As the photographer credited with defining the genre of black-and-white fashion photography, Helmut Newton is nevertheless rarely found outside the pages of books and magazines. That’s why our ears perked up when the recordOutboundLink(this,…
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Louisville’s Speed Art Museum, in the midst of a three-year expansion project, has found a new director in Ghislain d’Humières (pictured), director of the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma. He will succeed Charles Venable, who departed last fall to take the top job at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. D’Humières’ first day on the job is September 3.
At OU, he led a $15 million capital campaign as well as the development and management of the museum’s new 20,000 square-foot Stuart wing. D’Humières previously served as assistant director at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco during the construction of the de Young Museum of Art. “His essential role in the opening and logistical organization of the $320 million, 290,000 square foot de Young project at the Fine Art Museum of San Francisco, was one of many contributing factors leading to the search committee’s decision to hire Ghislain,” said Allan Latts, chair of the Speed Art Museum’s board of trustees in a statement issued today. “He also initiated innovative partnerships with the University of Oklahoma and its stakeholders that broadened the museum’s reach throughout the community.”
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by LinYee Yuan Those familiar with the work of American artist Ellen Gallagher often view her delicate works on paper and canvas through the lens of racial and gender politics—Gallagher’s “DeLuxe” series famously abstracted African-American beauty and…
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Replacing the embarrassingly bulky recorder and headset once required for an audio tour, the Guggenheim’s new mobile app comes flush with insightful information, images and video to enhance past and…
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Ten years after completing the Ílhavo Maritime Museum in Portugal, Lisbon studio ARX Portugal has extended the building by adding an aquarium dedicated to codfish (+ slideshow).
The aquarium is contained within an angular metal-clad structure, positioned over a white concrete base. Bridging a public plaza, the building sets up a winding route between the existing museum and its accompanying research centre.
ARX Portugal placed the aquarium tank at the centre of a spiralling pathway, allowing visitors to look into the water from different heights and positions.
The architects explain: “The visitor’s path is a spiralling ramp, a journey that begins in suspension over the tank and turns into a diving mode of gradual discovery, an experience of immersion in the cod habitat.”
An informal auditorium offers a stop along the route, where visitors can learn more about the fish, while extra facts and pictures are printed across the walls.
A private basement floor houses technical equipment needed to maintain the tanks and there’s also storage space to house the museum’s archive.
ARX Portugal completed the Ílhavo Maritime Museum in 2002 and it was one of five projects nominated for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture in 2003.
The studio’s other projects include a top-heavy concrete and glass house and a residence with a gaping chasm through its centre.
Photography is by Fernando Guerra.
Here’s a project description from ARX Portugal:
Ílhavo Maritime Museum Extension
The codfish aquarium connects two other buildings and sets a complex built ensemble, united around the subjects of the sea and fishing. In this unusual structure, the Maritime Museum is the place of memory, the Aquarium the space for marine life and CIEMAR, installed in the old renovated school, the research centre for the activities of man linked to the sea.
In articulating these three units the building is both an autonomous urban equipment that relates to the context and defines a public space, but it is also a building-path, which develops in a spiral around the tank as it connects the Museum to the old school.
In a context of small scattered houses, it is shaped by the interstices of this urban domestic fabric and establishes a new public domain. But in doing so it breaks into two horizontally overlapping bodies searching for a scale of transition.
In its proposed matter duality, the white concrete body emerges from the ground and sets the basis for defining a square. The floating black body of metal scales sets the height of the square, in a public urbanity redefined into three dimensions.
At the heart of the building we find the fish and the sea. The visitor’s path is a spiraling ramp, a journey that begins in suspension over the tank and turns into a diving mode of gradual discovery, an experience of immersion in the cod habitat. The informal auditorium, with extensive visibility into the aquarium, marks a pause in the visit for contemplation and information about the life of this species.
All technical components of control are placed in the basement, guaranteeing a subliminal operation of all the life support systems, the quality of the seawater, the control of air temperature and even the new reserves of the Maritime Museum.
Location: Ílhavo, Portugal
Owner: Ílhavo Municipality
Project: 2009–11
Construction: 2011-12
Architecture: ARX PORTUGAL, Arquitectos Lda.
José Mateus
Nuno Mateus
Work Team: Ricardo Guerreiro, Fábio Cortês, Ana Fontes, Baptiste Fleury, Luís Marques, Sofia Raposo, Sara Nieto, Héctor Bajo
Structures: TAL PROJECTOS, Projectos, Estudos e Serviços de Engenharia Lda.
Electrical and Telecomunications Planning: Security Planning
AT, Serviços de Engenharia Electrotécnica e Electrónica Lda.
Mechanical Planning: PEN, Projectos de Engenharia Lda.
Sanitary Planning: Atelier 964
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by ARX Portugal appeared first on Dezeen.
