The picks of the week from around the web.
Archive for the 'architecture' Category
In which I go to the Venice Architecture Biennial, so you don’t have to. Continue reading ‘No Architects’
I was in Bassano del Grappa today. A beautiful small Medieval/Renaissance town scenically situated in the foothills of the Dolemites, it’s well worth a visit. Palladio’s famous pontoon bridge is elegant, almost timeless in its grace, and the collection at the city museum of pictures by the town’s greatest artist son Jacopo del Ponte, aka. Jacopo Bassano, is both grand and moving. His best work is earthy and rustic, yet possessed of a luminous spirituality that transcends the profane. Continue reading ‘Walls — Bassano’
Just returned from a short, sweet trip to Barcelona. Found this on a wall, in one of the many recesses of Gaudí’s Sagrada Família. Made me think of this passage from Leonardo’s notebooks:
“… if you look at any walls soiled with a variety of stains, or stones with variegated patterns, when you have to invent some location, you will therein be able to see a resemblance to various landscapes graced with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, great valleys and hills in any combinations. Or again you will be able to see various battles and figures darting about, strange-looking faces and costumes, and an endless number of things which you can distill into finely-rendered forms. And what happens with regard to such walls and variegated stones is just as with the sound of bells, in whose peal you will find any name or word you care to imagine.”
Somehow auspiciously appropriate in that particular building.
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Vacation and work have kept me away for a while, a will probably continue to do so for a little while yet. While in Boston, I checked back on one of the city’s premier cultural institutions.
The new wing of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston is emblematic of museum branding today, all the more so because of the particular intractability of its foundational stipulations. In a cultural climate where having a great collection simply isn’t enough, institutional visibility has become closely tied to event culture. for a museum that can’t even rehang its collection, this is of course a problem, so what do you do? Raise $180 million and hire go-to starchitect Renzo Piano to facilitate all the things museums seem convinced they have to do to stay afloat these days: an new wing housing a concert hall, a gift shop, a restaurant, a children’s art room, an exhibition space for artists-in-residence, a greenery. All sustainable, geothermal and daylight-harvesting, of course.
You do what you gotta do to survive, I suppose, but the absurdity of this trend for museums to go extra-curricular is particularly clear at the Gardner, whose intermittently great collection is forever trapped in a mediocre hang by the vanity of its founder, who insisted that everything be presented exactly as she left it at her death. This results in many important works being hung at low visibility and in often idiosyncratic and unenlightening juxtaposition, with the preciously empty frames of masterworks stolen in 1990 remaining on the walls as if to consecrate this “vision.” A new wing could have worked wonders for the presentation of the museum’s masterpieces, if only.
Still, Boston has a new, reportedly great concert hall and I’m sure Piano’s elegant building will attract customers. It has the potential to become a strong cultural center, if it does not blow too many leaks and if the museum’s direction finds ways of breaking its somewhat stale reputation. A good thing, even if the overall tendency is troubling.
A bunch of recent comics links: