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Frick Collection will reopen in April 2025 after multiyear renovation

2024-10-31T19:28:00-04:00

The opening date for the restored Frick Collection museum in New York City has been set to April 2025. The multiyear Selldorf Architects project revitalizes existing spaces while adding new galleries to the program and opening up the historic Fifth Avenue mansion's second floor to visitors for the first time. A total of 27,000 square feet of new space was created by its construction. The original facades and other decorative elements were also restored while making significant upgrades that also improved its operable efficiency.

Image courtesy Selldorf Architects

Annabelle Selldorf in Vogue: 'I aim to do no more than what needs to be done, but no less either'

2024-08-05T15:24:00-04:00

Until I worked with Ian Wardropper at the Frick, I don’t think I made it clear to myself that I’m a practical person. I’m a visual person. I think about how things go together. I have very strong opinions about what is beautiful, but at some point I realized it’s about something bigger than that. Architecture is such a real profession, and we can imbue it with all kinds of theoretical thinking, but it’s pretty basic when you’re working in the public realm.

Annabelle Selldorf is working remotely from her summer home in Maine these days, she tells Vogue. Among the projects covered are her debated Sainsbury Wing redesign (“Many years down the road, this will be remembered as a Venturi, Scott Brown building and not as a Selldorf building [...].”) and the completed residential component of the One Domino Square redevelopment on the Williamsburg waterfront. The new Frick Collection expansion gets even more of the quotes, centering on the highlight 220-seat Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium before its anticipated debut towards the end of this year.

Over on Archinect Jobs, the firm is currently hiring for an open Fall 2024 Architectural Intern position in its New York office.

Selldorf Architects' first residential towers shine on the Brooklyn skyline

2024-06-28T11:40:00-04:00

Selldorf Architects recently debuted the studio's first two residential skyscrapers at the redeveloped One Domino Square site in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

With an allotment of 398 new rental units and 160 total condominiums, the project boasts more than 700,000 square feet of usable space united by a seven-story podium with 12,000 square feet of ground-level retail spaces and another 40,000 worth of amenities offerings spread throughout three upper-level floors that connect via an elliptical central staircase feature.

Image: William Jess Laird

Both the 39-story mixed-use condominium tower and its 55-story rental neighbor feature an iridescent porcelain tile-clad facade designed to change color throughout the day as they reflect and shift to meet the evolving sunlight.

Image: William Jess Laird

Two 6,500- and 5,000-square-foot terraces at levels six and eight provide further space for private entertainment and relaxation for tenants and their guests, with a heat...

Selldorf Architects, a leading female-founded/run NYC firm, is currently hiring

2023-03-08T11:57:00-05:00

Following last week’s look at an opening for an Assistant Professor of XR Technologies at Arizona State University, we are using this week’s edition of our Job Highlights series to explore open roles at Selldorf Architects.

Over on Archinect Jobs, the 70-person architectural design practice is currently advertising for two roles in their New York City office. For their Project Manager position, the firm seeks a “senior professional architect responsible for delivering projects on time and on budget while maintaining design excellence and maximizing profitability and efficiency.” Meanwhile, their Interior Designer role calls for an individual responsible for “sourcing, ordering, creating digital images, generating proposals, purchase orders, specifications, and invoices, ensuring client presentations are properly prepared and executed, and more.”

Why the role interests us

C...

Smithsonian American Art Museum selects Selldorf Architects to lead its much-needed revitalization

2023-02-07T17:32:00-05:00

The Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) has announced Selldorf Architects as the lead designer for an effort aimed at revitalizing its public spaces and permanent collections galleries for the first time since 2006.

The scope of the project entails the creation of a new dedicated space for time-based media art and other types of displays in line with the museum’s “new vision.” Selldorf’s design will “highlight the grandeur of the historical architecture” of the Greek Revival Old Patent Office Building while simultaneously creating the new spaces. A press release mentioned the firm’s engagement with the Smithsonian Institution on the project dating back to 2020.

