Category: visual

“For the last 45 years, Alexander has been a controversial figure on the architectural scene, both revered and reviled; yet in [a] period burdened by flocks of architectural theorists, I would guess that he is one of very few whose work will endure. If Alexander often irritates his critics, it is in part because he is so obviously gifted.”

“[T]he bold new arrival has been widely praised by the architectural community and sharply criticized by those who see it as a contextual affront to the neighborhood.” Count Ada Louise Huxtable among the unoffended. “To this native New Yorker who has watched the city evolve over decades and treasures its unrelenting diversity, Mr. Mayne has got it just right.”

“In the latest round of dismissals, which took place late last month, the Newseum eliminated 29 full-time positions, or 13 percent of personnel. It has now reduced its staff by 23 percent overall.” Meanwhile, “the Smithsonian Institution has received 158 responses to the voluntary buyout plan it announced in late September.”

“The dream of razing four of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s oldest buildings – or at least radically reconfiguring the dreary, closed-in quadrangle they occupy – is being resurrected.” Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, winner of this year’s Pritzker Prize, is working with museum leaders on “a long-range plan for getting rid of the problematic buildings and plaza, and replacing them with a more open and inviting structure.”

“The digital reconstruction is the result of painstaking analysis based on hundreds of high-definition photographs of the masterpiece. … Pixel by pixel, the researchers cloned da Vinci’s original pigments, [which had been localized in the hi-def photos,] using their virtual palette to restore areas where the color is irreparably lost.”

“An entire wing of the Victoria and Albert Museum has been requisitioned. A suite of ten galleries has been completely overhauled. More than £30 million has been spent.” The new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries transform “the V&A from an outmoded Victorian maze of glass cases into a modern museum of world-class calibre.”

Visitors to the “Terra Cotta Warriors” show at the National Geographic Museum spent “more time on the texts that line the galleries’ walls than on the statues displayed across their floors. It was often easier to get face time with a 2,000-year-old terra cotta warrior than an unjostled view of the text panel that explained him.” So why “were we so happy to be there?”

Millennia ago, the graves of Old Europe “held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold artifacts to be found anywhere in the world. The striking designs of their pottery speak of the refinement of the culture’s visual language.”

“It was good to see the demolition crews pulling down the building by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. … If Mies’ name were not associated with this unremarkable shed, would anyone have cared about it? No. Did the building, stripped of its famous name, have the merits to stand on its own? Again, no.”

Set up in 2004 by the Arts Council, Own Art enables people to take home a piece of contemporary art straight way but then pay for it in 10 monthly interest-free instalments, borrowing anything up to £2,000. So far the scheme has made over 14,500 loans to purchase art valued in excess of £11.6 million.