Susan Sellers, founding partner and creative director of New York-based design consultancy 2×4, is moving on up, to the East Side, where on Monday, June 24, she’ll begin her new role as head of design at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In overseeing the museum’s department of design, Sellers will lead a cadre of specialists–in installation, graphic, and lighting design–that attend to everything from signage and printed materials to exhibitions and gallery installations.
Sellers, who is also senior critic in graphic design at Yale School of Art, comes to the Met with extensive experience working with museums. 2×4 has developed graphic identities for the likes of PS1 and the Brooklyn Museum, and Sellers has cultivated the studio’s approach to brand identity for museums and public institutions including the Guggenheim, Longwood Gardens, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She has also designed exhibitions for clients such the Guggenheim and the Storefront for Art and Architecture–as well as Nike and Prada. “Her design work is both elegant and strategic,” noted Metropolitan Museum director Thomas Campbell in a statement announcing Sellers’ appointment, “and I look forward to having her develop a design vision for the Met that speaks to the museum’s diverse collections and audiences.”
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The UnBeige summer cottage lacks a proximal beach, pool, swimming hole, pond, or water feature of any sort, and yet we’ve long craved this inner tube in the form of a donut (complete with sprinkles and a notched “bite”) for its resemblance to a work by Kenny Scharf. And so imagine our delight upon learning that the Whitney Museum was cooking up some summer treats with the artist himself. With this pair of exclusive-to-the-Whitney-Shop products, art lovers can float their cares away on a whimsical yet possibly demonic inflatable pool toy–inspired by a Scharfian scheme for an unrealized public art project–and then dry off with the beach towel, nearly six feet of colorful cotton printed with Scharf’s 2008 painting “Introducing…. The Hot Dog.”
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Le Corbusier said that he preferred drawing to talking, on the grounds that the former is “faster and leaves less room for lies.” And so we silently sketched a “vehement silhouette” of MoMA beside a pair of round eyeglasses and handed it to writer Nancy Lazarus, who knew immediately what to do. Here’s her take on the museum’s highly anticipated Corbu-fest.
Le Corbusier’s urban plan for Rio de Janeiro (1929). Inset, a 2012 photograph of his Villa Savoye (1928–31). © 2013 Artists Rights Society, New York/ADAGP, Paris/FLC. Photo © Richard Pare
So much for Swiss diplomacy and neutrality: Le Corbusier, a prolific artist and architect, was politically active and often provoked and antagonized those closest to him in the art world, according to Jean-Louis Cohen, professor in the history of architecture at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.
Cohen spoke at the press preview for “Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes,” which opens Saturday at the Museum of Modern Art. He organized the exhibition and served as guest curator, working with Barry Bergdoll, MoMA’s chief curator of architecture and design. The comprehensive display of 320 objects draws on MoMA’s own collection and extensive loans from the Paris-based Le Corbusier Foundation, culminating a longstanding but rocky relationship with the artist.
The career of Le Corbusier (a Frenchman born in Switzerland as Charles-Edouard Jenneret) spanned six decades. The scope of his life’s work leaves the public both impressed and overwhelmed: he was involved in 400 architectural projects, completed 75 buildings, and published nearly 40 books. A small group of his buildings is now being considered for inclusion on the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites.
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(Photo: Alan McAteer)
Visitors can arrive at Riverside Museum in Glasgow by foot, bicycle, bus, subway, train, ferry, or car. The variety of options is fitting for Scotland’s “Museum of Transport and Travel,” which opened the doors to its new home, designed by Zaha Hadid, in June 2011. The museum bested a field of 40 museums from 21 countries to take the title of 2013 European Museum of the Year, an honor presented last month in Belgium. Judging for the 36-year-old award is based on “public quality,” the extent to which a museum satisfies the needs and wishes of its visitors.
The jagged outline of the Riverside Museum “enscapsulates a wave or pleat, flowing from city to waterfront, symbolizing the dynamic relationship between Glasgow and the shipbuilding, seafaring, and industrial legacy of the river Clyde,” according to Hadid. Views through the building’s clear glass facades reveal one of its most memorable features: pistachio-hued walls. Chosen by Hadid in consultation with the exhibition designers, the color makes for a warm yet striking backdrop for displays that range from a wall of automobiles and a ceiling-mounted swirl of bikes to exhibits about long-sunken paddle steamers and glam tramcars from the 1930s.
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News: Swiss architect Peter Zumthor has revealed plans to raze the existing buildings of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and replace them with a new solar-powered campus.
Commissioned by LACMA to bring the museum into the twenty-first century, the architect proposes the demolition of the 1965 building by William L. Pereira and a later extension by Hardy Holzmann Pfeiffer Associates, in favour of a glazed two-storey structure that will sprawl out across the Wilshire Boulevard site in a series of undulating curves.
A large flat roof will encompass the new building. Solar panels will cover its surface, intended to generate more than enough energy to power the building.
“I think we have a great opportunity here,” says Zumthor. “Having a big flat roof exposed to the sky we can produce all the energy we want with solar power.”
