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Norway’s new Kunstsilo Museum has opened to the public in the southern port city of Kristiansand. The new home for the private collection of Nicolai Tangen is the product of a six-year transformation authored by Spanish studios Mestres Wåge Arquitectes, Mendoza Partida, and BAX in a... View full entry
Before the internet and social media, architecture projects and the work of architects were viewed and documented differently. Similar to other professions like the culinary arts and fashion, the public's understanding and exposure to these industries has changed as new technologies have... View full entry
With full theatrical trappings—nu-age Philip Glass music, smoke machines, mood lighting--the Eisenman team unveiled to the crowd a scale model of the building, which produced a light show to rival a Laser Floyd spectacular.
These dozen red-hued Death Star beams [...] were to be placed on the building and neighboring structures, flashing, blinking, sweeping across downtown like some insane city-scale laser security system.
Three years later, it was opened.
Sans lasers.
— Docomomo US
Nathan Eddy, architecture documentary director and most recently a driving force to save Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s AT&T Building in New York, pens a delightful review of Peter Eisenman's 1990 competition-winning proposal for the Greater Columbus Convention Center in Columbus... View full entry
Almost 20 years since Frank Gehry’s $100m titanium-clad Guggenheim Bilbao opened, another city on Spain’s north coast is getting a major contemporary art centre designed by an internationally acclaimed “starchitect”. — The Art Newspaper
Renzo Piano's first big commission in Spain, The Centro Botín, is opening today. The architect claims that its comparisons with the museum that became a model for culture-driven regeneration schemes worldwide are too simplistic. According the president of the Fundación Botín’s visual arts... View full entry
Earlier this year, news broke that the Finnish government had vetoed plans for the Guggenheim Helsinki Museum, a controversial satellite of the famed New York institution. Now, a new proposal has been prepared by the City government and the museum’s support foundation, which will be presented to... View full entry
For all of the dubious attention attracted by the “Bilbao Effect” theory [...] a more prosaic, and arguably more important aspect of museum location has received little attention: not which city a museum is built in, but where in that city. Locations that would once have seemed inevitable, such as Chicago parkland, are hugely contentious in the 2000s, while locations previously unthinkable in that year – an abandoned lumbermill in Bilbao [...] – are now commonplace. — theguardian.com
Related stories in the Archinect news:Embattled Lucas Museum may move to S.F.'s Treasure IslandLawsuit against Lucas Museum holds off (for now)‘Museum directors hated Bilbao’ View full entry
But still strong is the seduction of the Bilbao Effect — when an architecturally exciting project makes an institution more of a destination, like Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Spain. And with the success of the new Whitney Museum of American Art, which is drawing droves downtown, everyone seems to be grabbing for hammers — NYT
Robin Pogrebin explores how with more than a dozen New York cultural institutions planning major projects, fundraisers are hoping to tap into the deepest pockets. Strategies include selling naming rights, targeting heavyweights donors, remembering certain 'Dos and Don’ts' and expanding boards... View full entry
Today's Editor's Picks is a special themed "place based" edition - highlighting content (old/newish) from the archives/site - about Denver and Colorado. Partly as an apology for the brief/unexpected lull in the Picks. Also, inspired by my own recent relocation to The Mile High City. Just one part of an ongoing attempt to learn about my new home.
While MArch students at the University of Colorado, Denver, Patrick Beseda and Lacy Williams realized a design/build project for a micro-dwelling. FOUNDhouse inspired by the WikiHouse project, was an exploration of digital fabrication, the possibilities of DIY and the democratization of... View full entry
...What [Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao] showed, [is that] if you picked a remote part of the world and put a world-class museum in it, the world would beat a path to your door. That's the so-called "Bilbao Effect," but you'll notice that doesn't mention art; it mentions tourism, travel and finance.
I feel we're in a strange time where we're building furious Potemkin villages of seeming life, behind which, if you looked with the right eyes, you would see cobwebs and skeletons.
— NPR
NPR has curated a list of noteworthy-quotes from Michael Lewis, an art history professor at Williams College, who's interviewed in the recent issue of Commentary Magazine.Never before has art sold better or museums drawn larger crowds. Yet, according to Lewis at least, most Americans have become... View full entry
“The library is a tool to attract people to the village,” said Mr. Li, a professor of architecture at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
When visitors come to see the library, he said, they also spend money at the village’s few restaurants, pay parking fees and donate money for the building’s upkeep.
“The place is special,” said Li Wenli, 45, an insurance saleswoman from Beijing [...].
— nytimes.com
Call it a rural Bilbao Effect or not, we're still quite excited that Archinect was one of the very first outlets to publish Li Xiaodong's stunning Liyuan Library building: First spotted on the popular China Builds blog and then, in a little more detail, as a ShowCase installment in the Features... View full entry
The Museo Universidad de Navarra, a brand new gallery designed by the renowned Rafael Moneo, may lead to a stampede of art lovers every bit as important to Pamplona as the running of the bulls [...]
The architect is Rafael Moneo, a Pritzker prizewinner and native of Navarre province. [...]
If the architecture of the new gallery is not as eye-catching as Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim, the collection is more impressive [...].
— theguardian.com
At 85, the architect Frank Gehry has neither stopped building nor started repeating himself and this month offers plenty of proof. Besides the unveiling of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, which he designed for the billionaire Bernard Arnault, the explosively coloured Biomuseo in Panama opened on 2 October followed by a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, which opened on Wednesday, 8 October (until 26 January 2015). Gehry dispels some common misconceptions about his museum designs. — theartnewspaper.com
Related: Gehry-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton to open this October View full entry
The tallest residential block in Germany is to rise up next to Berlin's needle-like TV tower by 2017. Designed by the US architect Frank Gehry and paid for by US real estate firm Hines, the 150-metre (492ft) building on Alexanderplatz will have 39 floors, with about 300 apartments, restaurants, a hotel and a spa. [...]
Nonetheless, the city senate's building director, Regula Lüscher, welcomed the plans for "an extremely striking new landmark".
— theguardian.com
I foresee that major urban spaces of Pyongyang, such as Kim Il Sung Square, will be used as “public” space with a greater variety of urban activities, such as commercial activities and show events. [...]
The last thing that may happen in North Korea, or the thing that should not happen in some sense, is the Chinese model. Considering the scale of the economy and the potential of the North Korean market compared to China, it is hard to picture radical and massive urban development in Pyongyang.
— NK News
Part two of NK News' interview with Dongwoo Yim pushes the discussion of North Korean urbanism into the future, comparing potential development methods to those seen in China and South Korea. Focusing on capital Pyongyang, Yim proposes a "Bilbao effect" development strategy that is heavy on... View full entry
Far from being anchored in the local context, the project (the disastrous City of Culture of Galicia outside Santiago de Compostela, designed by Peter Eisenman) has decapitated Monte de Gaias and replaced it with a phony landscape with curves like those of a fun-fair roller coaster. These cynical intellectual manipulations cannot mask the reality of structures resembling supermarkets twisted about with algorithms and camouflaged with a thin veneer of granite (imported from Brasil!). — Uncube
In a short sweet and illustrated article writer historian William J.R. Curtis puts several Bilbao effect projects in the trash can. It might as well be called "f..k content." View full entry