Architecture
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Searching for the Origins of Austgralian Art and Culture
By: - Dec 01st, 2010anything over 255 chars will be deleted.
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Hancock Shaker Village Open House Dec. 11
Co Hosted With UMass Amherst
By: - Nov 30th, 2010Hancock Shaker Village (HSV) and UMass Amherst will host an open house for prospective students to learn about the new Master of Science in Design with a concentration in Historic Preservation program on Saturday, December 11 from noon to 2pm at Hancock Shaker Village (1843 W. Housatonic St., Pittsfield, MA). Please RSVP to Dr. Steven Bedford, program director, at 413.443.0188 ext. 239 or sbedford@hancockshakervillage.org.
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Boston MFA Opens Art of Americas New Wing
New Inviting Space Frames Vast Collection
By: - Nov 15th, 2010After much anticipation and over a decade of planning, fundraising, design and construction, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts has opened to great fanfare its new Art of the Americas Wing. Under the guidance of Director Malcolm Rogers and the design of Foster+Partners, the new wing adds 27% new space to the building, creatively installed galleries and a refreshed experience for the MFA visitor. This is a stunning addition to a great cultural institution.
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Suffolk University Opens Modern Theatre
Revitalizing Boston's Theatre District
By: - Oct 12th, 2010The long closed 1914 Modern Theatre will reopen on November 4. The former movie house on Boston's Washington Street has been renovated in the continuing down town expansion of Suffolk University. The venue will present productions of the Suffolk theatre department as well public programming. The theatre is intimate with just 185 seats. Suffolk also operates the C. Walsh Theatre on its Beacon Hill campus.
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Shipping Container Architecture
Puma City Store Near Fenway Park
By: - Oct 08th, 2010Staying only for a few months at various locations around the world, Puma City is a movable piece of temporary utilitarian architecture. Made of metal shipping containers, it is a three tiered architectural retail event now being bolted together near Fenway Park. Red and flashy yet cool and made from recycled materials, it is architecture as brand.
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Brilliantly Renovated Paramount Center
Superb Venue That Speaks of Form For Function
By: - Sep 30th, 2010Built in 1932, and abandoned in 1976, The Art Deco Paramount Theatre has been smartly revitalized this year by Emerson College into the multipurpose Paramount Center. The project merges the old and the new with flair, sensitivity and beauty. Besides its educational value, it will serve as a major piece of the new ArtsEmerson program's venues. It also is another repair to the City of Boston's urban fabric.
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I Like Ike
Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum
By: - Jun 06th, 2010It was Memorial Day when we visited the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library and Museum in his home town of Abilene, Kansas. It seemed like stepping back in a time machine as so little has changed in this middle American hamlet since he left to become the savior of democracy and a leader of the free world. The heart of the complex of five buildings is the modest family home where he was raised as one of seven brothers by fundamentalist parents.
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High Line: Masterpiece NYC Urban Park
Building Upon Infrastructure In Creative Ways
By: - May 25th, 2010Originally constructed in the 1930s to lift dangerous freight trains off Manhattan's streets, the High Line is an abandoned elevated train track. When completed, this piece of dormant infrastructure will be a 1.5 mile public park running through Manhattan's Lower West Side neighborhoods. Created as an integrated landscape, designed by landscape architects James Corner Field Operations, with architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the High Line combines meandering concrete pathways with naturalistic plantings. It is already an urban jewel.
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Rising Currents: Projects For New York's Waterfront
Global Warming Solutions Exhibit at MoMA
By: - May 25th, 2010The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and its satellite in Long Island City, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, joined together to address one of the most urgent challenges facing, New York, the nation’s largest city: sea-level rise resulting from global climate change. Five interdisciplinary teams were brought together to re-envision the coastlines of New York and New Jersey around New York Harbor. Their task was to imagine new ways to occupy the harbor itself with adaptive “soft†infrastructures that are sympathetic to the needs of a sound ecology of one of New York’s great open spaces. The current MoMA exhibit establishes the dialogue on this potentially dangerous topic.
