Coming from a background in marketing, Dexter Wimberly isn’t afraid of a hard sell. Since moving to the art world as an independent curator, Wimberly has worked to discover and promote talent that is…
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Among the Morgan’s 250,000 works is a 1630 Rembrandt etching, “Self-Portrait in a Cap.”
There’s always plenty to see at New York’s Morgan Library & Museum, which unveiled its stunning Renzo Piano-designed expansion in 2006, and the place is a magnet for school groups who take in Mr. Morgan‘s majestic library and visit the latest exhibitions. So what leaves a lasting impression with the youngsters—Charles McKim‘s Italian Renaissance-style palazzo? The illuminated manuscripts? A Rembrandt self-portrait? Try the high-tech toilets. Time Out New York recently flushed out the secret from Nicole Haroutunian, a museum educator at the Morgan:
We spend 90 minutes looking at one of the most beautiful libraries in the world, at 1,000-year-old books decorated with gold, at a secret staircase; yet often what most impresses the students who visit is the automatic toilets in the bathroom. The kids usually come piling out saying, “Even the bathrooms are so fancy! The toilet flushes on its own!” They also always think that the water fountains are made of gold.
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History will not be kind to patchwork leather and purple paisley velvet, but the oxymoronic notion of “hippie fashion” makes for a groovy exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. [Cut to footage of crowds digging granny dresses, kooky tunics, and platform shoes to the tune of “Sugar Magnolia” and “Purple Haze.”] Later today, a couple of vintage VW buses will be stationed at the museum’s Huntington Avenue entrance for social media photo ops, and those far from the Hub can feel the love anytime with “Hippie Chic: Remix,” an online app that debuted this week.
Doff your blue feathered Yves Saint Laurent chubby and spend a few minutes choosing among 54 ensembles inspired by the fashion revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s as well as trippy options involving faces borrowed from the MFA collection (George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, Dante Gabriel Rossetti‘s Pre-Raphaelite flower child) or an uploaded visage. The result of the not-so-long, strange, online trip is a psychedelic album cover designed for sharing with far-out followers.
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Architect Frank Gehry has released images of his shortlisted entry for the competition to design National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) in Beijing – a competition thought to have been won by Jean Nouvel.
Gehry’s firm Gehry Partners was shortlisted along with Nouvel and Zaha Hadid for the prestigious project and while no official announcement has been made, the Financial Times reported in May that work was about to start on building Nouvel’s design.
Gehry’s submission features translucent stone cladding and an interior made up of a series of tall, geometric courtyards reminiscent of pagodas and temples.
“We realized the project from concept through design to a full scale mock-up [of the cladding] that we manufactured in Beijing,” says David Nam, partner at Gehry Partners. “The project was developed in depth over one and a half years through 3 stages of competition.”
Nam added: “To our knowledge the Chinese government has made no official announcement [about the winner of the competition]”.
The National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) will be the showpiece of a new cultural district being built close to Herzog & de Meuron’s National Stadium in Beijing’s Olympic Park. It will attract up to 12 million visitors per year, making it the world’s busiest art museum.
Models of Gehry’s design are on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MOCA) as part of the A New Sculpturalism exhibition of of southern Californian architecture.
See all our stories about Frank Gehry | See all our stories about Beijing
Here’s some text about the project from Gehry Partners:
NATIONAL ART MUSEUM OF CHINA
COMPETITION
Beijing, People’s Republic of China
The globalization of art is connecting the cultures of the world. Art can act as the instrument for breaking down the barriers to understanding between cultures. China is the focus of this global conversation at this moment. The Chinese contemporary art world is exploding at an unprecedented rate proportionate to the size of its population. People all over the world are flocking to experience Chinese art. This form of cultural engagement promotes cross cultural understanding and appreciation. This is the model for the future, and is central to the design of the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC).
The competition for NAMOC involved three rounds that took place between December 2010–July 2012. Round One was the concept phase. Round two was the primary design phase. Round three addressed client feedback from round two, and advanced the technical development of the project.
