Architecture

By Design: A Transformed Cooper-Hewitt New York Museum Reopens

At their best, the exhibitions at the restored, renovated, and expanded Cooper-Hewitt Museum explore the history and culture of design and decorative arts with transcendent panache.

We go to a design museum to see the best of form and function. Because design is the intersection of art and function, aesthetics and technology, its physical grace is underscored by its utility. In the last half-century, objects of design (in some cases objects of desire) have been showcased with care and scholarly intensity in design museums throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. Over the years, the enthusiasm for design has spread. Now corporations see the notion of good — even great design — as a goal. Design is not only fashionable and chic, but it has become mainstream.

Above: Installation view, “Controller of the Universe” and Solar Wall, in “Tools: Extending Our Reach.” Photo: Matt Flynn, courtesy of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design. xxxxxxMore

A Gourmand’s Guide to Louisville, Kentucky’s Most Happening City

Part One features two of Louisville’s most popular hotels, one overflowing with museum-quality works of art, along with eight of the city’s most-talked about restaurants with special attention paid to the food and cocktails that not only fueled my stay but allowed me to, in the course of nine days, to move with ease from one place to another.

Arriving is a State of Mind

It seems that no matter what city I visit I tend to fall in love with it, sometimes deeply. Yes, wherever I go—the result is that I meet myself there, face to face. The world of commerce being what it is, it is not often that I get to quietly experience myself unhindered by daily annoyances in this manner. Being able to look at where I am coming from, where I have been, where I am now, and just perhaps where my next step in life might take me without having to spend a month in rehab, is a joy. This, coupled with indulging my intellectual and hedonistic desires—always a must on any trip made (why else leave town?). xxxxxx More

Beaux Arts Architecture: Toward a Classical Metropolis

www.artesmagazine.com — Grounds of the Columbian Exposition, Chicago , 1893, a Beaux-Arts extravaganza.

One in a series of articles completed by BiLLY BoY Enteprises, the division of William Green Architecture that focuses on self-generated creative projects. This investigation was inspired by a project with which the firm is currently engaged, influenced in part by Beaux Arts architecture.

Introduction

Beaux Arts architecture was very much a style of its time, an architectural reflection of imperial ambitions and an embodiment of formal opportunities given birth by technological advances in the building industry. With its origins in the École des Beaux-Arts, France’s leading art academy in the nineteenth century, the style was informed by a strong scholarly tradition in the architectural orders of ancient Greece and Rome. The erudite heritage of the Beaux Arts style was balanced by its unique response to the rapidly evolving industrialism of the nineteenth century. Architects of the period made increasing use of iron, a material that became more available as new manufacturing methods significantly reduced production costs. An extremely malleable material that could be mass produced and quickly assembled like no other material previously employed, iron allowed for the proliferation of grand buildings designed as celebrations of national pride. Unique in its attempts to negotiate the old with the new, Beaux Arts architecture culminated in the early twentieth century, when its strong Classicist streak was superseded by the industrial forms dear to the metropolis which it had come to define. xxxxxxMore

Harvard Art Museums Reborn: A New Architectural Frame for Art, Education, Conservation

Harvard Art Museums mark favermann artes fine arts magazine — A Renzo Piano-designed steel and glass ‘lantern’ and one-story addition sit atop the original 1925 Fogg Museum. Photo: Harvard Univerity

When a visitor enters the new Harvard Art Museums, there is a feeling of great institutional arrival, a sense of an art historical place and an overall atmosphere of beauty of light and materials envelops the space.

However, with that said, the newly renovated and expanded Harvard Art Museums tries to put too much great art and great educational resources into just a good, not great structure. xxxxxxMore

Architecture as Privilege: the Rarified World of Private Clubs

The following research was inspired by an architectural project with which the firm of William Green Architecture is currently engaged. This project spurred research on historical private clubs in New York City, which then naturally expanded to span from their historical roots to their place in modern society.