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Whitney Museum to Break Ground Downtown
Renzo Piano Design for Meatacking District in 2011
By: - May 25th, 2010In an historic decision for the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Board of Trustees has voted unanimously to break ground on a new museum building in downtown Manhattan in May 2011. Located in the Meatpacking District on Gansevoort Street between West Street and the High Line, the six-floor, 195,000-square-foot building, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano, will provide the Whitney with essential new space for its collection, exhibitions, and education and performing arts programs in one of New York’s most vibrant neighborhoods.
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Remember the Alamo
Signifying the Lone Star State
By: - May 18th, 2010Following a thirteen day siege by a Mexican army the small mission turned fort, The Alamo, fell with loss of its some 200 defenders. The battle cry "Remember the Alamo" inspired the troops of General Sam Houston. A short time after the Alamo tragedy Texans won independence from Mexico in 1836. By 1845 Texas ceded to the United States with Houston as its first of two senators. After a tour of the Alamo we chilled out with lunch along the lovely and scenic San Antonio River Walk.
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Clinton Library in Little Rock
Building a Bridge to the 21st Century
By: - May 17th, 2010The Williams J. Clinton Presidential Center and Park sits on 7 acres just a short walk from the dining and entertainment area of Little Rock, Arkansas. The box like design by Polshek Partnership. LLP canitlevers toward the Arkansas River and an old railroad bridge. Locals call it the Clinton Double Wide for its unremarkable prefab look.
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The Mount Announces Season Program
Something Old Something New in Lenox
By: - Apr 30th, 2010The Mount, the stately home of Edith Wharton in Lenox, Mass.. reopens for a season of new programs and audience favorites. Highlights include the launch of The Mount's first annual writers festival, Berkshire WordFest (July 23-25); the return of theatre for the second year running in partnership with Wharton Salon (August 18-29); the seventeenth season of The Mount's popular Biography Series (July 12-August 30); and a new exhibit on adaptations of Wharton's works for stage and screen (opens June 5).
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High Line Enlivens Chelsea
Former Elevated Line Morphs as a Park
By: - Apr 15th, 2010Rather than being torn down a former elevated train line is now a delightful park threading through Chelsea. It is an outstanding example of urban recycling. It is a great way to take a break during a Chelsea gallery tour.
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SHIFTboston Responds to Article
Perspective of Competition's Sponsor
By: - Apr 13th, 2010Last fall, SHIFTboston ran a competition to look at different ways to "move" the City of Boston in the 21st Century. Mark Favermann wrote a critical review of the finalists and winners. In response, the organization's executive director Kim Poliquin has written a different perspective about this urban design creative exercise. Critic Favermann answers.
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Edith Wharton's The Mount
Berkshire Literary Festival July 23-25
By: - Apr 04th, 2010In 2008, with $8 million in debt and missed payments, Berkshire Bank initiated foreclosure on Edith Wharton's Lenox estate The Mount. Under executive director, Susan Wissler, that debt has been reduced to $5.1 million with an annual budget of $2 million. The Mount is about to launch a new season with expanded programming. While The Mount is back on track it faces daunting challenges.
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SHIFTboston, A Competition of Ideas
Urban Notions, Both Thoughtful and Trivial
By: - Apr 01st, 2010SHIFTboston was originally intended as a local competition but became an international event, attracting 142 entries from 14 different countries and several dozen states. The challenge was to look at Boston in a futuristic way. A "distinguished" jury was chosen to review the entries. The result was a little of everything from the terrific to the trivial. Surely, something better could have won than the eventual prize winner. Perhaps the jury started sipping wine too early in the day?
