Archinect - News

Steven Holl and SKUPINA-designed Terezín Ghetto Museum advances

2024-02-02T15:16:00-05:00

Steven Holl Architects is advancing toward the start of their Terezín Ghetto Museum project in the Czech Republic. The firm was named the winner of an international competition to design an extension of the existing museum in 2022 and will deliver the project on the site, which was first constructed as a citadel in 1780. The Schematic Design phase was completed in March.

Commemorating the lives of an estimated 33,000 Jews that were lost under Nazi occupation in Terezín between 1939 and 1942, the Museum is an important tool in the culture sector’s response to antisemitism and will result in a “hopeful new presence” in a country whose social fabric is seen by some as being strained by hate groups and far-right extremists.

Image courtesy Steven Holl Architects

SKUPINA, the 21-year-old studio founded in Prague by Marcela Steinbachová, is included as the co-architect of the scheme. The pair had previously collaborated on a small renovation project for the interiors of the Franz Kafka Soci...

Elizabeth Diller is drawing personal lessons from her design for the Jewish Museum's Edmund de Waal exhibition

2021-10-18T16:40:00-04:00

The personal has never been a hallmark of Diller’s work in architecture and design. But working with de Waal’s emotionally charged travelogue, she said, had a transformational effect. “Seeing the world of his family through Edmund’s eyes,” she said, “I saw my family history also.” “Edmund dug into his past,” Diller added. “I didn’t. I couldn’t bear it.” Designing an exhibition based on de Waal’s book has changed that.

Six rooms designed by Elizabeth Diller give viewers a glimpse into de Waal’s inner world informed by his relatives, the Ephrussis, who, like the architect’s own Polish family, was forced into exile during the Holocaust. Diller said she wanted the exhibition spaces to reflect the displacement felt by the storied art-collecting family and chronicled by de Waal in his fiction. The author referred to Diller as “the great dramaturge of space.”

Diller had previously designed a 2016 exhibition at the museum which focused on the lifework of French architect Pierre Chareau.

The exhibition "The Hare with Amber Eyes" goes on view starting November 19th. More information can be found here.

Step inside the first U.S. exhibition of Pierre Chareau, co-architect of the Maison de Verre

2016-11-08T13:01:00-05:00

Pierre Chareau was a French architect and designer best known for the groundbreaking Maison de Verre in Paris that he designed with Dutch architect Bernard Bijvoet. However, Chareau's diverse body of work has received hardly any exposure in the U.S. Thanks to a collaboration between Diller Scofidio + Renfro and the Jewish Museum in New York City, Chareau's work made its U.S. debut last Friday in the exhibition, “Pierre Chareau: Modern Architecture and Design”.

Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet, Maison de Verre, 1928-1932.

After Chareau fled Paris from German occupation during World War II, his own designs and his vast art collection were scattered when he sold them, as he tried to rebuild his career in New York. The exhibition attempts to piece together parts of Chareau's life and works during those trying times, while integrating in-vogue media and technology that can appeal to today's broader audience.

The exhibition still dedicates much of itself to Chareau's seminal work, the Mais...

Olson Kundig will design the Noah's Ark-themed Children's Museum for the Jewish Museum Berlin

2016-08-03T20:25:00-04:00

Noah's Ark will be brought to life once again in the upcoming Children's Museum on the Jewish Museum Berlin campus. The Jewish Museum Berlin Foundation launched an invite-only international competition this past January wherein participants added their own spin in incorporating the biblical story in their proposals. Late last month, Seattle-based Olson Kundig Architects won the commission. Berlin-based Staab Architekten won second place, while Michael Wallraff ZT GmbH of Vienna received third.

Authored by Olson Kundig owner and principal Alan Maskin, their team's approach to the concept ultimately won the jury's favor with its playful depiction of the essential themes of the Children's Museum. Visitors both young and old will get to experience the museum as if they were Noah, exploring the space through interactive and imaginative installations that tailor to kids ages 5-12 years old.

“The design by Olson Kundig has the potential to unpack the biblical story in all its relevance, ...

The first US exhibition on Pierre Chareau coming to the Jewish Museum

2016-05-05T13:38:00-04:00

This fall, the Jewish Museum will present what it’s billing as the first United States exhibition devoted to the work of Pierre Chareau, a French Modernist who for decades fell out of the mainstream history of art and architecture [...] Chareau (1883-1950) was a prolific designer and art collector in France, and best known for his Maison de Verre (“Glass House”), a landmark building in Paris created in 1928 in collaboration with the Dutch architect Bernard Bijvoet...

The exhibition, entitled "Pierre Chareau: Modern Architecture and Design", is the third exhibition in a trilogy of design exhibitions, following surveys of the work of Isaac Mizrahi and Roberto Burle Marx.

The French architect and designer also had an impressive collection of art, which will be on view in the exhibit.

The exhibition will be designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

"Architecture is a field of repression": Daniel Libeskind on childhood memories, trauma, and architecture

2015-11-19T17:05:00-05:00

"You repress almost everything to produce a building," states Daniel Libeskind during a long and wide-ranging conversation with the architectural historian Gillian Darley in the context of the exhibition Childhood ReCollections: Memory in Design at the Roca London Gallery.

"Everything is repressed because it has to fit into the context, it has to be stylized, it has to appeal to clients, it has to be normal," he contends. "But I always thought, try to show what has been repressed in architecture. It’s very difficult because people don’t like it."

Their conversation touches on a number of Libeskind's central concerns and makes frequent reference to both his biography and his oeuvre. Here are some of the highlights (check out the full video below):

On his childhood:

"I was lucky to have that experience of... the mythology of New York, which is arriving by boat as an immigrant. You know, woken up, 4 o’clock in the morning by my mother with my sister, go up, wake up, 'you’re going to see Ne...