NAMOC will form the centerpiece of a new cultural district in Beijing. Located to the north of the city center in the Olympic Park, the district will be comprised of four museums. NAMOC will occupy the most important site facing the central axis of the Olympic Park. The primary goal of the competition brief was to create a design that addresses the concept of a 21st century Chinese architecture. We created a design that is uniquely tailored to China and its rich cultural history, evoking historical models without copying them, to create an innovative building unlike anything else in the world.
Throughout our projects we have been looking for a way to express movement with inert materials like the Greeks did with the horses and soldiers in the Elgin marbles and like the Indian Shiva dancing figures. Our effort to express subtle movement in the façade is what leads us to studying glass.
The façade is clad with a new material developed by Gehry Partners – translucent stone. Evocative of the most precious Chinese materials, it has the qualities of jade. Of all the materials we explored, we found glass to be the most transcendent and symbolic of Chinese landscape paintings, of moving water, of the mountains covered in mist. It has gravitas that creates an emotional impact on visitors. It gives the building a stately and noble appearance, appropriate for a national museum.
We experimented with the translucent stone in many different conditions and configurations, looked at it in various lights, and found that it has the ability to project movement. It changes beautifully with the light, becoming ephemeral, and allowing for different effects with artificial lighting, banners and projection. The glass allows the building to easily transform throughout the day and the seasons, as well as for festivals and for changing exhibitions.
The translucent stone is part of the innovative sustainable façade concept that incorporates a ventilated airspace to reduce the heating and cooling loads of the building. In addition, the airspace is used to display art banners and projections, which provides the ability for the building’s façade to change and remain current far into the future, even becoming a canvas for artist projects.
The building’s entries and interiors have been organized to accommodate an unprecedented number of patrons expected to visit the museum. The building has been designed to efficiently and comfortably accommodate 38,400 visitors per day and approximately 12 million visitors per year, enabling NAMOC to have the highest attendance of any museum in the world. Four distributed entries at each corner of the building facilitate the processing of a large number of visitors, and minimize any queuing of visitors. Each of the four entries is connected to one of four escalators systems that provide fast and efficient distribution of visitors to all parts of the museums. A ceremonial entrance is placed in the center of the west façade, facing the Olympic Park. The articulation of this entrance evokes the silhouette of a Chinese temple.
The building interiors are organized around a series of large public spaces, connected vertically by escalators. These spaces are inspired by pagoda and temple forms- rendered as occupiable voids; the shapes are only legible from the inside. The public spaces provide an orienting device for visitors to easily navigate the large museum, and establish a formal continuity between the shapes of the building façade and the interior of the museum. In addition to providing access to galleries, the public spaces provide opportunities for large scale art exhibit spaces and events.
The organization of the galleries was developed through discussions with NAMOC. Sixty percent of the galleries are dedicated to the permanent collections of 20th century Chinese art, Chinese calligraphy, Chinese folk art, and international art. The permanent collection is housed on the second, third, and fourth floors in gallery types to align with the requirements of the art. The ground floor, fifth floor, and roof top galleries are dedicated to changing contemporary art exhibitions. They are taller in height and have a greater variety of shape and scale.
The museum includes a full complement of supporting functions. An art academy, an art research and conservation institute, five auditoriums, retail stores, restaurants and cafes, and large art storage areas have been incorporated into the design of the museum.
The design for the museum was developed with an integrated sustainability concept. The design is based on a high comfort-low impact strategy that includes concepts for load reduction, system optimization, and renewable resource substitution.
The calculated impact of the integrated sustainability concept is a 57% reduction in energy use and carbon emissions over a standard museum, the equivalent of 275 Beijing households.
Gehry Partners developed a larger landscape and master plan design for the museum’s surrounding areas to link with master plan for the cultural district. A revitalized waterfront park to the west provides new public open spaces and ground level retail areas, and a visual foreground to the museum as viewed from the main axis of the Olympic Park. A connection to the subway is provided at the first level below grade that links directly to the museum. A new park to the east of the museum offers additional public open space and sculpture gardens as an extension of the museum. The roof of the museum has a public garden that allows visitors views to the Olympic Park beyond, and provides a key fifth elevation to the museum when viewed from above.
