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May 09

The Photographers’ Gallery by O’Donnell + Tuomey

Irish architects O’Donnell + Tuomey have extended a red brick warehouse in central London to provide a new home for The Photographers’ Gallery.

The Photographers Gallery by ODonnell and Tuomey

Top image is by Kate Elliot

Black-rendered walls overhang the original Victorian brickwork to cover the new fourth and fifth floors, which both contain galleries and are lit by a two-storey-high, north-facing window in one corner.

The Photographers Gallery by ODonnell and Tuomey

Lectures and workshops will take place on the third floor, an environmentally-controlled gallery is on the second floor and offices are on the first floor.

The Photographers Gallery by ODonnell and Tuomey

Part of the facade is cut away and glazed to reveal the cafe and bar at ground level, and a digital wall in the reception area will present a changing selection of projects from both professional photographers and the public.

The Photographers Gallery by ODonnell and Tuomey

A bookshop and print salesroom occupy the basement.

The Photographers Gallery by ODonnell and Tuomey

The ground floor is clad in black polished terrazzo and hardwood panels that match the thickness of the new rendered walls, while large windows with matching hardwood frames on the upper levels afford views towards nearby Oxford Street and Soho.

The Photographers Gallery by ODonnell and Tuomey

The gallery will reopen to the public on 19 May.

The Photographers Gallery by ODonnell and Tuomey

Photographs are by Dennis Gilbert.

The Photographers Gallery by ODonnell and Tuomey

Here’s some more explanation from the gallery and a statement from the architects:

The Photographers’ Gallery unveils new home designed by O’Donnell + Tuomey

The Photographers’ Gallery will unveil its new home for international and British photography in the heart of London’s Soho on Saturday 19 May 2012. The Gallery’s opening will mark the conclusion of its ambitious £9.2 million capital campaign, which has been generously supported by Arts Council England’s Lottery Fund alongside a range of Trusts, Foundations, corporates and individuals.

Award winning Irish architects O’Donnell + Tuomey were commissioned to redevelop The Photographers’ Gallery in 2007 and construction on the building began in Autumn 2010. The transformed building features a two storey extension that will double the size of the previous exhibition space. Providing a platform for an enhanced programme of exhibitions, the generously proportioned galleries will showcase established and emerging photographic talent from the UK and around the world.

A sculpted terrazzo entrance with an open plan design will connect the ground-level Café and lower-ground Bookshop to the street, creating a welcoming meeting place and lively hub for visitors. A centrepiece of the ground floor will be The Wall, a digital display which will present guest-curated projects, artist commissions and collaborative photographic work involving the public.

Extending over a further five floors, the original Victorian red-brick warehouse will be linked to a modern steel-framed extension through an external sleeve of black render, terrazzo and sustainably sourced Angelim Pedra wood. The architects have created numerous links between exterior and interior, punctuating the building with large feature windows which function as apertures onto the urban realm around Oxford St.

A new environmentally-controlled floor will create opportunities to show more work from archives and museum collections and higher ceilings in the top floor galleries will provide dynamic spaces for large-scale and moving image works.

Situated at the heart of the building between the two main exhibition spaces will be the Eranda Studio. Placing an emphasis on the Gallery’s education programme, this floor will feature a full schedule of talks, workshops and events. Introducing permanent elements to the programme, the Eranda Studio will include a camera obscura and a Study Room where the public will be able to access an archive of material related to exhibitions and events which have taken place since the Gallery was established in 1971. Also featured on this floor will be Touchstone, a quarterly display of a single, groundbreaking photograph.

Complementing the enhanced facilities for the public programme will be new spaces for the Bookshop, Print Sales Room and Café. The Bookshop will offer the latest releases as well as hard-to-find art and photography titles and a range of niche cameras. The Print Sales Room will see the relaunch of The Photographers’ Gallery Editions, in which a world-renowned photographer donates a limited-edition print of their work to benefit the Gallery’s public programmes. The new street level Café will be run in partnership with Lina Stores, the oldest family run delicatessen in Soho, and will boast an Italian menu of freshly-made dishes and baked goods.

A new visual identity for the Gallery has been created by North, one of the UK’s most respected and innovative design practices. Inspired in part by the building’s architectural design, this new visual identity will boldly communicate the Gallery’s vision both within the building and beyond.

The Photographers’ Gallery staff together with its Board of Trustees has raised £8.84 million to date towards its projected £9.2 million capital campaign target. Funds raised include a £3.6 million grant from the Arts Council England’s Lottery Fund; £2.4 million from the sale proceeds of the Gallery’s previous building at Great Newport Street and £2.8 million from Foundations, Trusts, individuals, corporates, an auction of donated photographs held in 2011 and other public funds. The gallery plans to raise the remaining £360,000 for its public programme through naming rights for the top floor gallery and public appeal.

Architectural Statement

The Gallery is located at a crossroads, between Soho and Oxford Street. The corner site is visible in a glimpse view through the continuous shop frontage of Oxford Street. Ramillies Street is approached down a short flight of steps, leading to a quieter world behind the scenes of London life, a laneway with warehouses and backstage delivery doors.

The brick-warehouse steel-frame building is extended to minimise the increase in load on the existing structure and foundations. This extended volume houses large gallery spaces. A close control gallery is located within the fabric of the existing building.

The lightweight extension is clad in a dark rendered surface that steps forward from the face of the existing brickwork. The street front café is finished with black polished terrazzo. Untreated hardwood timber framed elements are detailed to slide into the wall thickness flush with the rendered surface. The composition and detail of the hardwood screens and new openings give a crafted character to the façade.

A deep cut in the ground floor façade was made to reveal the café. The ground floor slab was cut out to lead down to the basement bookshop. An east-facing picture window and the north-light periscope window to the city skyline were added in response to the specific character of the site.

May 08

Black Paintings

Posted in: currentevents

Yan Pei-Ming captures past and present in five large-scale paintings

The first thing Yan Pei-Ming said while presenting his new exhibition, “Black Paintings” at David Zwirner was “I aspire to be an artist, period. Not a Chinese artist.” Though born in Shanghai, the artist is now based in Dijon, and speaks French—not Chinese—through a translator. “My work,” he continued, “does not have a ‘made in China’ feel to it. I’ve always tried to speak in a universal pictorial language.”

Pei-Ming certainly has a knack for choosing subject matter with a global reach. In the past, he’s gained notoriety for his large, monochromatic portraits of people like Lady Gaga, Bernard Madoff, Michael Jackson and Maurizio Cattelan. In this show, however, you won’t see many familiar pop-culture faces, save for Muammar Gaddafi in the work “Gaddafi’s Corpse”, which is hard to discern without reading the title first. In “Pablo”, Pei-Ming shows Pablo Picasso as a huddled young boy wearing large men’s shoes, an imagined memory of the great painter playing dress-up, perhaps, in his father’s clothing. “Exécution, Après Goya”, a bright red homage to Goya’s “The Shootings of May Third 1808“. The show’s title, says Pei-Ming, is “derived from a late series of wall paintings by Goya, since transferred to canvas. In these works, not originally intended for public view, the Spanish artist offers haunting visions of humanity’s darker side.”

“When Goya worked he had to work from his imagination, but in my case I’m working from documentation” says Pei-Ming, referencing the artist’s historical paintings. “We’re surrounded by photographs and documents that attest to what has happened and I use that as source material.” Though it’s doubtful that much original source material was needed for “Pablo”, it’s still true for most of Ming’s work, including his dark interpretation of the Acropolis, which he describes as “the cradle of Western civilization and democracy.” Titled “All Crows Under the Sun Are Black!”, Ming mounted it first in his show, as his way of putting “it in dialogue, face to face with art in the contemporary world,” he says.

“Moonlight” is another monochromatic gray painting depicting an immigration over rocky waters, illuminated by brushstrokes of white moonlight on the waves. Painted in much the same style as “All Crows Under the Sun Are Black!”, it too is a landscape that features a barely discernible outpost on the dark horizon, but the Acropolis is so dark it almost fades into the feverishly painted background. If you’ve ever seen a picture of the Acropolis you know that it’s huge and white, the centuries-old pillars standing strong on their flat-topped perch above Athens—and at night it’s lit up like the Lincoln Memorial. Here, Ming has shrunk it down and killed the lights, blending it so thoroughly into the background he seems to almost be wiping it from history itself.

