Category: visual

“Collapses at the site have alarmed conservationists, who warn that this ancient Roman city is dangerously exposed to the elements — and is poorly served by the red tape, the lack of strategic planning and the limited personnel of the site’s troubled management.”

“A bit more turmoil has come to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Earlier this week a former curator”- Lynn Orr, who worked there for 29 years – “sued the institution saying she was wrongfully fired because she was a union supporter and whistleblower.”

The petition to add her to her husband and partner Robert Venturi’s 1991 Pritzker Prize “has now drawn 9,000 signatures, many of them from the world’s most famous architects, including six prior Pritzker winners. And it has reignited long-simmering tensions in the architectural world over whether women have been consistently denied the standing they deserve.”

“A dozen years after Calatrava built the spectacular Ysios winery in the rainy Alava region of northern Spain, the building’s dramatic, undulating roof continues to let in the damp. Now Domecq, the owner of the winery, has said it is fed up with the botched attempts of Calatrava’s original builders at fixing the roof and wants [€2m] from them so that it can bring in fresh architects and engineers to design a new one.”

“The Panorama da Arte Brasileira will pit itself against the very museum that is hosting it: the exhibition will comprise architectural proposals for a new home for the Museu de Arte Moderna, the building in Ibirapuera park that has been home to Panorama since it began 44 years ago.”

“Is it good art? Is it worth a quid? I’ve no idea. If anyone could actually fathom the farce of economics, we’d all have a pound to buy some art with.”

“Rice fields gave way to roads, lined with ever more fantastical buildings. It is now the biggest, most densely populated and fastest-growing city in the Pearl River Delta, the world’s largest manufacturing megalopolis, home to 50 million people.”

“The Smithsonian will begin closing certain galleries on a rolling basis come May 1 because of across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration.”

Following up on its CCTV headquarters in Beijing, OMA (Rem Koolhaas’s firm) has designed a new stock exchange building for the city of Shenzhen. Nicknamed “the Miniskirt”, it’s a collage of two Mies van der Rohe buildings.

“Underneath the top painting of the folds of a man’s tunic, we saw an eye, a nose and then a mouth appear. We were seeing what likely was part of an ancient Roman fresco, thousands of years old.”