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entry by Gehry Partners appeared first on Dezeen.
Beijing architecture studio MAD has designed an artificial island with an art museum set in caves in its three dune-like forms.
Set in a reservoir on Pingtan island in China’s Fujian province, the Pingtan Art Museum will be accessed via a narrow undulating bridge.
The building is designed by MAD as three concrete mounds, creating cave-like exhibition spaces inside and curved public spaces over the rooftops.
“The island is firstly a public space that is then turned into a museum,” say the architects. “The sea, the beach, the oasis and the slope all interconnect with each other, forming a harmonious capacious space with the mountains in the distance.”
The concrete walls will be mixed with local sand and shells to give them a rough, grainy texture.
As the largest private museum in Asia, the 40,000 square-metre structure will display a collection of over a thousand Chinese artworks and objects.
The building will also form the centre of a new city on Pingtan, which is currently in the planning stages.
Other projects underway by MAD include a village of towering apartment blocks in the mountains and a skyscraper with gardens at each level.
Completed buildings by the firm include a pair of twisted skyscrapers and an icicle-shaped museum for wooden sculptures. See more architecture by MAD »
Read on more more information from MAD:
MAD Pingtan Art Museum Begins Construction Preparation Phase
Pingtan Art Museum, the third museum design by MAD Architects, has just begun its construction preparation phase. It will be the largest private museum in Asia, claiming a construction area of over 40,000 square metres. The museum’s investments total around 800 million RMB and upon completion, its debut exhibition will display over a thousand pieces of national treasures.
Being the largest island in the Fujian province, Pingtan is also the Chinese island nearest to Taiwan. In 2010, the ‘Comprehensive Experimental Zone’ project in Pingtan was officially launched; the island is expected to become the primary location for trade and cultural communication between Taiwan and the mainland in the foreseeable future. The island, which is currently home to fisheries and a military base, will quickly be transformed into an large-scale urban development zone.
This new city, which is still under planning, will hold the museum at its centre. The museum itself acts as a smaller scale island off the Pingtan Island itself, connected to land only by a slightly undulating pier, which, in turn, bridges artificial and natural, city and culture, as well as history and future. The museum represents a long-lasting earthscape in water and is a symbol of the island in ancient times, with each island containing a mountain beneath it.
The island is firstly a public space that is then turned into a museum. The sea, the beach, the oasis and the slope all interconnect with each other, forming a harmonious capacious space with the mountains in the distance. The building is constructed with concrete that is blended with local sand shells. The indoor space, formed by the rise and fall of the formal movements, looks similar to ancient caves.
Pingtan Art Museum is built in a landscape setting of an urban city. After its completion, it will create a new space for the city and the city’s inhabitants and further inspire them to reflect on the impact made by time and nature.
Location: Pingtan, China
Program: Museum
Site Area: 32,000 sqm
Building Area: 40,000 sqm
Director in Charge: Ma Yansong, Dang Qun, Yosuke Hayano
Design Team: Zhao Wei, Huang Wei, Liu Jiansheng, Jei Kim, Li Jian, Li Guangchong, Alexandre Sadeghi
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by MAD appeared first on Dezeen.
There’s a trend a-brewin’ in the form of deconstructed, shape-shifting graphic identities for art museums. We still can’t stomach the “responsive W” that Experimental Jetset cooked up for the Whitney, but Project Projects is onto something with its dynamic new look for the RISD Museum. Part of an overhaul that included a name change (it was formerly known as The Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design) and the first website redesign in the museum’s history, the fresh mark was inspired by the architectural space of the RISD Museum—composed of five buildings located on the historic East Side of Providence, Rhode Island–and consists of a stylized “M” within which the letters R, I, S, and D are positioned.
Check out the identity’s fluid, interactive application on the new website, also a Project Projects project. “Throughout [the site], colorful bands function as gallery walls and create a sense of progression from room to room as the visitor scrolls, dimensionalizing the site and connecting it to the identity system’s emphasis on the museum as a space,” note the designers, who have mixed the bands with “button-like tags [that] foster a more networked type of discovery through the museum’s collections from Ancient to Contemporary, grouping objects by time period, genre, material, and technique to emphasize methods of making across disciplines.”
