Category: visual

The Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, the largest business school in Europe, has selected Hadid to design a 430,000-square-foot Library and Learning Center. “The [building’s] two volumes [will] appear freestanding, but actually form a canted, six-story polygonal structure.”

“A luxury residential sky-scraper designed by acclaimed Anglo-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid in the heart of Warsaw has been put on ice due to the global financial crisis,” according to a report in the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza. The 250-meter, 600-apartment, €400 million tower, shaped like a scalloped fleur-de-lys, had been expected to open in 2012.

“Just in time for spring kitchen remodeling projects, the Pritzker Award-winning architect has designed a curvaceous faucet for the British company Triflow Concepts.” The next question: “Why stop here? Can the Zaha Hadid refrigerator line be far behind?”

“The way four-legged animals walk has been well known since the 1880s, when Eadweard Muybridge’s motion-capture photographs revealed the sequence of leg movements.” Many artists, evidently, have not been taking note. “After analyzing more than 300 depictions of walking animals in museums, veterinary books and toy models, the researchers report that in almost half of them the leg positions are wrong.”

“The newly installed secretary of the Smithsonian Institution announced yesterday that he has implemented a hiring freeze and eliminated salary increases and bonuses for one class of its highest-paid employees. G. Wayne Clough has also asked several departments to reduce their current-year budgets by 5 percent to 8 percent.” The Smithsonian’s endowment dropped 25 percent last year.

Doomsayers won’t find an ally in Michael Conforti, president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, who argues “that this financially perilous period is ‘a great time for art museums.’ They are, he said, ‘bellwethers for people at moments like this. We saw this happen after 9/11. If we are doing our jobs well, we’re the places that people can turn to in times of instability.'”

“A new X Factor style television talent show will attempt to discover the next British art sensation. The BBC Two show, presented by advertising boss and art collector Charles Saatchi, is open to all aspiring artists. Finalists will be tutored by leading contemporary artists before exhibiting their work in St Petersburg, Russia.”

“A tapestry of Picasso’s Guernica, which was at the centre of a row just before the invasion of Iraq, is to go on display at the Whitechapel Art Gallery on 5 April. It currently hangs at United Nations headquarters in New York, just outside the Security Council chamber.”

“As if art dealers weren’t upset enough about falling prices, now there’s short-selling of galleries. Last fall, the How’s My Dealing? blog (which rates gallerists’ treatment of their artists according to anonymous informants) began a gallery ‘DeathWatch’ thread–and dealers are on edge over its retailing of unsubstantiated rumors.”

Does it matter that the brisk-selling work in a Melbourne gallery was created by a 22-month-old child?