SHFT+ALT+DLT: December 23
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Portuguese architect, curator, and writer Pedro Gadanho will join the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Architecture and Design as a curator of contemporary architecture effective January 11. In addition to organizing exhibitions, Gadanho will supervise the annual Young Architect’s Program, which has recently expanded from New York to Rome and Chile. Read more details in AN‘s breaking news story.
In other museum news, James Cuno, the President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, has taken on yet another Getty role: acting director of the Getty Museum. In addition to supervising all of the Getty’s various holdings, Cuno, the former director of the Art Institute of Chicago, will now be back in familiar territory, overseeing the museum following the resignation of acting director David Bomford.
Other West Coast shifts: Behnisch Architekten closes their Venice, CA office, while Oakland, California-based VDK Architects, which specializes in the Science & Technology market sector, has merged with the architecture and engineering practice Harley Ellis Devereaux.
More mergers back East:Electric Lighting Agencies and O’Blaney Rinker Associates are joining forces and combining their lighting and control system specification businesses in New York City.
Dwell magazine regrouped this fall following the departure of editor-in-chief Sam Grawe and also established a New York editorial outpost; executive editor Amanda Dameron was promoted to editor-in-chief and Alejandro Chavetta was bumped up from art director to creative director. Kelsey Keith departed Curbed NY to join Dwell as a New York-based senior editor.
MoMA Taps Pedro Gadanho as Curator of Contemporary Architecture
Pedro Gadanho (David Farran/Courtesy MoMA).
The Museum of Modern Art has confirmed that the Portuguese architect, curator, and writer Pedro Gadanho will join MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design as a curator of contemporary architecture.
According to MoMA’s release: “In his new role, Mr. Gadanho will be responsible for a broad portfolio that reinforces the Museum’s commitment, since 1932, to contemporary architecture. In addition to building the Museum’s holdings of contemporary architecture, he will oversee the annual Young Architects Program (YAP), co-organized with MoMA PS1, and the two-year-old YAP International Program in conjunction with the MAXXI in Rome and Constructo in Santiago, Chile; organize further exhibitions in the Museum’s “Issues in Contemporary Architecture” series; and develop larger scale exhibitions of contemporary architecture, including exhibitions that explore relationships between architecture and other contemporary art practices.”
On View> Talk to Me at MoMA
Hello World!, Bernhard Hopfengärtner (Courtesy MoMA)
Talk to Me
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St.
Through November 7
Talk to Me explores the subject of communication between people and their environment, highlighting the role of the designer in imagining and establishing these connections. Through a diverse selection of objects and conceptual work, the exhibition examines designs that engage users, including information systems, visualization design, communication devices, and interfaces, like the QR code mowed into a field in Bernhard Hopfengärtner’s project Hello World!, above.
On View> 194X–9/11: American Architects and the City
Mies van der Rohe's Museum for a Small City Project, 1942 (Courtesy MoMA)
194X–9/11: American Architects and the City
The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St.
Through January 2
Prompted by the United States’ entrance into World War II in 1942, Architectural Forum magazine commissioned pioneering architects to imagine and plan a postwar American city. At the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, 194X-9/11: American Architects and the City features the plans, renderings, and sculpture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Paul Rudolph, and Rem Koolhaas and their ideas for cities of the future. Rarely displayed works, such as Mies van der Rohe’s collage Museum for a Small City Project (1942), above, reveal plans for cultural centers and urban life in uncertain times.
QUICK CLICKS> Altophobia, Old Archphobia, Parkphobia, Sunset
Scared of heights? Courtesy NYTimes/Rothstein
High up. The New York Times‘ Edward Rothstein went out on a ledge for the paper today. The critic took on the glass boxes that protrude from the Willis Tower in Chicago known appropriately as the Ledge. The critic waxes poetic about the vulnerability of the city and the fully human sensations that occur when floating some 1,353 feet above the street. He also takes the opportunity to point out the redundancy of the Ledge’s cousin, the Grand Canyon Skywalk.
Tear Down. Christopher Hawthorne balked at SFMOMA‘s public relations campaign to portray the museum’s new Snøhetta-designed wing as a wallflower respecting its Mario Botta-designed neighbor. But as Hawthorne points out in the LA Times, the new building is anything but quiet. Rather it’s more a “chiseled behemoth.” Hawthorne finds the museum’s affront to its Botta as part of a larger trend in the American museum world where the tendency is to drop good, but alas, old architecture in lieu of ever newer names and trends. Read: Whitney, MoMA, Barnes, to name but a few.
Put a Lid on It. In a totally biased and unabashedly opinionated piece for City Watch, Jack Humphreville writes that a back room deal may have LA ratepayers of the Department of Water and Power footing the bill for a new twelve-acre park designed to cap the underground reservoir replacing the Elysian Reservoir. Humprhies argues that the $85 million park should fall under the auspices of the City and the Department of Recreation and Parks.
