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Henning Larsen’s ‘forest canopy-like’ World of Volvo opens in Sweden

2024-04-16T11:52:00-04:00

The Henning Larsen-designed World of Volvo has opened in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Housed under an expressive timber canopy, the 237,000-square-foot building will serve as an experience center for the car brand Volvo, designed around “Scandinavian values of freedom of movement, access to nature, and openness and inclusion.”

Image credit: Rasmus Hjortshoj

The main timber structure is formed of glulam and cross-laminated timber, designed as three tree-trunk-like columns that fan out to carry the entire load of the roof while “enveloping visitors in a welcoming forest-like canopy.” The center’s round structure is intended to encourage visitors to create their own journeys through the building’s interior and exterior.

Image credit: Rasmus Hjortshoj

Inside, a series of spaces are contained to host cultural events, talks, and conferences, accommodating up to 1,100 people. Anchoring the structure is a 485,000-square-foot exhibition space...

EskewDumezRipple uses musical instruments and AI as inspiration for their Louisiana Music and Heritage Experience Museum design

2023-10-20T11:47:00-04:00

EskewDumezRipple has unveiled its design for the Louisiana Music and Heritage Experience Museum in New Orleans. The 120,000-square-foot project is intended as a “venue to showcase and highlight the contributions that the city of New Orleans has made to the music industry.”

Image credit: EskewDumezRipple

Located opposite the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, the museum seeks to consolidate a complete view of music from several smaller museums spread across the state and region. The concept design of the scheme is inspired by music and musical instruments, with an outer shell drawing inspiration from the hollowed body of a guitar.

Meanwhile, the outlines and silhouettes of various instruments including violins, guitars, and brass pieces, are conveyed through “sinuous and flowing lines” in specific elements and building details.

Image credit: EskewDumezRipple

AI tools such as Midjourney were used during the design...

PAU begins Rock & Roll Hall of Fame expansion in Cleveland

2023-09-13T14:00:00-04:00

PAU has shared details of its expansion project of the I.M. Pei-designed Rock & Roll Hall of Fame museum in Cleveland ahead of next month’s anticipated groundbreaking.

The initiative will add a triangular structure to Pei’s iconic original glass pyramid design, featuring a new entrance lobby, education center, offices, and a 6,000-square-foot multipurpose space that’s meant to increase its overall footprint by 33% while activating public space along a currently underutilized section of the city’s Lake Eerie waterfront.

Rendering courtesy of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU)

The total 50,000-square-foot design evokes the museum’s architectural lineage within the new addition, where solid shapes pronounced as asymmetries serve as the visual markers of the building’s various programmatic elements combined under a tilted angular roof and façade composed of steel and granite in further reference to the region’s industrial character.

Rendering courtesy of Practice for Architect...

Dorte Mandrup team unveils Nunavut Inuit Heritage Center with rock and turf-covered roof

2023-07-18T11:16:00-04:00

Dorte Mandrup has announced their team’s success in an international competition to design the Nunavut Inuit Heritage Center. Located in Iqaluit, Canada's territorial capital, the facility is set to be a cultural bridge promoting Inuit heritage and facilitating “healing and reconciliation between Inuit and non-Inuit communities.”

The winning team included Dorte Mandrup, Guy Architects, LEES+Associates, Adjeleian Allen Rubeli, EXP, Pageau Morel, Altus Group, and indigenous consultants Kirt Ejesiak and Alexander Flaherty.

Image credit: MIR

The design concept is a creative interpretation of community perspectives, traditional Inuit knowledge, and the healing potential of the planned facility. The design takes its cues from the regional topography and environmental phenomena such as kalutoqaniq – patterns formed in snowdrifts by the prevailing wind. Emulating these natural shapes, the building will carve into the rocky hillside, echoing the features of the natural landscape.

“The Nunavu...

A look inside Montreal’s award-winning Insectarium

2023-06-09T11:47:00-04:00

An architectural team composed of Kuehn Malvezzi, Pelletier de Fontenay, and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architects has been awarded the Grand Prix d’excellence en architecture from the Ordre des architectes du Québec for their Metamorphosis of the Montreal Insectarium.

Main façade and Pollinator. Photo credit: James Brittain — Kuehn Malvezzi / Pelletier de Fontenay / Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architectes in consortium

The project underwent a seven-year design and construction period before opening on April 13th, 2022. Featuring hundreds of insect species and detailed displays, the center also holds an immersive sensory labyrinth experience, a pollinator garden, creative workshops, and production areas.

