The 85,000-square-meter Dongdaemun Design Plaza & Park, expected to open in 2010 on the site of a former municipal stadium in north central Seoul, will “include a multi-purpose park, a design museum, a library, and other educational facilities. The impressive 30,000 square meter park will both give homage to and re-interpret traditional Korean gardening design with reflecting pools, lotus ponds, pebble beds and bamboo grooves.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Zaha, Queen Of The Nile: Hadid Wins Two Major Cairo Commissions
Cairo Expo City will include twin office towers (31 and 33 stories) and major conference and exhibition spaces under roofs designed to resemble wind-sculpted sand dunes. The Stone Towers office/hotel complex will have façades with “a vocabulary of alternating protrusions, recesses and voids” as well as a sunken landscaped plaza called the Delta.
The Ballets Russes Return To The Scene Of That Historic Riot
“On Friday night [at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées], in a culmination of years of diplomatic and artistic negotiation, the curtain will be lifted on four of the works that helped make the dance troupe’s name.” The program includes “two of the company’s best-known ballets, Scheherazade and Ravel’s Bolero, alongside two 1912 works which were largely forgotten about after Diaghilev’s death in 1929.”
Hollywood’s Top Prop Shop Closes Down
“[Harvey] Schwartz, the owner of 20th Century Props, plans to go out of business next month and auction the inventory. Battered by the surge in out-of-state movie production and the demise of scripted programming on network television, the once-thriving business – one of a handful of its type remaining – is failing.”
Betty Connors, 92, Who Built Berkeley’s Cal Performances
“From 1945 to 1979, Ms. Connors ran the university’s program for presenting music, dance and theatrical events on campus – the first salaried employee responsible for undertaking a job formerly done by a faculty member.” She brought the likes of Rostropovich, Birgit Nilsson, Dave Brubeck and Ravi Shankar to Berkeley, creating what has become one of the leading arts presenters in the U.S.
At The Center Of The City Opera Storm
“If nonprofit cultural organizations were run like corporations – in which chief executives are, at least in principle, held accountable for financial performance – the chairwoman of New York City Opera, Susan L. Baker, might well be out of a job.”
Women Of The Future
A look at the careers of the Futurists Natalia Goncharova and Sonia Delaunay, who helped change the trajectory of art and design in Europe.
Some Japanese Males Start Mellowing Out, Making The Rest Of The Country Nervous
“Ryoma Igarashi likes going for long drives through the mountains, taking photographs of Buddhist temples and exploring old neighborhoods. He’s just taken up gardening, growing radishes in a planter in his apartment.” This sort of 20-something male would be completely unremarkable in Seattle or Munich. But in Japan, these “soushoku danshi” (literally, “grass-eating boys”) are precipitating a national debate about masculinity.
Sonny Rollins, Maria Schneider Triple Winners At Jazz Awards
“Rollins, 78, collected awards for musician of the year and top tenor saxophonist on Tuesday night. Rollins’ Road Shows, Vol. 1, a collection of live concert recordings from 1980 to 2007, was chosen the historical recording/reissue of the year. … Schneider once again won the awards for composer, arranger and large ensemble of the year in voting among the 450 members of the Jazz Journalists Association.”
Atlanta’s Woodruff Arts Center Approves New 25-Year Master Plan
“The master plan calls for the Memorial Arts Building, which opened in 1968, to be dismantled or have its space reconfigured or renovated, and be replaced by four free-standing, but connected, buildings surrounding an expansive pedestrian plaza that would extend to the Peachtree sidewalk. Those structures are the new Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concert hall, the Alliance [Theatre] expansion, the Alliance auditorium and the current Symphony Hall, to be renovated and used for arts and education functions or rental.”