Manhattanhenge. Gothamist reminds us that tonight at 8:17PM the full sun will set in perfect alignment with east west axis of Manhattan’s street grid. Remember not to stare, mesmerized, for too long.
Folks Weigh In On the Future of the Folk Art Museum
American Folk Art Museum (Photo by Michael Moran)
Apparently the art world hates the American Folk Art Museum building! (Who knew?!) In the wake of the news that MoMA is buying the Todd Williams Billie Tsien-designed building, two of the art world’s more prominent voices both bashed the building and argued it hastened the Folk Art Museum’s decline. The esteemed Times critic Roberta Smith called it “unwelcoming” and argued that the museum’s fate was sealed by “lackluster, visionless leadership; the weak economy; and inappropriate architecture.” Smith’s husband happens to be Jerry Saltz, the pugnacious art critic for New York, who went much further in a piece titled, “Architecture Killed the American Folk Art Museum.” He called the building, “ugly and confining, it was also all but useless for showing art.”
Not everyone agrees!
MoMA To Go House Hunting in the Burbs
(Courtesy The Washington Independent)
The foreclosure crisis has up-ended old assumptions about the relative prosperity of cities versus suburbs. In many regions waves of foreclosures have hit the suburbs hardest. In the second iteration of their “Issues in Contemporary Architecture” residency and exhibition series, MoMA and P.S. 1 will ask five teams to design interventions for five “megaregions” facing high levels of foreclosures. Like the earlier iteration, Rising Currents, the new project, Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream will include a residency and public workshops at P.S. 1, followed by an exhibition and public programs at MoMA. Organized by Barry Bergdoll, chief curator for architecture and design, and Reinhold Martin, director of the Buell Center at Columbia, Foreclosed “will enlist five interdisciplinary teams of architects to envision a rethinking of housing and related infrastructures that could catalyze urban transformation, particularly in the country’s suburbs,” according to a statement from the museum.
Antonelli Talks To Me: Upcoming Design Show at MoMA
WiFi Divining Rod by Designer Michael Thompson
Senior curator in MoMA’s department of architecture and design, Paola Antonelli is also a verb. She said so herself in describing her approach to curating, in general, and particularly preparing for her upcoming summer show, Talk to Me, opening on July 24. Read More
MoMA/P.S. 1 Young Architects Program Winner Announced
Interboro's design for MoMA P.S.1 (Courtesy Interboro)
P.S. 1 and the Museum of Modern Art have just announced that Brooklyn-based urban design and planning firm Interboro Partners are the winners of the 2011 Young Architects Program. Now celebrating its 12th year, the honor means designing what by now is widely recognized as the liveliest party space of the summer, the outdoor plaza of P.S. 1 in Queens.
Quick Clicks> He′s Back, Pay Up, On Fire, Sale!
Rahm Emanuel is on track for election. (Courtesy chicagoforrahm.com)
On Track. The mayor of Chicago holds sway in a big way. That’s why we’re keeping an eye on the ballot, and, as of today, Rahm Emanuel is back in business, reports The Chicago Tribune. Emanuel has stated that one of his first priorities is to expand Chicago Transportation Authority’s Red Line.
Street price. Speaking of getting around town, a new coalition called the Sustainable Transportation Campaign is reviving the idea of congestion pricing for New York City, reports Andrea Bernstein at Transportation Nation.
Change of Hearth. Curling up by a roaring fire sounds idyllic on a snowy day, but do the realities of a fireplace outweigh the romance? We’re still debating the subject following this piece in The New York Times.
Bookmark it. MoMA’s Design Store book sale is in full swing, says Curbed NY. Architecture and design classics and new releases over 50% off! Visit the stores in New York or online.
MoMA′s Young Architects Program Heading to Rome
Zaha Hadid's MAXXI in Rome (Courtesy Museo Nazionale Delle Arti Del XXI Secolo)
The prestigious Young Architects Program put on by the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA P.S.1 in New York has announced that it’s teaming up with Rome’s National Museum of 21st Century Arts, or MAXXI, to host a second outdoor installation at the new Zaha Hadid museum.
Read more: Officials hope for a local feel as finalists are announced.
Nouvel Sanguine About Midtown Guillotine
Jean Nouvel optimistic despite MoMA Tower's shortened stature (CBS News)
Jean Nouvel feels like his MoMA Tower has been put under the guillotine. The starchitect behind the lopped-off Midtown Manhattan proposal told CBS News this weekend that “It’s very French to cut the head, eh?” His 75-story tower would have rivaled the Empire State Building for supremacy over the New York skyline, standing 1,250 feet tall, but met significant opposition from neighbors worried the tower would drown their street in shadow.
City Planning Commission officials voted earlier this year to allow a shortened version of the tower – chopping off 200 feet of the Pritzker Prize winner’s design. Nouvel’s vision has been sent back to the drawing boards, but he says it’s “not in his character” to feel discouraged. Be sure to check out AN‘s cameo appearance at the end of the interview.
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