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  #21  
Old Posted Apr 27, 2007, 12:24 AM
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http://www.gothamist.com/2007/04/26/new_more_access.php

New Entrance Approved for Historical Society

April 26, 2007






On Tuesday, the New-York Historical Society scored a victory at the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), which unanimously approved a scaled-down plan to renovate the building's exterior. In spite of unrelenting criticism from local Community Board 7, the LPC panel affirmed the appropriateness of modifications such as:

- A recessed glass entrance vestibule with two new portals adapted from current windows at the Central Park West entrance.
- Wider main staircase and free-standing graphic kiosks (CPW).
- Enlarged windows and ADA-compliant entrance ramp at the West 77th St. entrance.


The New-York Historical Society has evolved into a much more progressive institution than the stuffy, exclusive architecture of its 1908 building would suggest. Created by York and Sawyer to exude neoclassical pomp, the building "was designed as a private club that did not intend to embrace the public," said the architect Paul Spencer Byard in a November 1st NY Times interview. Byard's firm of Platt Byard Dovell White has designed the renovation just approved.

According to the society's press statement, "These changes will enable an internal renovation designed to make the Historical Society into a modern and accessible community, education and cultural facility for children, scholars and the general public." Added Columbia University historian Kenneth T. Jackson, "The New-York Historical Society headquarters... was built to preserve the legacy of old, rich, white families."

The entrance renovation--modest in scope as it is, compared with more dramatic plans rebuffed last week by the LPC--will present a more inviting and open public face.

Judging from yesterday's Times article and a meeting held on March 6, the community's concerns appear founded in another of the society's projects, a hypothetical 23-story residential tower that would have to earn separate approval in order to proceed. The notion that historic buildings have to be pickled in formaldehyde in order to foster long-term preservation has been spectacularly disproved in cities around the world. For example, the recent glass addition to the Morgan Library and Museum at Madison and 36th St. (infinitely more transformative than the subtle N-YHS plan) highlights the building's history while renewing its contemporary relevance.



https://www.nyhistory.org/future/StrategicPlan/

http://www.landmarkwest.org/advocacy/nyhs.html
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  #22  
Old Posted Jun 26, 2007, 6:46 PM
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http://www.theslatinreport.com/story...sign&fromPage=

HINES + NOUVEL = MORE MOMA



Will Nouvel's new 54th Street tower tower over Cesar Pelli's 1985 Museum Tower behind it on West 53rd?

Peter Slatin
DESIGN | NYC 06 19 07


After a fierce and very hush-hush competition among five world-leading architects, France's Jean Nouvel has been chosen to design a new 60-plus story tower in the heart of Midtown Manhattan. To rise next to – and be joined with - the Museum of Modern Art's sleek, serene and recently expanded home on West 54th Street, the new building will contain 75,000 square feet of additional exhibition space for the museum. Sources say it will also contain speculative office space and – bien sur – luxury condominiums.

The developer is Houston-based Hines Interests in partnership with Whitehall Street, the Goldman Sachs group, which earlier this year won the right to acquire and develop the 17,000-square-foot, block-through parcel. It stands immediately west of MoMA and was previously occupied by the historic City Athletic Club on West 54th Street; the club closed in 2002 and was acquired by the museum out of bankruptcy.

MoMA's press office referred calls to Hines, where a spokeswoman said that it was "too early" to say anything. But sources familiar with the design competition and the project confirmed the selection of Nouvel. Whitehall also declined to comment.

One challenge in going public with the selection may be the fast-changing world of finance. Earlier this year the developers were seeking more than $125 million in debt financing for the project, a figure that sources say could rise by an additional $100-plus million, depending on potential zoning variances for the site. But at the time, even though Manhattan's high-end condo market had begun to rebound from a stall in the last half of 2006, at least one lender balked at the borrowers' willingness to pay more than $750 a buildable, or FAR, square foot for the site.

Another issue that may be delaying an announcement: whether the new MoMA galleries – which will not have their own entrance but will simply be extensions of the existing galleries, will be designed by Nouvel or by the Yoshio Taniguchi, the Japanese architect of who designed MoMA's renovation and expansion, which opened in 2005. Sources say that it's most likely that it will be Taniguchi who designs the new exhibit halls, which will occupy the first six floors of the building.

There is also the question of the direct involvement of Nouvel himself; the architect has been known to be less than conspicuous at some of his projects, and no doubt Hines wants to be sure that it gets Nouvel when it hires Nouvel.

MoMA has been pressed to add new space ever since the renovation opened, following complaints from many quarters that the new galleries were lacking in grace and space and had lost some important qualities following the museum's reopening.

The new building is the 62-year-old Nouvel's third, largest and most central Manhattan commission. His first New York building, 40 Mercer Street in SoHo, which was also developed by Hines and Whitehal, along with developer Andre Balasz, is nearly complete. A second, 20-story building is in development by Alf Naman and Cape Advisors at Eleventh Avenue and 19th Street, across from Frank O. Gehry's (and Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg's) luminescent InterActive Center, opened earlier this year.

