Category: visual

Zaha Hadid wins the UK’s prestigious Stirling Award for the second year running, for an academy that incorporates four different schools. One innovation in the tight space? “A 100-metre running track through the middle of the site, under a bridge between two school blocks.”

The Art Newspaper runs the numbers on the Getty’s grants for the massive, six-month-long celebration of visual arts in L.A.

Charles Garnier’s design – in response to a bombing that killed more than 150 people – defines understanding of the arts in 19th century Paris. But the building’s more than lovely: If you know the language of architecture, you can read the building like a book.

“What Pompeii presents is thus the ruin of a reconstruction of a ruin, an intellectual nonsense. The visitor sees 20th-century concrete and steel rusting and collapsing. A re-erected column in the House of the Faun looks fit to fall again and is propped by scaffolding. Replicas abound. Ugly temporary roofs are jammed on top of courtyards, stripping them of ancient atmosphere or modern purpose. Only the streets seem fit for purpose.”

“Aboriginal art promoters and enthusiasts, Australian and foreign, have tried repeatedly in the past two decades to overcome the indifference of the fickle, shifting contemporary culture establishment and stage breakthrough shows that would put the indigenous tradition on the map: regularly, a landmark exhibition is held, word spreads, then ebbs away, and all the optimism dies.”

“The tower had to be an exception to everything – from afar and up close. The new design would stand alone in the skyline, meaning it needed a dramatic profile. But in the square, it had to honor Trinity Church.”

“It’s a direct result of schools anticipating a likely curriculum change away from creative arts courses. You can’t ask kids to pay to travel to London museums on their own. I also think it’s about teaching morale. It’s just another consequence of government policy.”

Christopher Hawthorne offers his top five choices.

“On June 18, Bulgaria’s capital awoke to find the statues in a monument to the Soviet armed forces brightly spray-painted as Superman, Ronald McDonald, Santa Claus, Captain America and The Joker. The characters, according to graffiti the pranksters left at the base of the monument, were now ‘in step with the times’.”