On November 11, the Louvre Abu Dhabi opened on Saadiyat Island, a cultural district off the coast of the capital city of the United Arab Emirates. The museum was designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel and is the result of a €1 billion agreement between Abu Dhabi and France.

The project was announced in 2007 with a contract in which Abu Dhabi agreed to pay €400 million to use the Louvre brand name for a period of 30 years, and €574 million more for French expertise and loans. The Agence France-Muséums, which includes the Louvre and 16 other institutions, will lend up to 300 artworks during the next 10 years; develop four temporary exhibitions each year for 15 years; and provide management and support for 20 years. The deal also included a €25 million renovation of part of the Louvre’s Pavilion de l’Horologe. Beyond this €1 billion agreement, Abu Dhabi paid for the €600 million construction cost of the new museum.

Jean Nouvel, whose other cultural projects include the Fondation Cartier, Musée du quai Branly, and Philharmonie de Paris, is especially suited for the Louvre Abu Dhabi. One of his best-known works is the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, a landmark building which established a French-Arab connection with Arabic design for a modern and international cultural institution. Nouvel has also designed the National Museum of Qatar, which is expected to open next year.

The 24,000-square-meter Louvre Abu Dhabi comprises 55 individual white gallery buildings arranged as a village on an archipelago in the Persian Gulf. The entire complex is sheltered by a vast dome structure that appears to float above the cluster of museum buildings. The 180-meter dome is supported by only four columns, which are hidden within buildings to create the floating effect. The dome weighs some 7,500 tons and consists of eight layers – four outer layers of stainless steel and four inner layers of aluminum separated by a five-meter steel frame.

The dome is the project’s defining characteristic, and is inspired by cupolas and mashrabiya windows found in traditional Arabic architecture. Its complex pattern results from geometric designs that are repeated at various sizes and angles in each of the eight layers, forming 7,850 star shapes. As the sun passes through, dappled light provides an ever-changing effect named the “rain of light.” At night, the dome becomes like a constellation when it is illuminated from within.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi has about 600 artworks in its own collection so far. The Agence France-Muséums has guided the acquisitions, but some early speculation was that the sheikhs might exclude nudity and non-Muslim religious art. However, a Bellini painting of the Madonna and Child, a Roman bronze of the Apollo Belvedere, and a Yemeni manuscript of the Hebrew Bible are among many works already on view that provide evidence to the contrary.

Unlike the Louvre in Paris, which does not collect, for example, American art or works created after 1850, the Louvre Abu Dhabi aims to be a universal museum with works from all places and periods, including contemporary art. Its inaugural exhibitions are described as twelve “chapters” that are curated thematically rather than by geography or chronology. Examples include Civilizations and Empires, A Modern World?, and A Global Stage, with works that range from a 2,700-year-old Grecian sphinx, to an Impressionist painting by Gustave Caillebotte, to a site-specific commissioned installation by Jenny Holzer.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi is the first universal museum in the Arab world, the Louvre’s first international satellite, and the first museum to open on Saadiyat Island, a $27 billion development off the coast of Abu Dhabi. The island’s planned cultural district includes the Louvre, a maritime museum designed by Tadao Ando, the Zayed National Museum designed by Norman Foster, a performing arts center designed by Zaha Hadid, and a Guggenheim museum designed by Frank Gehry.

While the Guggenheim and Zayed National Museum show no signs of progress (the British Museum recently terminated its partnership with the Zayed National Museum), Saadiyat Island does have a marina, luxury resorts and residential developments, a campus for New York University, and Manarat Al Saadiyat, a gallery complex. The emirate estimates that the island will be home to 150,000 people by 2020.

The UAE is a study in modern economics, architecture, urbanization, and now cultural development. The Louvre Abu Dhabi is the result of a unique international partnership described as “a new cultural beacon, bringing different cultures together to shine fresh light on the shared stories of humanity.” The museum, to say nothing of the larger ambition of Saadiyat Island, already changes perspectives and shifts the world’s cultural center of gravity further towards the East.

Louvre Abu Dhabi from The Art Newspaper.

The post Louvre Abu Dhabi appeared first on .

In Santander, about 60 miles west of Bilbao on Spain’s north coast, the new Centro Botín opened on Friday, June 23. The waterfront arts center was designed by Renzo Piano as a new regional museum along with the redevelopment of an urban park.

Unlike the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Centre Pompidou Málaga (Spain’s most notable and most recent museum projects, respectively) Centro Botín was completely privately funded. It was commissioned by the Botín family, whose Banco Santander is the largest bank in Spain. The Fundación Botín funded the center’s €80 million construction cost and will provide an annual budget of €12.5 million.

Centro Botín is Renzo Piano’s first building in Spain. The 10,285 square-meter structure is comprised of two wings. The west building contains 2,500 square meters of galleries on two floors, and the east building contains classrooms, an auditorium, restaurant, shop, and rooftop terrace. The two wings are separated in the middle and raised up above the ground to extend views from the nearby Jardines de Pereda to the bay.