Nouvel has been selected over submissions by Diller Scofidio + Renfro; Morphosis; Reiser and Umamoto; and Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners. Any one of these architects would doubtless have added something striking to the city's skyline, which is quickly developing nodes of exciting new residential architecture. Tribeca has Philip Johnson's Urban Glass House and a small building by Winka Dubbeldam; Chelsea has the burgeoning, adventurous High Line corridor anchored by the IAC; and Midtown has 53rd and 54th Streets, where more commercial offerings include Norman Foster's anticipated Shangri-La Hotel and condos for RFR Holdings just a few blocks east of MoMA on 53rd Street. And there is of course Cesar Pelli's original Museum Tower, partly behind and even adjacent to the new tower site, on West 53rd Street.

Still, the path from a star architect's selection to a built project will be a tricky one for Hines and for MoMA and its brand new chair, Jerry Speyer. There are complex air rights questions including transfers from historic properties nearby; one package has already been assembled by MoMA and is being transferred to Hines along with the site. However, further air rights are yet to be nailed down and delivered, and the ability to do so will certainly affect the outcome of the deal, its size, and its price.

Then, of course, there is the market, which Hines can only hope will show the same durability and value as MoMA's core collection of modern masters.



Nouvel's 40 Mercer condo project in SoHo will open later this year.




Nouvel has also designed a 20-story condo at Eleventh Ave. and 19th Street, across from Fank Gehry's InterActive Center.




The new building will rise jsut to the west of the museum's West 54th St. entrance, which is will share.




The renovated and expanded Museum of Modern Art will get 75,000 square feet of new exhibition space.
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  #23  
Old Posted Jun 27, 2007, 11:29 PM
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curbed.com

West Chelsea Gallery Building: Modern Enough for Ya?

Tuesday, June 26, 2007, by Joey


Photo via Flickr/Edward Sudentas

We've pretty much neglected the Chelsea Arts Tower—the 20-story West 25th Street commercial condo building marketed to art galleries—and wouldn't you know it, they went ahead and built the damn thing. And it's pretty crazy lookin'!

We weren't sure how this would sell when it was first announced, but it looks like we underestimated the deep-pocketed Chelsea art scene. According to the building's website, only one unit remains unsold, and two are for lease. If you recall, the Arts Tower helped usher in a new era of West Chelsea development, and if you want to see it spring to life, the official site also has a slew of construction shots...
http://www.chelseaartstower.com/
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  #24  
Old Posted Jul 21, 2007, 10:46 AM
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worldarchitecturenews.com

The Museum of African Art...
(renderings from Neoscape, for Robert A. M. Stern Architects)








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  #25  
Old Posted Aug 27, 2007, 10:30 PM
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Posted on curbed.com

New New Museum Getting All Mesh-y on The Bowery



A few weeks ago we gave a little peek of something going up on the facade of the New New Museum rising on The Bowery. And now almost the entire building is covered in what turns out to be a metallic mesh. Workmen on site at the New Museum claim that the facade all around is actually aluminum, which doesn't match up with what was promised here. From an interview with the architects at SANAA posted on the New Museum website:

SANAA: The exterior cladding will be galvanized zinc-plated steel, a material that is extremely strong, yet light. The character of it is a bit rough, just like the Bowery. It's textural in appearance, yet actually smooth to the touch and it is reflective in a way that abstracts its surroundings and suggests a different way of seeing them.

Doesn't look too smooth to us. Was it budget cuts or that old bugaboo "artistic differences" which lead to the mesh-y-ness? Anybody in the know, please drop us a line.




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  #26  
Old Posted Nov 30, 2007, 1:39 AM
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http://gothamist.com/2007/11/29/a_preview_of_th.php

A Preview of the Nearly Opened New Museum

November 29, 2007



Beginning at noon this Saturday the New Museum will open its new doors, but this morning
we snuck a peak inside. The gray aluminum mesh exterior of the building is a whimsical stack
of rectilinear boxes shifted off-axis, not unlike a pile of blocks arranged haphazardly by a
toddler. It's a bold, dynamic presence on the Bowery and, along with the Bowery Hotel,
signifies yet another firm step away from the area's gritty past.

After the jump, tons of pictures from inside every nook and cranny of the museum.



Perhaps the most striking feature inside the seven story museum is the complete absence of
internal columns; the building is held together by a series of cross-bracings and the skylights
allow natural light to filter through spaces where the stories are offset. The three main floors
of galleries are airy but not particularly capacious, creating a cozy, modest context for the
work. The fifth floor is given over to an educational center; the ground floor lobby features a
bookstore, cafe and glass-walled gallery space; the basement level houses a 182-seat
theater. On the seventh floor, an outdoor patio and glass enclosed event space will be used
for installations and private soirees; the view of downtown from up there isn't bad.

