Archinect - News

L.A.'s Petersen Museum receives 2017 American Architecture Award

2017-04-13T16:58:00-04:00

Despite receiving a substantial drubbing from architectural critics, the Petersen Museum has managed to garner a 2017 American Architecture Award from the Chicago Athanaeum Museum of Architecture and Design (among 78 other finalists).

The award, which has been given out since 1994, recognized the new design of the museum for transforming "the Petersen building into one of the most significant and unforgettable structures in Los Angeles." The award panel went on to note that:

Unlike most museum renovations, which involve complete building teardown, this is a repositioning project. To use the metaphor of a car, if the existing building is a car’s chassis, the design is the body. The bones of the structure remain, and the existing concrete portico on Wilshire is removed. The rooftop becomes converted into a party space which can be rented out. A corrugated aluminum rain screen outboard wraps around the building on each of the three street frontages, giving the museum an entirely new l...

Christopher Gray, wry architecture author/researcher, dies at age 66

2017-03-14T12:48:00-04:00

Rooting himself less in a strictly academic tradition and more in an observed, on-the-street context, architecture author and researcher Christopher Gray catalogued what he considered to be beautiful and surprising for The New York Times from 1987 to 2014 in his "Streetscapes" column. He also started a kind of architectural detective business known as the Office for Metropolitan History in 1975, which would research the history, deeds, old photographs and any other paperwork connected with a particular building in the days before the instant compendium of the internet. His work was often used to add depth and context to the work of other architects/critics including Robert A.M. Stern, who The New York Times quoted as saying about Gray that he "was generous with his time and always willing to share what seemed like his almost infinite knowledge of the city’s architectural and social history.” Gray, who died Friday at age 66 from complications due to pneumonia, leaves behind over 1,40...

Archinect's critical round-up of LACMA's Frank Gehry exhibition

2015-09-24T15:04:00-04:00

While the LACMA's retrospective of Frank Gehry is based off a previous show organized last year at the Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, its Los Angeles locale (plus an additional gallery not present at the Paris show) provides a different context. Some critics took a fawning approach to the show; others looked at the work in the context of Gehry's recent undertaking of the redevelopment of the Los Angeles River, and his history in Los Angeles generally.

KCRW's resident art critic Edward Goldman said that "LACMA, with its unique history of collaboration with Frank Gehry as a designer for a number of the museum's high profile exhibitions, was able not only to deliver a thoroughly researched lecture, but also succeeded to bring us, visitors, inside his studio and even inside his mind." Goldman, who marveled at how lovely it would be to travel to Minneapolis to see the Frederick R. Weisman Museum, gushed that "it's simply amazing how prolific and unstoppable Gehry has been ...