Hasta La Ideas

Le photographe Peter Wegner a réalisé la série « Buildings Made Of Sky » pour montrer une nouvelle dimension de New-York : une ville imbriquée dans une ville. Il suffit de mettre la tête à l’envers pour découvrir une nouvelle architecture en suspension, celle des grattes-ciels faits de nuages et des couleurs du soleil.

Japanese fashion brand Comme des Garçons has opened a branch of its London store Dover Street Market in New York City (+ slideshow).

The new Dover Street Market store on Manhattan’s Lexington Avenue opened just before Christmas, and displays garments and accessories by both established and emerging fashion designers among a variety of installations.

“I want to create a kind of market where various creators from various fields gather together and encounter each other in an ongoing atmosphere of beautiful chaos – the mixing up and coming together of different kindred souls who all share a strong personal vision,” said Comme des Garçons founder Rei Kawakubo about the concept for the stores.

A selection of artists and designers created graphics and 3D pieces for the interior to form different environments across the seven storeys.

On the ground floor Kawakubo arranged wooden sticks haphazardly across part of the ceiling above scaffolding poles, which are used to support the rails displaying Comme des Garçons’ own designs.

White beams are clamped together to create angled shelves for Dover Street Market merchandise.

More scaffolding is used to form the section for Japanese designer Junya Watanabe on the floor above, where a kiosk for Moscot sunglasses is also located.

A globular tunnel painted purple on the inside covers the staircase connecting levels three and four.

Wooden structures and lattices are dispersed across the fifth level, some large enough to walk through.

The top two floors are decorated with a mix of patchwork wall hangings, illuminated lettering, translucent display units and metal columns.

American designer Thom Browne‘s apparel is presented in a glass room modelled like an office.

As well as New York and London, Dover Street Market also has an outpost in Ginza, Tokyo, which opened in 2006.

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News: the Williams and Tsien-designed former American Folk Art Museum in New York will be demolished just 13 years after it was built to make room for an extension to the neighbouring Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), despite an outcry from architects, conservationists and critics.

In a statement last night, MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry said the museum will move forward with designs by Diller Scofidio + Renfro to extend its existing building over the site of the former folk art museum designed by American architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien and completed in 2001.

The decision follows a six-month study that investigated options for its retention. “The plans approved today are the result of a recommendation from the architects after a diligent and thoughtful six-month study and design process that explored all options for the site,” said Lowry.

“The analysis that we undertook was lengthy and rigorous, and ultimately led us to the determination that creating a new building on the site of the former American Folk Art Museum is the only way to achieve a fully integrated campus.”

Williams and Tsien have described the move as “a missed opportunity to find new life and purpose for a building that is meaningful to so many”.

“The Folk Art building was designed to respond to the fabric of the neighbourhood and create a building that felt both appropriate and yet also extraordinary,” they said.

“Demolishing this human-scaled, uniquely crafted building is a loss to the city of New York in terms of respecting the size, diversity and texture of buildings in a midtown neighbourhood that is at risk of becoming increasingly homogenised.”

The bronze-clad museum first opened its doors in 2001 to exhibit a collection of paintings, sculptures and crafts by self-taught and outsider artists, but relocated to a smaller site on Lincoln Square, further north in Manhattan, after the building was sold to MoMA in 2011 to pay off a $32 million loan.

However, Williams and Tsien believe the building already holds a “powerful architectural legacy”.

“The inability to experience the building firsthand and to appreciate its meaning from an historical perspective will be profoundly felt,” they said.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro‘s expansion will add approximately 3700 square metres (40,000 square feet) of new galleries and public spaces to the museum.

It will extend across two sites west of the museum’s midtown Manhattan building, including both the folk art museum site at 45 West 53rd Street and three floors of a new residential tower underway next door, allowing the existing lobby and ground-floor areas to be transformed into a large public space.

Scroll down for the full statement from Glenn D. Lowry:

Message from Glenn D. Lowry
Director, The Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art’s Board of Trustees today approved initial details of a major building project that will expand the Museum’s public spaces and galleries to provide greater public accessibility and allow the Museum to reconceive the presentation of its collection and exhibitions. Working with Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the renowned interdisciplinary studio based in New York City, the Museum has developed a plan to integrate its current building with two sites to the west of the Museum’s midtown Manhattan campus into which it will expand: three floors of a residential tower being developed by Hines, at 53 West 53rd Street; and the site of the former American Folk Art Museum, at 45 West 53rd Street. The plans include new gallery space on three floors within the tower, and a new building on the site of the former museum.

