Not all great architecture begins with a bulldozer. From Foster + Partners’ reworking of Berlin’s Reichstag, to last year’s Stirling Prize winner, the partially ruined Astley Castle by Witherford Watson Mann, many of the most successful new buildings start with an older one. The latest feature on the Phaidon Atlas brings together six of the most […]
The artist Ai Weiwei, confined to his house and studio in Beijing, his passport confiscated by the state, has been roaming the corridors and state rooms of Blenheim Palace, one of the grandest houses in England, through a 3D computer model. He has never set foot in the gigantic home of the Duke of Marlborough, but is […]
PARIS — One cloudy afternoon this month, the line to enter the Louvre stretched around the entrance pyramid, across one long courtyard and into the next. Inside the museum, a crowd more than a dozen deep faced the Mona Lisa, most taking cellphone pictures and selfies. Near the “Winged Victory of Samothrace,” Jean-Michel Borda, visiting […]
There may not be many Americans at Art Basel compared to the droves of Europeans, but this morning, the buzz here briefly centered around New York City when Lisson Galleryannounced plans to open a brand spanking new 8,500-square-foot space in Chelsea, constructed under and around the High Line. Nearly 50 years after Nicholas Logsdail opened Lisson’s […]
Forget the bloody martyrdoms and hot pincers … Viola’s glorious new video installation is a hi-tech Caravaggio that redefines religious art. Bill Viola has created a powerful modern altarpiece for St Paul’s Cathedral that perfectly suits the restrained spirituality of this most English of churches. Coming into Christopher Wren’s great building on a weekday morning when crowded buses […]
The Shard has spawned a host of angular glassy lumps across the capital. But is this new crystal city full of Shardettes a welcome change? When Renzo Piano casually described his design for London Bridge Tower in a press conference as “a shard … a shard of crystal,” he must have had little idea what […]
A year away from opening, the new home of the Whitney Museum of American Art is still a construction site, but it is already a vivid presence in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, and curators have mapped out months’ worth of exhibitions there. The first show to go on view next spring — an opening date has […]
From St Paul’s to the Gherkin, London’s skyline is full of history – and character. Will the new tower frenzy spoil all that? Oliver Wainwright lists his top 10 worst upstarts.
The Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron – among the world’s leading designers – has been selected to design a new Vancouver Art Gallery. The firm will have two themes: building for art, and making downtown work better. HdM, which designed Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium and London’s Tate Modern gallery, beat four other […]
As scaffolding went up around the former Folk Art Museum building on Tuesday, one of its two architects broke his silence to say how devastated he and his partner are about the Museum of Modern Art’s decision to tear down “one of our most important buildings to date.” “Yes, all buildings one day will turn […]
The American Conceptualist Dan Graham has long worn many art world hats. He has produced films and videos, drawings and prints; chronicled rock culture; and collaborated with bands like Sonic Youth and Japanther. But Mr. Graham is perhaps best known for his architectural environments and glass pavilions, which he has been designing since the 1980s. […]
MEXICO CITY — Few devotees, domestic or foreign, seem to find their way to Mexico City’s museums of contemporary art, of which there are several. Nor are any of those museums firmly fixed on the route followed by the packs of art professionals — curators, collectors, dealers — who ritually travel the planet from one art […]
The underside of the Granville Street Bridge in Vancouver will be turned into a surface for artworks in lightboxes as part of the Vancouver House project. The forgotten urban area under the bridge is being reclaimed as part of the development. Westbank Projects is planning to bracket the main section of the bridge with low-rise buildings and […]
Those still mourning the loss of the Todd Williams Billie Tsien-designedAmerican Folk Art Museum at MoMA’s hands may find some (small) consolation in a new revelation: Although the building will still be demolished as planned, “We will take the façade down, piece by piece, and we will store it,” MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry told the New York Times. Taking down the façade […]
Peace and quiet can be hard to come by in the middle of Manhattan. Maybe, if the ice ever melts, you might balance a lunch burrito on your lap in the sunken plaza outside the McGraw-Hill Building. Or park yourself in a hotel lobby and pretend to be a guest. But for many people the […]
The Society for Ethical Culture was an apt setting for Tuesday night’s conversation on the Museum of Modern Art’s forthcoming expansion. The plan to add 40,000 square feet of gallery space to the museum’s Midtown campus has charged a virulent debate about ethics in the architecture community. Ever since the museum and its architects, Diller Scofidio […]
YOU NEVER KNOW what you’ll find when you go bicycling in Beijing. Eight years ago, the Belgian entrepreneur Juan van Wassenhove set off from his home in the Chinese capital to pedal around the vanishing hutongs, the labyrinthine alleyways that were once the heart of the ancient city, when he glimpsed what appeared to be the […]
Two celebrated architect couples, whose careers took off almost simultaneously in the hothouse of New York City design and who supported each other’s successes, are barely on speaking terms. One pair, Billie Tsien and Tod Williams, designed the former home of the American Folk Art Museum on West 53rd Street; the other, Liz Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, just […]
When the Museum of Modern Art wrapped up six months of foregone agonizing and decided to raze the American Folk Art Museum, it claimed to be sacrificing a small work of architecture for the sake of Big Art. MoMA’s prescription for the ideal viewing experience is more galleries, more wall space, more hallways, and bigger lobbies. […]
Last week, Diller Scofidio + Renfro unveiled a design that replaces AFAM — a useless place for the exhibition of art, and a building whose demolition I have advocated — with even worse spaces. Their generic technocratic edifice is scornful to art, and will be less conducive to looking at art than the building it […]