Entrance Hall. Photo credit: James Brittain — Kuehn Malvezzi / Pelletier de Fontenay / Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architectes in consortium

The insectarium is part of ...

Construction underway in Poland on one of Europe’s largest museum complexes

2023-05-30T11:48:00-04:00

Construction is underway in Warsaw on a new complex for the Polish History Museum and Polish Army Museum, designed by the Warsaw-based architectural design studio WXCA.

Located at the Warsaw Citadel, on the site of former 19th-century fortifications, the museum and an associated park are intended to create “a place of culture, remembrance, and recreation.”

Polish History Museum. Image credit: WXCA

Three structures are to be built on the site: the headquarters of the Polish History Museum, and two buildings for the Polish Army Museum. When combined with the already-existing Museum of the 10th Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel and the Katyń Museum, the “park of museums” is expected to become one of the largest museum complexes in Europe.

Polish History Museum. Image credit: WXCA

For the Polish History Museum, WXCA imagined the scheme as a monolithic body expressed through a minimalist stone form. Within the s...

Several museum expansions and design research projects among National Endowment for the Humanities grant recipients

2023-04-25T13:34:00-04:00

The National Endowment for the Humanities has announced the awarding of $35.63 million in grants for 258 humanities projects across the United States. As with previous years, the 2023 edition of the grants includes funding for several architecture-related projects, including buildings and research.

Architectural projects to be funded include the William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum, which will undergo a schematic design process for an expansion and renovation to its Rockland, Maine center. Meanwhile, the Shelburne Museum in Vermont will use the funding to design and construct a new Perry Center for Native American Art on its campus.

The Shelburne Museum, Vermont. Image credit: Flickr user Tolka Rover licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission has received funding for preparatory architectural works for the renovation of a new Research & Learning Center at the Eckley Miners’ Village Museum in Weatherly, Pennsylvania, while the National Orn...

Colonial Williamsburg museums expanded with new entry pavilion

2020-08-05T16:57:00-04:00

Samuel Anderson Architects has completed a 65,000-square-foot addition to the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum and the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum (AARFAM) complex located at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia.

The updated art museum experience includes a new entrance for the complex that is situated across from the John Custis House and Garden. The addition is the first major expansion that the museums have received since they were joined under the same roof back in 2007. Previously, visitors entered the complex through a circuitous underground route running through the former Public Hospital of 1773.

Inside the building, a new lobby and supplemental orientation spaces connect the two existing museums while a new cafe and museum store offer visitor amenities that are "significantly enlarged and bathed in natural light through expansive, new windows overlooking the picturesque Bicentennial Park," the architects write.

The new wing brings a 25% increase in gallery ...

Its curves recall the vernacular found in southern Senegal's Casamance

2018-12-09T20:41:00-05:00

The idea of establishing the museum dates back more than 50 years, to Senegal's late poet-president, Léopold Sédar Senghor. Along with Martinican writer Aimé Césaire, Senghor was a creative force behind the philosophy of Négritude, which opposed the imposition of French culture on colonies in Africa and the Caribbean.

Senegal's new Musée des Civilisations noires opens this week in the capital, Dakar.

Anyone know who the architect is? Nothing I could find/Google Translate seems to indicate. Perhaps, some nameless bureaucratic office or Chinese ExtraStateCraft(er)?

New Museum taps Rem Koolhaas’ OMA to design next phase of Bowery expansion

2017-10-11T12:32:00-04:00

The New Museum Board of Trustees announced Wednesday that OMA’s Rem Koolhaas and Shoehei Shigematsu will design the museum’s new building at 231 Bowery as part of the institution’s expansion. The new structure, purchased by the contemporary art museum in 2008, will link the museum’s Sanaa-designed building and double their footprint on the Bowery, adding 50,000-square-feet of space. OMA’s first public project in New York City, 231 Bowery is expected to break ground in 2019.

First announced last May, the museum’s expansion makes way for more galleries, improved public circulation and flexible space for new programs. In a press release, a member of the museum’s board of trustees, Lisa Phillips, called OMA a “great choice.” She added, “Koolhaas has thought deeply about the identity and landscape of our city going back to his landmark book Delirious New York, published in 1978, a year after the Museum’s founding. Though he is one of the world’s finest architects with a deeply civic and ...