Instead of a traditional entrance and staircase, Zumthor imagines the building with various entry points that will enable visitors to find different routes through the galleries. In some places the structure will be raised up on legs, providing ground-level storage for artworks, plus the Bruce Goff-designed Pavilion for Japanese Art is to be retained alongside.
An architectural model of the project is on show at LACMA as part of the exhibition “The Presence of the Past: Peter Zumthor Reconsiders LACMA”, alongside former and unrealised plans for the museum from architects including OMA and Renzo Piano.
Although the architect has been working on the project for over five years, the design is still conceptual and is unlikely to break ground for several years.
Peter Zumthor was this year awarded the Royal Gold Medal for architecture and described how he believes that light, materials and atmosphere are the most important aspects of architecture in the coinciding lecture.
He was also the architect of the 2011 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, where he told Dezeen “I’m a passionate architect… I do not work for money”.
See more architecture by Peter Zumthor »
Here are more details about the exhibition from LACMA:
The Presence of the Past: Peter Zumthor Reconsiders LACMA June 9–September 15, 2013
Resnick Pavilion, Centre Gallery
As part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. initiative, The Presence of the Past: Peter Zumthor Reconsiders LACMA marks the first time the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has explored its own history in the context of an exhibition. The culmination of the exhibition is a proposed design for the future of the eastern side of the museum’s campus as envisioned by Pritzker Prize- winning architect Peter Zumthor introduced to the public for the first time, a project. The exhibition also offers an overview of nine other projects by the acclaimed architect, who has previously built only in Europe.
Exhibition Overview
The Presence of the Past contains approximately 116 objects, including architectural models, plans, photographs, drawings, fossils, film, and ephemera. Many of the historical materials are drawn from LACMA’s archive and have not been on public view in several decades, if ever. The exhibition’s chronology spans some 50,000 years, starting with actual Pleistocene fossils excavated from Hancock Park.
Peter Zumthor designed the exhibition space for The Presence of the Past, which is meant to evoke the architect’s studio, emphasising the process of design and research that continue to shape his evolving thoughts for LACMA’s campus.

Exhibition Organisation
The exhibition is divided into three sections, the first of which examines the museum’s buildings within the complicated history of its Hancock Park site. This section explores the development of LACMA’s campus and explains how financial restrictions, political compromises, and unrealised plans have prevented the museum from achieving both a unified aesthetic and an optimal art-viewing experience. In order to demonstrate the long engagement of artists with Hancock Park, The Presence of the Past includes the work of two scientific illustrators, Charles R. Knight and John L. Ridgway, who documented Pleistocene-era species at Rancho La Brea. These works are on loan from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. The Presence of the Past marks the exhibition debut of Ridgway’s evocative watercolours of paleontological specimens which have only been illustrated in books to date. Knight’s renowned fifty-foot mural of the La Brea Tar Pits was installed at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County for decades but has been in storage for several years.
The first section also examines the museum’s more recent history, including the work of five prominent architects and firms that have either built on LACMA’s campus or have contributed unrealised plans that nevertheless influenced its architectural evolution: William L. Pereira; Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates; Bruce Goff; Rem Koolhaas’s Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA); and Renzo Piano. Among other stories, the exhibition details how Pereira’s original vision for the museum was dramatically compromised within a few years of the original buildings’ completion, when surrounding fountains – the driving concept of his “floating museum” – were paved over due to tar seepage.
This section also documents, with photographs, how artists have responded to LACMA’s architecture over the years, including Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, and Asco; as well as seven artists (among them Chris Burden, Michael Heizer, Robert Irwin, and Barbara Kruger) whose architectonic artworks have shaped the campus in recent years.
The middle section of The Presence of the Past highlights aspects of Peter Zumthor’s architectural career most relevant to his plans for LACMA. Nine Zumthor projects have been selected to elucidate key aspects of the architect’s proposed design for LACMA: his interest in the geologic history of the site, his passion for materials, craftsmanship and the effects of light, and his commitment to an architecture of total integration. These convictions are examined in two films that discuss Zumthor’s architectural approach and methodology: a short documentary by German filmmaker Wim Wenders and a presentation of Zumthor’s past work narrated by actor Julian Sands.
The third and final section of the exhibition presents Zumthor’s preliminary plans to re-envision LACMA’s campus and his ideas for the possibilities of the museum in the twenty-first century. More specifically, Zumthor’s proposed design would replace LACMA’s 1965 William L. Pereira and Associates buildings and the 1986 addition by Hardy Holzmann Pfeiffer Associates while retaining and highlighting the Bruce Goff-designed Pavilion for Japanese Art, completed in 1988. The centrepiece of this section is an over thirty-foot concrete model designed by Zumthor and produced by Atelier Zumthor, positioned at a height intended to simulate looking into the building at street level. The model is complemented by a short film by Lucy Walker featuring a conversation between Zumthor and LACMA’s CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director, Michael Govan, about their plans for transforming the museum-going experience.
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Los Angeles County Museum of Art appeared first on Dezeen.
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