Hasta La Ideas

If you’re at the head of a now decades old fashion empire, eventually you’re going to get bored of bathing in money and hiring the locals to feed caviar to your lions. The obvious next step is to get into collecting something. If you’re Ralph Lauren, those things are cars, of which he now has many. Starting yesterday and running through to the end of August, the fashion baron will be showing off a selection of his amassed sports cars at the Les Arts Decoratifs museum in Paris under the title, “L’Art de L’automobile. Chefs-D’Oeuvre de la Collection Ralph Lauren.” You can read briefly about the exhibition on the English side of the museum’s site, and even more if you speak French here. Some additional details are at the Lauren-affiliated site dedicated to his cars. Or better still, this short clip announcing the exhibition’s opening, which features at least one, but maybe two, strangely Photoshopped images of Lauren standing in front of a car.

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FREE Fernando Romero EnterprisE have completed this anvil-shaped museum in Mexico City, with a windowless facade composed of hexagonal aluminium tiles.

The Museo Soumaya is constructed of 28 steel curved columns with different diameters and geometries, which create its irregular form.

The building widens at the top, where a roof suspended from a cantilever allows natural daylight onto the top floor gallery.

The museum will house over 6,200 Latin American artworks in a continuous exhibition space spread across six storeys, as well as an auditorium for 350 people, a library, offices, a restaurant, a gift shop and a lounge.

More museum stories on Dezeen »

Here is some more information from the architects:

Completion of Museo Soumaya
FREE Fernando Romero EnterprisE

Mexico City–Designed by FREE Fernando Romero EnterprisE, Museo Soumaya opened to the public on March 29, 2011 after four years of development. The Museo Soumaya houses one of the most important art collections in Latin America with over 6,200 artworks and 60,000 square feet of exhibition space.

The Soumaya Museum is located in a former industrial zone dating from the 1940’s which today presents a very high commercial potential. The Soumaya Museum plays a key role in the reconversion of the area:  as a preeminent cultural program, it acts as an initiator in the transformation of the urban perception. Its avant-garde morphology and typology define a new paradigm in the history of Mexican and international architecture.

From the outside, the building is an organic and asymmetrical shape that is perceived differently by each visitor, while reflecting the diversity of the collection on the inside. Its heterogeneous collection is housed in a continuous exhibition space spread over six levels, representing approximately 60,000 ft². The building also includes an auditorium for 350 people, library, offices, a restaurant, a gift shop and a multi-purpose gathering lounge.

The shell of the building is constructed with 28 steel curved columns of different diameters, each with its own geometry and shape, offering the visitor a soft non-linear circulation all through the building. Located at each floor level, seven ring beams provide a system that braces the structure and guarantees its stability. The top floor is the most generous space of the museum; its roof is suspended from an impressive cantilever that allows natural daylight to flow in freely. In contrast, the building’s envelope is nearly opaque, offering little and scarce openings to the outside. This gesture can be interpreted as an intention to create a protected shelter for the art collection. The façade is made of hexagonal aluminum modules that optimize the preservation and durability of the entire building.

“The Museo Soumaya is an extraordinary structure rising up from the earth’s crust as a multi-dimensional icon,”  Raymund Ryan, 
Curator, 
The Heinz Architectural Center.

Location: Lago Zurich # 245, Col. Ampliación Granada, Del. Miguel Hidalgo. México DF. C.P. 11320
Completion: March 2011
Client/Owner: Fundación Carlos Slim
Architect Office: FREE Fernando Romero EnterprisE
General Contractor: CARSO Infraestructura y Contrucción
Interior Design:  FREE + MYT/ CEO-Andrés Mier y Teran

See also:

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Zayed National Museum by Foster + Partners	MAXXI by Zaha Hadid	Design Museum Holon by Ron Arad Architects

Carlo Scarpa’s architectural feat restored to glory as Venice’s newest museum

Widely recognized for their Ettore Sottsass-designed Valentine typewriter, one of Olivetti’s less celebrated design accomplishments is the company’s Venice showroom and store. Architect Carlo Scarpa spent two years conceiving the space with a focus on transparencies and materials after commissioned by Adriano Olivetti in the late ’50s, leading to what became one of the most significant architectural achievements of the 20th century.

Located on Venice’s famed Piazza San Marco, 14 years ago the Olivetti store was turned into a novelty shop. Last year the space’s owner, Assicurazioni Generali, began working with the Venice Heritage office to painstakingly refurbish the shop to its original appearance, reinstating authentic materials, forms and color schemes. They also turned to the glorious Italian cultural institution, FAI to protect and manage the building, which is filled with a unique collection of typewriters and calculators donated by Olivetti that’s now open to the public for regular visits along with the rest of the space.

One focal point of the renovated store is Alberto Viani’s “Nudo al Sole”—a sculpture that the architect put above a black Belgian marble plinth covered by water. To achieve the right amount of light, Scarpa increased the number of windows, illuminating the irregularly-shaped mosaic glass floor which changes color in each area. The main entrance is red, the central section almost white, the side entrance blue and the rear yellow.

The showroom-slash-museum provides exhaustive testimony to Scarpa’s construction expertise, taste and sophistication in the dialogue between old and new—skills that enabled him to design a classic in a city of architectural icons. The Olivetti Store is made of savvy construction details, balanced contrasts and constant maniacal research into lettering and texts, the results of which were never so eloquent as they are in the Olivetti Showroom.

Ground control to major…museum show! David Bowie will get his due as a performance artist in a retrospective opening May 9 at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. With “David Bowie, Aritst,” MAD sets out to “expand past his notoriety as a musician” to showcase “the too-often-overlooked diversity and multifaceted nature of Bowie’s total artistic output,” according to a press release issued by the museum. The program includes a film series—from Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and The Hunger to Basquiat and a new 35mm print of The Man Who Fell to Earth—as well as kiosks showing music videos, interviews, concert footage, and other audio-visual goodies (fingers crossed for a clip of Bowie’s brilliant cameo on Extras, below). The Bowiefest, which runs through July 15, is presented in conjunction with MAD’s intriguing summer exhibition: “Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities,” which will showcase small-scale, hand-built depictions of artificial environments and alternative realities by the likes of James Casebere, Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz, Mat Collishaw, and Amy Bennett.

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Speaking of unrequested street art as we were in that last post, LA MoCA‘s problem of having graffiti pop up outside of their museum has spread all the way to Michigan. The still-under construction, Zaha Hadid-designed Eli and Edythe Broad Museum, on the campus of Michigan State University, was recently tagged with five paintings, each with “the same image, a circular face with two red, wavy lines coming from its sides.” A piece of building machinery was also hit. The university is upset, but sources tell the State News that the damage isn’t anything that can’t be cleaned up fairly quickly. What makes it kind of interesting and significant is that the Broads financed the MoCA’s Art in the Streets street art exhibition. So like we said, even if the artist/vandal wasn’t aware of it, the LA museum’s problem has now spread across state lines.

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