Word: museumize
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...later, Rothko would agree to provide work for a restaurant in the newly completed Seagram Building. The commission came by way of Philip Johnson, the American architect and peerless cultural middleman, who had collaborated on the design of the Four Seasons and had also arranged for New York's Museum of Modern Art to buy its first Rothko. So it may have been partly out of gratitude that Rothko agreed to a project that was in every way wrong for him. The Four Seasons was glittering, elegant and worldly. Rothko, then 54, was intense, anguished and obsessed with producing images...
...first decade or so of 21st century American architecture as the Age of Piano. In the past five years, Piano, whose practice is based in Genoa, Italy, has completed six major projects in the U.S. while working on five or six more. In addition to the Academy, museums in Dallas, Atlanta and Los Angeles carry his stamp. So do an agile reconfiguration of the Morgan Library in New York City and a 52-story headquarters for the New York Times. Still to come are an addition to the Art Institute of Chicago; new buildings for the Kimbell Art Museum...
This would not have been the position most people would have predicted for Piano in 1977, when he became suddenly famous for one of the funniest buildings of all time. The Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, which he co-designed with the British architect Richard Rogers, is a museum that's been disemboweled, its brightly colored ventilation tubes, pipes and escalator draped along the exterior in a riot of externalized intestines...
...career-length succession of wild and crazy schemes. But lurking within him was a closet classicist. That became obvious in 1987 with the opening of his Menil Collection in Houston--another startling building, but this one startling in its simplicity. A subdued, low-rise museum, the Menil is a machine for delivering light, which it coaxes indoors in just the right amounts through an ingenious roof system of louvers...
With the California Academy, a combination research institute, natural-history museum, planetarium and aquarium, Piano is back in stride. What he has produced is a fascinating hybrid of classicism and a romantic view of nature that stretches back to the 18th century. The original museum, a complex of 11 buildings constructed over decades in Golden Gate Park, was badly damaged by the earthquake that hit the Bay Area in 1989. While keeping some of the original Beaux Arts structure, Piano has wrapped it in a finely detailed package of glass and steel...