The plans approved today are the result of a recommendation from the architects after a diligent and thoughtful six-month study and design process that explored all options for the site. The analysis that we undertook was lengthy and rigorous, and ultimately led us to the determination that creating a new building on the site of the former American Folk Art Museum is the only way to achieve a fully integrated campus.

As a major component of the Museum’s desire for greater public access and a more welcoming street presence, the preliminary concepts approved today will transform the current lobby and ground-floor areas into an expansive public gathering space, open to the public and spanning the entire street level of the Museum, including The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. In advance of these plans, the Museum will increase free public access to the Sculpture Garden later this year.

The extension of MoMA’s galleries to the west on its second, fourth, and fifth floors will add a variety of spaces and allow the Museum to present an integrated display of its collection across all disciplines—photography, architecture, design, film, media, prints, drawings, performance, painting, and sculpture. These carefully choreographed sequences will highlight the creative frictions and influences that spring from seeing these mediums together.

The expansion will add approximately 40,000 square feet of new galleries and public areas, providing 30% more space for visitors to view the collection and special exhibitions. The additional space will allow the Museum to show transformative acquisitions that have added new dimensions and voices to its holdings, drawing from entire collections of contemporary drawings, Fluxus, and Conceptual art; the archives of Frank Lloyd Wright; and major recent acquisitions by such artists as Marcel Broodthaers, Lygia Clark, Steve McQueen, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Mira Schendel, Richard Serra, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Cy Twombly, among many others.

Our vision for MoMA’s next phase will be completed over the coming years, and I look forward to updating you on our progress.

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folk art museum says MoMA director appeared first on Dezeen.

One thousand editions of literary journal The Paris Review cover the ceiling of skincare brand Aesop‘s new store in Chelsea, New York (+ slideshow).

The Aesop Chelsea store is located a few streets away from the journal’s New York headquarters. “I first discovered The Paris Review in a vintage Melbourne bookstore many years ago,” said Aesop founder Dennis Paphitis. “I have since that time tried diligently to read every issue in a sober state.”

The walls are lined with monochrome extracts of 60 years of The Paris Review, including photographs and letters, while the issues on the ceiling are in full colour.

One side of the store features a cast-iron sink with tube lights fitted into the wall above. The opposite wall displays Aesop products on five freestanding black lacquered shelves.

A small black wooden table in the centre of the store displays more issues of The Paris Review, while a 1950s-style wooden cabinet acts as the counter at the rear of the shop. The floor is covered with black slate tiles.

No two Aesop stores are the same and Dennis Paphitis told Dezeen that he was “horrified at the thought of a soulless chain”. The brand also completed it’s Marylebone London store earlier this year, a restoration by Studio KO that references the rustic English brick house. 

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in copies of The Paris Review appeared first on Dezeen.

This New York loft conversion by local architect Ali Tayar is divided using bespoke prefabricated panels based on a Swiss modular housing system from the 1960s (+ slideshow).

Tayar designed the home for Maryana Bilski, a creative director he previously collaborated with on the interior of a hotel in Switzerland, who oversaw the restoration of the 1872 cast iron building in the city’s Soho district.

Bilski commissioned a small steel-framed pavilion on top of the building, hidden behind a mansard roof and based on a system devised by Swiss architect Fritz Haller in 1967. “As a boy in Switzerland, my partner lived in the first Haller modular house. This was like an extension of that childhood home, here in New York,” Bilski said.

Wanting to continue the idea of this modular construction in the apartment below, Tayar created a bespoke prefabricated system using 1.2-metre-square aluminium panels to build freestanding boxes that house the master and guest bedrooms, and kitchen units and appliances, as well as modular ceiling panels.

“Fritz Haller’s idea of modular architecture informed my whole education,” he said. “So I conceived of the interior of the original loft, below the penthouse, as a custom-made prefabricated system based on the geometric model Haller had developed.”

“The interior is completely free of the building shell,” said Tayar. “It came in boxes and got installed. It can be uninstalled, put back in boxes, and taken out.”

Porthole windows in some of the aluminium panels used to construct the bedrooms allow light to enter during the day and seem to glow at night, while the bright orange panels used for the kitchen inject a hit of colour into the predominantly neutral interior.

