Andres Lepik Photo:Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art Andres Lepik, a German curator and historian, joined the Museum of Modern Art as curator of contemporary architecture on July 1. He becomes the newest member of the Architecture and Design Department, headed by Barry Bergdoll, who was appointed last summer. Lepik most recently served as chief curator of the 20th- and 21st-century architecture collection at the Kunstbibliothek, in Berlin. Working in that capacity since 2004, he staged a series of small exhibitions that explored the designs of Berlin-based architects who have had commissions around the world but not in Berlin.

Columbia University continues to encounter hurdles in its plans to build a new 17-acre campus in Manhattanville, a scheme created by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop and Skidmore Owings & Merrill. Roughly 400 people turned out a public hearing last week to support plan 197-A, a modest community-backed alternative to the school’s proposal. Named for a clause in New York City’s charter that authorizes communities to create and submit their own development plans to the City Council, and developed over the past three years with the help of experts at the Pratt Institute, the 197-A plan is intended to integrate

Coop Himmelb(l)au’s much anticipated first project in the Americas, the Akron Art Museum’s John S. and James L. Knight Building, opened yesterday to mixed critical reviews. The $35 million, 63,000-square-foot wing adds to a Renaissance revival structure dating to 1899, tripling the museum’s size and giving it more galleries for exhibiting its collection of 19th- and 20th-century art. Photo: © Roland Halbe Coop Himmelb(l)au¹s addition to the Akron Art Museum. The Austrian firm Coop Himmelb(l)au won the Akron commission in September 2001. Architecture principal Wolf Prix has advocated the creation of “architecture out of frozen air that you can enter”

In retrospect, the anointing of Renzo Piano to design an addition to the Kimbell Art Museum seems almost preordained. He worked in Louis I. Kahn’s Philadelphia office during the 1960s and already had three critically acclaimed art museums in Texas: the Nasher, Menil Collection, and Cy Twombly Gallery. Photo: Courtesy the Kimbell Art Museum The existing Kimbell Art Museum, in Fort Worth, designed by Louis I. Kahn, dates to 1972. The museum has hired Renzo Piano, who worked for Kahn, to design a new building across the street. Piano called the commission, which was announced in April, “an awesome challenge,

More than 350 board members and invited guests from industry organizations convened in Denver last week for the 88th annual meeting of the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB). Representatives from nearly all 54 jurisdictions, except for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, attended the multi-day event. During his keynote address, Chris Luebkeman, director of Global Foresight and Innovation for Arup in London, urged attendees to make decisions that will “survive and thrive” well into the future. Trained as a geologist, structural engineer, and architect, Luebkeman described himself as a generalist “in the spaces between professions.” Using a classic

It’s getting to be legacy time for President George W. Bush and, among other things, that means building a presidential library—which, after months of official denials and equivocations, is headed for Southern Methodist University (SMU), in Dallas, the alma mater of first lady Laura Bush. This location was confirmed in an RFQ issued on May 24 by 3D/I, a Houston-based firm hired by the Presidential Library Foundation to oversee the selection process. The document outlines a 145,000-square-foot library and 40,000-square-foot public policy institute on “property that SMU recently acquired.” The project must be compatible with “the distinct architectural character of