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Tadao Ando accused of copying artist Willie Cole's designs with recycled Met Gala chandelier

2023-05-03T11:16:00-04:00

Last night, a star-studded crowd trickled into the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its annual gala beneath a gargantuan chandelier made of what appeared to be plastic water bottles. After the event took place, several members of the art community noticed what appeared to be suspicious similarities between the chandelier and the plastic works of American artist Willie Cole.

Cole’s work is included in the museum’s permanent collection, and the large-scale chandeliers in question were profiled just two months ago by the New York Times. The large-scale pieces were made of nearly 6,000 individual water bottles and were created to instigate a conversation about the water crisis afflicting Cole’s hometown of Newark, New Jersey, in 2019. Some have found them comparable on social media.

The pieces were also profiled in Vogue yesterday, which quoted event planner Raul Àvila as saying: "We wanted to find a way to create a sustainable design that would implement the bottles into a breathtaking installation unlike anything we’ve done before."

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Tadao Ando’s tribute to Karl Lagerfeld will take over the Met’s Costume Institute this spring

2023-03-23T17:16:00-04:00

The three-decade professional relationship between Karl Lagerfeld and Pritzker winner Tadao Ando will be continued in a new exhibition designed by the architect for the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Opening to coincide with the Lagerfeld-themed Met Gala during the first week of May, Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty promises to be a treatise on Lagerfeld’s work organized around the duality between straight lines and the “Serpentine line” first theorized in William Hogarth’s 1753 essay The Analysis of Beauty.

The essay was supposedly an inspiration for the late fashion designer throughout his decorated career, the arch and milestones of which are covered in the introductory segment to the exhibition. This introduction will be followed by two galleries that hone in on themes derived from each type of line and are divided into nine ‘sublines’ included as examples of contradictory impulses throughout his friend’s long oeuvre.

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Shohei Shigematsu of OMA transforms the Met for the spring Costume Institute exhibit

2016-04-19T12:58:00-04:00

NOT MANY ARCHITECTS get to reshape a wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But Shohei Shigematsu, who runs the New York branch of Rem Koolhaas’s Rotterdam-based firm, OMA, has done precisely that. This month he converts a skylit, double-height section of the museum—the 1970s Robert Lehman Wing—into a graceful, cathedral-like setting for Manus x Machina, the Costume Institute’s spring show, opening May 5.

The exhibit, curated by Andrew Bolton, considers "the founding of the haute couture in the 19th century, when the sewing machine was invented, and the emergence of a distinction between the hand (manus) and the machine (machina) at the onset of industrialization and mass production."

Accordingly, the organizers wanted an exhibition design that blends the analog and the mechanical. Shigematsu's intervention is intended to "soften" the existing brick-and-stone of the 1970's-era Robert Lehman wing, which was designed by Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo and Associates.

Interested in other collaborations between the sartorial world and architecture? Check out these links: