Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Museum of Modern Art The new Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman education building, completing the
museum’s expansion, opened Tuesday. Shown is the staircase at the end of the lobby.
Posted on 11/29/2006 4:24:31 AM PST by Pharmboy
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Museum of Modern Art The new Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman education building, completing the
museum’s expansion, opened Tuesday. Shown is the staircase at the end of the lobby.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
The Museum of Modern Art’s garden, with the
new building on the left and the reclad
1964 building by Philip Johnson on the right.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
A new meeting room overlooks St. Thomas Episcopal Church.
The new Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman education building at the Museum of Modern Art is unlikely to appease those who feel the museum has become a soulless corporate machine. But at least it underscores what is most alluring about the museum’s recent expansion.
A taut composition of floating planes and elegant lines, the education wing has a cool, self-confident air like that of the museum’s 2004 gallery building, which was also designed by Yoshio Taniguchi. Finally, we can experience the museum as a complete urban composition. And while its sleek packaging may alienate those who consider it evidence of the institution’s aloofness, it reaffirms that Mr. Taniguchi is adept at designing complex spaces, often with real seductive power.
The eight-story building, which opened yesterday, anchors the eastern end of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. Its main facade there, a towering glass wall capped by a soaring steel canopy, mirrors the facade of the David and Peggy Rockefeller Building across the garden to the west, creating a monumental frame for the activity below, like the prosceniums of twin stages. But it is the audience that is on display. Seen from the street or the garden, the museum presents a continuous pattern of activity, reaffirming its public mission.
This is what we expect from Mr. Taniguchi:
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Art and architecture ping...
Pharmboy.
Thanks for an interesting article.
Art ping. Let Sam Cree, Woofie, or me know if you want on or off this art ping list.
I've been to the MoMA in the past couple of years, and there is something to it being souless and corporate. I have not yet seen the new addition discussed here.
The Whitney, however, although modern, is a great place to see art. Breuer did a brilliant job on that building. Steel and glass boxes never did much for me (other than the Seagram's building).
I'm pretty easy to please when it comes to museums & I'm seriously prejudiced but I have a massive soft spot for Louis Kahn's art museums (Yale Center for British Art, but especially the Kimbell in FW TX).
For more commentary on the new Cullman Ed. Bldg, here's James Gardner's take in the New York Sun yesterday.
Leni
Not likely. Very few of them were designed by psychotic faggots.
I love meeting people who agree with me! (Especially Hawaiians).
Now THAT'S funny (a bit tough, but funny).
Oops. I hate to burst your bubble, but the architect of the duomo at Basilica Santo Pietro not to mention the Medici Chapel & others, a certain Signor M. di Lodovico Buonarroti (better known perhaps by his first name Michelangelo), was absolutely, as some freepers like to put it, "a packer". As an architect, probably his main contribution is as the inventor/developer of the "giant order" of pilasters for his renovation/remodeling of the facade of the Campidoglio (Capitoline Hill in Rome), emulated by virtually every architect working in classicism since, including my personal fave Palladio!
This is getting weird...I also think Palladio was brilliant.
That's good to know. (I guess I fell for the fag hype over him.)
Hi elenil. I'll be the first to agree with you about the Gay Lobby's revisionist view of history that all the giants of world civilization were gay - they claim almost every historical & cultural figure as one of their own on the slimmest of laughably palty evidence.(They're not the only ones who do this BTW: every self-help organization for every problem on the planet claims Leonoardo for their cause, poor guy. It's no wonder he was ever able to get any work done at all with all his 'disabilities', lol.)
But the case for Michaelangelo seems awfully solid b/c it's derived from contemporaneous accounts of his struggle against it & actual evidence like love sonnets he had written for his longtime companions who themselves were known at the time as homosexuals - not just from the eroticism of the David.
The judgement about Michaelangelo seems discarded only by those who just don't want to see what they don't want to see.
Next time I go back to the NE of Italy, now that I am an old hand at driving italian-style (i.e.,insanely fast) and can scare the living daylights out of the slowpokes on the autostrada by blinking my lights in their rearview mirrors with the best of 'em, I am going to do a proper, lazy self-guided tour of all his villas. I grew up going to all the gorgeous neoclassical plantation homes along the miss. river but I didn't truly "get" any of them or Monticello for that matter until I walked up that hill in Vicenza & got my first glimpse of Villa Capra/La Rotunda.
PS) I am neither hawaiian by ethnicity nor residence(100% euro-american here), just my name is.
Although I think the National Association of Hyperactive Bipolar Diabetics with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder who claim him as their mascot may beg to differ, lol - who knows? ;-)
But his contributions to western culture were so massive & ultimately extra-sexual, it's akin to speculating what brand of tennis shoes he might have worn - pretty irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, really.
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