Palm Springs Art Museum, Architecture and Design Center; photograph by Daniel Chavkin, courtesy of Palm Springs Art Museum
This weekend, the Palm Springs Art Museum will open its new Architecture and Design Center in a restored mid-century modern building. The A+D Center is an important extension of the museum’s facilities as well as its exhibitions and programs.
The Fondation Louis Vuitton, in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris; photo courtesy of Fondation Louis Vuitton
On October 27, the new museum building for the Fondation Louis Vuitton will open in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. It was designed by the Los Angeles-based starchitect Frank Gehry with the patronage of the French businessman Bernard Arnault.
Ólafur Elíasson, Riverbed, 2014; installation view, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, 2014; photo by Anders Sune Berg
In Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Ólafur Elíasson has transformed the museum’s South Wing into a rocky river landscape with a site-specific installation combining nature, architecture, and art.
In Boulogne-Billancourt, a western suburb of Paris, an island in the Seine is being developed into an “artistic micro-city” designed by Jean Nouvel. The project for Île Seguin will create artists’ studios, commercial gallery and auction spaces, an exhibition hall, and a conference center to transform the island into a modern cultural hub.
This summer, André Le Nôtre’s 17th-century Water Theater grove at Versailles has been restored by the landscape designer Louis Benech with contemporary sculptures by Jean-Michel Othoniel – the first new permanent artworks added the garden in over 300 years.
Guggenheim Helsinki design competition, view of Helsinki’s waterfront; image via ArchDaily
Last month, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Helsinki city officials announced an international design competition for a proposed new museum in the Finnish capital. The Guggenheim proposal has been met with disapproval in Helsinki since 2011, and there is no certainty that the design competition will gain public support for the project.
Richard Serra, East-West/West-East, image via Qatar Museums Authority
This spring, coinciding with his first major exhibition in the Middle East, American sculptor Richard Serra launched a public art commission in Qatar entitled East-West/West-East. Serra’s large-scale assemblies of sheet metal are famously minimal and massive, and this site-specific work in Qatar is absolutely monolithic.
LACMA campus and the La Brea Tar Pits alongside Wilshire Boulevard. Photograph by Monica Almeida, The New York Times.
We recently explored LACMA’s new campus plans – codylee.co/lacma.
In short, architect Peter Zumthor has designed a massive new pavilion to replace a dysfunctional set of older buildings. However, officials from the Page Museum identified that Zumthor’s new building could encroach upon and damage the adjacent La Brea Tar Pits, which are an active paleontological research site with important deposits of Ice Age-era fossils.
Today, revised designs show Zumthor’s amoeba-like building sparing the tar pits and instead spreading across Wilshire Boulevard. This is insane bold.
exterior view of the new Petersen Automotive Museum
The Petersen Automotive Museum first opened in 1994 in a former department store building at the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, across the street from LACMA and the forthcoming Academy Museum. It is one of the largest automotive museums in the world with a collection of more than 300 vehicles and other objects relating to the history of automobiles. Last summer, the Petersen announced a capital project to redesign its building to mark its 20th anniversary in 2014.
exterior view of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures
At the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, on the southwestern edge of LACMA’s campus, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences is constructing the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. The project is led by Renzo Piano—the starchitect of LACMA’s adjacent Broad and Resnick pavilions—and will include a renovation of the landmarked May Company Building.