Hasta La Ideas

When Frank Gehry‘s Abu Dhabi Guggenheim was put on hold toward the end of October, it wasn’t for some obvious reason like in the spring, when the project was under fire for labor conditions. Instead, it was a bit more mysterious and sudden. One day things seemed to be moving along swimmingly and the next, its building contracts were recalled and everything just stopped. Now some additional information has come out that helps clear up the picture a bit. The Art Newspaper has filed this fascinating report on how the Guggenheim development wound up being affected by financial factors, with Abu Dhabi having to pick up a healthy dose of the slack from those other emirates who haven’t been faring as well once the bottom fell out of the economy (Dubai, anyone?). Add to that concerns over keeping its citizens happy as the rest of the area seems to be joining in on sweeping “Arab Spring” changes in leadership, and spending hundreds of millions to build a museum winds up seeming like the sort of thing that can be put on the backburner for awhile. However, given that the sorts of trials and tribulations encompassed in financial crises and surrounded by civil instability, how temporary that backburner will wind up being is anyone’s guess. It certainly seems as though, based on this report, Frank Gehry won’t be seeing his Guggenheim finished anytime soon.

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Last summer you might recall that, following the wake of the Gulf oil spill, a number of British museums became the target of protesters who chided those organizations for taking donations from British Petroleum. The National Portrait Gallery got hit, as did the British Museum. The Tate Britain perhaps received the largest brunt of the movement, with activists spilling oil both inside and outside of the museum. So apparently worrying were the protesters’ actions that Tony Blair even canceled a planned book party at the Tate Modern so as to not run into any trouble. But that was last year and now everyone has moved on to joining Occupy movements, right? Not so fast. The Independent reports that this week a Tate trustee, Patrick Brill, has broken ranks and come out against the museum’s association with BP, saying that what the activists are doing is a “thoroughly good thing” and that “BP is a disgrace.” Here’s a bit more:

“The relationship of BP and Tate is nuanced and complex and full of contradictions,” said Mr Brill. “I am critical of BP and yet I sit on the Tate board. I’m on that board because I believe in the power of art. Art is important; yet art is under threat. That is why I sit on that board. I will not leave the board because of protests about BP, but these protests are important.”

For their part, the Tate has responded saying it continues to value its relationship with BP, which it has had as a donor for more than twenty years. Should Brill’s comments spark another year of internal oil spills and protestors camped out front, we’ll just have to see if the Tate continues to sing that tune.

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Dezeen in Israel: here are some images of the recently opened new wing at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, which has a dramatically faceted atrium piercing its centre.

Designed by American architect Preston Scott Cohen, the Herta and Paul Amir Building has a spiralling plan with two storeys above ground and three underground floors.

Galleries overlook the 26-metre-high atrium through long windows that slice through its angled walls.

Although the building has a triangular plan, these exhibition galleries are rectangular and display art, design, architecture and photography.

Walls fold around the entrances to these rooms and appear on approach to be wafer-thin.

The museum has a tessellated concrete exterior where windows match the shapes of the triangular and rectangular panels.

You can see more stories about Israeli architecture and interiors here, or if you’re interested in furniture and product design from Israel you can check out our special feature here.

Photography is by Amit Geron.

Here’s some more information from the museum:

Herta and Paul Amir Building
Tel Aviv Museum of Art

The design for the Amir Building arises directly from the challenge of providing several floors of large, neutral, rectangular galleries within a tight, idiosyncratic, triangular site. The solution is to “square the triangle” by constructing the levels on different axes, which deviate significantly from floor to floor. In essence, the building’s levels—two above grade and three below—are structurally independent plans stacked one on top of the other.

These levels are unified by the “Lightfall”: an 87-foot-high, spiraling, top-lit atrium, whose form is defined by subtly twisting surfaces that curve and veer up and down through the building. The complex geometry of the Lightfall’s surfaces (hyperbolic parabolas) connect the disparate angles of the galleries; the stairs and ramped promenades along them serve as the surprising, continually unfolding vertical circulation system; while the natural light from above is refracted into the deepest recesses of the half-buried building. Cantilevers accommodate the discrepancies between plans and provide overhangs at the perimeter.

In this way, the Amir Building combines two seemingly irreconcilable paradigms of the contemporary art museum: the museum of neutral white boxes, which provides optimal, flexible space for the exhibition of art, and the museum of spectacle, which moves visitors and offers a remarkable social experience. The Amir Building’s synthesis of radical and conventional geometries produces a new type of museum experience, one that is as rooted in the Baroque as it is in the Modern.

