Il Whitney Museum di Renzo Piano

Il Whitney Museum di Renzo Piano non piace a James Panero. 
"The new Whitney Museum, designed by Renzo Piano and Renzo Piano Building Workshop, along with Cooper Robertson, at a cost of $422 million, opened to much fanfare on May 1. From the outside, it is a jumble of pipes, stairs, HVAC units, portholes, bending planes of enameled steel, and what look like a few stone corners hauled off as spoils from the old Whitney building, that crystalline fortress of solitude on Madison Avenue designed by Marcel Breuer in 1966, which the new Whitney now metaphorically explodes, reprocesses, and repackages. Beyond the mere display of art, this new cultural factory serves double duty as an incinerator of the museum’s own unwanted past. And unlike the waste-transfer facility next door, with its idling trucks and utilitarian sheds parked along the water, which will soon be renewed as parkland, the Whitney’s new exterior is not a holdover of industrial blight but the aggressive, purpose-built pastiche of blight. newcriterion.

American Public Libraries

In the course of eighteen years, beginning in 1994, the California-based photographer Robert Dawson took pictures of hundreds of public libraries across the United States. The results are collected in his new book, The Public Library: A Photographic Essay (Princeton Architectural Press). newyorker. 
Nella foto: Peterborough Town Library; Peterborough, New Hampshire

MoMA Loses Face

The Museum of Modern Art’s announcement on January 8 that it will indeed tear down Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s American Folk Art Museum building of 1997–2001 felt like hearing that a relative or close friend had finally succumbed to an incurable disease. Even though the outcome had been expected, it was a shock nonetheless.

That news seemed all the more terrible coming three weeks after the opening only few miles away of Williams and Tsien’s latest work, their Samuel J. and Ethel LeFrak Center at Lakeside, in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, a public ice skating rink that won immediate raves as an exemplar of contemporary civic architecture. The new facility offers further proof that its creators—who, like their most salient precursor, Louis Kahn, have eschewed commercial work in favor of cultural and educational commissions—are among the most thoughtful exponents of the building art today. Martin Filler, nybooks. 

Nella foto: Tod Williams and Billie Tsien's American Folk Art Museum. 

Literary Architecture

One Friday evening in March, I took the train to Columbia University and walked into one of the strangest and most interesting classes I’d ever seen. It was the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, part of the Mellon Visiting Artists and Thinkers Program at Columbia University School of the Arts, and a multimedia workshop in which writing students, quite literally, create architectural models of literary texts. For the past four years, Matteo Pericoli has led the workshop at the Turin-based Scuola Holden creative writing school, and this year, he brought the concept to New York. While the idea seems intuitive enough—each student chooses a text he or she knows inside out, and then builds it—the challenges arise in interpretation. Sadie Stein su theparisreview.

The American Folk Art Museum

The only surprising thing about the Museum of Modern Art’s long-anticipated announcement that it will demolish Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s Museum of American Folk Art building of 1997–2001, an architectural gem that abuts the MoMA campus on Manhattan’s West 53rd Street, is that this deplorable decision took so long to occur. ...
The tragic turn of events on 53rd Street is nothing less than cultural vandalism, made more odious because it will be carried out by a presumed institutional guardian of high culture and contemporary design. As MoMA grows and grows and builds and builds, the destruction of this architectural landmark may someday be forgotten by the general public; but for those who care about the long view of art, this needless desecration will remain a permanent blot on the reputation of those responsible for it. nybooks.

A pranzo con Moshe Safdie

Una bella intervista con l'archietetto israelo-canadese-americano Moshe Safdie sul significato della casa. "I put it to him that, even so, he was a long, long way from one of the founding fathers of modern architecture, Le Corbusier, and his credo, “A house is a machine for living in.”

“A house is not a machine!” he exclaimed. “It’s something else for living—but not a machine.”

“What is it?”

“That’s a good question.”

He thought for a few moments. “You know, there’s a good Hebrew word for it, mishkan.”

He explained that in biblical terms it means a sacred place, a tabernacle, divinely inspired. (And there are rules laid down for building it.) But, for Moshe Safdie, the secular meaning of mishkan is a house—a sublime refuge midst the clamor of the world". vanityfair.

New York City Life: Rooftops

There are few lines in New York City more powerful than “Come check out my roof.” The promise of a rooftop viewing prolongs mediocre dates, ensures attendance at impromptu parties, and solidifies connections among neighbors who would otherwise prefer to have nothing to do with one another. (“Shall we have a beer on the roof?” “Why not!”)

Even an unfinished, borderline dangerous rooftop can dramatically alter one’s life in positive ways, connecting a claustrophobic ( “cozy!”) studio apartment to a sphere of possibilities accessible only to richer neighbors: gardening, sunbathing, hosting dinner parties, smoking-without-suffocation, flirting with a view, adequate AT&T reception. slate.

Alex MacLean , Up on the Roof: New York’s Hidden Skyline Spaces (Princeton Architectural Press).

A passeggio per Central Park

Una bella iniziativa, quella di John Cotner, artista e poeta newyorkese: passeggiare e chiacchierare. L'appuntamento di oggi è a Central Park e John Cotner parlerà di Frederick Law Olmsted, architetto dei paesaggi e uno degli artefici di Central Park. "Recreation is a new interactive walk designed by Jon Cotner. To celebrate National Landscape Architecture Month, as well as the legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted, Cotner will lead dialogues with participants as they stroll through Central Park. Olmsted’s architectural philosophy will be put into play, bringing everyone closer to the Park’s physical and social landscapes".

Pedro E. Guerrero

The Living Garage, 1959

Pedro E. Guerrero, who will turn 95 later this year, for many years was Frank Lloyd Wright’s favorite lensman.

It is particularly welcome then, that the Julius Shulman Institute at the Woodbury School of Architecture in Burbank has organized Pedro E. Guerrero: Photographs of Modern Life, the first major retrospective of his work, which traces his career from the late 1930s through the 1960s.  

We can see why America’s greatest architect favored Guerrero, for no other photographer has better understood how Wright integrated his buildings into their natural settings. But the architect’s sustained patronage was not enough to support Guerrero and his growing family, and after serving in the army during World War II he turned to commercial photography in New York City and moved to New Canaan, Connecticut - then the epicenter of Modernist residential design - though he always remained on call to shoot his mentor’s latest creations. Martin Filler, nybooks.