The inaugural exhibit is titled "Unmonumental" and is an "international survey on all three main
gallery floors that opens with sculpture by 30 artists from around the globe, then expands
over the course of five months into a dense, teeming environmental experience through the
addition of layers and collage, sound, and internet-based art." This will be on view through
March 23rd, and there are a few major commissioned installations on the horizon as well.
You'll see one of these greeting you before you even enter the building: The "Hell Yes!" sign
(Ugo Rondinone) brightens up the Bowery and will be the first of many public art installations
on the facade.

_

Naturally the museum can't afford to be shy about jumping in bed with corporate sponsors, so
the first 30 straight hours of its opening - which goes on continuously through the night - will
be sponsored by Target and admission will be free. Naturally, all the free tickets have already
been distributed. But don't despair; they expect some tickets to go unused, "thus it may be
possible for visitors to show up during the course of the marathon event and get a ticket on
the spur of the moment; but there is absolutely no guarantee!" In other words, you'll have a
good shot of getting in for free around 3am. After they burn through all the Target
sponsorship money, it'll cost $12.



Above photo of the lobby cafe, with mischievously mis-matched chairs.



Foreground: "Canon enigmatico a 108 voces" by Abraham Cruzvillegas. Background (sofa
bed) "Fuck Destiny" by Sarah Lucas. Further back is "Cube" by Rebecca Warren.




Ground floor "BLACK ON WHITE, GRAY ASCENDING" by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries.



"Our Love is Like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours (Tree)" by Martin Boyce.
Photo by Jake Dobkin.



Lower level theater.



"Split Endz (wig mix)" by Jim Lambie.



"Myth Monolith (Liberation Movement)" by Marc Andre Robinson.



"Untitled (Kerze)" by Urs Fischer. Photo by Jake Dobkin



Lots of architectural critics commented on the slim staircase from the 5th to the 6th floor--
there's a small gallery off the landing with an audio piece.



The bathroom tiling is totally insane.



No, seriously-- it's really totally insane. (Picture from our frenemies at Curbed.)



Skyline shot from the seventh floor balconies-- the view of downtown is the true highlight of the visit.



View from inside the skybox on the 7th floor.



Last but not least, a view of the lattice-skin mesh. It doesn't look as good up close as it
does from far away, but it's still kind of funky.

More pictures can be found at the Gothamist Flickr stream.
http://flickr.com/photos/gothamistll...7603327643014/



________________________________________

http://curbed.com/archives/2007/11/2...ealed.php#more

Curbed Inside: Hell Yes, New Museum Revealed!

Thursday, November 29, 2007, by Lockhart

The New Museum opens to the public on Saturday with a free kick-off extravaganza (did you
get your Target-sponsored reservation?), but the gang at 235 Bowery invited the press over
this morning for a little preview. Finally, we were able to crawl into the womb of SANAA's
crazy minimalist creation, and what we found was—dramatic pause—an art museum. What,
you were expecting a Japanese palace where animé fantasies spring to life in a burst of
rainbows? Us too, but we digress. In truth, the New Museum felt small, like you could knock
the whole thing out in a half-hour before Sunday brunch. But the views (to the LES, Tribeca,
Soho, FiDi and beyond) are killer, and the place sells Cheese Puffs, so it's pretty much a must-see.


We booked this room for our Super Bowl party.


Seventh Floor event space (The Sky Terrace), looking towards BLUE, THOR et al.


Seventh Floor, looking downtown.


Out on the patio, looking west to Soho.


A preservationist's dream: Trump behind bars.


The satellite Genius Bar location. Total j/k. It's the fifth-floor resource center! No, you
cannot check your Gmail on them. We tried.


Learn, my little contemporary artists, learn!


The cage (aka Sam Durant's ...For People Who Refuse to Knuckle Down, 2004).


The most over-hyped stairwell in town? Cue the Goldberger: "The most exciting space in the
building is only four feet wide and some fifty feet high, and is tucked behind the elevators: it
contains a stairway connecting the third- and fourth-floor galleries. I have never been
anywhere at once so eerily narrow and so gloriously monumental." Sure, buddy.


Oh, one more thing: Hell Yes!


http://www.newmuseum.org/
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  #27  
Old Posted Nov 30, 2007, 6:38 AM
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The Chazen Museum of Art (formerly Elvehjem Museum of Art) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is one of the nation's leading university art museums. Founded in 1970, its mission is to provide access to original works of art for faculty and students and community members and to present related educational programs in support of the teaching, research, and public service missions of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Chazen features eleven galleries for the presentation of the permanent collection and temporary exhibitions, the Mayer Print Center, and the Museum Shop, as well as lecture halls, auditoria, and the Kohler Art Library.

The more than 17,500 works in the museum's permanent collection explore cultures and art move_ments from ancient Egypt to the present. The collection focuses on western European and American painting, sculpture, and graphics with important examples by Giorgio Vasari, Bernardo Strozzi, Jean-Baptiste Corot, Eug�ne Boudin, Alexander Archipenko, Naum Gabo, David Smith, Hans Hofmann, Louise Nevelson, and Helen Frankenthaler.