Peter Zumthor didn't like his own "conventional renderings" for LACMA (and will release new images)

2016-10-18T18:40:00-04:00

“They were conventional renderings, which I personally don't like so much," Peter Zumthor states in an interview with CLADnews, referring to the widely-criticized renderings of his proposed building for LACMA that were released in August. Relating that the renderings were created strictly for the purposes of an environmental review, Zumthor says his team is working on new images, made by photographing models (Zumthor is known to prefer models to digital renderings). “The models allow us to take pictures with natural daylight, the light of the sun, which makes a lot of difference,” he explains. “These will explain the building better.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Zumthor describes his plans in his typical spiritual language: “You’ll have this almost sacred, sublime kind of experience, but I would also like to accommodate the profane, the dirty, the normal, the everyday.” He also employs a forestial analogy to describe the placement of art in the proposed museum, which eschews traditio...

The (2016-2017) Amazing Expanding Arts Universe

2016-10-12T23:53:00-04:00

Between now and next fall, Mr. Holl’s office will dedicate five major arts projects in the United States. In the same period, dozens of new cultural commissions will open around the world, many by the biggest names in the architectural business, including David Adjaye, Herzog & de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas/OMA, Thomas Heatherwick, Fumihiko Maki, Mecanoo, and Robert A. M. Stern.

Despite earlier predictions and rumors to the contrary, Reed Kroloff reports on the Millions of Square Feet, Billions of Dollars: (from the new Tate Modern and Elbphilharmonie, to The National Kaohsiung Arts Center in Taiwan) of new cultural commissions.

"The museum in the machine": The Digital Museum of Digital Art, on view IRL in Brooklyn

2015-12-21T14:19:00-05:00

Imagine visiting a museum while playing a video game. DiMoDA is essentially that: the museum in the machine, the shell in the ghost. Whoever has played Super Mario 64 will be right at home. With “wings” that you visit through portals housed within the museum’s “walls,” DiMoDA is a gateway station to art. With that in mind, Salazar-Caro took an iconic approach to the design of DiMoDA, making it recognizable and striking amid what will be a mutable, shifting cosmos of wings...

"You can visit DiMoDA on your Mac or PC, or with the superior Oculus Rift experience that is available to visitors at TRANSFER. The gallery also has a 3D printed model of DiMoDA by Salazar-Caro on display, along with a non–Oculus Rift DiMoDA station. Somewhat ironically, it turns out that the best way to experience this virtual world is in a physical gallery, with credit going to TRANSFER for providing the best possible experience and introduction."

Imagining a museum without walls

2015-12-01T11:42:00-05:00

The new museum won’t be defined by architectural glamour or by a market-vetted collection, though it may have these. Structurally porous and perpetually in progress...where walls are dissolvable, access is open, and art is invited to tell us who we are as an arrogant, exclusionary but possibly teachable culture — is still awaited

15 years into the new millennium, Holland Cotter outlines the need for a new version, for the 21st century, museum. She begins by criticizing the Bilbao era, and the entities resulting from a "love of gigantism in architecture and art". Then goes on to outline the possibilities of a 21st-century institution, "Experimental — interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, self-critical, heterodox".

A site of memory for a fledgling nation

2015-11-16T11:29:00-05:00

But Bickels’s lasting legacy was more technical...For those who care about spaces — like Hultén, Piano and countless other international visitors over the decades — the combination of intimate, varied rooms and light sources make for a kind of ur-museum, not grand but perfectly executed.

James McAuley explains how Mishkan Le’Omanut (designed by Samuel Bickels) in Ein Harod, has inspired some of the 20th century’s most iconic buildings. Especially, with regards to the use of natural light within museum architecture.

Art museums are more popular than ever – but what about the art inside?

2015-08-17T18:14:00-04:00

...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 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 "indifferent" to art.

Lewis isn't the first to note that today's spectacular museums serve as a façade that hides a pitiful situation in contemporary art. The contemporary artist and pioneer of institutional critique, Andrea Fraser, made a video in 2001 that touched on exactly this issue.

Entitled, Little Frank and His Carp, the work (posted below; warning, vaguely NSFW) features Fraser as she tours the lobby of the newly-opened Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. As Fraser listens to the audio guide describe the architecture in gushing, ecstatic terms, the artist herself verges on a near-sexual experience.

In a 2005 interview, excerpted on UbuWeb, Fraser explains, "What struck me about the audio tour...