Category: visual

“Lubetkin wanted buildings to empower people. ‘Architecture can be a potent weapon,’ he wrote, ‘a committed driving force on the side of enlightenment, aiming however indirectly at the transformation of our present make-believe society, where images outstrip reality and rewards outpace achievement.'”

“The museum returns with a new plan — with some old goals still intact. The Frick family rooms previously off-limits to visitors will be opened to the public for the first time. There will be a renovation of underground space and a revised layout for visitor circulation, to create seamless movement from the museum to its reference library.”

“‘The American story is profoundly African-American,’ said Paul Gardullo, a curator. ‘You don’t get America without African America; you don’t get our struggle for equality. And you don’t get jazz. You don’t get rock ’n’ roll.'”

“Six months after artist Ryan Mendoza’s team finished stripping the facade off a two-story house near Eight Mile and Livernois — and assured neighbors the rest of it would be demolished immediately — the naked shell of the home still stands in the middle of a healthy block. It’s a nightmare of urban decay, rubble, debris, exposed beams, falling plaster and broken promises.”

“Checked wallpaper decorated with a Matisse poster and a miniature portrait of the Virgin Mary. A black leather sofa. A single bed with electric-blue sheets. … At first, the underground workers who stumbled upon this scene in a disused U-Bahn tunnel in Berlin’s Reinickendorf district in mid-January assumed they had encountered an abandoned film set.”

While the Frick abandoned its earlier renovation plan, designed by Davis Brody Bond — which called for a six-story addition that eliminated the gated garden on East 70th Street — its space constraints have remained the same, if not “become more pressing.”

“The public square has always been synonymous with a society that acknowledges public life and a life in public, which is to say a society distinguishing the individual from the state. There were, strictly speaking, no public squares in ancient Egypt or India or Mesopotamia. There were courts outside temples and royal houses, and some wide processional streets.”

The drawings that biologist Ernst Haeckel made while aboard the HMS Challenger‘s round-the-world voyage in the 1870s had a surprisingly wide influence. (They’re also very cool.)

“Rewind to a few centuries ago and finding that one specific color might have meant trekking to a single mineral deposit in remote Afghanistan—as was the case with lapis lazuli, a rock prized for its brilliant blue hue, which made it more valuable than gold in medieval times.”

“Scientists further confirmed that the laws of nature, such as the force of gravity and the speed of light, are symmetrical in the sense that they apply equally throughout the Universe. These discoveries found widespread application, even inspiring some artists to create iconic expressions of nature’s symmetry in their art.”