Specialized collections include in-depth holdings of Japanese woodblock prints, Chinese export porcelains, European medals, Soviet socialist-realist paintings, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British watercolors, drawings of Antoine Pevsner, Lalique glass, South and Southeast Asian sculpture, and Indian miniature paintings.

The museum organizes and presents a year-round schedule of temporary exhibitions celebrating national and international art and artists. Major exhibitions include Frank Lloyd Wright and Madison, John Steuart Curry: Inventing the Middle West, Wildeworld: The Art of John Wilde, The Art of Judy Pfaff, and Xu Bing: The Glassy Surface of a Lake.

The museum has exceptional teaching collections of ceramics, medals, coins, silver, furniture, and glass, used by university professors, area schools, and the museum's education department. Educational offerings include gallery tours, lectures and symposia, film and video presentations, and cooperative programming with local communities and arts organizations.
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  #28  
Old Posted Nov 30, 2007, 6:40 AM
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  #29  
Old Posted Dec 15, 2007, 5:18 PM
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I have a question. Is the "Hell, Yes!" installation on the facade of the New Museum a permanent fixture? I think it's just too perfect, like a new subject of photography in Manhattan. It's humorous without being ridiculous.
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  #30  
Old Posted Dec 19, 2007, 11:20 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by StatenIslander237 View Post
I have a question. Is the "Hell, Yes!" installation on the facade of the New Museum a permanent fixture? I think it's just too perfect, like a new subject of photography in Manhattan. It's humorous without being ridiculous.
Don't know if that particular sign is permanent, but there will be other works out there.

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  #31  
Old Posted Apr 17, 2008, 5:36 AM
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http://curbed.com/archives/2008/04/1...r_redo.php?o=0

Landmark Queens Museum Finally Ready for Redo



The new west facade of the Museum, facing the Grand Central Parkway.


Tuesday, April 15, 2008, by Robert

The landmark Queens Museum of Art building in Flushing Meadows Park is finally ready for a long planned redo, we think. The renovation and expansion have been in the works since 2001 when a radical remake was floated, embraced and, then, repudiated as being a little over the top for a building built for the 1939-40 Worlds Fair that was also the first meeting place of the United Nations.

The new plan, which was unveiled several years ago is designed to "maintain the building's infrastructure without returning it to a particular time period." The $47 million project will double the museum's size as it takes over space currently occupied by an indoor skating rink. The museum remake comes from Grimshaw Architects. The renovation was originally supposed to be finished by 2006, then by 2009. The current target date is 2010. No word on what the final target date is or whether the nearby Philip Johnson-designed New York State Pavilion will collapse from 45 years of neglect in the meantime.










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  #32  
Old Posted Apr 18, 2008, 1:45 AM
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Niceeeee. I'm jealous of every other borough. Staten Island deserves some props, we have kind of, sort of an......art.....scene, maybe.

Build SIAM! (Staten Island Art Museum) I totally just made that up. Cool acronym, right?
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Old Posted Apr 18, 2008, 2:46 AM
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Originally Posted by StatenIslander237 View Post
Niceeeee. I'm jealous of every other borough. Staten Island deserves some props,
Well, you've got free ferry rides, and a couple of beaches. You've got your very own subway line (no other borough has that). What more do you want?...

Besides, you're already a part of the world's greatest city.
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Old Posted Apr 18, 2008, 3:16 AM
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Well, you've got free ferry rides, and a couple of beaches. You've got your very own subway line (no other borough has that). What more do you want?...

Besides, you're already a part of the world's greatest city.
Staten Island's beaches are nothing to rave about, and we could still use some more cultural institutions, maybe a more urban downtown area (which is supposedly coming), and much more public transit, but all in all, we doin' aaight.

Being part of NYC is just a nice bonus.
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Old Posted Apr 18, 2008, 3:29 AM
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Originally Posted by StatenIslander237 View Post
Staten Island's beaches are nothing to rave about, and we could still use some more cultural institutions, maybe a more urban downtown area (which is supposedly coming), and much more public transit, but all in all, we doin' aaight.

Being part of NYC is just a nice bonus.
That's the spirit. Staten Island is at least the fastests growing borough (at last check), so that's something that could probably change things down the line. I do recall reading something about an art scene in SI, but it's not clear to me now. And there was the proposed NASCAR track in the borough - that would have been something unique for the city. But the NIMBYs were so against it, and the site is now being proposed as a shopping mall.
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Old Posted May 1, 2008, 4:02 AM
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/ar...01whit.html?hp

Whitney’s Downtown Sanctuary

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
May 1, 2008


Optimism is in the air again at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which has just released a preliminary design by the Italian architect Renzo Piano for its proposed satellite museum downtown.

For more than 20 years the Whitney has been unveiling sunny expansion plans for its Marcel Breuer home on Madison Avenue, only to have them crash against the reality of neighborhood politics. With its decision to build a second museum in the meatpacking district, the Whitney seems to have found its bearings.

