Category: visual

“Along with the museum’s ambitious new Olympic Sculpture Park on the shore of Elliott Bay, the $86 million doubling of the downtown museum’s public and gallery spaces also bumps Seattle to a league that once seemed out of reach: It is now a national player, though a firmly regional one, too.”

Let’s say you run a nondescript, inner-city primary school in London. And let’s say that, among your student body, you count no fewer than twelve students whose parents are internationally renowned BritArt superstars. Suppose you might be able to rustle up a fundraiser slightly more productive than your average bake sale?

“A shepherd in a remote region of Nepal bordering Tibet has been instrumental in the discovery of an extraordinary art treasure that lay hidden for centuries: a collection of 55 exquisite cave paintings depicting the life of the Buddha.”

“It sounds, at first blush, like an oversize architectural joke — a skyscraper where each floor would revolve independently around a central core, not only making a 360-degree rotation but also creating a constantly shifting profile.” But architect David Fisher isn’t joking, and his vision for a spinning skyscraper is on the way to becoming reality in the wealthy Arab metropolis of Dubai. This week, Fisher has been attempting to sell Chicago officials on the idea of a similar structure in America’s Second City.

Paris is attempting to engineer “a much-needed jolt to the city’s aging urban core… Supporters laud the development, known as Paris Rive Gauche, as a futuristic alternative that could help revive the city’s economy and its struggling universities while creating much-needed housing. But some in this always-opinionated city denounce it as a stale corporate wasteland.”

“The Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History quietly has begun a $115-million fundraising campaign and five-year renovation project to update the oldest segment in its string of connected structures in Exposition Park. The renovations, already underway, include restoring the museum’s original 1913 rotunda, letting in a lot more light and girding it with modern earthquake protection. Existing exhibition spaces in the rotunda building and adjoining 1920s-vintage areas will be reconfigured to create six new galleries.”

“Certainly, more people will be able to see the Barnes collection in a new museum freed of the strict visitor limits (1,200 per week) that apply in Merion Station. But if they shuffle into the parkway building from a museum down the block — saving time for a trip through the nearby behemoth of the neighborhood, the Philadelphia Museum of Art — how meaningful is the experience likely to be?”

“Lie down with a bank, get up with pinstripes; but riffing off a bare-bones bank was not the only challenge. Venturi’s 1991 building is a faux art deco merger of a traditional Chinese palace and a McDonald’s drive-through, five stories of muted razzle-dazzle. Portland architect Cloepfil was charged with creating a plausible link between art and banking. What he came up with would be a handsome addition to any post-industrial urban core. It’s cleaner and more alluring than the bank but doesn’t attempt to compete with Venturi’s postmodern patchwork.”

“Venice is not a competition, and I think most artists couldn’t care less about the prizes, although it is, like everything else to do with the art world, a stew of competitiveness. And then there are those rare, brilliant moments that remind you what the point of it all actually is.”

The Blair government has invested in high-profile architecture. “I don’t doubt that many cities have enjoyed a renaissance. Much attention has been given to showpiece design and architecture but I do worry about the way that the architecture of the less well-off, of the everyday, of our sprawling new suburbs and car-bound rural housing estates is in a very sad, and unsustainable, state indeed.”