About €16 million of the construction cost was to redevelop the park adjacent to the museum. The building site was formerly a parking lot, separating the Jardines de Pareda from Santander Bay. By moving a road and a parking structure underground, the project doubled the size of the park, tripled the amount of green space, and reconnected the city to the bay. The park also gained an amphitheater, which functions as an open-air cinema with a screen on the museum’s west façade.

Centro Botín is characteristic of other Renzo Piano museum buildings (he has designed more than 25 to date) with natural light and a carefully balanced relationship to the surrounding environment. The exterior is clad with 270,000 ceramic plates that reflect the colors of the sea and sky. Inside, ventilation systems and lighting tracks are exposed, and full-height windows provide views of the bay.

Before Centro Botín opened, it gave memberships for unlimited free admission to about 80,000 locals and announced a schedule of free programs in the park and amphitheater. The museum was inaugurated by King Felipe VI of Spain, and also opened a permanent sculpture installation in the Jardines by the Spanish artist Cristina Iglesias.

While Centro Botín is a major cultural development, it does not aim to replicate the “Bilbao effect” of mass tourism and blockbuster exhibitions. Its primary missions are research, training, and dissemination. It has a research partnership with Yale University, and the exhibitions program has a particular focus on researching and cataloguing Spanish drawings from the 16^th century. One of the museum’s inaugural exhibitions was a group of 80 drawings by Francisco de Goya on loan from the Prado. In addition to changing exhibitions, the center will show works from the collection of the Fundación Botín.

The post Centro Botín appeared first on .

After a three-year expansion and renovation, the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opened to the public this weekend. The museum has more than doubled in size and is now the largest modern and contemporary art museum in the US.

SFMOMA was founded in 1935 and occupied the Beaux-Arts style War Memorial Building for 60 years. In 1995, the museum opened a building designed by the Swiss architect Mario Botta. That same year, interestingly, SFMOMA was one of the first museums to launch an internet website.

The new building was designed the Norwegian firm Snøhetta, whose notable projects have included the Oslo Opera House and the Lillehammer Art Museum. Rather than modify the Botta building, Snøhetta’s 235,000-square-foot expansion rises above it with a white façade that conceals its mass with rippling forms, outdoor terraces, and setback upper levels.

On its first and second floors, the museum’s new building offers some 45,000 square feet of gallery space that is open to the public for free. The inaugural installation includes Richard Serra’s 2006 Sequence.

The new building fills seven floors with gallery space, and three more floors with a library, classrooms, theater, café, shop, and staff areas. SFMOMA now totals 460,000 square feet with 170,000 square feet of gallery space—20,000 square feet more than MoMA in New York.

Four floors contain galleries dedicated to the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection, which comprises 1,100 postwar and contemporary works owned by the founders of Gap. The former SFMOMA trustees gave their collection as a long-term loan, with a requirement that the current installation of about 260 works must be repeated once every decade for 100 years.

The expansion project broke ground in 2013, but SFMOMA’s capital campaign began in 2009. The museum raised a total of $610 million by late last year, counting $305 million for construction costs, $245 million for endowment funds, and $60 million for programming and operating expenses. In addition to the new building’s free public gallery spaces, SFMOMA now offers free admission for visitors under age 18.

The post The New SFMOMA appeared first on .

In Rio de Janeiro, the Museu do Amanhã (Museum of Tomorrow) has opened just in time to become, perhaps, the most incredible new museum of 2015. Designed by Santiago Calatrava, the Museu do Amanhã is the showpiece of a redeveloped cultural district.

In 2009, Rio launched the Porto Maravilha (Marvelous Port) project to redevelop the waterfront district north of downtown. An elevated highway was replaced with a promenade, historic buildings were restored, and the Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR) opened in 2013. The Museu do Amanhã is the most visible feature of Porto Maravilha but has a larger significance for Brazil, and the world, beyond the port.

The Museu do Amanhã is an astonishing landmark. It appears to float on water, surrounded by reflecting pools and by Guanabara Bay. The soaring trussed roof cantilevers over public plazas, extending past the building by 45 meters on one side and 75 meters on the other, with a maximum height of 18 meters above the city-facing public plaza.

The museum is massive but efficient, using 40 percent less energy than typical buildings. The roof functions as a brise-soleil with movable photovoltaic panels that provide solar energy, and water from the bay is used for the cooling systems and to fill the reflecting pools outside.

These sustainable design features align with the museum’s exhibitions, which consider the origins of our planet and it’s possible futures, addressing climate change, population growth, consumption, and biodiversity. A film explicates billions of years of Earth’s history, an interactive allows visitors to calculate their own environmental impacts, and video screens stream real-time figures of consumption and films of environmental disasters. The narrative is (literally, in three languages), “We have lived on earth for 200,000 years. Since 1950 we have modified the planet more than in our whole existence. We are more. We consume more. More. More. More.”

The museum’s architect, Santiago Calatrava, is well-known for bridges and railway stations, and his neofuturist style has been applied to civic projects including the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències in Valencia, Spain. In Rio de Janeiro, the design and function of the Museu do Amanhã may draw comparison to Oscar Niemeyer’s futurist buildings in Brasilia, which attempted utopian ideals with architecture and city planning. 500 miles away and fifty years later, the redevelopment of the Porto Maravilha is a relatively smaller project, but the content of the Museu do Amanhã has a much larger focus.