Mr. Piano’s project for a site on Gansevoort Street, west of Washington Street, is a striking departure from the ethereal glass creations that have made him a favorite of the art-world cognoscenti. Its bold chiseled form won’t appeal to those who prefer architecture to be unobtrusive.

Rising among the derelict warehouses and hip boutiques of the rapidly changing neighborhood, the museum’s monumental exterior forms are conceived as a barrier against the area’s increasingly amusement-park atmosphere.
It makes a powerful statement about the encroaching effects of the global consumer society. Inside, Mr. Piano has created a contemplative sanctuary where art reasserts its primary place in the cultural hierarchy.

The feat is especially impressive given the obstacles Mr. Piano and the Whitney have overcome. After they spent years refining a proposed addition to the Breuer building, the museum abandoned that plan in 2006 (the third time that the museum had pulled out after commissioning a noted architect to design a major expansion). Then the idea of a satellite downtown raised concerns that the Whitney would abandon its Breuer building or that it could not afford to run two museums.

In a recent interview Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, said the curators had yet to define the relationship between the two buildings. (One possibility is that the Breuer building will be used for exhibitions that focus on one aspect of the collection or a single artist, with the core of the collection relocated downtown.)

Mr. Piano’s design is certainly distinct from Breuer’s, presenting a strange, even forbidding aura. The building’s faceted surface seems hewed from a massive block of stone. Its main facade is slightly angled to make room for a small public plaza. The roof steps down in a series of big terraces on one side; on the other, it forms an impenetrable block facing the West Side Highway.

But as you study the form more intently, more layered meanings emerge. The stepped roof, for example, both supports a series of outdoor sculpture gardens and allows sunlight to spill down onto the High Line, the elevated rail bed that is being converted into a public garden. The angle of the facade allows people walking along the High Line to catch glimpses of the Hudson River down Gansevoort Street.

The feeling of a structure being carved apart to facilitate the flow of light and movement is magnified at ground level. Part of the structure rests on a glass base that houses a bookstore and cafe, so that you feel the full weight of the building bearing down. The underbelly of the building tilts up at one end, providing shade for the plaza and adding a sense of compression as you approach the entry.

This experience abruptly changes as you cross the threshold, for a window at the back of the lobby opens onto a view of the water and the height of the lobby space suddenly lets you breathe again. From there elevators whisk you up to the auditorium, library and galleries.

The new museum will have 50,000 square feet of gallery space, compared with 32,000 uptown. The third-floor gallery, at 17,500 square feet, will be the largest column-free space for viewing art in Manhattan, Mr. Weinberg said.

Mr. Piano plans to use a weblike structure of delicate steel, glass and fabric scrims for the roof on the top-floor gallery: the kind of intricate lighting system he has created before, in projects like the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. Because the galleries are on multiple levels, visitors can experience the drama of climbing from darkness into light as they proceed through the floors.

The contrast between the muscularity of the exterior and the refinement of the interior brings to mind other recent designs, including Rem Koolhaas’s Casa da Musica in Porto, Portugal, and Rafael Moneo’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. Each of these projects offer an enclave conceived as a refuge from the world outside.

But in this case Mr. Piano is also offering a gentle critique of Breuer’s fortresslike vision for the Whitney. Like Breuer’s 1966 design, Mr. Piano’s building is a temple to culture; but here the relationship between inside and out — high art and the marketplace — is more fluid.

The design is preliminary, and needs more work. The weblike roof system, for example, is nothing more than a concept at this point. Mr. Piano is toying with the notion of bringing daylight into the lower-floor galleries — as the Sanaa design did for the recently opened New Museum on the Bowery — which is possible here because of the terraced roof.

Just as important to the outcome of the design, however, is Mr. Piano’s approach to New York’s evolving cultural scene. He and Mr. Weinberg refer to the downtown site as a return to the museum’s roots, because Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s original museum opened on West Eighth Street. But unlike 1930s Greenwich Village, the meatpacking district is more shopping mall than vibrant art scene. So one of Mr. Piano’s most delicate tasks will be to balance a spirit of openness with an instinct for self-preservation.

He has wisely decided not to link the building directly to the High Line, forcing visitors to climb down to street level before entering the museum across the plaza. Yet other key issues are less resolved. The building’s chiseled aesthetic could be pushed a bit further, becoming more animated. The relationship between the lobby and the upper floors is still clunky.

And there is the issue of material. At a meeting last month Mr. Piano, who often uses the metaphor of a ship in dry dock when talking about the satellite museum, said he was leaning toward a steel frame structure covered in welded steel plates, an idea that may be a holdover from his abandoned design for the uptown expansion. But the massive form of the downtown design suggests a building drawn from a single block rather than one built of individual structural pieces.

That image would probably be strengthened by cladding the building in a stone compound. A concrete exterior could also form a psychological bridge between the new museum and the Breuer building, making a trip downtown feel more like a homecoming.