“Black Paintings” marks a departure in Ming’s work not only from his focus on contemporary culture but also in his point of view. Instead of traditional portraiture, we see his figures splayed out, crouching on the ground or facing a firing squad. They’re not only shown in scene, in a narrative, but as part of a larger historical context, one that’s not pinned down to a specific moment in time. Instead of immortalizing a cultural icon at the height of their fame, Ming is depicting history in progress. He goes back in time to moments history may have overlooked in an attempt to connect the recent and distant past, and though he makes his point of view clear in the subjects he chooses to paint, those choices don’t represent a distinctly Chinese or even Eastern perspective, but one that’s uncompromisingly universal.

“Black Paintings” runs through June 23, 2012 at David Zwirner.

David Zwirner

525 W. 19th St.

New York, NY 10011

Apr 27

Movie: Rem Koolhaas on Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture by OMA

Posted in: Rememberance Jewellery

Movie: Rem Koolhaas was at the ICA in London this morning to launch OMA’s design for the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow. He gave Dezeen a quick introduction to the new gallery, which will be built in Gorky Park in the Russian capital for gallerist Dasha Zukhova.

See our earlier story about Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture here.

Apr 26

Datong Art Museum by Foster + Partners

Posted in: Datong

Construction has started on an art museum with four overlapping peaks that Foster + Partners have designed for Datong, China.

Datong Art Museum by Foster + Partners

The Datong Art Museum will be one of four new buildings at the cultural plaza and will be sunken into the ground.

Datong Art Museum by Foster + Partners

Corten steel will create a roof that weathers over time, while a series of skylights will direct strips of natural light into the galleries within.

See more projects by Foster + Partners here.

Here’s the full press release from Foster + Partners:

New museum under construction in Datong, China

Construction is underway at Datong Art Museum – China’s ‘Museum of the 21st Century’. The museum will open in 2013 to represent China in the ‘Beyond the Building’ Basel Art international tour.

The 32,000-square-metre venue is one of four major new buildings within Datong New City’s cultural plaza. Its centrepiece is the Grand Gallery, a heroically scaled, top-lit exhibition space measuring 37 metres high and spanning almost 80 metres, in which artists will be commissioned to create large-scale works of art.

Externally, the building’s form is conceived as an erupted landscape. The entire museum is sunk into the ground with only the peaks of the roof visible at ground level. The roof is clad in earth-toned Corten steel, which will weather naturally over time. The building relates in scale to the three other cultural buildings in the group, balancing the overall composition of the masterplan while maximising the internal volume of the Grand Gallery.

The roof is composed of four interconnected pyramids, which increase in height and fan outwards towards the four corners of the cultural plaza. A clerestory between each volume creates a dynamic play of light and shade internally, while illuminating the building from within to create a beacon for the new cultural quarter at night. Visitors approach via a gentle ramp and stair, which are integrated with the sunken plaza to create an informal amphitheatre. The arrival sequence culminates in a dramatic overview of the Grand Gallery.

The interior is designed to be highly flexible to accommodate a changing programme of displays. The Grand Gallery is arranged over a single level, which can be subdivided to create individual exhibition spaces, and the services are fully integrated with the structure. The children’s gallery, group entrance lobby, café, restaurant and support spaces are arranged around sunken courtyards to draw in daylight.

The building’s efficient passive design responds to Datong’s climate. High-level skylights take advantage of the building’s north and north-west orientation, using natural light to aid orientation while minimising solar gain and ensuring the optimum environment for the works of art. A high-performance enclosure further reduces energy use. The roof, which accounts for 70 per cent of the exposed surface area, is insulated to twice building code requirements and, with just 10 per cent glazing, maintenance requirements are also minimised.

Luke Fox, a senior partner at Foster + Partners:
“We are delighted to reveal designs for the new museum and look forward to working with the city to take the project to the next stage. When complete, Datong’s new quarter will be the centre of the city’s cultural life, with the new museum as its ‘urban room’ – a dynamic space, open to everyone to meet and enjoy its different displays and activities.”

Apr 18

Easter Sculpture Museum by Exit Architects

Posted in: Cultural buildings, Exit Architects, slideshows

Slideshow: Madrid studio Exit Architects designed this concrete sculpture museum behind the retained facade of an old house in southern Spain.

Translucent glazed walls connect the existing brick walls to the new three-storey-high structure, which is recessed by a few metres to create a public plaza at the main entrance.