The Origin of the Private Club

Private clubs have been a fixture of urban society for nearly two centuries, first in England and later in the United States. The motivation to form clubs derives from basic human desires: sociability; belonging to a larger entity; the comfortable safety net of being judged by a wider pool of friends and associations, rather than only one’s self. They are also arguably practical. Etymologically, “Club” derives from “cleave” – splitting the costs to reap the benefits of privilege [1]. The sensibility increases when clubs form around a common interest, as they are often wont to do. Members pool their resources, from financial to social, and their experiences, to create a hotbed of cultural production and consumption. xxxxxxMore

The Calder Family Legacy: Sculpting a City’s Image

The boulevard runs straight as an arrow from a towering city hall to the front door of its eponymous museum of art. Fashioned after Paris’s 19th century, Baron Hausmann-designed thoroughfares, Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway is the mile-long artery that daily pumps new life into this historic setting. And standing atop City Hall tower, a beneficent, 27-ton, 37-foot tall sculpture of Quaker, William Penn, hand out-stretched, surveys all. Today, this metropolis still bears the name he first assigned to it in the 1660s—phila-delphia, the city of ‘brotherly love,’ in his very own sprawling “Sylvania” (Latin for “forests” or “woods”), gifted to him by King Charles II. The towering figure faces northeast, toward Penn Treaty Park — the site where, legend has it, Penn once signed a treaty with the native Lenni Lenape. With his right hand he gestures in that direction, while his left holds the Charter of Pennsylvania. xxxxxxMore

Arkansas’ Crystal Bridges: All the Art Museum Wal-Mart Money Can Buy

New England museums are expanding. The Museum of Fine Arts has completed its Art of the Americas wing, designed by Lord Norman Foster. The venerable Gardner Museum expanded with a design by Renzo Piano, who also designed the Harvard University Art Museums, unveiling in November, 2014.

During the Fourth of July weekend, the Sterling and Francine Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass will introduce the design by Tadeo Ando. It hugs the ground with reflecting pools enhancing the horizon line of Berkshire Mountains. Its prior annual attendance of 150,000 is anticipated to double. Nearby, Mass MoCA expects an uptick of some 40,000 to 165,000 through both the Clark’s expansion and first full season of an Anselm Kiefer building, in addition to the one displaying works by Sol LeWitt. xxxxxxMore

Metropolitan Museum of Art’s, The Cloisters: Radiant Light: Canterbury Cathedral Stained Glass

A rare exhibition of stained glass from England’s historic Canterbury Cathedral on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s, The Cloisters, through May 18, 2014. It features six Romanesque-period windows that have not left the cathedral precincts since their creation, over 900 years ago, in 1178–80. A special installation was constructed within the museum, elevating and backlighting the windows to approximate their usual position, above eye level. Rarely do examples of artisanship of this complexity and age move from their original location, much less travel thousands of miles, before eventually returning to be reinstalled, high above the transept floor of the cathedral.

Above: This border panel surrounded one of the Ancestors of Christ figures in a clerestory window at Canterbury Cathedral. Weathering on the reverse of the glass from exposure to the elements over the centuries, now being repaired, caused corrosion and deep pitting.artes fine arts magazineMore

The Gropius House, Historic Architecture:1938 Bauhaus Home in Lincoln, Mass.

Walter Gropius (1883-1969) was a highly celebrated German architect and master teacher. He is considered one of the most influential architects of the 20th century. Born to a middle class family, his father was also an architect. He was the visionary founder and first director of the legendary school of design known as the Bauhaus in Germany. Gropius was a leading proponent of modern architecture. artes fine arts magazineMore

Victor Horta’s Art Nouveau: Belgian Master of Organic, Sinuous Design

Art Nouveau is often flowery, organic, and asymmetrical, its flowing forms corresponding visually to musical movement. With all its various forms and translations firmly rooted in the second half of the 19th century, Art Nouveau served as the doorway to our modern age.

Primarily dating from the 1890s, until the outbreak of World War I (1914), Art Nouveau was the refinement of an aesthetic reaction to the excesses of the industrial revolution, with its mirror-twin progeny: technological triumphs and deplorable social conditions. artes fine arts magazineMore