Mr. Piano certainly has the skill to resolve these issues. Meanwhile he has laid the groundwork for a serious work of architecture. The bold form expresses a level of experimental courage that he hasn’t shown in years. It represents his willingness to move forward without betraying his faith in historical continuity. This is a building that could revive the Whitney, and inject welcome creative energy into the city’s cultural life.




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Old Posted May 2, 2008, 5:14 AM
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More renderings of the new Whitney from curbed.com














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Old Posted May 2, 2008, 8:26 AM
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Originally Posted by NYguy View Post
That's the spirit. Staten Island is at least the fastests growing borough (at last check), so that's something that could probably change things down the line. I do recall reading something about an art scene in SI, but it's not clear to me now. And there was the proposed NASCAR track in the borough - that would have been something unique for the city. But the NIMBYs were so against it, and the site is now being proposed as a shopping mall.
Yea, I'm aware of what happened with the NASCAR track, it's pretty pukey. You have no idea, the NIMBYs in S.I. are ten times worse than anywhere else. Shit doesn't get built at all here, unless it's an ugly townhouse development that's poorly planned and crawling with permit loopholes.

An art scene? Maybe. We have a mildly thriving-ish Indie music scene (Ingrid Michaelson anyone?), but an actual art museum would be nice.

P.S. The Whitney's lookin' hot. That neighborhood...I can't...
It's gonna be so different there in like 5-10 years.
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Old Posted May 2, 2008, 1:52 PM
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http://downtownexpress.com/de_261/sp...seumlooks.html

Sports Museum looks for a hit on Broadway


By Julie Shapiro
May 2-8, 2008


Listening to Philip Schwalb talk about sports is a lot like listening to an art collector talk about rare paintings.

“It takes people away from the mundane and the everyday,” Schwalb said. “They get to participate in or watch something really beautiful…. It allows for a feeling of transcendence.”

Schwalb, founder of a soon-to-open sports museum in Lower Manhattan, thinks sports are just as beautiful as music or art — but until now, there has never been a national museum celebrating athletes.

That will change on May 7, when Schwalb opens the doors of the Sports Museum of America at 26 Broadway. The museum will feature the history and achievements of athletes in 30 sports, ranging from football, basketball and hockey to bowling, fishing, rugby and lacrosse.

The museum will host a dedication ceremony outside at the base of the Canyon of Heroes next Tues., May 6 at noon. Forty famous athletes will attend the dedication, including Giants quarterback Eli Manning, who paraded up the Canyon earlier this year, Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova, ex-Rangers Rod Gilbert and Mike Richter, Mario Andretti, retired Dallas Cowboy Tony Dorsett, Olympic gymnast Kerri Strug and track-and-field Olympian Carl Lewis.


The museum’s galleries will showcase 600 sports artifacts, 1,100 photographs and 20 original films. Fans will be able to see Michael Jordan’s No. 9 “Dream Team” jersey from the 1992 Olympics and a boxing glove signed by both Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier after they fought at Madison Square Garden in 1973. Schwalb devoted one gallery to breaking barriers of race, gender and nationality in sports.

The galleries for each sport will have three main components: videos, interactive computer programs and artifacts. In the baseball room, visitors will look into a periscope and at the touch of a button they’ll pull up videos of famous moments from baseball history, along with facts about what happened. Then, visitors can look at artifacts from the sport’s most famous players: Joe DiMaggio’s bat, Willie Mays’s glove, a World Series trophy and dozens of World Series rings.

The sports rooms will also have what Schwalb calls “touchables.”

“We didn’t want to create a museum where everything is behind glass,” he said.

Kids can take practice swings with Alex Rodriguez’s bat or shoot with Wayne Gretzky’s hockey stick. The close contact with famous athletes will be “irreplaceable,” Schwalb said — but he estimates that the museum will have to replace the artifacts themselves every six months because of general wear and tear. Luckily, he has a long list of athletes signed up who are eager to donate.

The museum will also house the original Heisman Trophy, given each year to the country’s best college football player. From its inception in 1935 until 2001, the Heisman Trophy had a home a few blocks away at the Downtown Athletic Club, at 19 West St, and the club hosted a ceremony each year to present the new trophy. After 9/11, the Downtown Athletic Club closed and the ceremony moved to Midtown.

Schwalb built a whole gallery devoted to the Heisman Trophy, where visitors will be able to see and touch the 1935 original. Portraits of past winners will line the walls. Each year, the Sports Museum of America will host the trophy presentation ceremony, a televised event that draws the nation’s best college football players.

The museum is located at the southern tip of Manhattan, on the first three floors of 26 Broadway, the landmarked Standard Oil building.

“The location couldn’t be better,” Schwalb said. The building’s windows overlook the Canyon of Heroes, where triumphant athletes have marched in parades for nearly 100 years — most recently when the Giants won the Super Bowl this year. The museum will open 45,000 square feet of space next week, including 4,000 square feet of retail for sports merchandise and memorabilia and an 8,000-square-foot venue for special events. The museum hopes to eventually open an additional 25,000 square feet of space, possibly for a café or a theater.

