When it opens next month in Boston, the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate will be aiming to restore respect for Congress at a time when rancor and partisanship have seriously damaged its reputation. [...]

The 68,000-square-foot institute, designed by the architect Rafael Viñoly, is on the Boston campus of the University of Massachusetts and has a 99-year lease on the site. — nytimes.com

The Museo Universidad de Navarra, a brand new gallery designed by the renowned Rafael Moneo, may lead to a stampede of art lovers every bit as important to Pamplona as the running of the bulls [...]

The architect is Rafael Moneo, a Pritzker prizewinner and native of Navarre province. [...]

If the architecture of the new gallery is not as eye-catching as Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim, the collection is more impressive [...]. — theguardian.com

In 2015, Libeskind’s brand of Deconstructivism (and all varieties of Deconstructivism, one might argue) amounts to a familiar, dull architecture; a calcified formal language whose shock-factor and novelty has worn away. One would hope that Libeskind, as a leading architectural practitioner, could at least try to articulate a new agenda in the experimental vein of his earlier work. Alas — as the Mons International Conference Xperience shows — that’s not the case.  — blouinartinfo.com

After a $91m, three-year renovation, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is due to reopen on Friday, 12 December.

[...] the firms Gluckman Mayner, Beyer Blinder Belle and Diller Scofidio + Renfro—moved the museum’s offices and research library, previously on the third floor, into the adjacent Miller-Fox townhouses, which had been used for storage. In the offices’ place, they built the Cooper Hewitt’s first open-plan galleries. — theartnewspaper.com

The Whitney Museum of American Art announced today that it will open its new home in Chelsea on 1 May 2015. With double the exhibition space of its "old" Marcel Breuer-designed building, the museum will be able to show far more of its collection of Modern and contemporary American art in its Renzo Piano-designed new space in the Meatpacking District. [...]

Weinberg told us that Piano saved the institution from making one decision that it would have lived to regret. — theartnewspaper.com

After six long years of laboring on the renovation and expansion of the Harvard Art Museums, lead architect Renzo Piano had but one simple message at the unveiling of the new complex to the press on Friday.

“There is very little an architect should say about a new building,” he said. “Just ‘Welcome.'” — bostonmagazine.com

Hundreds flocked to downtown Palm Springs Sunday for the grand opening of the Palm Springs Art Museum's Architecture and Design Center, an ode to the city's unique — and timeless — mid-century modern designs.

The center opened with "An Eloquent Modernist," an intimate depiction of the work of E. Stewart Williams, the acclaimed architect whose designs defined desert modern style in Palm Springs throughout the 1950s, '60s and '70s. — desertsun.com

After years of delays and soaring budgets, the Fulton Center transit hub opened its doors at 5 a.m. this morning. Envisioned after the September 11th attacks as a way to help revitalize downtown, the complex makes it easier to connect between nine subway lines: the A, C, J, Z, R, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Eventually, riders will also be able to connect to the E and 1 trains, as well as the PATH. — NY Magazine

One of the most popular museums in Paris, the Picasso Museum, reopens on Saturday after a five-year closure for a costly and controversial renovation. [...]

In the run-up to the big day, Lebon has been busy conducting VIP tours. Among his guests: the American architect Frank Gehry, whose monumental Louis Vuitton art foundation has just opened on the other side of Paris.

"I am not here to criticise the architecture, but to praise the painting - which is of course phenomenal," says Gehry. — bbc.com

In a cultural twofer that makes it Frank Gehry week here, the Louis Vuitton Foundation, a private cultural center and contemporary-art museum designed by Mr. Gehry, had its official inaugural ceremony on Monday, attended by the French president, François Hollande. At the same time, the Pompidou Center across town is giving Mr. Gehry, based in Los Angeles, a major career retrospective, his first in Europe. — nytimes.com

There are some deft variations on the design themes of the two older sections, and they show some gentle wit, a quality that was absent in 2009 and 2011, when these earlier portions, which run from Little West 12th Street to West 30th Street, were completed.

Now, for example, you can actually walk on old train tracks, rather than look wistfully at the remnants of the tracks poking up amid the plantings. — vanityfair.com

The Aga Khan Museum, which opens Sept. 18, offers a welcome antidote to these clichés through art that celebrates the rich cultural history of the Islamic world.

The building’s architect, Fumihiko Maki of Japan, has used geometric patterns inspired by the great mosques of classical Islam, repeating them in the inlaid floor of the courtyard, etched glass, and wood screens in the auditorium. — news.nationalpost.com

Despite its echoes of Paris’s architectural past, Frank Gehry’s latest museum project—the Fondation Louis Vuitton, opening this fall in the Bois de Boulogne—is like nothing the city has seen before: muscular and delicate, utilitarian and fantastic, a marriage of cultural ambition and private enterprise. Paul Goldberger looks at the genesis of LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault’s partnership with Gehry, and the triumphant result. — vanityfair.com