SHFT+ALT+DEL: July 13, 2012
Quentin Bajac will become the chief curator of photography at MoMA in January 2013. Bajac is currently at Centre Pompidou, Musée Nationale d’art moderne in Paris, where he has led the photography department since 2007. He will succeed Peter Galassi, who retired from MoMA as chief photography curator in 2011.
Mason Currey joined Print magazine as executive editor. Previously, he was managing editor at Metropolis.
Trinity Simons has been named director of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD), an organization that helps mayors prepare for the role as chief urban designers of their cities. Simons previously was a program officer in the Wellesley, Massachusetts office of Enterprise Community Partners.
Architecture and Design Exhibitions by the Numbers
Animal Superpowers, an interactive game by Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada was part of MoMA's Talk to Me exhibition. (Courtesy MoMA)
If your interested in how many people viewed Christian Marclay’s The Clock exhibition at the Centre Pompidou (6,996 for its three day run) in 2011 then The Art Newspaper‘s yearly round up of the top exhibitions makes great reading. This year the list breaks out Architecture and Design exhibitions and New York’s MoMA is the clear winner.
SHFT+ALT+DEL: April 27
John Gourlay is tapped to be executive publisher of Metropolis magazine. Gourlay’s previous magazine publishing creds include Harvard Business Review, Foreign Affairs, Utne Reader, Audubon, and American Craft.
SB Architects appoints Emilio Perez as head of its Miami office. Specializing in hospitality and mixed-use projects, Perez worked with Gensler, Portman Associates, Cap Cana Resorts, and Royal Caribbean before joining SB.
Barry Bergdoll, the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA, has been elected to the 2012 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Read More
Pictorial> Modeling for PS1: HWKN’s Wendy
HWKN's proposal, Wendy, in the PS1 courtyard. (Courtesy HWKN)
So you want to win the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program? This year’s champs Matthias Hollwich and Marc Kushner of HollwichKushner (HWKN) shared some insight about their strategy with AN. The competition started with an invited portfolio submission from about 20 young architects. After being selected by the MoMA PS1 panel as one of three finalists, HWKN started in with rigorous research into past winners and the selection process. “We made a book about every entry,” Hollwich said. This study provided in-depth knowledge of the different approaches and forms which have won, and also those that have not been successful.
In news that will surprise no one, Studio Gang is getting the star treatment by the Art Institute with a monographic show planned for fall 2013. Eavesdrop is certainly not immune to Jeanne Gang’s charms, nor do we dispute her talent, but her work is exhaustively covered in these pages and every other design publication as well as prestige glossies like The New Yorker. Last year, Studio Gang released a monograph of their work, as well as a book-length design proposal for the Chicago River. The firm’s contribution to MoMA’s Foreclosed exhibition just opened. Zoe Ryan and her team at the AIC, then, have given themselves a difficult task: how to show or say something new about the MacArthur-anointed genius architect. And next time, AIC, shine the spotlight on someone a bit less exposed!
SHFT+ALT+DLT: December 23
SHFT+ALT+DLT
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.
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