Within America’s first national sports museum, Schwalb also built a gallery devoted to another first: the first women’s hall of fame.

Billie Jean King, the tennis player who defeated Bobby Riggs in the 1973 “Battle of the Sexes,” founded the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1980, but it has never had a permanent home. Visitors to the hall of fame’s gallery in the Sports Museum will learn about inductees through interactive computer programs.

In June, the women’s hall of fame will hold an induction ceremony at the museum for exceptional female coaches and athletes.

Schwalb thought up the idea for the Sports Museum on Sept. 10, 2001, his 39th birthday. He was on an Amtrak train, returning from a trip up to Springfield, Mass. to see the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. A self-described “huge basketball fan,” Schwalb was disappointed to see only a handful of people in the two days he spent at the museum.

Then he realized that even as a longtime basketball fan, he had never been to the Basketball Hall of Fame before, mainly because of its location. Other halls of fame lie scattered throughout the country — like the International Swimming Hall of Fame in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., or the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, R.I. — but their locations prevent them from attracting more visitors and gaining wider renown.

“People just don’t know about them,” Schwalb said.

So Schwalb had an idea: Why not combine the highlights of all the sports halls of fame under one roof, and put that roof in the heart of the biggest city in the country?

“Wouldn’t people just love that?” Schwalb remembered thinking, excited about his brainstorm.


The next day was 9/11, putting all such thoughts on hold.

But in the days and weeks that followed, as Schwalb heard politicians and community leaders call for rebuilding Downtown, he decided what his piece would be: America’s first national sports museum. He wanted to celebrate the beauty and grandeur of sports, while at the same time adding a new attraction to draw people to Lower Manhattan.

The Lower Manhattan Development Corp. signed on to his idea in May 2002, and Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff added his support several months later. Springfield’s Basketball Hall of Fame was the first sports partner to join Schwalb in 2003, and other supporters soon poured in. Then Schwalb received $52 million in tax-free Liberty Bonds, just over half of the $100 million he needed to raise. Another $5 million came from taxable bonds and he raised the rest from private donations, which include personal contributions from the leaders of Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs.

The museum is now partnered with 62 sports organizations, including every single sports hall of fame in the country.

Schwalb does not see his museum as competition for the many halls of fame, but envisions a mutually beneficial relationship. After years of conversations, the halls of fame agreed to loan artifacts for Schwalb to display, providing about 80 percent of the exhibits. In return, Schwalb has earmarked $2.5 million annually for the other museums. He also plugs the halls of fame in an exhibit called the “Hall of Halls,” which tells visitors where to travel for a more in-depth look at any given sport.

The Sports Museum of America faced several delays in opening, as Schwalb worked to get funding and exhibits in place.

As Schwalb developed the exhibits, he wanted to add more sophisticated interactive features, which took time.

One example is in the hockey gallery, an exhibit that Schwalb calls the “goalie’s nightmare.” Visitors put on what looks like a goalie’s mask but is actually fitted out with a virtual reality video screen. The museum spent months with the New York Rangers, sticking tiny cameras on the goalie and recording real footage of pucks speeding toward him at 120 miles per hour. Safe and warm in the museum, visitors will have nearly the same experience that professional goalies have on the ice.

“It’ll really blow people away,” Schwalb said. “That’s our goal: to let you feel and see and touch things you wouldn’t ordinarily see.”

The ticket prices are steep — $27 for an adult — reflecting the expense of creating and maintaining such high-tech exhibits.

The museum’s leaders expect to draw 1 million visitors in the first year, about half of them from the New York metro area. School groups will provide a lot of traffic — in fact, the first members of the public to see the completed museum will be a group of 1,000 New York City school teachers.

Schwalb also hopes to tap into New York’s 46 million yearly visitors. He imagines that a trip to the Sports Museum will round out a tourist’s visit to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Visitors will see the museum’s 24-foot-high windows as they exit the ferries and head north from Battery Park.


Schwalb considers himself more of a sports fan than a player, though he has coached basketball for the Jewish Community Center and the YMCA. Attending Duke University cemented his love of basketball, and growing up with two parents from New York made him a diehard Mets fan. Just last week, Schwalb threw the first pitch at Shea stadium, an experience he calls “mind-blowing.”

Schwalb admits a slight bias at the museum toward New York’s home sports teams.

“Our first obligation as the nation’s first museum of sports was to do a good and fair job covering all sports and teams,” Schwalb said. “We needed to be impartial, but it was kind of difficult.” The museum has extra artifacts from the Mets, Yankees, Jets, Giants and Rangers. “If you’re a New York fan, you’ll be a little happier,” Schwalb added.