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For the first Monday since 1971, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is open to the public (step right up to see the blood-stained roof deck, which looks even spookier in a steady drizzle!). But there’s a price to pay for this new seven-days-a-week schedule: also for the first time since 1971, admission will not come in the form of a brightly colored metal badge. The museum has moved to paper tickets. Quel scandale! Blame it on the rising cost of metal and a dwindling supply of manufacturers of tiny tin discs in a rainbow of 16 collect-them-all hues. “It just became too expensive,” the Met’s Harold Holzer told The New York Times. “We saw that it was inevitable.” Fear not, badge fans, because we suspect that the remaining stock will soon pop up in the Met’s gift shop, possibly in jewelry or key chain form.
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Party over here! And by “here,” we mean the outdoor courtyard of MoMA PS1, where CODA has erected “Party Wall,” a flexible pavilion that will provide shade, seating, water, and conversational fodder to crowds attending performances and other summer happenings at the Long Island City art space. The Ithaca-based experimental design and research studio, established in 2008 by Caroline O’Donnell, bested four other finalists—Leong Architects, Moorhead & Moorhead, TempAgency, and French 2D—to win this year’s Young Architects Program in New York (there are also YAP competitions in Chile, Istanbul, and at MAXXI in Rome).
Even before you can discern that the towering steel-framed structure is clad in a wooden macrame of interlocking “bones” and “blanks” donated by Comet Skateboards (eco-friendly, bien sûr!), you squint at the porous facade and ask, “Wait, does that spell something? What does it say?” Exactly, party people! “In fact, it does not say anything in itself,” say the designers, “it says something only in relation to the ground and the sun, and even then, says little, except what it would like to be: a wall.”
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Sitting at the south end of New York City’s High Line park, the Renzo Piano work-in-progress is the Whitney Museum’s future home. The team behind the project is…
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News: Swiss architecture studio Herzog & de Meuron has been selected to design a visual culture museum in Hong Kong’s new West Kowloon Cultural District.
Selected ahead of a shortlist of architects that included SANAA, Renzo Piano, Toyo Ito, Snøhetta and Shigeru Ban, Herzog & de Meuron will work alongside UK firm TFP Farrells to deliver the M+ museum on Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, giving the city a dedicated centre for twentieth and twenty-first century art, design, architecture and film.
M+ is scheduled to complete in 2017 and will be one of the first buildings to open in the West Kowloon Cultural District, which is being masterplanned by London office Foster + Partners and is set to contain a total of 17 cultural venues around a 14-hectare city park.
Design critic Aric Chen was appointed curator of design and architecture for M+ last summer. He told Dezeen that the museum will help to “place Asia at the centre” of design history, rather than on the periphery as western curators have done.
Other venues underway in the West Kowloon Cultural District include a Chinese opera designed by Vancouver-based architect Bing Thom and Hong Kong-based architect Ronald Lu. See all our coverage of the West Kowloon Cultural District.
Herzog & de Meuron was also recently selected to design the new National Library of Israel, after the initial competition winner was dismissed over a copyright dispute. Other new projects by the studio include a 57-storey tower for Miami and the completed Messe Basel exhibition centre. See more architecture by Herzog & de Meuron.
Here’s a short statement from Herzog & de Meuron:
Herzog & de Meuron win competition to design M+
The West Kowloon Cultural District Authority has appointed Herzog & de Meuron to design the new building for M+. Based on the recommendation of an international selection jury, Herzog & de Meuron were selected ahead of five other short-listed architecture firms. M+ is the new museum for visual culture in Hong Kong, focusing on 20th and 21st century art, design, architecture and moving image. The building will be situated on the waterfront of Victoria Harbour at the edge of a planned 14-hectare park. It will be one of the first projects to be completed in the West Kowloon Cultural District, and a key venue in creating interdisciplinary exchange between the visual arts and the performing arts in Asia.
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in Hong Kong appeared first on Dezeen.
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