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Antoni Gaudi's Casa Batllo and Casa Mila
Two Extraordinary Residences in Barcelona
By: - Jan 31st, 2010Antoni Gaudi's genius can be seen in the design of private residences. Two of his most cherished projects are now museums in Barcelona. In Casa Batllo and Casa Mila, his personal style can be seen intersecting with Catalan Art Nouveau, Moderniste, to express his unique vision. These examples are a family home and a large apartment building that in two somewhat different ways illustrate the master's unique hand in architecture, design and art. Each one is a startling structures of wonder and delight.
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Fumihiko Maki Designs MIT Media Lab Building
Pritzker Prize Architect Creates Style For Substance
By: - Jan 27th, 2010The MIT Media Lab and Visual Arts Building has recently opened. The building was designed by Pritzker Award architect Fumihiko Maki who is known for elegant fusion of East and West aesthetics. An uberModernist, Maki studied and worked both in the United States and Japan. His signature is crisp, exact design forms and attention to building materials and details. In a time of the Great Recession, MIT is continuing to complete its campus projects while other prestigious universities have put their's on hold.
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Antoni Gaudi's Soaring La Sagrada Familia
An Architectural Vision of Devout Religious Mysticism
By: - Jan 22nd, 2010Spain's most visited site, Barcelona's La Sagrada Familia is a cathedral like no other in the world. Antoni Gaudi's masterwork is a soaring almost other worldly edifice to his devout Catholicism and his original creative process. This is an architecture of passion and mysticism that was the architect's great obsession for 43 years.
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Renzo Piano's Gardner Museum Addition
A Special Project of Preservation and Imagination
By: - Jan 21st, 2010Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano is one of the premiere designers and renovators of museums in the world. He was chosen in 2003 to preserve the existing century old Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum as well as create an imaginative new addition. Mrs. Gardner, who embraced everything Italian, would have absolutely loved Renzo Piano. At the recent announcement unveiling the new designs at the museum, Piano mentioned his love of the light in the space, the beauty of the courtyard and the special quality of the institution.
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Antoni Gaudi's Fantastic Park Guell
Masterpiece of Open Space and Imagination
By: - Jan 17th, 2010The concept of Garden Cities was introduced in 1898 by Ebenezer Howard. A visionary and sophisticated Catalan industrialist Eusebi Guell commissioned Gaudi, in 1899, to create a Garden City on a large tract of land overlooking Barcelona. The result is the fantastic Park Guell. The garden city never was completed, but the resulting environment is one of the great open spaces and public areas ever created. Imagination was implemented, and a masterpiece is now shared by all who visit it.
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Mies van der Rohe's 1929 Barcelona Pavilion
Exquisite International Style Icon Masterwork
By: - Jan 11th, 2010The German Pavilion, now referred to as the Barcelona Pavilion, was created and built in less than a year by Ludwig Mies van der Rohr for the German Government's exhibit for the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition. The architect used geometry and materials in the most elegant ways to create one of the most beautiful edifices of the 20th Century. It was torn down shortly after the exhibition closed. In the 1980s, several Spanish architects had it rebuilt. It is now a major architectural attraction in Barcelona where it has been designated by UNESCO as a World Heritage site.
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Michael Graves Tells Almost All at Harvard
Superstar Architect Speaks About His Design Life
By: - Oct 04th, 2009At 75, sitting in a wheelchair paralyzed by an unknown virus several years ago, Michael Graves ruminated on his education and career at his 50th reunion at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. This was a personal journey of the kid from Indianapolis to the architecture professor at Princeton emeritus, Target's object maker, Post Modern's pater and Corot-like painter.
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Guggenheim Museum Marks 50th Anniversary
Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward Exhibition
By: - Jul 04th, 2009The great architect's landmark building was completed in the fall of 1959. This summer, The Guggenheim Museum is celebrating its golden anniversary with a wonderful exhibition of Frank Lloyd Wright's designs. Bringing together 64 projects, many of which have never been seen by the public, this exhibit broadly demonstrates the resonance and continued influence of this unique architect.
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