Hasta La Ideas

If you’d heard about the recent flooding in the Philippines, which took its toll in human lives and destroying whole towns, it’s likely that the last thing on your mind would be shoes. But for those of you who were thinking about footwear, you can rest easy in knowing that the majority of Imelda Marcos‘ shoes were saved from destruction thanks to some quick thinking by the staff at the Marikina Shoe Museum (“Home of the World’s Largest Shoe”), which was the recipient of “more than 800 pairs donated by the former first lady,” who were able to move the collection out of harms way. When the water started coming in, “the staff quickly moved the collection to the top shelves of display cabinets and only around 100 got wet.” So breathe easy, shoe fetishists (and the ghost of Imelda Marcos), the mother of all collections has been saved.

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Here’s hoping that Umberto Eco, the Louvre’s latest guest curator, has a taste for Royales with cheese. In what only sounds like a headline from The Onion, McDonald’s will open a restaurant and a coffee shop inside the Louvre next month. According to a report in The Daily Telegraph:

“The Louvre welcomes the fact that the entirety of visitors and customers, French or foreign, can enjoy such a rich and varied restaurant offer, whether in the museum area or gallery,” the museum said in a statement.

The McDonald’s would represent the “American segment” of a new “food court,” and would be situated “among (other) world cuisines and coffee shops,” it wrote.

It added that the franchise owner “has taken the utmost care in ensuring the quality of the project, both in culinary and aesthetic terms.”

Lest you envision museum-goers munching McNuggets while admiring the work of Michelangelo, we should point out that the establishments will be located in the Louvre-adjacent underground mall known as the the Carrousel du Louvre. Still, many are outraged at the planned location of France’s 1,142nd McDonald’s. “This is the last straw,” an unnamed art historian working at the Louvre told the Telegraph. “This is the pinnacle of exhausting consumerism, deficient gastronomy, and very unpleasant odors in the context of a museum.” Others invoked the ‘ol slippery slope—or should we say pente savonneuse. “Today McDonald’s, tomorrow low-cost clothes shops,” said art blogger Didier Rykner. Too late. The Carrousel du Louvre’s current tenants include ESPRIT and Tie Rack.

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At the very start of the year, the still fairly new head of the Smithsonian, Wayne Clough, put a lock down on spending at the famed institution, stopping almost all new hiring and ceasing all raises and bonuses. Just a couple of months later, he was back at it, extending hours at the more popular museums and offering up new ideas to keep the money from drying up (sadly, he can’t take credit for The Smithsonian Collection line of department store furniture). But as we’ve been constantly reading since about this time last year, things aren’t easy for museums at the moment and so another cost-cutting measure at the Smithsonian has come to light. Modern Art Notes was slipped an e-mail sent from Alison McNally, Under Secretary for Finance and Administration, to all the Institution’s employees explaining that they would be offering voluntary buyout packages for “an amount equal to an employee’s calculated severance pay entitlement or $25,000, whichever is less” and decided upon between this past Monday and November 30th. So it looks like some more trimming is in store. But as for how many employees decided to take the leap, we’ll have to wait and see.

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It’s been a little while since we last checked in at Brandeis University to see what’s going on with the Rose Art Museum debacle. As you might recall, back in January, the university’s board decided in secret to shut down the museum and sell off all of the art therein to help pay the bills. This led to a firestorm of protests, meetings, op-ed pieces, and everything in between. The last time we’d reported on Brandeis, back in late July, supporters of the museum were taking the university to court, trying to block any possible sales. Well now, after nine months since this began, it looks as though things have swung the way of the protesters. The big news is that the university’s longtime president, Jehuda Reinharz, has announced that he will be resigning, which is largely being perceived as relating to his mishandling of the Rose. Furthermore, the school recently decided through committee that the museum should remain open and that its future should be of more concern from here on out. So good news all around, it seems, for Rose supporters. Though this story has a tendency to take some quick turns, so we’re keeping our congrats to only around 87% until we know for sure everything is safe and sound on the Brandeis campus.

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Danish architects CF Møller have completed the second phase of the Darwin Centre, an extension to the Natural History Museum in London.

The centrepiece of the extension, which opens on 15 September, is an eight-storey concrete cocoon contained within a glass atrium.

The centre contains storage areas for the museum’s vast collections as well as new public galleries.

All images are copyright Natural History Museum.

Here’s some text from the Natural History Museum:

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£78M NEW DARWIN CENTRE BY CF MOLLER ARCHITECTS OPENS AT THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM, LONDON

The Natural History Museum is both one of the UK’s top five visitor attractions, and a world-leading science research centre. The architecture of both phases of the Darwin Centre are designed to reflect this dual role, and, through innovative and ambitious design, reveal to the public for the first time the incredible range and diversity of the Museum’s collections and the cutting-edge scientific research they support.

Neil Greenwood, the Natural History Museum’s Programme Director for the Darwin Centre, explains, ‘Many people love the Natural History Museum for its iconic Victorian Waterhouse building. However, through the Darwin Centre, we wanted to challenge this traditional perception and highlight the work of our scientists and the importance of our collections. The Darwin Centre is set to be a truly inspirational addition to the Natural History Museum when it opens to the public on 15 September 2009.’

The second phase of the Darwin Centre, designed by C F Møller Architects, completes the western site of the Natural History Museum, uniting Alfred Waterhouse’s terracotta construction from 1881, with the first phase of the Darwin Centre which opened in 2002. Like the rest of the Natural History Museum, the new completed Darwin Centre plays three important roles: safeguarding the millions of specimens in the Museum’s collections, providing research facilities for our scientists, and inspirational public spaces for visitors. It is these three uses that are central to the design of both phases of the Darwin Centre.

Darwin Centre: Second Phase

Designed by C F Møller Architects, the second phase of the Darwin Centre takes the form of a huge eight-storey concrete cocoon, surrounded by a glass atrium. This centrepiece resembles a large silk cocoon, and forms the inner protective element of the Darwin Centre’s second phase. The scale of the Cocoon is such that it cannot be seen in its entirety from any one position, emphasizing its massive scale. The shape and size give the visitor a tangible understanding of the volume of the collections contained within.

The collections areas within the Cocoon are world class, the regulation of temperature and humidity, as well as the separation of work and storage areas reduce the risk of pest infestations ensuring that the collections will be protected and preserved for many years to come.

Public access to the scientific core of the second phase of the Darwin Centre takes the form of a visitor route up and through the cocoon, overlooking the science and collection areas. This provides a complimentary activity to the Darwin Centre’s other function of protection, preservation and research. The visitor can experience the Darwin Centre as a compelling and interactive learning space, observing the scientific and research activities without interrupting scientific work in progress.

Anna Maria Indrio, partner at CF.Møller, comments “C. F. Møller Architects is very proud and honoured to have been given the task of designing a framework for the Natural History Museum’s unique collection of plants and insects. The large silk cocoon protected by a glass atrium encloses a fantastic treasure, reflecting evolution itself. The macroscale of the space and the size of the cocoon expresses the enormous importance of the collections. Iconic forms should only be used if the relationship between the building and its interpretation is entirely self-evident, as it is in this case.

The new building has completely changed the Natural History Museum’s relationship with the site from being an introvert to an extrovert building. It was incredibly demanding to solve the task of the second phase of the Darwin Centre in this way, but the cocoon will become a major attraction and a trademark of the Darwin Centre in the future.”

Darwin Centre: First Phase

Designed by HOK International, the first phase of the Darwin Centre houses 22 million zoology specimens preserved in jars of alcohol and provides state of the art laboratories for 100 scientists.

The public areas of the first phase of the Darwin Centre, showcase the scale and diversity of this collection. Looking through a glass screen into the storerooms and up through the six-storey atrium visitors can appreciate the sheer volume of material kept there with illuminated floor-to-ceiling cases allowing a close-up view of specimens.

The collections themselves are kept in optimum storage conditions. Regulating the temperature of the storage rooms to a constant 13°C significantly reduces fire risks, and the separation of collections spaces from the work areas, and the placing of service systems outside of the building ensures that unnecessary access to the collections is minimised.

The second phase of the Darwin Centre in numbers

• the second phase of the Darwin Centre has cost £78 million
• the base construction took around 25 months and 280 people to build
• at 60 metres long, 12 metres wide, 300 millimetres thick and 3,500 square metres, the eight-storey-high cocoon is the largest sprayed concrete, curved structure in Europe
• the cocoon will hold 17 million entomology specimens and three million botany specimens in 3.3 kilometres of cabinets
• these cabinets would stretch from the Natural History Museum in South Kensington to Westminster Cathedral if put end to end
• the cocoon is approximately 30 centimetres thick and will be kept at a steady 17°C and 45 per cent relative humidity, the optimum conditions to store collections
• the second phase of the Darwin Centre has 16,000 square metres of floor space
• the building will accommodate up to 220 staff and science visitors
• there will be 1,040 square metres of laboratory space, doubling the size of the Natural History Museum’s current laboratory areas
• 2,500 people per day will be able to take a self-guided journey through the collections and research areas

The second phase of the Darwin Centre is designed by Scandinavian architects CF Møller, who won an international architectural competition in 2001. It was built by BAM Construction Ltd.