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Obdurate by Design

The difficult cause of willful buildings that demand heroic efforts to preserve.
James S. Russell, FAIA Emeritus
September 16, 2014
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The difficult cause of willful buildings that demand heroic efforts to preserve. Photo © Peter Mauss/Esto The American Folk Art Museum in New York, by Tod Williams Billie Tsien, invited visitors to explore its many levels with narrow atriums and stairs lined with display niches. Though the public spaces of Boston City Hall choreograph a theatrical itinerary of light and shadow, many citizens and politicians find the building intimidating. Though it was indisputably a significant work of architecture, New York's American Folk Art Museum, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, is being demolished. Its fate was sealed when Diller
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Beyond Cubed

Suzanne-Stephens
Suzanne Stephens
September 16, 2014
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Changes in office design give new meaning to “open plan.” Photo © Eduard Hueber In 2013, Perkins + Will used benching—desks arranged like conference tables—for the New York offices of Vente Privée USA, a joint partnership of the French online fashion retailer and American Express. The main workspace lacks walls or partitions and features casual seating clusters. The reception area is furnished with found art and idiosyncratic furniture, to give the space the energy and insouciance it purveys in its business. Speed, spontaneous interaction, flexibility, and collaboration describe the brief for office design today, where the “open plan” reigns. Fueled
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Cathleen McGuigan

But Is It Art?

Reaching across the divide of disciplines, architects and artists find that their concerns can coincide.
Cathleen-McGuigan
Cathleen McGuigan
August 16, 2014
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This past spring, the sculptor Richard Serra was honored with the President's Medal from the venerable Architectural League of New York, which cited his evolution as an artist from the “concerns of matter and materiality to more spatial preoccupations.” 


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Visitor Center, Clark Art Institute

The Museum, Clark Art Institute

A Classic Remastered: A sensitive restoration and renovation of an art museum intensifies its original aura.
Wendy Moonan
August 16, 2014
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Annabelle Selldorf was an obvious choice to renovate the venerated museum of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, home to a stellar collection of European and American paintings.


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Visitor Center, Clark Art Institute

Visitor Center, Clark Art Institute

Lasting Impression: Since it opened in 1955, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute has drawn 200,000 visitors annually to see its French Impressionist paintings among 9,000 works of art.
Wendy Moonan
August 16, 2014
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Last month the Clark completed a $145 million campus expansion on its 140-acre site in the Berkshire mountains of Massachsetts. Included is a new visitor center by Tadao Ando Architect & Associates and a renovation of the existing museum by Selldorf Architects.


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