The $54 million Museu do Amanhã project was funded the City of Rio de Janeiro and the government of Brazil, as well as the Roberto Marinho Foundation, Banco Santander, and BG Group.

The post Museu do Amanhã appeared first on .

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has announced that Moreau Kusunoki Architectes is the winner of the Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition. The French architecture firm’s design, Art in the City, is proposed for a site at Eteläsatama on Helsinki’s South Harbor. The Finnish outpost would be the Guggenheim’s fifth museum, and its third in Europe, if it is constructed.

See our previous coverage: Guggenheim Helsinki? Not so fast…

The Guggenheim Foundation has museums in New York, Venice, and Bilbao, and another under construction in Abu Dhabi. Plans for a museum in Helsinki began in 2011 with a proposal that called for the city and state to provide €130 million for construction, €23.4 million for a licensing fee plus another €2 million annually, half the estimated annual operating costs of €14.4 million, and a merger with (or a closure of) the Helsinki Art Museum.

The city rejected the plan, and the Guggenheim submitted a revised proposal that removed the licensing fee, halved the operations fee, reduced projected operating costs, and spared the Helsinki Art Museum. Additionally, an independent study estimated that the new Guggenheim could generate $56 million for the city each year and create 500 permanent jobs in and around the museum. The new proposal moved forward and the Guggenheim announced an international design competition last June.

By September, the Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition received 1,715 entries from 77 countries. In December, the jury shortlisted six proposals for further concept development. The six designs—by AGPS Architecture (Zurich), Asif Khan (London), Fake Industries Architectural Agonism (Brooklyn), Haas Cook zemmrich STUDIO 2050 (Stuttgart),SMAR Architects (Madrid), and Moreau Kusunoki Architectes (Paris)—were presented in a public exhibition at the Kunsthalle Helsinki this spring.

The winning team of Moreau Kusunoki Architectes is a Parisian firm founded by husband and wife Nicolas Moreau and Hiroko Kusunoki. They have designed other cultural projects including a theater in Beauvais, a contemporary art center in Marseille, and a university building in Bourget du Lac. Their proposal for Helsinki combines traditional building materials in a transparent campus that opens to the sea and the city.

Art in the City is comprised of nine pavilions connected by glass-walled corridors, with views onto Helsinki’s South Harbor and Observatory Park. Six of the pavilions will contain galleries totaling about 4,000 square-meters of exhibition space, comparable in size to the Guggenheim’s iconic building in New York. The three remaining pavilions will contain a performance hall, educational space, administrative offices, and collections facilities. Glassed-walled gardens and concave roofs with clerestories will permit light into the buildings. The tallest pavilion will contain a restaurant under a glazed top, and has been called a lookout tower or lighthouse.

The exteriors will be clad in charred black wood, which is traditional in Finland and often seen on rural churches. The site will be oriented toward South Harbor with a long promenade and will be connected to Observatory Park by a pedestrian bridge. An official statement from the eleven-member jury describes that they “found the design deeply respectful of the site and setting, creating a fragmented, nonhierarchical, horizontal campus of linked pavilions where art and society could meet and intermingle.”

The project is not without opposition. Beyond the city’s rejection of the 2011 proposal, some Finns are dubious of the Guggenheim’s costs and benefits. While the “Bilbao effect” has been touted in support of cultural projects in cities around the globe, the Guggenheim doesn’t always produce winners. It previously had museums in Las Vegas and Berlin that closed in 2008 and 2013, respectively, and is now accused of complicity in labor abuses and human rights violations in the construction of the Abu Dhabi project.

Moreover, Finns are not entirely convinced that Helsinki needs the Guggenheim. Like other Scandinavian countries, Finland has a distinct visual culture of modern design and local artists. In contrast, the Guggenheim is an international brand of mega-museum. The only other major cultural site in Helsinki by an international architect is the Kiasma, a contemporary art museum designed by Steven Holl (New York). Kiasma opened in 1998 to some opposition and concerns about the incursion of starchitecture, but since then it has become a much-admired feature of the city.

Helsinki has given provisional approval for the project site at Eteläsatama, and the Moreau Kusunoki design seems incredibly refined, but don’t expect a groundbreaking event just yet. Even if Helsinki’s city board accepts the Guggenheim’s proposal, it will still need approval from the eighty-five-member city council. Finland is ascendant but still facing austerity, so public funding for a private museum may be a bigger competition than the one for the design.

The post Guggenheim Helsinki Design Revealed appeared first on .

Last summer we explored designs and plans for The Broad: codylee.co/the-broad.

As the project nears completion, we had an exclusive sneak peek on February 15 in advance of the museum’s September 20 opening.

The Broad is a major addition to LA’s Grand Avenue cultural district that includes MOCA and the Music Center. The $140 million building was designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro with a “veil and vault” concept that permits natural light into the galleries. The much-anticipated museum opened for a preview this Sunday with a rare opportunity to see its third floor – an impressive uninterrupted 35,000-square-foot gallery space – before the installation of partition walls.