“This reinstallation project will invite essential conversations around inclusion and diversity now central to both public discourse and the daily work of arts organizations,” SAAM's Director, Stephanie Stebich, said in a statement. “It will shed new light on American artists whose voices will be more prominent in convers...

Denise Scott Brown says she's not pleased with Selldorf Architects' Sainsbury Wing redesign

2022-11-28T15:19:00-05:00

A considerable row has sprung up concerning Selldorf Architects' controversial revamp of the National Gallery's Sainsbury Wing after one of its original co-designers, Denise Scott Brown, made comments over the weekend indicating a disagreement and lack of support for the currently under-review proposal.

"She’s making our building look like a circus clown," Scott Brown told The Guardian's James Tapper without elaborating on which specific elements the already widely-opposed plans she has an issue with. "There are elements of tragedy – circus clowns are made up to look happy, but they’re not. This is a circus clown wearing a tutu."

Selldorf had previously mentioned in an April New York Times preview of her MOCA San Diego makeover and in another Architects Journal update from August that she had spoken with Scott Brown about both projects. During our coverage of the Sainsbury Wing in October, Seldorf said, "she has been counseled by the wing's original co-architect Denise Scott Brown ...

Selldorf unveils revised Sainsbury Wing plan in response to critical backlash

2022-10-21T09:00:00-04:00

Selldorf Architects has released a revised plan for the controversial overhaul of the Sainsbury Wing at London’s National Gallery following a torrent of criticism that has grown online after their initial designs were unveiled this summer.

The Architects’ Journal is reporting on the revisions, which appear to have entailed the retention of certain ground floor elements in the lobby and changes to the originally proposed placement of existing structural columns, as well as to the materials used in the balustrade and lobby walls.

Image courtesy Selldorf Architects

"I don't think of these changes as a compromise. I see them as a welcome development," Annabelle Selldorf told AJ. "In the resubmitted plans, much more of the existing fabric will remain, creating a clearer dialogue with the original building. And yet the original goals remain intact."

Image courtesy Selldorf Architects

"I took from this reaction hat people truly care about the building. And when when you perceive that, you ha...

Rowan Moore issues a blow to the Selldorf-led Sainsbury Wing redevelopment

2022-06-23T09:00:00-04:00

The problem is that the proposed new work is something else altogether to Venturi and Scott Brown’s playfulness and personality. It has curving glass balustrades, white walls and oak-clad pillars, and expanses of plain paving outside. It is an architecture of near-emptiness, the default style of international art-world good taste.

Moore ran through the litany of changes Annabelle Selldorf is making in replacement of the current iteration’s “bum notes,” which the critic pinned on a rift between the original expansion's benefactors and what was then called Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates.

This is now the second Denise Scott Brown-designed museum that Selldorf has laid her (very capable) hands-on after the recently opened Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego revamp, which she said engendered a “greater clarity across the history of all the building types.” Moore, seizing on the difference in intrusion levels between the two similar projects, said “there could be more rapport between the current and the proposed and more cleverness and wit” before making a surprising turn to his own long-distant past.

Moore concluded, “by refusing to align themselves with any one architectural camp, trad...

Annabelle Selldorf goes inside her long-awaited Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego design

2022-04-29T12:06:00-04:00

“People always think we do sensitive historical renovations, but that’s not all we do,” “It matters a great deal because it’s new,” Ms. Selldorf said of the San Diego museum. “It’s my biggest new-built institution. And it stands on its own two feet.”

NYT writer Ted Loos went to San Diego for a visit to the just reopened Museum of Contemporary Art with the doyenne of the typology who talked about the renovation’s overarching mission to “greater clarity across the history of all the building types” and her personal desire to leave Irving Gill’s original 1916 structure “completely unencumbered.”

