“We’re like surgeons around a body,” said David Chipperfield as he looked at Berlin’s New National Gallery. The building, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, one of the 20th century’s greatest architects, was almost as bare as it had been at its topping-out ceremony, in April 1967. The British architect and his lieutenant, Martin Reichert [...] surveyed the dirty steel frame and exposed concrete walls atop weed-strewn sand. “We’ve opened him up and now we’re looking at him.’” — The New York Times

As government officials in Moscow earmark Constructivist buildings for demolition in a massive project to relocate up to 1.6 million of the city’s residents, a non-profit museum dedicated to preserving Russia’s avant-garde architecture has opened in the Shabolovka neighbourhood. — The Art Newspaper

What makes a museum building successful? Until the arrival of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao in 1997, this question might have been almost exclusively focused on the best environments in which to view art. But the Guggenheim’s phenomenal success, which allowed the Basque government to recoup the construction costs within three years, moved the debate on to issues of branding and statement architecture.

Now the discussion has moved on again. — theartnewspaper.com

Online visitors from around the world can now explore the interior of the iconic Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through Google Street View technology. Additionally, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, in collaboration with the Google Cultural Institute, has made available over 120 artworks from its collection for online viewing. [...]

The Guggenheim’s architecture presented unique challenges for Google’s engineers and Street View team. — guggenheim.org

For an artist who used to chop up cows and ambush people with his foreskin, his new south London HQ is notably subdued. The facade is not encrusted with dead butterflies nor diamond skulls, nor is there the clinical air that his eerie white production facility in Gloucestershire exudes. In fact, it looks a bit like a block of luxury docklands apartments – a couple of old brick warehouses with a polite in-keeping brick extension. Has the 50-year-old prankster finally grown up? — theguardian.com

Opening in October, Newport Street Gallery is the realisation of Hirst’s long-term ambition to share his diverse collection – which includes over 3,000 works – with the public. [...]

Designed by architects Caruso St John, Newport Street Gallery spans 37,000 square feet, which includes a restaurant and shop. Its construction has involved the conversion of three listed Victorian buildings [...]. — Damien Hirst

Next month, New York-based gallerist Gavin Brown will open a Rome gallery in an unexpected location: an 8th-century church named Sant’Andrea de Scaphis at Via dei Vascellari 69 in the Trastevere neighborhood... “It’s not that I was looking to open a place in Europe. I was looking to open this place in this building,” [said Brown] “I think a lot of people who run the kind of business I run have this real-estate problem...If you see empty buildings, you imagine what could be done there.” — ArtNews

Damien Hirst’s new art complex in south London, which will house Modern and contemporary works drawn from the artist’s collection as well as natural history objects, will be free of charge when it opens to the public in 2015. After more than a decade in development, the gallery, which runs the length of Newport Street in Vauxhall, is due to open in the summer.

[...] design by Caruso St John Architects, which converts and extends three Grade II-listed theatre carpentry workshops, in 2005. — theartnewspaper.com

Until now the Amsterdam museum has usually presented its Van Goghs in a simple chronological sequence, set against white walls. This display originally seemed appropriate for the building’s architecture, a series of stark white galleries designed by Gerrit Rietveld, the leading Modernist architect of the De Stijl movement. The white-cube spaces have now been transformed by coloured walls, varying according to the artist's different periods [...]. — theartnewspaper.com

[...] a gallery dedicated to design and architecture will soon also be added the Centre.

Like the “Galerie de Photographies," which is housed in former technical facilities, the future design gallery will be located within the existing Piano + Rogers-designed building. “Eventually, there should be almost no offices in the building, and we'll keep only the technical facilities that are strictly indispensable," said Seban. — news.artnet.com

At 85, the architect Frank Gehry has neither stopped building nor started repeating himself and this month offers plenty of proof. Besides the unveiling of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, which he designed for the billionaire Bernard Arnault, the explosively coloured Biomuseo in Panama opened on 2 October followed by a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, which opened on Wednesday, 8 October (until 26 January 2015). Gehry dispels some common misconceptions about his museum designs. — theartnewspaper.com