The building’s first and second floors are still under construction and unfortunately inaccessible. Rather than the stairway or cylindrical glass elevator that ascend through the vault at the core of the building, visitors on Sunday arrived at the third floor through a freight elevator that will soon transport works by Jeff Koons, Keith Haring, and Cindy Sherman for the museum’s inaugural exhibition.

The honeycomb-like exterior filters daylight into the third floor through the roof and glass walls on the north, east, and south sides. From inside, the veil provides limited views onto Walt Disney Concert Hall, MOCA, and The Broad’s new public plaza that has been planted with 100-year-old olive trees. LA’s perpetual sunshine, permitted through more than 300 skylights, is a primary feature of the gallery. The building’s scale and light conditions make it feel surprisingly understated and not at all austere.

For this one-day event, titled Sky-lit: Volume, Light, and Sound, The Broad commissioned two installations. BJ Nilsen’s DTLA was an audio collage of recordings from neighborhoods surrounding the museum, and after sunset, Yann Novak’s Stillness projected atmospheric images of Los Angeles and Seattle onto the gallery’s 200-foot west wall. The installations emphasized The Broad’s architecture, site, and environment.

When the museum opens in September, it will house 2,000 postwar and contemporary artworks from The Broad Art Foundation and the personal collection of Eli and Edythe Broad. It will operate with an endowment of more than $200 million and admission will be free. Sunday’s preview event sold out within minutes of availability and media buzzed with images all day. Meanwhile, a line formed across the street for admission to the final day of MOCA’s Andy Warhol exhibition.

See codylee.co/the-broad for our earlier post.

The post The Broad: Sky-Lit appeared first on .

It has been a great few weeks—actually, a great year—for new museum buildings. It gets even better this weekend when the Harvard Art Museums will open a new building. The incredible structure, designed by Renzo Piano, unites Harvard’s three separate museums under a vast glass roof.

The Fogg Museum with American and western European art, the Busch-Reisinger Museum with Germanic and northern European art, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum with Asian, Islamic, and Indian art share administration but previously operated in separate buildings. In 2006, a renovation and expansion project was announced to renovate the facilities and combine the three museums. Renzo Piano was selected as the architect and construction began in 2008.

The red brick exterior of the Fogg’s 1927 Georgian Revival-style building has been preserved, and its original travertine-vaulted courtyard is a significant feature of the renovated space. An entirely new structure, covered in New England-y gray cedar, expands the museum to a total of 240,000 square feet with 43,000 square feet of gallery spaces, a public courtyard, shop, café, theater, classrooms, and research spaces. All of this is contained under the transparent glass roof, which is the most distinctive characteristic of the new facility.

Carefully controlled natural light is a hallmark of Renzo Piano’s museum buildings. At Harvard, the pyramidal glass roof above the historic building streams daylight onto the arcaded courtyard of the original building and into glass-walled spaces of the new building’s upper floors. A system of 1,800 glass louvers over triple-insulated glass panels and automated shades protects artworks from direct light and ultraviolet rays.

Piano has called the glass roof a “glazed lantern” and a “light machine.” Harvard’s president, Drew Faust, calls the museum a “teaching machine” for visitors to learn about the newly combined collection of 250,000 objects.

The Art Study Center allows visitors to request works for close and extended viewing; the Lightbox Gallery provides technology to further explore museum collections and archives; the Special Exhibitions Gallery presents new research on artistic practice; the University Galleries allow professors to set aside specific artworks for study in their courses; and, on the top floor, the glass-walled Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies lets visitors see conservators and researchers at work. The new building, and its programs, extend accessibility and transparency.

The Harvard Art Museums will open to the public on November 16 after six years of renovations and expansion. The project is estimated to have cost around $350 million, including $250 million for renovations and $67 million for operating endowments.

Bonus facts:

– Renzo Piano has designed at least 25 museum projects, including the Broad and Resnick pavilions at LACMA, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée d’art Contemporain in Lyon, and the Fondation Beyeler near Basel.

– The Straus Center has a collection of over 2,000 pigments that can be used for restoration and are now visible through glass walls.

– The Fogg building’s Calderwood Courtyard was designed after the façade of the canon’s house of the 15th-century church of San Biagio in Montepulciano, Italy.

The post Harvard Art Museums appeared first on .

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.

Bernard Arnault is the billionaire chairman and chief executive of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the largest luxury conglomerate in the world with brands including Louis Vuitton, Dior, Fendi, Givenchy, and Dom Pérignon. He is also a major art collector with a collection including works by Monet, Picasso, Henry Moore, and Yves Klein.

Arnault selected Frank Gehry to design his museum after a visit to Gehry’s best-known project, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which is archetypal of his deconstructivist style with striking (but functionless) exterior forms wrapped in metal. Other major projects by Ghery include the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and the forthcoming Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

For the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Gehry designed an assemblage of blocks, described as icebergs, surrounded by immense glass panels described as sails. The white iceberg blocks are clad in 19,000 individual panels of fiber-reinforced concrete, and twelve sails, on a frame of steel and wood beams, are comprised of 3,600 individual panels of glass. The building totals 126,000 square feet, containing eleven galleries, an auditorium, restaurant, and bookstore.