Original wooden columns that appear throughout the space influenced the choice of larch for the ceiling, kitchen units and for storage panels clipped onto the bedrooms.

Tayar designed an expansive sectional grey sofa to create a large lounge area, while the antique chairs and settee nearby flank chrome and glass coffee tables designed by Haller.

A staircase leads up to the penthouse, where the glazed walls provide views across the city.

Photography by Eric Laignel.

Here’s a project description from Ali Tayar:

Soho Penthouse

Designing interiors for the Omnia hotel in Zermatt, Switzerland, Ali Tayar of the Parallel Design Partnership developed a close working relationship with Maryana Bilski, the project’s American expat creative director. Tayar subsequently designed a carbon-fiber yacht for Bilski’s Swiss partner. When the couple were planning a move to New York, they turned again to Tayar for their duplex, the final phase in an almost decade long rehabilitation of one of SoHo’s finest cast-iron buildings.

As at the Omnia, Bilski oversaw the SoHo project. She worked with Bialosky + Partners Architects on a painstakingly authentic restoration of the 1872 building’s facade, elaborately ornamented in the style of France’s Second Empire-even recasting replacement elements in iron rather than less-expensive fiberglass.

Then, on a flat section of the roof, hidden by a Haussmann-esque mansard, she asked the firm to erect a small steel-framed glass penthouse pavilion, using a modular system devised by the Swiss architect Fritz Haller in 1967. “As a boy in Switzerland, my partner lived in the first Haller modular house. This was like an extension of that childhood home, here in New York,” she says.

The 1,300-square-foot penthouse pavilion was also an extension of Tayar’s studies at Germany’s Universität Stuttgart and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Instead of subdividing the 4,500 square feet of loft space with conventional studs and plasterboard, Tayar constructed his two principal architectural elements from 4-foot-square modules in grey anodised aluminium, used either on their own or with larch panels snapped in.

These pods contain the master suite and the guest suite, the former raised because the windows at the front of the loft are higher. Translucent portholes puncture the panels of both pods, letting light in during the day and out at night. Similar panels, only bright orange, sheathe the front of a third unit, a freestanding wall with a grandly scaled version of the Pullman kitchen built into the back. The ceiling’s perforated larch panels are modular, too.

He limited his palette to just a few materials, starting with the honey-colored larch – a softwood not normally associated with luxury construction but chosen to coordinate with the original Doric columns. There is also granite for the two baronial fireplace surrounds, the bathroom’s walls and tub and sink surrounds, and the kitchen’s counter and backsplash. The only strong colour is the orange of the kitchen panels.

“Furnishing the apartment was a matter of weaving together the history of the building with the history of the clients,” he says. The result takes a long view of modernism – one that starts with its birth in the second industrial revolution of the mid-19th century, the world of the crystal palace and the cast-iron facade, and continues to develop up to the present. The first purchase was a set of Danish 1950’s dining chairs, fine-boned in rosewood and leather.

That was easy. “I know what I like,” Bilski says. Finding a suitably expansive sofa for the living area was harder. After rejecting several contemporary models, she suggested Tayar design something himself, and he came up with a 15-foot-wide gray sectional with black lacquered elements, a nod to her admiration for Eileen Gray. Less monumental are a pair of Haller’s glass-topped chrome cocktail tables and a century-old settee and armchairs.

In the dining area, a massive silvery table base supports an enormous oval of granite. “It was the biggest piece we could find,” Tayar says. Bilski adds, “It truly anchors the space. They had to bring it in with a crane. I can’t believe they’ll ever be able to take it out again.” The entry’s console table, a long slab of Japanese cedar topping elegantly splayed carbon-fiber legs, is a custom design very similar to a table in his own apartment.

Art offers a link to the Omnia in particular and Switzerland in general. A large black-and-white photograph of the Alps, taken by the late Balthasar Burkhard, hangs in the living area. “We used a lot of his work at the hotel. That one was a gift from him when the project was complete,” Bilski says. Meanwhile, two striking wrought-iron sculptures came from the original Haller house.

As for the entry’s huge Keith Haring graffiti drawing, it was purchased in 1997 from a gallery in SoHo but immediately whisked off to Europe. Bilski couldn’t wait to bring the Haring home.

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modular Swiss house by Ali Tayar appeared first on Dezeen.