2 Columbus Circle (on the right), day view (Photo: New York Times)

The 1964 Gallery of Modern Art at 2 Columbus Circle is being transformed into a new space for the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD). Almost everything about the building has changed, but the original “lollipop” columns persist. The New York Times has put an interactive feature online, providing an animated overview of the building’s redesign. Moreover, on the MAD-website you can watch a video of the construction works.

Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) Floor plan: new vs. old situation (Photo: New York Times)

(Photo: Courtesy of Renzo Piano Building Workshop and Cooper, Robertson & Partners)

The New York Times is very positive about Renzo Piano’s computer renderings for the future downtown annex of the Whitney Museum: “The bold form expresses a level of experimental courage that he hasn’t shown in years. This is a building that could revive the Whitney, and inject welcome creative energy into the city’s cultural life.”

The architect seems to be very busy these days. After the opening of the LACMA earlier this year and the expected completion of the California Academy of Sciences this fall, the Witney Museum is only one of many large museum projects by the Italian maestro. On Tate Modern’s website you can hear and watch him talk about another highlight in his carreer, the 52-storey glass skyscraper housing the new headquarters of The New York Times.

Read more (New York Times, May 1 2008)
Go to website Whitney Museum of American Art

The spiderweb shaped Living Roof on top of California Academy of Sciences in bloom.

This fall, after eight years and almost half a billion dollars, architect Renzo Piano will complete the greenest museum ever built—the new California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park—housing its aquarium, planetarium, and natural-history museum under a two-and-a-half-acre “living roof.”

Long section of the museum design © Rpbw

Piano’s museum has made extensive use of technology in the service of the institution’s green mandate and promises to set a new standard for ‘green museums’. Vanity Fair’s Matt Tyrnauer writes about its genesis.

Overview © Rpbw

The Art Institute of Chicago’s new Modern Wing will include museum gardens and plantings that will increase green space on the city block by 21,075 square feet.

Forget Corinthian columns: Today’s museums have features like green roofs – such as on the new wing at the Institute of Fine Arts in Chicago – or goats as part of the maintenance team, as at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the first facility in the US to qualify for LEED certification on an existing building.

“I cannot count the number of institutions that are doing serious green stuff. That’s how huge it is,” says Sarah Brophy, coauthor of “The Green Museum,” to be published later this spring. “[Green measures] are going to become as natural and automatic as full accessibility and inclusivity,” Brophy says. “Within a year, the public is going to be asking all museums about their environmentally sustainable behavior. They’re going to want to see evidence. That will push all museums. There’s a pretty substantial learning curve, but the entire population is going to be going through it, and museums will be part of that group.”

Read article (the Christian Science Monitor. April 9, 2008)
Read about museums that are ‘going green’
Read an extensive case study of the Grand Rapids Art Museum, dubbed “The Temple of Green” (GreenSource).

Although the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum exhibited works of great artists, its contract with hotel resort the Venetian in Las Vegas won’t be renewed. (Photo: Las Vegas Sun)

The Las Vegas Sun reports on the announcement by Guggenheim officials that the museum foundation will close down its Guggenheim Hermitage branch in the Venetian, a large scale hotel and casino in the world’s gambling capital Las Vegas. The Guggenheim opened two Las Vegas museums, designed by Rem Koolhaas, in October 2001. The Guggenheim Hermitage, a partnership between the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, was the smaller of the two.

The museum’s official statement emphasizes the predetermined life-span of seven year for the project, and that number has been reached. Critics argue that the museum simply failed in terms of visitor numbers and commercial successes and therefore had to be closed. They blaim it on a combination of uninspiring, second-rate exhibitions, and the the fact that the nonprofit museum was housed in the for-profit hotel-casino which made it difficult to raise extra money within the local (business) community.

The Guggenheim’s (overseas) expansion plans have been hit hard in recent years. The Bilbao museum changed the face of museums, but grand plans to create a brand as distinctive as Coca-Cola - to put a Guggenheim everywhere from Mexico to Taiwan - proved too ambitious. The 63,700-square-foot Guggenheim Las Vegas closed its doors 15 months after its opening in 2001 because of lack of funds and low attendance. Its only show was “The Art of the Motorcycle.” Back in 2005 the British newspaper the Guardian already reported on the epic rise and (predicted) fall of the Guggenheim empire and its flamboyant director under the telling title ‘Is this the end of the Guggenheim dream?’. Notwithstanding all the troubles the Guggenheim is experiencing, plans for a large museum project in Abu Dhabi will be pressed forward as Thomas Krenz vividly described in a recent interview.

At the Hyde Park Art Center, an 80-foot-long gallery starts on an outside wall of the building with a projection screen for video art. (Photo: Joshua Lott for The New York Times)

New museum projects trumpet a $100 million redesign here, a $300 million building there. As part of their annual Museum special, the New York Times praises the $3 million Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, proving that not all museum construction has to cost in the nine figures.

The museum hired Douglas Garofalo, architect and a pioneer in digital design, who kept the warehouse’s original shape but gutted the interior. He wanted a building that “changes every time people come.” He designed an 80-foot-long L.E.D. projection facade along the east wall — a 21st-century canvas to display video artwork. He then placed five corrugated metal garage doors below the projection screen. When opened, they create a plaza extending the main gallery onto the street.

Exterior Hyde Park Art Center  (Photo: Ricardo Phillips)

Go to website Hyde Park Art Center
Go to ‘Museums: a Special Section’ (New York Times, March 2008)

Friday night fun at the Guggenheim’s Art After Dark party. (Photos: Aarona Pichinson and Virginie Blanchere)

In New York and Los Angeles, museums after dark are often busier than during daylight hours. In both cities, just about all of the major museums, and a few of its minor ones, have jumped on the nocturnal bandwagon, hoping to hook a younger generation on museumgoing. But they’ve hooked the older crowd as well, with some offering live music or D.J.’s, performances and lectures, discount prices and, not surprisingly, booze.

A majority of these evening activities are on Friday nights, seemingly perfect for just-arrived out-of-town weekenders. The crowds they attract appear much more local than tourist. The average attendee comes with high heels and a hip handbag, not sensible shoes and a Lonely Planet guide.

Whitney Live offers live performances at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Here are some examples from New York:
Target First Saturdays @ Brooklyn Museum of Art
Art After Dark @ Guggenheim Museum
K2 Lounge @ Rubin Museum of Art
Whitney Live @ Whitney Museum of American Art
Get Weird @ New Museum of Contemporary Art

And from Los Angeles:
NIGHT VISION @ Museum of Contemporary Art LA
College Night @ Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Friday Nights @ The J. Paul Getty Museum

Read more (The New York Times, February 7, 2008)

Interesting article in The Independent on the similarities and differences between two major museums that both received a glass covered courtyard by British architect Sir Norman Foster. Courtyards have become something of a Foster speciality. In the 90’s he designed the Great Court at the British Museum, and in the last few years he and his team created the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard – named for it sponsors - at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C., which opened last November.

Foster was eager to rekindle the history of the Smithsonian as a social-events building providing a large public living room for people in Washington. This kind of space, whether it’s totally enclosed, partially enclosed, or completely open, is something that Foster has developed as a theme in buildings over many years.

The renovated Kogod Courtyard at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington by Foster + Partners.

 
Great Court at the British Museum (London, UK, 1994-2000) by Foster + Partners.

Other examples of Foster-designed “urban living rooms” include the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia, where visitors can view works of art in a relaxed setting, and the Sage music centre in Gateshead, where the main level is accessible all year round whether a concert is taking place or not. The Kogod Courtyard even features free wireless internet access.

However, Foster’s spectacular glass additions for existing spaces do not always receive a positive response. Referring to the Great Court at the British Museum, fellow-architect Rem Koolhaas has accused Foster of turning an icon of the Enlightenment into a kitschy homage to the Mall of America, as was reported in The New Yorker.

Visit website Foster + Partners
Read article (The New York Times, November 19, 2007)

Since this week, the Whitney Museum of American Art branch at Altria, located on Park Avenue at 42nd Street in New York, has ended its operations. Comprising a 5,200-square-foot sculpture court and a 1,000-square-foot gallery, the branch consisted of a large gallery space and a sculpture court and ran nearly the full block. In 25 years, the Altria branch has presented 110 exhibitions and hundreds of performances and events in midtown Manhattan.

The Whitney Museum of American Art branch at Altria closed this week.

The idea for the Whitney at Altria originated in the mid-1970s, when Altria embarked on the development of a new corporate headquarters by the architect Ulrich Franzen. At the time, the city was in the midst of a severe fiscal crisis and many major corporations were leaving New York. A city incentive allowed for the allocation of extra floors in new buildings that included an interior public space.

Altria was the first to use this incentive to create a cultural facility.The branch opened in April 1983, after construction was completed of the Altria (formerly known as Philip Morris Companies) headquarters building at 120 Park Avenue. It was an unprecedented project, marking the first time a corporation included a museum as an integral part of its offices and fully funded the activities within this space. Altria is now undergoing a corporate restructuring and, as a result, moving its headquarters out of Manhattan.

Accoring to the the New York Times the Whitney is not looking for a new location to take the place of the Altria branch. “It has been fabulous, but the branch museums are a thing of the past,” the museum’s director Mr. Weinberg told the newspaper. “They’ve pretty much run their course.”

Guggenheim Las Vegas opened in 2000 and was closed down in 2003.

Several incidents at the Guggenheim Museum have made it painfully clear that a museum’s dreams of empire one day have to face reality. Hardest hit have been the museum’s off-site ventures, which in a more boastful period were the stuff of the Guggenheim’s far-flung ambitions. First to close was the SoHo branch, which shut its doors in 2001, despite all the neighborhood’s visibility and the attention-getting shows of important artists as Gary Hill and Bill Viola. And for lack of funding the Guggenheim Las Vegas, a soaring exhibition hall at the the Venetian Resort-Hotel-Casino, was abruptly closed down only 15 months after its spectecular opening.

At the same time, however, the European branches of the museum in Bilbao, Venice and Berlin are performing very well and other museums are planning to open satellite venues, including Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Centre Pompidou in Metz and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Download press release (Whitney Museum of American Art, January 23, 2008)

Philippe de Montebello retires as director of the Metropolitan Museum

According to the Association of Art Museum Directors, a New York-based nonprofit representing more than 180 museum directors, 21 U.S. museums will be looking for successors of the postwar generation of directors. With diminishing federal and corporate funding, the job descriptions of the top position at museums might be intimidating curators at one side, where others leave for better paid jobs at auction houses.

“At the Met, Mr. Montebello’s successor will need to be able to wax rhapsodic with curators about hieroglyphics and Damien Hirst as well as manage a staff of 2,600, a $201 million operating budget and a $1 billion capital campaign.”

Read full article (Washington Post, January 10, 2008)