Image courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

Selldorf acknowledged the early preservation effort championed by Denise Scott Brown indicating that it was a major focus not to alter her 1996 design as much as possible, adding that it was her “only regret” that they didn’t meet before the project was inaugurated in 2015. She described the end result as “a space that is well-balanced, well-proportioned, calm, focused and not about gesture” and closed by mentioning its intention in the context of the development of the museum's audience.

“I thought about how I can bring people in, and make them feel like they are welcome there,” she said...

Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario announces major expansion project led by Selldorf Architects, Diamond Schmitt, and Two Row Architect

2022-04-28T14:35:00-04:00

Fresh on the heels of Selldorf Architects’ most recent museum upgrade, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) announced its selection of a team led by Annabelle Selldorf's firm to oversee its new AGO Global Contemporary expansion beginning in 2024.

Two Row Architects will join Diamond Schmitt on the project that will give the institution an extended footprint for the first time since its last Frank Gehry-designed expansion opened in the fall of 2008.

The museum has undergone a total of seven renovations since first opening in 1900, and is now looking to add about 50,000 square feet of new galleries that reportedly comes in the form of “flexible volumes suited to the varied media of contemporary art.”

The AGO’s director Stephan Jost also said “we want the work we show to reflect the city that we serve,” and that the expansion should be responsive to the institution’s new targets for audience development and community involvement. Plans are for a six-story tower to be constructed along the...

Selldorf unveils plans for a remade Shaker Museum campus in Upstate New York

2021-06-29T14:11:00-04:00

Plans for the new home of Upstate New York’s Shaker Museum have been unveiled this week, offering the public a glimpse at the multimillion-dollar makeover that has given new life to a restored former Hudson Valley hotel.

Selldorf Architects is responsible for the effort which will add some much-needed shelf space allowing the museum’s 18,000 objects and artifact collection to be properly displayed. The collection had not been on view in over a decade and will now be hosted by a new modern building and remade Victorian-era hotel on Austerlitz Street in the artistically significant village of Chatham.

Renderings of Shaker Museum, Designed by Selldorf Architects

The plan was announced in August and will now join the firm’s list of recent high-profile museum restorations that has included projects for the Frick and LUMA Arles collections. The museum’s offices and permanent collection will be relocated from nearby Old Chatham and will showcase great American design. The museum also owns ...

Michael Kimmelman explores New York City's iconic skyscrapers on virtual walks with Guy Nordenson and Annabelle Selldorf

2020-04-29T15:06:00-04:00

Over the years, architects have not been the only ones to inscribe New York’s skyline — the signature image of the last American century — across the urban ether. Among others, structural engineers, practical poets of often towering imagination and import, have also figured out how to scale those heights. Skyscrapers are team efforts, after all.

For his latest feature in a series of virtual strolls exploring iconic Manhattan skyscrapers with noteworthy building experts, NYT architecture critic Michael Kimmelman invited engineer Guy Nordenson to join him for a closer look at the midcentury, Eero Saarinen-designed Black Rock/CBS Building, the Postmodernist classic 550 Madison Avenue, formerly known as AT&T Building, and 432 Park Avenue by Rafael Viñoly.

If you missed last week's virtual walk around town, catch up with Kimmelman and architect Annabelle Selldorf inspecting Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson's Seagram Building, the MetLife Building (formerly Pan Am Building), 270 Park Avenue (originally known as Union Carbide building and currently being demolished by JPMorgan Chase), the Lever House, and 601 Lexington Avenue (once known as Citicorp Center) designed by Hugh Stubbins.

Looking for a curated selection of the best virt...

Annabelle Selldorf-designed Qianlong Garden Interpretation Center coming to Beijing's iconic Forbidden City in 2020

2019-01-29T17:42:00-05:00

The 250-year-old retirement digs of an 18th-century Chinese emperor are getting a face-lift. The World Monuments Fund announced Monday that the New York-based architect Annabelle Selldorf and her firm, Selldorf Architects, will design an interpretation center at the Qianlong Garden in the Forbidden City in Beijing.

