unwraps in a clockwise turning sequence and culminates at “in-position” viewing of the city of Nanjing in the distance. The meaning of this rural site becomes urban through this visual axis to the great Ming Dynasty capital city, Nanjing.
The courtyard is paved in recycled Old Hutong bricks from the destroyed courtyards in the center of Nanjing. Limiting the colors of the museum to black and white connects it to the ancient paintings, but also gives a background to feature the colors and textures of the artwork and architecture to be exhibited within. Bamboo, previously growing on the site, has been used in bamboo-formed concrete, with a black penetrating stain. The museum has geothermal cooling and heating, and recycled storm water.
Photograph by Shu He
Client: Nanjing Foshou Lake Architecture and Art Developments Ltd Architect: Steven Holl Architects Associate architects: Architectural Design Institute, Nanjing University Structural consultant: Guy Nordenson and Associates Lighting design: L’Observatoire International
Construction period: February 2005 – Program: museum complex with galleries, tea room, bookstore and a curator’s residence Building area: 2787 sqm (30,000 sqf)
Foster + Partners has completed a new gallery wing clad with golden pipes at the Lenbachhaus art museum in Munich (+ slideshow).
The three-storey extension branches out from the southern facade of the 120-year-old Lenbachhaus, which was first constructed as the home and studio of nineteenth-century painter Franz von Lenbach. It was converted into a museum in the 1920s and had been incrementally extended over the years, so architecture firm Foster + Partners was brought in to rationalise the layout, as well as to add the new gallery wing.
“Our main challenge has been to maintain the same amount of exhibition area within the museum’s footprint, while creating new circulation and visitor spaces,” said architect and studio founder Norman Foster. “Given the way that the different parts of the museum had evolved, there was no such thing as a typical space – every corner is unique and required individual attention and different design decisions.”
Rows of metal pipes made from a copper-aluminium alloy clad each elevation of the extension, designed to complement the restored yellow-ochre render on the walls of the original building. Together, the new and old structures frame the outline of a new courtyard with an entrance at the point where they cross.
Beyond the entrance, visitors are greeted with a triple-height atrium that wraps around the corner of the old exterior walls. A long narrow skylight runs along the edge of the roof and is screened by louvres that cast stripy shadows across the walls, while an installation by Olafur Eliasson is suspended from the centre of the ceiling.
“[An] important aspect of our design has been creating new opportunities for works of art to be exhibited outside the traditional confines of the gallery, such as in the atrium,” added Foster. “This space develops the idea of the ‘urban room’. It is the museum’s public and social heart, and point of connection with the wider city.”
Galleries occupy the two upper floors of the new wing and are dedicated to the display of the Blue Rider collection of expressionist paintings by artists including Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc.
The ground floor contains a temporary exhibition space and an education room, plus a glazed restaurant that opens out to a terrace around the edge of the building.
As part of the renovation, the architects also addressed the energy efficiency of the existing building. They added new heating and cooling systems in the floors, replaced lighting fixtures and introduced a rainwater harvesting system.
The Museum’s historic buildings have been carefully restored and the exhibition spaces augmented by a spectacular new wing, which provides an ideal environment for viewing the magnificent ‘Blue Rider’ collection. As well as radically improving the buildings’ environmental performance, the remodelling has created a new entrance and social spaces, including a restaurant, terrace, education facilities and a dramatic full-height atrium, where the old is articulated within the new.
Built in 1891 as a studio and villa for the artist Franz von Lenbach, the Lenbachhaus Museum has been gradually extended over the last century. However, its buildings were in need of renewal and the museum lacked the facilities to cater to a growing audience of 280,000 people a year. Redefining circulation throughout the site, the project has transformed a complex sequence of spaces of different periods into a unified, legible museum that is accessible and open to all.
Peeling away the unnecessary historical accretions, a 1972 extension has been removed to reveal the wall of the original villa, which has been sympathetically restored in ochre render. The different historical elements are then unified along Richard-Wagner Street by a new gallery pavilion, containing two levels of exhibition space. The new building is intended as a ‘jewel box’ for the treasures of the gallery – it is clad in metal tubes of an alloy of copper and aluminium, their colour and form designed to complement the villa’s rich ochre hue and textured facades.
Inside the new building, a sequence of intimate galleries display the Museum’s internationally-renowned ‘Blue Rider’ collection of early twentieth-century Expressionist paintings, echoing the domestic scale of their original setting in the villa Lenbach. As many of the works of art were painted in ‘plein-air’, indirect natural light has been deliberately drawn into the upper level galleries to create the optimum environment for their display.
A new entrance has been created adjacent to the restaurant, accessed via a new landscaped piazza to the east of the museum – this move reclaims the courtyard garden, turning it from a pedestrian thoroughfare into a tranquil space for visitors. The restaurant is open outside of the Museum’s opening hours and its seating continues outside, helping to enliven the surrounding streets and attracting new visitors into the galleries.
The new social heart of the building is a dramatic top-lit atrium, with ticket and information desks, access to a new temporary exhibition space on the ground floor and a grand, cantilevered stair to the upper level galleries. Clearly articulating the old within the new, its impressive volume incorporates the ochre exterior wall of the original villa and is scaled to accommodate large-scale works of art. The Museum commissioned the artist Olafur Eliasson for a site specific work titled Wirbelwerk. During the day sunlight washes the white walls via a long, slender opening at roof level and horizontal louvres cast changing patterns of light and shade within the space.
As well as repairing the fabric of the existing buildings, one of the main aims of the project has been to radically improve the museum’s environmental performance. A water-based heating and cooling system within the floors has been implemented – using significantly less energy than an air based heating, this represents an innovative step in a gallery context. Rainwater is also collected and recycled and lighting has been replaced and upgraded with low-energy systems.
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