Scientists plan to dig up as many as 50 members of the Medici family to study the bodies for clues to how they lived and died. “Starting from June, corpses will be removed from the monumental tombs in the Medici Chapels at Michelangelo’s church of San Lorenzo in Florence, allowing scientists to reconstruct the dynasty’s genetic make-up and their real family tree.”
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A Canadian City Courts Gehry
It’s been a mating dance of four years between the Art Gallery of Ontarion (which has a new $300 million collection it wants to display) and architect Frank Gehry. Finally plans for the museum’s expansion are about to be revealed. “What took so long? Well, it was a complicated courtship involving negotiating strategies on both sides. There was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. There were endless brilliant ideas that were eventually discarded. There were plane trips, and there were bonding experiences, including hockey games. There were problems that sometimes seemed insurmountable, and for a while, a division of opinion within the AGO board. And always, there were money issues.”
The Man Who Chooses Architects
“Reed Kroloff is one of a small coterie of competition advisers who organize and administer the bake-offs so often used to determine which architecture firms will design which coveted projects. These advisers are both catalysts for — and beneficiaries of — an upsurge in interest in how architects are chosen. Competitions that only five years ago would have been local affairs now draw thousands of entries from around the world, partly because the Internet makes the rules available to any architect with a computer and modem.”
A Revised WTC Memorial Plan
“Michael Arad, the designer who proposed the winning memorial with reflecting pools in the tower footprints, has been refining drawings for a final design expected to be unveiled on Wednesday. He is working with Peter Walker, a landscape architect who joined him during the jury selection process. ‘It is impossible to please everyone. Everybody can’t weigh in on this.’ But since the designs were announced last month and Arad’s was chosen last Tuesday, it seems that nearly everyone has.”
A Showpiece Stadium
Architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have broken ground on their biggest project yet. “On Christmas Eve, construction began on its biggest project yet: the Olympic Stadium, which will form the centrepiece of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. The 100,000 capacity arena promises to be the most remarkable stadium since Gunter Behnisch’s 1972 Olympic Stadium in Munich. It looks like a giant bird’s nest, with a mass of structural members intertwined to form its huge basket.”
Albee – Overcoming The Past And What A Past)
Edward Albee has “written 28 plays over 44 years, but as he wrote in the programme notes for the Almeida’s 1996 revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, that play, premiered on Broadway in 1962, has “hung about my neck like a shining medal of some sort – really nice but a trifle onerous”. Among American playwrights he ranks alongside Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, and like them he has suffered critical rejection.”
Record Concert Sales In UK In 2003
According to new figures, in 2003, “UK music lovers spent more on going to concerts last year than at any time since records began 90 years ago as the rock revival helped to fuel a new hunger for live gigs.”
The Art Of Bilingual Writing
“The tradition of literati who live and work in more than one language dates back to antiquity, but today we tend to think of 20th-century examples as most prominent: Joseph Conrad emigrating from Polish to English, Samuel Beckett morphing from English to French, Vladimir Nabokov ardently abandoning Russian for “Ada” (and “Lolita”) in English. More recently, Russian-born Andrei Makine, winner of many laurels for his fiction in French, and Ha Jin, the Chinese-born author who won the National Book Award for “Waiting”…
Piano – MIA In Orange County
Orange County, California has a rich musical life – orchestras, chamber music, recitals. But there’s one big thing missing – the piano. Why, wonders Tim Mangan, is there no ongoing series committed to the piano?
Edinburgh – City Of Change
Edinburgh’s skyline is changing. “The pendulum having swung from destruction to timidity, there is now the fervent hope that it might have settled in a happy middle position where we value the past, and look to continue it into an optimistic future.”