According to the World Monuments Fund, "the interpretation center will be located in an existing, restored structure within the second courtyard of the Qianlong Garden."

Juanqinzhai theater room after conservation. Image courtesy World Monuments Fund.

"Selldorf and her NYC-based firm, Selldorf Architects, designed the center in three distinct halls surrounding an open pavilion, each of which will provide visitors with a unique perspective on the past and present of the remarkable complex."

Interpretation Center exterior before conservation. Image courtesy World Monuments Fund.

"The Garden was largely left dormant after PuYi, China’s last emperor, left the Forbidden City in 1924. Its buildings have never been opened to the public, and it is one of the most significant historical sites in the Forbidden City to remain unrestored since imperial times. In 2004, World Monuments Fund and the Palace Museum partnered on a comprehensive review of the entire Qianlong Garden site and developed a ...

Frick Collection expansion clears NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission hurdle

2018-06-27T14:03:00-04:00

In a major victory for the Frick Collection, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission on Tuesday approved the museum’s latest plan to expand and renovate its 1914 Gilded Age mansion — the institution’s fourth such attempt to gain more space for its exhibitions and public programs. [...] Some critics were disappointed by Tuesday’s vote. Theodore Grunewald, a preservationist, called it “a vote for blandness.”

The approved proposal represented a revised version of the Frick Collection expansion scheme, taking into consideration concerns brought forward by the Stop Irresponsible Frick Development preservationist group at an impassioned four-hour public hearing in May.

The expansion plans were designed by Selldorf Architects with Executive Architect Beyer Blinder Belle.

Renzo Piano to design new $50M art gallery for mega-dealer David Zwirner

2018-01-09T18:22:00-05:00

That, Mr. Zwirner said, is the site of what in the fall of 2020 will become the new heart of his New York operation: a five-story, $50 million gallery designed by Renzo Piano. [...] The precise design has yet to be determined — Mr. Piano is in the early stages of the process. But it is likely to have a similarly spare aesthetic to Mr. Zwirner’s current spaces, by Annabelle Selldorf.

In its article about art dealer David Zwirner's upcoming Renzo Piano-designed gallery and global headquarters, the NYT recounts a telephone interview with Piano about (early) design visions for the building: "You kill art by making just white boxes, so you need to integrate emotion in some way. You cannot be neutral, because otherwise you disappear."

David Zwirner's current portfolio of NYC galleries includes this 20th Street gallery in West Chelsea by Selldorf Architects. Photo: Jason Schmidt.

When completed in 2020, the building will be the Zwirner art empire's fifth gallery in New York and the seventh worldwide.

Annabelle Selldorf collaborates with Gagosian gallery on Francis Bacon exhibition

2015-11-04T18:05:00-05:00

Selldorf and the curators were forced to strategically navigate the strict installation stipulations attached to each piece — and still create a dynamic space for viewing. [...] “We wanted a very calm background,” Selldorf says. “It is the quality of the work that makes the show exciting, so rather than creating additional noise, we really focused on making spaces that were quiet and measured in such a way that the focus of attention was on the paintings.”

Give and Take: Michael Kimmelman and Annabelle Selldorf discuss architectural ethics in urban environments

2014-10-20T13:58:00-04:00

The power of architecture at work in the modern city was a theme that emerged from the start at last Thursday night’s Big Ideas, Bold Thinkers, Brilliant Dialogue series at Pratt Institute. This particular conversation featured New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman and Architect Annabelle Selldorf. Moderator Spencer Bailey of Surface magazine used the broad term of “power of architecture” as a catalyst that spawned a conversation on the social responsibility of architecture as we move into an ever‐growing, thickening urban environment.

Selldof’s recent Sunset Park Recycling Center Brooklyn got the discussion going. Selldorf began by explaining why she was so excited to take on an infrastructure project, noting the architectural demands of the site and program were very interesting problems to take on. But the thing that most fascinated her about the project was its capacity to give back to the city by providing an important logistical hub to New York City as well as co...