Construction began in 2008 and it is reported that costs have exceeded $135 million. The building has achieved a Haute Qualité Environmentale (HQE) certification of Très Performant, which is considered equivalent to LEED Gold. The ground-level entrance hall opens onto a water garden in the Jardin d’Acclimatation to create an active social space in the transition between the building and the landscape.

The building’s position in the Bois de Boulogne is noteworthy. At the western edge of the posh 16^th arrondissement of Paris, the Bois de Boulogne is the city’s second-largest public park and borders the Seine between central Paris and La Défense. Above the treetops, the Fondation gains views onto the city beyond. From afar, the shimmering glass building appears as an oversized and abstracted orangerie. The site remains a public park, and the Fondation has been granted a 55-year lease so that the building will revert to public ownership in 2062.

The museum’s first exhibitions will be announced only a few days in advance of the opening, but some speculations are on installations by Olafur Eliasson, Taryn Simon, and Sarah Morris. The Fondation’s permanent collection includes works by all three, and many others including Francis Bacon, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, and Richard Serra.

The museum for the Fondation Louis Vuitton is an expansion of LVMH and Arnault’s cultural patronage, which includes the Open Days initiative in which luxury brands open their ateliers to the public; the LVMH Young Fashion Designer Prize; a series of internships and degree programs with professional schools that aim to cultivate a new generation of designers and craftspeople; and a range of commissions and sponsorships. Much of this follows a philosophy that luxury brands, with an association of heritage and tradition, can ennoble themselves by supporting arts and culture.

Learn more at http://www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr/

The post Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris appeared first on .

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.

Île Seguin has a long and varied history. It was owned by the Abbey of St. Victor from the mid-12th century, and a bridge across the island linked the primary route between Paris and Versailles in the 17th century when it was known as the Île de Sève. Louix XV acquired it in the 18th century, and it fell under state ownership after the revolution. The island was acquired by Armand Seguin, the eponymous industrialist, in 1794, and by Louis Renault in 1919. Renault built France’s largest factory there, employing more than 30,000 people, and Île Seguin produced cars until the great but antiquated factory closed in 1992. The buildings were razed by 2005, and the island in the Seine became an industrial wasteland.

In 2001, Tadao Ando was selected to design a museum for the Francois Pinault Foundation on Île Seguin. The project was abandoned, and Ando renovated the Punta della Dogana in Venice for the Pinault collection.

In 2011, the municipality of Boulogne-Billancourt launched a private cultural project with the Société Civile Immobilière R4 (SCI R4) to construct an artistic micro-city on Île Seguin as part of a larger urban development project, Trapèze. The Trapèze project, which extends onto the right bank of the Seine at Boulogne-Billancourt, aims to create an entire urban zone of mixed-use development centered on the cultural environment on Île Seguin. Jean Nouvel—the French architect whose projects include the Institut du Monde Arabe and Musée du quai Branly in Paris, and the forthcoming Louvre Abu Dhabi and National Museum of Qatar—was selected as the R4 project’s designer.

Also in 2011, the Fondation Cartier, the Paris-based contemporary art foundation, commissioned designs from Jean Nouvel for a new base on Île Seguin. In 2014, the Fondation announced that it would instead expand its current facilities on Boulevard Raspail, which Nouvel designed in 1994.

Notwithstanding the loss of the Fondation Cartier as an anchor institution, the R4 development will share Île Seguin with the Cité Musicale, a 36,000 square meter concert hall that will include facilities for the Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris. The hall was designed by Shigeru Ban, the Japanese architect whose projects include the Centre Pompidou-Metz and the very recently opened Aspen Art Museum. The Cité Musicale is backed by a partnership with the Hauts-de-Seine Conseil Général and is expected to open in 2016, with construction having already begun.

R4 is expected to open in late 2017 with more than 30,000 square meters of space to support a visual arts community. There will be dozens of artists’ studios and workshops, twenty commercial galleries, a multi-purpose exhibition hall, a conference center, auction salesrooms, and other spaces to create the infrastructure of an international cultural hub on Île Seguin. Further, R4 aims to develop teaching programs in partnership with universities, and the larger Trapèze development may include office towers, a hotel, and a center for cinema and digital arts.

In advance of construction, Boulogne-Billancourt and R4 have begun a program of cultural events to activate Île Seguin, attracting 500,000 visitors in three years. A temporary Pavillon sur l’île Seguin hosts exhibitions about the island’s evolution and a public garden was designed on the old Renault factory outlines. In 2012, Île Seguin was the site of an exhibition for FIAC, the Paris-based modern and contemporary art fair. The island has also hosted Cirque en Chantier and Cirque du Soleil, a performance by Bjork, and a video art festival.

While not publicly reported, the investment in R4 is estimated to be above €100 million. The project’s founder is the Swiss investor Yves Bouvier, whose company, Natural Le Coultre, specializes in the logistics and transport of art. He is also the founder and president of Singapore Freeport, a company that set up and manages the first Freeport in Asia, and a majority shareholder in freeports in Hong Kong and Luxembourg. The President of SCI R4, Nelly Wenger, is a civil engineer whose own company provides strategic management for urban and cultural development projects.

The post R4, Île Seguin appeared first on .

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.

