Category: visual

Ever since New York’s Dia Center for the Arts announced that it was abandoning plans to renovate a Greenwich Village industrial space into 45,000 square feet of exhibition space, observers have been wondering what the Dia’s long-term future is, if any. “We need Dia, and Dia needs to do something decisive soon, even if it’s only to open a temporary space.” Meanwhile, buzz is continuing to build for the arrival of the New Museum, which has a $50 million home under construction in the Bowery.

Lee Rosenbaum says that the war of words between the Getty Museum and the Italian government is evidence that “a cautiously cooperative relationship has degenerated into an adversarial one. It now appears that that the objects that the Getty had hoped to return in exchange for a far-reaching accord, including loans of Italian antiquities, may instead be used as courtroom evidence against the Getty’s former curator, Marion True, now on trial in Italy on charges of trafficking in illegally excavated antiquities.”

“Paris yesterday unveiled plans for a vast glass-enveloped office block that will become its tallest commercial building and loftiest construction since the Eiffel tower was inaugurated in 1889. The ‘Phare’ (Lighthouse) tower, designed by the Californian architect Thom Mayne, is a gently sloping eco-friendly glass construction complete with wind-turbines on its roof, that will be the centrepiece of an ambitious overhaul of La Défense on the western outskirts of the city.”

“Frank Lloyd Wright’s wood-block model for the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Paper neckties with flowery designs by Picasso. Mies van der Rohe’s ‘projects-general correspondence 1920’s 1930’s.’ MoMA’s first guestbook from 1929. A rich trove of background for all the legendary works in the Museum of Modern Art will become more accessible to the public with the opening today of MoMA’s new education and research building in Midtown Manhattan.”

“Gazprom City, a proposed complex of stylish modern buildings that evoke, among other things, a gas-fueled flame, a strand of DNA and a lady’s high-heeled shoe, would sit on a historic site on the Neva River” in St. Petersburg, “opposite the Baroque, blue-and-white Smolny Cathedral. In any of six designs under consideration, the main tower would soar three or four times higher than this city’s most famous landmarks, an alteration of the landscape that has drawn heated protests from the director of the Hermitage Museum and the head of the local architects’ union.”

“A month after the Dia Art Foundation scrapped its plans to open a museum at the entrance to the High Line, the abandoned elevated railway line that the city is transforming into a public park, the Whitney Museum of American Art has signed on to take its place and build a satellite institution of its own downtown. … Plans call for the new museum to be at least twice the size of the Whitney’s home on Madison Avenue at 75th Street,” museum officials said, “and to be finished within the next five years.” Renzo Piano, architect for the Whitney’s now-abandoned uptown addition project, will design the new museum.

“When the American architect Richard Meier was asked to design a church in Rome to commemorate the 2,000th anniversary of Christianity, he offered an imposing white concrete structure dominated by three soaring ‘sails.’ The project’s main technical sponsor got to work on a coating that would enhance Mr. Meier’s trademark white sculptural forms. It came up with a material that essentially cleans itself, minimizing the need for maintenance. What the sponsor, the Italcementi Group, did not know was that the new material — which contains titanium dioxide, a white pigment — has another peculiarity. It ‘eats’ surrounding smog.”

Denver’s Clyfford Still Museum has chosen the well-respected team of Brad Cloepfil and Allied Works Architecture to design its new home. Allied has plenty of experience designing museums, including recent projects in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Seattle.

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the stark contrast between East and West was starkly apparent, and reunification did nothing to immediately alleviate the unequal division of resources, especially when it came to the city’s museums. But years of renovation and refurbishment finally have East Berlin’s Museum Island beginning to glitter like the jewel it once was.

An important early sketch of Stonehenge has been discovered in a 15th-century manuscript in northern France. “The little sketch is a bird’s eye view of the stones, and shows the great trilithons, the biggest stones in the monument, each made of two pillars capped with a third stone lintel, which stand in a horseshoe in the centre of the circle. Only three are now standing, but the drawing… suggests that in the 15th century four of the original five survived.”