Category: visual

Haring had assumed that his South Philadelphia mural would disappear, and it hasn’t. For this 88½-foot mural, it was the opposite: “I made this painting to amuse the sick children in this hospital, now and in the future,” he wrote in his diary – but by 2011 it had deteriorated badly, and the hospital was going to demolish it as part of an expansion. Roslyn Sulcas recounts how the piece, called Tower, was rescued.

• the one we here thought was the least bad of the finalists. (We agree with the vast majority – 78% – of Building Design readers, who chose a different candidate.) But the judges’ votes for the UK’s worst building of the year went to a development near London’s Victoria Station; one judge describes it as “two large blocks sliced and diced to create to create a series of angular volumes drunkenly leaning on each other … [with] a headache-inducing moiré pattern when viewed from the side.”

“The Perez Art Museum Miami, The Wolfsonian—FIU, ICA Miami, Dimensions Variable, Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, and Faena Art all announced they would be closed on Wednesday and remain shut through the weekend.” Fortunately, several of these museums were specifically built to withstand extreme weather.

Haring painted We the Youth on the side of a South Philadelphia row house in 1987 after his first plan – to paint a city garbage truck – didn’t pan out. The mural faced a vacant lot, and both Haring and his sponsors always expected another house to be built on it eventually. Then, of course, Haring became famous, and the mural is still there.

“Located 50 miles south of Indianapolis, Columbus owns dozens of architectural masterworks by internationally renowned designers from the era. Eliel and Eero Saarinen, and more than a handful of Pritzker Prize Laureates, including I.M. Pei, Richard Meier, and Robert Venturi, began developing projects there with sudden regularity in the mid-1950s.” Why were all these heavyweight architects making buildings there? Because of the owner of this company town’s company.

“Neapolis is believed to have been submerged after a tsunami in the 4th century AD destroyed most of it, as recorded by Roman soldier and historian Ammien Marcellin. The natural disaster also badly damaged Alexandria in modern Egypt and the Greek island of Crete.”

“Audiences are changing, behavior is changing, scholarship is changing, and I think I’ve helped move the museum in the direction that it needs to be moved in to be successful in the future. It required making some fundamental decisions, and now I’ve played the part I can play there, and I’m looking forward to moving on and thinking about the cultural sector in a broader way.”

“The boisterous sculptures and strident upside-down paintings of the Neo-Expressionist Georg Baselitz are known the world over. But when more than $3 million worth of works from his personal collection, including some he had created, disappeared from a German storage depot, it took months before anyone noticed. Prosecutors have [now] arrested three suspects, all of whom worked in the shipping industry.”

“The opening festivities, from 11 to 15 November, will be marked by cultural events and visits from museum directors from around the world. The café and the children’s museum will also be opened, but it will still take months before all the site’s facilities, which include a scientific center, are fully functional. The first exhibition, entitled ‘From One Louvre To Another’ and curated by Jean-Luc Martinez, will open on 22 December and will deal with the history of the Louvre in Paris.”

The artworks were taken by British soldiers who were sacking the capital of the Kingdom of Benin; the art was then auctioned off to pay for the costs of the invasion in which they were taken, and most of the pieces ended up in museums in Berlin and London, where they gave European viewers their first glimpse of African art.