The Guggenheim Foundation is a leading institution for the collection, preservation, and research of modern and contemporary art. It has word-class collections, a considerable endowment, and operates several international museums. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York opened in 1959, and its renowned modern spiral building is the only museum ever designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice occupies the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, an 18th-century palazzo along the Grand Canal. The Guggenheim Bilbao and the forthcoming Guggenheim Abu Dhabi were each designed by starchitect Frank Gehry.

Among these, the Guggenheim in Bilbao provides the model for the proposal in Helsinki. In 1991, the Basque government launched the project with a budget of $100 million for construction, $50 million for art acquisitions, $20 million for a one-time fee to the Guggenheim, and ongoing subsidies for operating costs. From its opening in 1997, the Guggenheim Bilbao has been an economic success. There were nearly 4 million tourists in the first three years, generating €500 million in regional economic activity and development that transformed the blighted port area into the region’s top tourist destination. The success has been so great that the “Bilbao effect” is a regular description for the urban renewal that other cities try to replicate by developing art museums and cultural attractions.

In Helsinki, the Guggenheim’s first proposal in 2011 called for the city and state to provide €130 million for construction costs, €23.4 million for a one-time licensing fee to the Guggenheim, €2 million annually for an operations fee to the Guggenheim, and half of the estimated annual operating costs of €14.4 million. The proposal also included a merger with (or a closure of) the Helsinki Art Museum. Residents opposed the project and the city council rejected the plan in 2012.

In 2013, the Guggenheim Foundation submitted a revised proposal for Helsinki. In short, it eliminates the merger with Helsinki Art Museum; removes the €23.4 million licensing fee, now to be funded by private sources; halves the €2 million operations fee to €1 million annually; reduces projected operating costs by 10 percent; increases visitor projections by 10 percent; and, notably, proposes a different building site at Eteläsatama on the opposite side of Helsinki’s South Harbor and away from the primary historical areas.

Critics of the plan identify that the Guggenheim would benefit without taking any financial risk, as Helsinki and Finland are expected to cover all of the costs. Moreover, the Finnish Ministry of Culture has no budget for the project so that funding would require either new taxes or budget cuts for other museums and cultural institutions. Many Finns are dubious of the proposal, which asks Helsinki to subsidize the Guggenheim. Even if some politicians and developers are eager to attract the Guggenheim brand with some new starchitecture to boost tourism, the desired Bilbao effect may be incongruous for Helsinki.

Bilbao was largely industrial until the decline of its port, mining, and ironworks industries in the 1980s. The Basque government’s investment in the Guggenheim’s construction and operations repaid the region nearly within a year of its opening, with €500 million in new economic activity within three years. With the Guggenheim as the centerpiece of the city’s revitalization, tourism in Bilbao increased from 25,000 in 1995 to more than 1 million in 1998, and stabilized at 615,000 since 2009.

Helsinki generates about one-third of all of Finland’s GDP and is on par, per capita, with Stockholm and Paris. The Finnish capital, however, does not expect such stunning figures as Bilbao. The Guggenheim Foundation projects €41 million in economic impact based on annual attendance of 550,000 visitors—more than twice the number of visitors to Helsinki’s popular contemporary art museum Kiasma, and even more than the renowned and relatively near Moderna Museet in Stockholm. The Bilbao effect will not happen in Helsinki if these projections fall short, and certainly not if the Guggenheim’s funding decreases support for the Helsinki Art Museum, Kiasma, and other arts institutions.

If Bilbao is not analogous to Helsinki, what about other global museum outposts? The Louvre in Lens, the Pompidou in Metz, the forthcoming Guggenheim and Louvre museums in Abu Dhabi… None of these projects are comparable to the proposal for a Guggenheim in Helsinki.

The Louvre-Lens, which opened in 2012, and the Pompidou-Metz, which opened in 2010, are satellites of national museums in France. They function to decentralize the national collections beyond Paris, in order to be more accessible to the entire country. Both museums have increased provincial tourism and redevelopment, but these are secondary results to the primary investment of building museums to extend the national collections.

Abu Dhabi is relatively new, incredibly wealthy, and populated with expatriates building a horizon of starchitect skyscrapers. The UAE has an incredibly rich cultural history, but relatively little cultural infrastructure. The Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by Jean Nouvel and scheduled to open in 2015, and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, designed by Frank Gehry and scheduled to open in 2017, are funded by a city that is incredibly wealthy in capital but not in the arts. Abu Dhabi’s deal with the Louvre, including construction costs and ongoing support, will total more than $1.3 billion over 30 years. Abu Dhabi’s deal with the Guggenheim Foundation is not reported but is assumed to be comparable. In both cases, one of the world’s wealthiest cities is commissioning new museums for cultural rather than economic development.

There is no precedent for the Guggenheim’s model of expansion and branding. Bilbao is the model for urban renewal by cultural investment, but can it work in Helsinki where the projected figures are both optimistic and modest? A design competition for the museum building was announced in June 2014 and the jury is expected to select a winning architect in a year. Then, Helsinki will decide again whether the Guggenheim’s brand will become part of the Finnish art world.

The post Guggenheim Helsinki? Not so fast… appeared first on .

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.

About an hour from Doha, across the Qatari peninsula in the Brouq Nature Reserve, the piece is an isolated destination. The trip to East-West/West-East requires an off-road vehicle and a GPS.

In a vast desert landscape, four vertical steel plates are aligned in a one-kilometer line between two plateaus, perpendicular to the horizon between them. They range in height from about 48 to 54 feet so that they are level with one another and with the topography. The pillars already have developed Serra’s characteristic rust patina, and the surface will often be too hot to touch in the desert where summer temperatures exceed 120F. With such height and mass, East-West/West-East is monolithic within the sublime landscape, and almost seems to be older than the crumbling cliffs around it.

East-West/West-East and the aforementioned exhibition were commissioned by the Qatar Museums Authority. QMA was created in 2005 to direct Qatar’s museums and art collection, which are expanding at at incredible pace.

Designed by I.M. Pei, the Museum of Islamic Art opened in 2008 with collections spanning twelve centuries and three continents. Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art opened in 2010 with a collection of more than 6,000 works, and the National Museum of Qatar, designed by Jean Nouvel, is scheduled to open in late 2014.

Under the leadership of Sheikha Al Mayassa Bint Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani – sister of the current Emir of Qatar – QMA has commissioned public works by artists including Richard Serra, Louise Bourgeois, Damien Hirst, and Urs Fischer. It is estimated that QMA spends more than $1 billion on art acquisitions and new commissions each year.

The post Richard Serra and Qatar appeared first on .

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.

The May Company Building dates to 1939 and its facade is considered a primary example of that decade’s Streamline Moderne style. Its cylindrical gold tower marked the entrance to LA’s leading department store and the western entrance to the Miracle Mile district. Its long horizontal lines suggested the aerodynamic shapes of airplanes and ocean liners with the same modernity but less ornamentation than Art Deco. The city of Los Angeles designated the facade a historic cultural monument in 1992. Nothing of architectural significance remains inside the building, but the exterior will be preserved for the Academy Museum.

A five-story glass “spine” building with stairs and elevators will connect the May Company building to a large, glass spherical addition to the north that will contain a theater and roof terrace. The glass sphere, dubbed “the spaceship,” will be adjacent to LACMA’s Resnick Exhibition Pavilion and will occupy the rest of the western border of the campus, facing Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass that is permanently installed on LACMA’s lawn.

The street level of the May Company building will become the museum’s entrance and lobby, with a cafe and a shop, and access to LACMA’s campus to the north and east from a 15,000 square foot public piazza. The street level will also contain galleries and access to the sub-level which will contain permanent exhibition galleries and a demonstration stage.

Moving up from the street level, the mezzanine level will feature a multifunctional space leading to the entrance of a 1,000 seat theater inside the massive glass sphere. The state-of-the-art theater inside the spaceship will be the museum’s most recognizable feature and will host film premieres, Academy screenings, and other special events. The theater will be named for David Geffen, the entertainment executive who has made the largest gift to date—$25 million—to the Academy Museum’s $300 million capital campaign.

The second and fourth floors will include more galleries and two smaller 141-seat theaters, and the third floor will be the museum’s education center. The fifth floor will open to a rooftop terrace with panoramic views to the Hollywood hills, as well as another special events and garden terrace that will accommodate 1,000 guests.

Construction will begin in late 2014 and the museum is expected to open in 2017. Kerry Brougher, whose resume includes the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC and MOCA in Los Angeles, has been selected as director.

Bonus facts:

– LA-based Zoltan Pali was already working on a renovation of the May Company building when Renzo Piano was selected for the Academy Museum project in 2012. It is reported that Pali left the project in May, 2014.

– The Academy has a collection of more than 10 million photographs, 165,000 films, 80,000 screenplays, 50,000 posters, and 20,000 design drawings.

– LACMA owns the May Company building and adjacent property where the Academy Museum will be constructed. The Academy will pay LACMA $36.1 million for what is effectively a 110-year lease.

The post New Museum in LA: The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures appeared first on .

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is the largest art museum in the Western United States with more than 120,000 works in its permanent collection and more than 1 million visitors annually. Its collection is encyclopedic, its programs are exemplary, and its leadership is solid, but LACMA’s mid-Wilshire campus is a hot mess.

The first phase of LACMA’s campus was designed by LA-based architect William Pereira and opened in 1965. Three modernist and mostly windowless buildings – the Ahmanson, Hammer, and Bing buildings – surrounded a central plaza and were themselves surrounded by reflecting pools. The pools suffered from proximity to the famous La Brea Tar Pits and were filled in 1975 to become gardens and sculpture courts.

By 1986 the museum had outgrown the Pereira buildings and commissioned the architectural firm of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates for the 115,000-square-foot addition now known as the Art of the Americas Building. The building provided four floors of much-needed gallery space, but forms a 300-foot blank edifice along Wilshire Boulevard and encloses the central courtyard.

In 1988 LACMA opened the Pavilion for Japanese Art, designed by Bruce Goff, on the eastern side of the campus near the tar pits. The exterior walls are translucent panels, like shoji screens, to permit natural light into the galleries. A large spiral ramp with viewing platforms, organic shapes and colors, and carpeted walls provide elegant spaces for a collection representing nearly 5,000 years of Japanese material and visual culture.

