Archinect - News

It's official, the Hirshhorn Museum has burst the bubble

2013-06-05T15:03:00-04:00

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden on Wednesday finally abandoned its long-planned project to cover the museum’s interior courtyard in Washington D.C. with a distinctive, temporary inflatable bubble. Citing financial uncertainties, Richard Kurin, the Smithsonian Institution’s under secretary for history, art and culture, made the announcement. He said outgoing director Richard Koshalek, who resigned last month after failing to receive full support for the bubble...

Peter Zumthor's $450,000,000 'Black Flower' for LACMA

2013-06-03T14:10:00-04:00

"Bracingly forward-looking, Zumthor's design for LACMA would give the city a much-needed jolt of architectural energy."

Zumthor's design, which obliterates the original campus of LACMA, would cost an estimated $450M to construct, with another $200M in soft and operating costs built in.

A few questions abound: is this really any different (in overall approach) than OMA's ill-fated masterplan from roughly 10 years ago? Will this truly solve LACMA's core collections questions? And would the money raised be much better allocated towards improving those, the existing facilities and creating a long term operations fund to help stabilize the institution?

China Builds Museums, But Filling Them Is Another Story

2013-05-23T17:12:00-04:00

Jeffrey Johnson, an architect who runs the China Megacities Lab at Columbia, is among a number of scholars who study China's rapid urbanization. He says local governments are building museums to create a cultural life and competitive identity for their cities. But China lost a lot of art because of its civil war in the 1940s, as well as the Cultural Revolution, looting and overseas sales. Johnson says many museums are going up faster than curators can fill them with works and audiences.

Kimbell Art Museum announces the Renzo Piano-designed pavilion will open on Nov. 27

2013-05-03T14:11:00-04:00

The highly anticipated expansion to the Kimbell Art Museum, designed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) and Kendall/Heaton Associates, opens to the public on Wednesday, November 27, 2013. Renzo Piano’s colonnaded pavilion stands as an expression of simplicity—glass, concrete and wood—surrounded by elms and red oaks, some 65 yards to the west of Louis I. Kahn’s vaulted, luminous museum of 1972.

Similar in scale to the Kahn building, the 300-foot-long, 22-foot-high building is composed of two parallel wings stretching from north to south, connected by two glass passageways. To the rear, the west wing will have a green sod roof, which appears to rise out of the ground with berms on either end and concrete retaining walls on the sides. The front, east wing is topped by a glass, steel and wood roof system. The wafer-thin top layer of this system, which features louvered photovoltaic cells, hovers above the east wing's most prominent feature: enormous laminated wood beams that appear to float above the concrete and glass walls and which are held aloft by square concrete columns.

The plan and elevation of the east wing, which faces the Kahn building, is tripartite, which mirrors the tripartite plan and elevation of the Kahn building. This is the most overt of the Piano building’s numerous echoes of its esteemed predecessor. The facade’s central, 100-foot-long recessed glas...

UC Davis selects SO – IL to design art museum

2013-05-01T18:30:00-04:00

UC Davis today announced that it has selected an emerging New York-based design firm, SO – IL, to design the campus’s planned art museum, envisioned as a regional center of experimentation, participation and learning. The firm will work with team members Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, a prominent architectural firm with offices in San Francisco, Seattle and Pennsylvania, and contractor Whiting-Turner, a national construction firm...

The new museum advances the way museums and architecture are approached in the 21st century.

Designed by SO - IL in partnership with Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, and built by Whiting-Turner, the design incorporates a 50,000 square foot steel structure that floats atop a series of interconnected interior and exterior spaces. The gallery space will be 29,000 square feet.

In describing the building, the architects state:

Davis is an ideal setting for a museum that will sow new ways of thinking about the experience of art. The Central Valley breathes a spirit of optimism. Whether one is influenced by the sweeping views over the flat plains beyond to the horizon, or the sense of empowerment one feels when being able to cultivate and grow freely—the spirit of this place is of invention and imagination. It is precisely this spirit we capture in our architectural proposal for the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art.

As an overarching move, the design proposes a 50,000 s...

LACMA taps Zumthor for $650-million new look

2013-05-01T14:08:00-04:00

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, an acclaimed Swiss architect is hoping to pull off what an acclaimed Dutch one could not. Next month LACMA will publicly unveil a $650-million plan by Pritzker Prize winner Peter Zumthor for a dramatic new museum building along Wilshire Boulevard.

Henning Larsen Architects Completes Umeå Art Museum

2012-12-17T18:21:00-05:00

Henning Larsen Architects has sent us photos and drawings of their recently finished Umeå Art Museum, a part of Umeå University Campus in northern Sweden.

All photos by Åke E:son Lindman.

Sifang Art Museum gets a web presence

2011-07-19T17:20:38-04:00

Steven Holl's Sifang Art Museum will be opening in Nanjing, China, in November of this year. In the mean time they have launched a pretty site with some nice alternating photographs of the building. Check it out.