Admission will be $27 for adults ages 15 to 59, $24 for students and seniors, $20 for children 4 to 14 and free for children under 4. Starting May 7, the museum is open Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. The tickets are timed, and the last ones are sold 90 minutes before closing.
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  #40  
Old Posted Jul 10, 2008, 12:22 PM
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http://www.tribecatrib.com/news/news.../hangar17.html

Remnants Await Return to WTC Site




By Carl Glassman
POSTED JUNE 27, 2008


It will be another three years before the National September 11 Memorial and Museum opens at the World Trade Center site. But for the museum’s curators, the monumental task of composing the 9/11 story is now.

Chief curator Jan Ramirez and associate curator Amy Weinstein are gathering the photos, films, oral histories and personal mementos for the permanent collection. But it is the massive artifacts —the rusted and twisted tonnage of World Trade Center steel and the wreckage of emergency vehicles, for example—that will influence design and engineering decisions before the museum is built.

Those objects, including a pair of structural steel “tridents” from the towers and the 65-ton “Last Column,” are among a thousand World Trade Center remnants cleaned and stored neatly in Hangar 17 at JFK Airport. Within two weeks after the disaster, the former Tower Air hangar had become a repository of massive Trade Center rubble, some of which will be selected for posterity.

Last month, a Trib reporter accompanied Ramirez on a tour of the 80,000- square-foot hangar, where she talked about objects being considered for the museum—decisions that will influence how generations of visitors try to comprehend the enormity of physical loss on Sept. 11.

Only a few of the mangled vehicles in the collection can return to the site. Among those might be Engine 21, which had been parked at Church and Vesey Streets when the towers came down. Ramirez said that the truck’s cab, a burned-out wreckage, and its rear section nearly intact, is a potent symbol of the “quirk of fate” that day.

“If you turned left you might have lived, if you turned right you might have died,” she said.

Ramirez and Weinstein are on a quest to find the people and stories behind the objects. For Engine 21, it is the last hours of William Burke, the revered fire captain who drove the truck to the scene that day. He perished on the 24th floor of the north tower after choosing to stay with two workers—one a paraplegic—though he knew the south tower had collapsed and the north tower was next.

A Ladder 3 truck that had been parked on West Street, its cab missing, also is likely to be displayed in the museum, Ramirez said. One of Ladder 3’s men was the highly decorated fire captain, Patrick J. “Paddy” Brown.

“We actually have recordings of his voice. We know he got up as high as probably the 43rd floor of the north tower,” said Ramirez. “He heard the evacuation order but stayed to make sure all the civilians were out. He was killed when the building came down.”

“You have to be careful how you use the word hero,” Ramirez noted, “and we probably will not use that word. But there were incredible choices that were made that day.”

Some surviving crew members of other vehicles in the hangar are still too traumatized to tell their stories, Ramirez said. Such is the case with two men who arrived in an EMS ambulance.

Gutted by fire, the vehicle’s ash-filled interior could be misperceived as harboring WTC dust, Ramirez said, so the ambulance will probably be one of the few objects encased in glass.

Just how the museum avoids displaying artifacts of destruction as perverse objects of sculptural art is still an open question, Ramirez said.

“We want to make sure that we do not aestheticize moments in which everything became so twisted or scratched that it becomes almost luridly beautiful,” she said. “We’re going to avoid using traditional museum mounts and, to the best of our abilities, we’re going to keep the mounts very humble. We’re not presenting them as fetishized objects.”

The few fragmented remains of Broken Propeller, the Alexander Calder sculpture that stood at the World Trade Center, lie pitifully on a line-up of tables within a “microclimate” tent of their own. Ramirez said the museum may bring the pieces back into a “silhouette ensemble placement” that does not pretend to create a new work of art.

The display of the “Last Column” offers other challenges, Ramirez said. The 36-foot girder, with its hundreds of photos and messages of grief and remembrance, is preserved in its own climate-controlled tent. There, preservationists Steven Weinstein and Peter Gat continue their years-long effort to halt the corrosion it suffered at Ground Zero.

But the famous totem probably can not be housed in the same controlled environment at the museum, where it will be displayed in a large area next to the exposed slurry wall.

“Do we have visitors actually go into a chamber where they can encounter it, do we enclose the column?” Ramirez asks. “We’re still thinking about a variety of options.”

The curators are tracking down many of the people who inscribed messages on the column in an effort to collect their stories.

Working with the museum’s design consultants, they are considering creating a touch screen on which visitors can scroll up and down a computer-generated facsimile of the column, touching on images or numbers or agency markings that will bring up an oral history or slide show.

“There is so much rich history to all of this,” she said.

It is undecided what will become of the boulder-like composite of concrete and rebar that now resides like a quarantined patient in a room of its own. It is several unknown floors of a tower compressed into a layered mass less than four feet high. It is so emotionally charged—family members differ on whether it should be exhibited—that Ramirez asked that it not be photographed.

“We’ve had the medical examiner come out and they said if there happened to be a person trapped there nothing would have survived at this heat, which they’ve estimated at about 2,800 degrees,” Ramirez said.

That object, like so many others in Hangar 17, will be the subject of much careful thought over the coming months.

“We’re just trying to think through every decision we make,” Ramirez said.














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