Category: visual

“Italian police have taken possession of a newly discovered ancient Greek temple in southern Italy after uncovering a developer’s plot to build over the 2,000-year-old ruins.”

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is getting a $31 million facelift. “Viewed from ground level, it’s hard to appreciate the building’s brilliantly colored and sometimes riotous level of detail – lion’s faces lining the roof perimeter every few feet, for instance. It’s equally difficult to see the decay, but a close look reveals lots to do.”

“Madarat, the last active gallery in Baghdad, just up a side road next to the Turkish Embassy in the Waziriya district near the city center. Imagine the risks involved for patrons attending an opening–how to get there safely, and then how long to stay en bloc as a provocative target, even how much precious gas to use up for art’s sake.”

“True, not every project can claim an extravagant budget or a big-name architect,” John King writes. “But there’s no reason new buildings in suburban downtowns or big-city neighborhoods can’t be modest triumphs of quality and care. The problem is when developers have formulas, communities have demands, architects have rent to pay and the actual building becomes an afterthought. So consider today’s column a manifesto of sorts….”

Felice Frankel, “first an artist in residence and now a research scientist at M.I.T., and now also a senior research fellow at the Institute for Innovative Computing at Harvard, … helps researchers use cameras, microscopes and other tools to display the beauty of science. With her help, scientists have turned dull images of things like yeast in a dish or the surface of a CD into photographs so striking that they appear often on covers of scientific journals and magazines.”

“The Reggia di Venaria Reale outside Turin is said to have provided Louis XIV with the inspiration for his palace at Versailles. But, by the end of the 1990s, the 80 hectares (200 acres) of land surrounding it had become little more than a wasteland. But yesterday, the reconstructed gardens were reopened to the public – the latest step in what the head of the regional government, Mercedes Bresso, has called ‘the biggest restoration project under way in Europe’.”

“Throughout the country, old buildings are making way for residential towers, office blocks and motorways. Developers have torn down tens of thousands of traditional courtyard homes in Beijing, countless colonial-era neighbourhoods in Shanghai and swaths of other historical cities. In their place are wide streets, concrete squares and huge right-angled buildings — often with the same small white tiles and blue-tinted windows.”

Liechtenstein is Europe’s smallest country. But it is buying art with a vengeance – “more for its national collection than any other European museum. Liechtenstein’s population is 34,000, the lowest in Europe (along with Monaco and San Marino). Its ‘national’ museum is not based in the Alpine mini-state, but in neighbouring Austria, housed in a Baroque palace in Vienna.”

“Seventy-two countries are competing for the top prize – the Golden Lion. For the first time there are separate pavilions devoted to African and Roma, or Gypsy, art.”

might have created a masterpiece. Philip Johnson did. “Its design is simple: an open plan interrupted only by a circular brick bathroom, a kitchen concealed under a sleek walnut folding bar, and ventilation provided by floor-to-ceiling doors on all sides that can be opened to the four winds.”