Conceptually, the Amir Building is related to the Museum’s Brutalist main building (completed 1971; Dan Eytan and Yitzchak Yashar, architects). At the same time, it also relates to the larger tradition of Modern architecture in Tel Aviv, as seen in the multiple vocabularies of Mendelsohn, the Bauhaus and the White City. The gleaming white parabolas of the façade are composed of 465 differently shaped flat panels made of pre-cast reinforced concrete. Achieving a combination of form and material that is unprecedented in the city, the façade translates Tel Aviv’s existing Modernism into a contemporary and progressive architectural language.

Architect: Preston Scott Cohen, Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts
Project Team: Preston Scott Cohen, principal in charge of design, Amit Nemlich, project architect; Tobias Nolte, Bohsung Kong, project assistants

Consultants:
Project Managers: CPM Construction Managment Ltd.
Structural Engineers: YSS Consulting Engineers Ltd., Dani Shacham
HVAC: M. Doron – I. Shahar & Co., Consulting Eng. Ltd.
Electrical: U. Brener – A. Fattal Electrical & Systems Engineering Ltd.
Lighting: Suzan Tillotson, New York
Safety: S. Netanel Engineers Ltd
Security: H.M.T
Elevators: ESL- Eng. S. Lustig – Consulting Engineers Ltd.
Acoustics: M.G. Acistical Consultants Ltd.
Traffic: Dagesh Engineering, Traffic & Road Design Ltd.
Sanitation: Gruber Art System Engineering Ltd.
Soil: David David
Survey: B. Gattenyu
Public Shelter: K.A.M.N
Waterproofing: Bittelman
Kitchen Design: Zonnenstein

Key Dates:
Architectural competition: 2003
Design development and construction documents: 2005-06
Groundbreaking: 2007
Opening: November 2, 2011

Size: 195,000 square feet (18,500 square meters), built on a triangular footprint of approximately 48,500 square feet (4,500 square meters)
Cost: $55 million (estimated)

Principal Spaces:
Israeli Art galleries: 18,500 square feet
Architecture and Design galleries: 7,200 square feet
Prints and Drawings galleries: 2,500 square feet
Temporary exhibitions gallery: 9,000 square feet
Photography study center and gallery: 3,700 square feet
Art library: 10,000 square feet
Auditorium: 7,000 square feet
Restaurant: 3,200 square feet
Offices: 2,700 square feet

Principal Materials: Pre-cast reinforced concrete (facades), cast-in-place concrete (Lightfall), glass, acoustical grooved maple (ceilings in lobby and library and auditorium walls) and steel (structural frame)

(Photos: Raul J. Garcia)

For the past few years, we’ve been telling anyone who would listen about Denver’s imminent Clyfford Still Museum, designed by Brad Cloepfil and Allied Works Architecture. The frequent response: “Who’s Clyfford Still?” Exactly! On Friday, the museum opened its doors and commenced reacquainting the public with the life and work of the late artist (meanwhile, earlier this month at Sotheby’s, one of his canvases fetched $61.7 million, a record for the persnickety Abstract Expressionist). The majority of the museum’s approximately 2,400 paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures—a mind-boggling 94% of Still’s total creative output—has never been on display, and the inaugural exhibition fills the nine second-floor galleries with 110 works (including the only three Still sculptures in existence). The show “aims to redefine our grasp of Still’s vision in both its scope and sustained intensity—highlighting his extraordinary use of color, draftsmanship, gesture, figuration, serial, procedures, and scale,” said adjunct curator David Anfam in a statement issued by the museum. Stay tuned for further reports on the cantilevered concrete marvel after we visit next month, and get a feel for the 28,500-square-foot museum in this virtual tour:

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Saul Bass tribute time! This evening, the Museum of Modern Art and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences join forces to present “Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design,” part of MoMA’s festival of film preservation. In addition to the New York premiere of Saul and Elaine Bass’s Academy Award-winning 1968 short Why Man Creates, freshly preserved by the Academy Film Archive, the event will include a rich selection of Bass-designed title sequences, commercials, and corporate campaigns. But this is no ordinary screening: designers Chip Kidd and Kyle Cooper will be on hand to offer their perspectives on Bass’s enduring influence, and design historian (and Bass pal) Pat Kirkham will share her memories of the late designer. Can’t make it to MoMA? Order Kirkham’s new book about Bass. The eagerly anticipated tome, out this month from Laurence King, was designed by Jennifer Bass (daughter of Saul) and contains a whopping 1,484 illustrations. (Yes, we counted.)
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