Monthly Archive for May, 2010

From The Independent…

Jean Nouvel, the designer of this summer’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London – and the impending One New Change development just east of St Paul’s Cathedral – is the world’s most restlessly inventive architect.

He is an Ahab, strapped to his profession’s mast on the high seas of the data age, eternally searching for his version of Moby Dick and the redemptions of what he calls “the seductive space, this virtual space of illusion”. Even 20 years ago, he was insisting that “the future of architecture is not architectural”.

Now 64 years old, has Nouvel lived up to that vividly provocative entrance line? And will his Serpentine Pavilion – aka the Red Sun – add to or detract from the 21st century’s pantheon of meaningful architecture? Is he the abjectly creative servant of major clients, or an artful agent provocateur in the world of Big Culture? In New York, they’re not sure. The City Council waved through Nouvel’s buildings in Mercer Street and 11th Avenue, but has recently ordered him to lop 200 feet off his proposed 1250ft Tower Verre, which neighbours MoMA and is flamboyantly corseted in steel beams. More…

From Nicolai Ouroussoff at The New York Times…

Reconstructive surgery or just a little nip and tuck? That’s the question that troubled the people who run Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts for years. As other cultural organizations around the country embarked on extravagant building projects in the late ’90s and the early ’00s, the center’s various institutions bickered about how to compete, given their aging campus. Eventually they settled on a modest course of treatment, hoping that a few careful incisions here and a stitch or two there would be as effective, and produce a result as beautiful, as new construction.

It seemed a sensible, even shrewd, strategy, especially after the completion last year of the project’s first phase — in which the architects, Diller Scofidio & Renfro, carved up the interior of the old 1960s-era Alice Tully Hall and sliced off parts of its facade to produce a striking hybrid of Modern and contemporary. More…