LACMA’s trustees commissioned Renzo Piano for a plan to expand the 20-acre campus to the west in 2004, including new gallery spaces, a parking structure, and an entry pavilion. The first phase opened in 2008 with a cost of $191 million, including the new 60,000-square-foot Broad Contemporary Art Museum. The $54 million Resnick Exhibition Pavilion opened with an additional 40,000 square feet in 2010 next to the BCAM.

The exteriors are clad in pale travertine marble with vibrant red highlights on mechanical and structural features – signature visual elements that have been incorporated into LACMA’s branding. The interior galleries are incredibly large with spaces that accommodate multiple simultaneous exhibitions or large-scale works of art. The Resnick pavilion is the world’s largest purpose-built, naturally lit, open-plan gallery space. As with other Renzo Piano museums, both pavilions feature a carefully designed system of north-facing skylights that illuminate the galleries during the day and glow from within at night.

Each of LACMA’s buildings are architecturally significant, but the campus is disjointed with particular problems in the older buildings. The Pereira buildings have lost their original aesthetic and the Art of the Americas building feels detached with no obvious circulation path inside or among the buildings. The visitor experience is confounding, and programming the unconnected spaces must be just as troublesome. Last year, LACMA presented a solution with a proposed design by Peter Zumthor.

Zumthor’s preliminary plans for a new museum building were presented in the 2013 exhibition The Presence of the Past: Peter Zumthor Reconsiders LACMA, which provided an overview of LACMA’s campus development alongside models of a massive new building. The new design does not affect the Japanese pavilion or the Renzo Piano buildings, but requires that the Pereira and Art of the Americas buildings be demolished and replaced with a singular, curvy, glass-walled building elevated above the street level.

From above, the new building will resemble an inkblot stretching from Urban Light east toward the Japanese pavilion and the tar pits. At the street level, LACMA’s campus will once again open toward Wilshire Boulevard and to the surrounding park. Several stairwells will provide entrance to the building and also support it, with the new galleries across a single elevated level totaling some 400,000 square feet. The museum’s total square footage will not significantly increase, but the new building will actually provide more gallery space for installation and programming. The entire exterior will be wrapped in glass, permitting natural light into the galleries and providing views in from across the street.

LACMA has launched a $650 million capital campaign, including construction costs of $450 million and $200 million for contingencies and operations. A solar roof may produce more energy than the building will require, and its greater efficiency could save $5 million each year in operating costs. Construction and opening dates are not yet announced.

Images above:
Pereira, Goff, and Piano building images from LACMA
Zumthor model images from LACMA

June 24, 2014, Update:  codylee.co/lacma-update

The post New Museum in LA: LACMA appeared first on .

Eli Broad has been a primary benefactor of the LA art world for decades. He was the founding chairman of MOCA in 1979 and is a lifetime trustee. In 2008, The Broad Foundation gave MOCA a $30 million bailout after its endowment had been depleted. Broad is also a lifetime trustee at LACMA, where The Broad Foundation gave $60 million for the Renzo Piano-designed Broad Contemporary Art Museum building. In total, the Broads have given over $800 million to LA’s art institutions.

Simultaneously, the Broads and The Broad Art Foundation have developed a combined art collection of nearly 2,000 important modern and contemporary works. So, Eli Broad is building a new museum.

The Broad is being constructed on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. It will be across from MOCA and adjacent to the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall, essentially at the center of the Grand Avenue Project, which Eli Broad co-founded to develop a cultural center around downtown’s Bunker Hill and Civic Center. The three-story, 120,000-square-foot building is expected to achieve LEED Silver certification and is being constructed at a cost of $140 million.

The Broad was designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro with an innovative “veil and vault” program to connect, conceptually and physically, outward public exhibition spaces with interior archive and work spaces. The exterior of the building will feature a honeycomb-like veil which will function as a brise-soleil to filter daylight into the building. The interior core of the building will contain the vault, with spaces for art storage, museum offices, and a lecture hall. The veil will be constructed of steel and glass-fiber-reinforced concrete by the German firm Seele. The vault is being constructed on site with some 36 million pounds of concrete.

At the street-level, the veil lifts at one corner to provide entrance from Grand Avenue into the public lobby, a shop, a multimedia space, and a 105-foot escalator that ascends directly to the third floor. The second floor will contain the vault. Its underside will shape the ceiling of the lobby below, its roof will be the floor of the third floor gallery, and its interior will be interrupted by the escalator, providing interior views as visitors ascend through the core of building. The third floor will be skylit and column-free, providing an astonishing 35,000 square feet of uninterrupted gallery space.

The Broad will activate an adjacent plaza, also designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, to extend the public space with an open landscaped corridor from Grand Avenue to a future Metro station near 2nd Street. The museum is set to open in 2015 and will provide free admission.

Bonus facts:
– The Broad Art Museum at the University of Michigan was designed by Zaha Hadid.
– Diller Scofidio + Renfro also designed the High Line in Manhattan, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and the new Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

February 16, 2015, update:  codylee.co/skylit-broad/

The post New Museum in LA: The Broad appeared first on .