Archinect - News

Peter Zumthor details LACMA’s design inspiration in new interview

2024-10-08T11:02:00-04:00

This must do something to the city—like the Pan Am Building in New York—but somehow today the courage is lost. It must mean something to the city that there is a shape that is hard to understand crossing the road. The owner’s representative in charge of our project recently said to me, “Peter, I’ve now started to understand what this building is doing on all sides.”

LACMA recently pushed back the opening of Zumthor's David Geffen Galleries to 2026 as Christopher Knight quoted an unnamed museum source in the LA Times as saying the project's budget (which had been an initial hurdle to clear) is now in excess of $835 million.

"In about a year, one end will open," Zumthor said, speaking of a public viewing period that could begin once the temporary certificate of occupancy (TCO) is obtained next May. "Some curators were critical of the spatial concept of the layout of the museum. But now since they can go and see the space for the first time, they start to like it. And they see the beauty of the handmade concrete body of the building—so I am told."

Josef Albers's Manhattan mural could return to New York

2014-11-25T13:26:00-05:00

Josef Albers’s Manhattan, a mural that enlivened the lobby of New York’s Met Life (previously the Pan Am) Building from 1963 until its controversial removal in 2000, could make a triumphant return to the city. Possible sites include the World Trade Center Transit Hub, The Art Newspaper understands. Finding a suitable home for the work is not the only obstacle: the original mural is in a landfill site in Ohio.

Can J.F.K.’ s Pan Am Terminal, a U.F.O.-Like Monument to America’s Jet Age Innocence, Be Saved from the Wrecking Ball?

2013-07-09T17:01:00-04:00

If the design, by the firm of Tippets Abbott McCarthy and Stratton, wasn’t as sophisticated as Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal a few hundred yards away—surely one of the great buildings of its era, transportation hub or otherwise—the Pan Am terminal was the second-best piece of architecture at JFK, and in some ways it captured the feeling of the moment more directly.

Building High Anxiety

2013-04-01T00:13:00-04:00

“A $100 million building cannot really be called cheap,” Ada Louise Huxtable, the celebrated architecture critic for The New York Times, wrote in 1963. “But Pan Am is a colossal collection of minimums.”

Ginia Bellafante recently wrote an article marking this month's 50th anniversary of the completion of Park Avenue’s Pan Am Building, since renamed the MetLife Building. Although, initially the public/critical reception was primarily negative, today the building is one of the most recognizable skyscrapers in the City.