Frank Gehry strikes again! The starchitect has revealed the plan for his first-ever Australian building, a business school. We’re wondering how the University of Technology Sydney feels about paying $150 million for a structure that’s been nicknamed The Treehouse and already looks like it’s melting or imploding or something. As for Gehry, he’s characteristically modest about his achievement: “Historically the great artists of our history have always been fascinated with the fold. Michaelangelo did many drawings, Leonardo Da Vinci did many drawings on that topic, and I’ve been fascinated with that topic.” [via UnBeige]
London’s 40-year-old Serpentine Gallery may have housed works by Man Ray, Andy Warhol, and Jeff Koons, but the gallery’s most impressive feature is its summer Pavilion series, which was created in 2000 by gallery director Julia Peyton-Jones. What started with Pritzker Prize winner Zaha Hadid’s steel structure became an annual invitation from the gallery for an architect to design an outdoor pavilion on its lawn.
The Pavilion project has attracted some of the most world renowned architects, none of whom had designed a building in England before (yes, that’s the one stipulation). With the financial backing from various sponsors (the gallery lacks any budget for the pavilions), these architects have been able to exert their creative freedom into a project that is completed in a mere six months, and on display for an even slighter 100 days. But no matter — roughly 250,000 visitors come each year, making the installation more than twice as popular as the Venice Architecture Biennale.
Today it was announced that controversial French architect Jean Nouvel is on board for 2010′s installation. Images from the past ten years of Serpentine Pavilions, plus a closer look at Nouvel’s mock-up, after the jump.
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Despite the clunky moniker, we read with interest as The Independent UK rattled off the seven — count ‘em, seven — relevant starchitects in the world, contrasting them with commercial building firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. SOM is a workhorse firm (established in 1936) that has put up major projects from Dubai to Beijing including five of the ten tallest buildings in the world — in other words, America’s first “super practice.” What SOM hasn’t hammered down is the je ne sais quoi of its flashier architectural contemporaries. A primer on the heavy hitters after the jump.
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Man oh man, Frank O. Gehry is not having a good month. (Maybe it’s true what they say about the end of January, no matter how starchitect-y you are.) Last week came the news that Gehry Partners is being axed as architect of record on the Museum of Tolerance in Israel; now we’re hearing wind of a stop-work order on New York’s own Beekman Tower. At least the band-aids are coming now, rather than three years after construction — as in the case of MIT’s Stata Center, over which Gehry was sued for breach of contract (read: leaks and cracked masonry) in 2007. See what the world will be missing in the form of Israel’s flashiest to-be building, after the jump.
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Edward Lifson of Hello Beautiful! recently took a jaunt outside of Sin City to check out a new Frank Gehry edifice for a medical center devoted to brain health. Currently under construction, the Lou Ruvo Center comprises two wings in different styles that crash and reverberate at a point of connection, creating a very Gehry-like dissonance that may also reference the two sides of the brain. Left side: ordered, linear, logical. Right side: creative, emotional, random. Click through for more images and see if you, too, can understand the architect formerly known as Ephraim Owen Goldberg.
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1. Movies about the world sucking and/or ending dominated the weekend box office. [via Gawker]
2. “That’s the great thing about art. Anybody can do it if you just believe. With practice, you can make great paintings.” – an interesting interview with Damien Hirst in the Guardian
3. Check out the Frank Gehry-designed hat that Lady Gaga was rocking at Saturday night’s MOCA gala. (During a five-minute production by video artist Francesco Vezzoli, she debuted her new song “Speechless” on a piano decorated by Hirst.) [via LAT]
4. Adult Swim is allowing fans to customize their own DVDs; for $20 you get to pick 110 minutes worth of episodes, customize the box art, and then they put it together for you. [via Collider]
5. New fiction from Sam Shepard; an excerpt of Nabokov’s The Original of Laura [via The New Yorker; The Times]
Apparently having one of the most iconic museum buildings in the world and a cultural influence so strong it’s spawned its own cute phrase (the “Bilbao effect”) isn’t enough for the Spanish outpost of the Guggenheim juggernaut. The Museo Guggenheim Bilbao has just announced plans for a satellite expansion a scant 40 km from its existing Gehry-designed command center. The proposed site is located in the Basque region near Guernica, itself a cynosure for art historians after Picasso’s rendition of the 1937 bombing massacre there during the Spanish Civil War.
Which begs the question: blight on or much-needed economic catalyst to a pristine but underdeveloped coastal region? We break down the numbers after the jump. Read More »
Today at Flavorpill, we were frightened by pictures of the Red Dust Down Under. We intrigued by Tim Burton’s Halloween-inspired fashion spread in Harper’s Bazaar. We snuck a peek at a scene from the White Stripes documentary. We decided if Lin-Manuel Miranda is involved with the Bring It On musical, it can’t be all bad. We met the real Smithers. We wondered what happened to Frank Gehry’s Corcoran Gallery of Art expansion. We watched the hunter become the hunted. And finally, we’ll leave you with the strange, NSFW promo video for Kanye West and Lady Gaga’s upcoming fall tour, which we’ve embedded after the jump. Enjoy! Read More »
DesignGuide.com is an online community of designers, architects, engineers, and other masters of the organized universe.
What makes this web-based community unique is its dual focus on the practical and cultural threads of the design discourse. Its most media-savvy aspect is the DG Movie House — a sub-site and email digest dedicated to rare films and archival videos, including interviews with architectural icons IM Pei, Louis Kahn, and Frank Gehry, plus clips featuring everyone from Brad Pitt to the Monty Python crew.
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Take one Paul Holdengraber (fabulously accented — and generally fabulous — director of LIVE from the New York Public Library), add 80-year-old architect Frank Gehry, count on outgoing LA Philharmonic conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, and throw in a dash of Barbara Isenberg, and you have a highbrow Monday night at the Celeste Bartos Forum. Read More »
