Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:06:34 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Architecture :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/architecture istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/redesigning-the-piazza-san-marco/84764/ Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Venice, Italy — Surely it will sound like sacrilege to propose that Venice's Piazza San Marco, the "drawing-room of Europe," as Napoleon famously called it, could stand improvement. But Americans abroad have never been known for their modesty, and it is in that spirit that I offer my services to the Most Serene Republic, with a suggestion that could have far-reaching urbanistic implications for its famous civic center. Before coming to Venice recently, I was in Rome, where I was struck by a... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/at-150-central-park-is-a-perfectly-balanced/84957/ Tue, 2 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST This year, with surprisingly little fanfare, Central Park is celebrating its 150th birthday. Five years ago, there were fireworks and daylong festivities to mark the sesquicentennial of the city's decision, in 1853, to build a great urban park in the middle of Manhattan. But it was in 1858 that the municipality finally decided upon the so-called Greensward plan of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, and it was in that year as well that the great work began. I know serious students of... Bloomberg News http://www.nysun.com/arts/italy-plans-partial-demolition-of-meier-museum/83910/ Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST The architect Richard Meier says his work has fallen victim to Italian politics and a government that is hostile toward contemporary art. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government last month announced plans for tearing down part of the Ara Pacis Museum designed by Mr. Meier as a home for an altar constructed in 9 B.C.E. to commemorate the peace following Rome's Gallic and Spanish campaigns. The plan to construct the first modern building in Rome's center since the Fascist era drew criticism... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/new-york-vs-hong-kong-at-skyscraper-museum/83644/ Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST For many tourists, the first order of business on their maiden visit to Manhattan is to overcome a slight sense of disappointment. Rather than seeing the endless avenues of ultra-modern skyscrapers that they were promised, they are greeted by old-fashioned neighborhoods of unremarkable height, whose size and rhythms have more in common with the Old World than with that mechanized metropolis that haunted the dreams of the modernists. There is, however, one city, literally on the other side of... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/dramatic-beguiling/83161/ Tue, 5 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Three years ago, the Lucida was little more than a notion. Six months ago it was a mere skeleton, and now, fully fleshed out, it surveys the southeast corner of Lexington Avenue as one of the more notable residential structures to rise in Manhattan in some time. The Lucida is not like most of the residential buildings that have arisen in Manhattan in recent years. A massive undertaking that occupies fully half of the block that stretches between Lexington and Third avenues and between 86th and... Staff Reporter of the Sun http://www.nysun.com/arts/kyu-sung-woo-wins-ho-am-prize/82494/ Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Kyu Sung Woo will be the first architect to receive the Ho-Am Prize in the Arts, an award that recognizes ethnic Koreans who have made noteworthy contributions to arts and culture through their creative endeavors. The Ho-Am Prize, which honors five Koreans each year for achievement in science, engineering, medicine, community service, and the arts, is sometimes called the Korean Nobel. The prize, endowed by Samsung, includes a $200,000 cash award. Mr. Woo is a Korean-born American architect... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-switch-building-a-lower-east-side/82332/ Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Manhattan is a land of narcissists, or so it often seems, with each citizen hell-bent on winning the fullest measure of attention through his or her wardrobe and personal comportment. And so you might think that our architectural stock would exhibit a similar excess, a similar individualism at all costs. But in fact, more often than not, the borough of Manhattan has been defined by an ineradicable architectural conservatism and banality. Perhaps it is the grid plan itself, promulgated in 1811... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/dark-tower-a-daring-design-over-madison-square/81865/ Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Though few people, if any, have seen a single rendering, there is palpable excitement in New York's architectural circles over a 22-story tower designed by Rem Koolhaas for One Madison Park, on the southeast corner of Madison Square Park. Given the buzz that has surrounded it in the press and on the Web, you would hardly know that another building in the same development is nearly completed and all of 50 stories tall. It is this tall, slender tower that has recently, and rather startlingly... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/palladio-architectures-virgil/81373/ Tue, 8 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Given the nearly total absence of fanfare, you could be excused for not knowing that this was the quincentenary of Andrea Palladio's birth. Generally it is a kind of condescension to treat the great cultural figures of the past as though, in some sense, they were, or needed to be, our contemporaries. And yet a respectable case could be made that, of all the architects who lived before the 20th century, few were as influential as Palladio (1508-80) or came closer, in the arc of their reputation... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/robert-sterns-brompton-is-pre-war-elegance-newly/80989/ Tue, 1 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST The Brompton, which is approaching completion on the southeast corner of Third Avenue and 86th Street, may very well be a better building than its neighborhood deserves. If this is not the case, it is only because the area is getting decidedly better, thanks to this new arrival, designed by Robert Stern, and to the Lucida, also nearing completion one block west on Lexington Avenue. For the longest time (that is to say, living memory), 86th Street between Lexington Avenue and Second Avenue has... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/at-one-bryant-park-scale-changes-everything/80783/ Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST One of the biggest banks to open in Manhattan in many years will be the Bank of America flagship that is promised for the all but completed One Bryant Park, a massive skyscraper designed by the firm of Cook + Fox. The building will also be known as the Bank of America Tower, in honor of its foremost tenant. Already the offices of the bank have been installed in this pale, Deconstructivist tower, and though we are still some months away from the project's completion, it is sufficiently far along... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/calendar/bedford-stuyvesant-out-of-crisis-mode/80247/ Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Not long ago, Americans discussed the "urban crisis." One measure of how little the phrase is used nowadays is that while Wikipedia has entries for "Energy Crisis" and "Urban Sprawl," the online encyclopedia has no entry for "Urban Crisis." It is no longer part of the lexicon of the young, but it was a phrase once much bandied, and its byword was Bedford-Stuyvesant. Life cycles of American urban neighborhoods have been volatile in the age of sprawl. (What sprawl giveth, sprawl taketh away.)... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/revivifying-yales-brutalist-pile/80261/ Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST More than any other American building, the home of the Yale School of Architecture holds a special, numinous place in the hearts of architects throughout the world. Recently, in the final stages of its being overhauled, journalists and critics were taken on a hard-hat tour of the premises by the school's current dean, Robert A.M. Stern, and by Charles Gwathmey, who has designed its new annex. Paul Rudolph's imposing Art and Architecture Building is nothing less than the physical embodiment of... OLIVER SCHWANER-ALBRIGHT http://www.nysun.com/arts/in-brooklyn-ikea-will-quack-like-a-duck/79920/ Fri, 13 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST On Wednesday Ikea will open its doors in Red Hook, and Brooklyn's appealingly dilapidated waterfront warehouse district will be home to a 346,000-square-foot store as bright and cheerful as a new box of Legos. Cue the balloons and complimentary water taxis. It's the first outlet in the five boroughs for the Swedish retailer. But by now, 23 years after its arrival in America, Ikea is no longer a novelty. Even New Yorkers, who regularly cross the Hudson to go to the store in Elizabeth, N.J., know... ROBERT HILFERTY http://www.nysun.com/arts/rafael-vinolys-musical-refuge/79619/ Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Architect Rafael Viñoly is losing count of his pianos. It's out of control. Three in the city, two on Long Island, one in London, another in South America, one in Miami, another lent to his son, maybe one in Los Angeles. He's about to bump up the tally with a Fazioli from Venice. Will it go into the new office he's about to set up in Dubai? "It's embarrassing. This becomes a fanaticism," Mr. Viñoly said recently at his TriBeCa headquarters, which are furnished with not one, but two Steinway... Bloomberg News http://www.nysun.com/arts/angkor-temple-gets-state-dept-grant/79507/ Mon, 9 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST A sacred temple in the historic Cambodian city of Angkor has received a $978,700 American grant to undergo the second phase of a restoration project. The World Monuments Fund received the grant from the U.S. State Department and will use the money to rebuild and stabilize the severely damaged east elevation at Phnom Bakheng, the oldest temple in the city, fund spokeswoman Holly Evarts said in a telephone interview. The temple, built by Khmer King Yasovarman I in 907 C.E., represents Mount... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/stepping-up-at-the-metropolitan/79182/ Tue, 3 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST This column is best read as an open letter to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, calling upon that august institution to drop everything and stop what it is doing. Anyone who has visited the museum in the past few weeks will have noticed that most of the steps leading up to the main entrance on Fifth Avenue have been cordoned off with white linen fencing. According to the press department, this is in preparation for cleaning, restoring, and "rethermalizing" the steps. There is nothing wrong with... Bloomberg News http://www.nysun.com/arts/pitt-plans-dubai-hotel/79102/ Tue, 3 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Brad Pitt, the star of "Fight Club" and "Ocean's 11" who professes a passion for architecture, will be a design consultant for an 800-room hotel and resort Zabeel Properties plans to build in Dubai, the developer said Monday. Zabeel, based in Dubai, hired architecture firm Graft LLC to design an America-themed hotel in the United Arab Emirates city, the developer said in a statement. The Los Angeles-based Graft, which has worked with Mr. Pitt on rebuilding efforts in New Orleans, will include... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/cooper-square-in-flight/76703/ Tue, 20 May 2008 00:00:00 EST In certain architects, the personal computer has engendered the bizarre delusion that anything is possible — that the laws of gravity have been repealed and the immemorial compacts of nature have been rendered null and void. Rather than the drably Newtonian right angles of the Modern movement, this new architecture professes to swivel and swerve on a dime, thanks to some logarithm that empowers computers to join titanium plates and much besides in ways unimagined by the builders of the past. In... FRANCIS MORRONE http://www.nysun.com/arts/new-life-for-litchfield-villa-in-prospect-park/76619/ Mon, 19 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Little by little, the Litchfield Villa, one of the most beautiful houses in America, is coming back from near-death. Situated in Prospect Park, the villa rose between 1854 and 1857 — predating the park itself. The Prospect Park Alliance, which shares the house with the Department of Parks & Recreation, has since 1987 marshaled private and public funds to effect a restoration of Prospect Park as breathtaking as what the Central Park Conservancy has done in Manhattan. The president of the... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/frank-gehrys-miss-brooklyn-renamed-reconsidered/76176/ Fri, 9 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Forest City Ratner has this week released the latest plans for its contentious development of the Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, more specifically for the parcel of its 22 acres that faces the southwest, looking past the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan. In an architectural context that tends, over time, to drag all things down in the direction of safe and unassuming mediocrity, these plans, from the studio of Frank Gehry, have the distinction of being even bolder than the initial ones and, in some... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/olympic-landscape/75479/ Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST When it comes to dreaming up grand architectural visions, repressive authoritarian regimes are clearly the way to go. There are none of those nettlesome obstructions that beset the urban planners of New York City: community boards and concerned citizens, good-government types and the dithering dysfunctionality of a score of agencies. Well known to all are the hurdles that developers and architects have encountered recently at ground zero and the Atlantic Yards, the acrimony that has beset... ZOE STRIMPEL http://www.nysun.com/arts/londons-latest-masterpiece/75426/ Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST LONDON — St. Martin-in-the-Fields, perched on a corner of Trafalgar Square, is one of London's most extraordinary entities. And now, after a $69 million renovation that represents one of the most complex architectural overhauls in recent British history, the church is ready to welcome the public in grand fashion. Eric Parry Architects has spent seven years on the site, which includes the church, designed by James Gibbs and consecrated in 1726, as well as a separate building (formerly containing... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/missing-the-marble-at-2-columbus-circle/74723/ Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST The wraps are starting to come off 2 Columbus Circle, which will be reborn this fall as the Museum of Art and Design. Although it remains within the dimensions and footprint of the original, the structure, formerly home to the Huntington Hartford Museum, has been fundamentally changed inside and out — and the city is much the poorer for that. Since its inauguration in 1964, this beleaguered building has been one of the most enduringly divisive structures in the city, if not the world. No sooner... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/sanaas-supernatural-designs/73932/ Tue, 1 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Devotees of Saturday Night Live will doubtless recall Nooni and Nuni Schoener, the ultra-effete couple played to perfection by Fred Armisen and Maya Rudolph. They come from some unspecified place in Europe, but they might as well hail from Mars, given how viscerally weird they are. Specifically, this goofy pair incarnates a certain strain of European defined by its passion for hyper-aestheticized, high-concept living. Each chair, each lamp, each ashtray in the Schoener home has some exorbitant... JACOB ADELMAN http://www.nysun.com/arts/frances-jean-nouvel-wins-pritzker-prize/73873/ Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Jean Nouvel, the French architect whose hypermodern buildings have been acclaimed for their eclectic nature and departure from tradition, has won the 2008 Pritzker Architecture Prize, it was announced Sunday. Mr. Nouvel joins Frank Gehry, Tadao Ando, and I.M. Pei in receiving the top honor in the field in recognition of his high-rises, museums, and performance halls around the world. "I think they understood very well that I fight for specific architecture against generic architecture," Mr... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/neo-mod-idiom-on-the-high-line/73270/ Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Even before its completion, Chelsea's High Line Park is having as catalytic an effect on its neighborhood as Central Park has had, over the past 150 years, on the Upper East and West sides of Manhattan. This year, in celebrating the sesquicentennial of that greatest of urban parks, we can appreciate the foresight of the magistrates who predicted that it would lead to the logarithmic development of the surrounding area. A similar building boom is on in Chelsea, not least in the areas directly in... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/at-parsons-an-adroit-makeover/72614/ Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST The newly renovated Parsons the New School for Design, like most living things in New York, has become adept at making do with the hand it has been dealt. Specifically, its lot has been to inhabit a dark warren of interlocking chambers in four buildings, very imperfectly conjoined and clustering around a central air shaft. Since the early 1970s, when Parsons moved to Fifth Avenue and 13th Street from Sutton Place, its architectural circumstances were an object lesson in the meaning of the term... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/cubic-elegance-rising-in-chelsea/72233/ Tue, 4 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST The Nomadic Museum, built in 2005 on Pier 54 beside the Hudson River, was one of the largest structures to rise in Manhattan in recent years. But if you visited the site today, you would find no trace of it. Though comparable in length to St. Peter's Basilica and the Capitol building, it has vanished completely. A tour de force intended to house an exhibition of Gregory Colbert's new-age photographs, it was created by the architect Shigeru Ban out of paper pylons and recycled freight containers... ROBERT HILFERTY http://www.nysun.com/arts/jury-beauty/71877/ Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST For the first time in my life, I could imagine actually looking forward to jury duty. Unlike those ponderous fortresses that typically shroud one's civic obligation in gloom and doom, architect Rafael Viñoly's Bronx County Hall of Justice, which opened its doors last month, epitomizes the notion of "innocent until proven guilty" — and doesn't condemn the rest of us who must pass judgment. It is, perhaps, the least Kafkaesque courthouse in the city — a welcoming, translucent nine-story structure... NICHOLAS WAPSHOTT http://www.nysun.com/arts/abuse-on-the-high-seas/71723/ Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST Of all the many grisly killers who have made fine operatic heroes, few are as difficult to explain and as hard to like as Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes. His anguished soul will be revived in a new Metropolitan Opera production by the British director John Doyle on February 28. The brooding fisherman Grimes is no mere cold-blooded killer, nor a gleeful assassin. He is a serial physical abuser of adolescent boys who, in the opera's opening scene, is the focus of a public inquiry into the death... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/apple-store-doesnt-fall-far-from-the-tree/70336/ Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST The spanking new Apple retail outlet on West 14th Street, at the intersection of Ninth and Hudson, occupies the eastern third of what was formerly known as the Western Beef Building — a landmarked, yet fairly undistinguished, three-story affair of tan brick, reddish brick accents, and insistently mullioned windows. The place has been entirely gutted and transformed by Cook + Fox Architects, the firm that has designed the soon to be completed Bank of America Building that overlooks Bryant Park... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/eighth-avenue-livens-up/69896/ Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Something strange happens to Central Park West, that prince of thoroughfares, as it heads south past Columbus Circle. Suddenly the dream ends and this noble street turns into a toad — ugly old Eighth Avenue. With the exception of Norman Foster's new Hearst Building at 57th Street, SOM's Worldwide Plaza at 49th Street, and Renzo Piano's recently unveiled Times Building at 41st Street, there is all too little distinction to this weary, workaday stretch of Manhattan. It is almost with relief when... ERICA ORDEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/steven-holl-architects-to-design-arts-facilities/69738/ Thu, 17 Jan 2008 18:25:40 EST Steven Holl Architects will design several arts facilities for Princeton University, the school announced yesterday. The project, which will occupy 135,000 square feet, will include a black box theater, dance, orchestral, and acting studios, and classrooms. The buildings will house the school's dance and theater programs, portions of its music department, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows in the Creative and Performing Arts. Preliminary plans for the new arts facilities... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/tastemakers-and-tastebreakers/69622/ Wed, 16 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST There was a time, within very recent memory, when sophisticated people would not have wished to visit, let alone inhabit, the vicinity of what is now called the High Line, the rusting and abandoned elevated rail that was built by Robert Moses and hasn't seen a freight train in more than a generation. But over the past two decades, nothing short of a revolution in taste has changed the way society, or at least a certain part of it, looks at the rotting relics of the industrial age. That... KAREN BOOKATZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/plazas-crown-jewel-poised-to-reopen/69456/ Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST The Grand Ballroom at New York's storied Plaza Hotel, reopening Wednesday after a $12.5 million restoration, has served as the backdrop to countless affairs — including such star-studded gatherings as Truman Capote's "Black and White Ball" and Mick Jagger's 50th birthday party; the opulent neoclassical room has rightfully earned a place in the annals of the city's beau monde history. So when developer Elad Properties bought the hotel in 2004 and authorized a $400 million top-to-bottom makeover... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/modernist-revival/69075/ Tue, 8 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST The reconstituted Kaufman Center, which opens its doors today after an eight-month, $17 million overhaul, may be the work of Robert A.M. Stern Architects, but it certainly is not what most people have come to expect from this eminent architect. Mr. Stern is famously a classicist and a contextualist, as is manifest at 15 Central Park West and his soon to be completed Brompton, at Third Avenue and 86th Street. But the new Kaufman Center — which comprises the Lucy Moses School, the Special Music... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/geek-chic-architecture/68892/ Thu, 3 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST In New York's architectural community, the center of everyone's attention these days is Bond Street. In that narrow stretch from Lafayette to Third Avenue, a number of boutique condominiums — some of the more imaginative buildings in Manhattan — are complete or nearing completion. Residential architecture's equivalent of the boutique hotels that are now taking over Lower Manhattan, these upstarts answer to the same aesthetic and spiritual ambitions and serve a very similar clientele. Beside the... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/impressive-new-home-for-pop-burger/68255/ Tue, 18 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Two new buildings have recently arisen in uptown Manhattan — one east, the other west — both of which deserve at least a moment of your attention. The first, and certainly the more striking, is Pop Burger, at 20 E. 58th St. Its name is admirably accurate, since the establishment does indeed serve burgers, and its dominant aesthetic, from the bubbly glass protrusions of its façade to the Warhol-inspired dining area in the back — not to mention the mod lounge and pool room upstairs — is an homage... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/skyline-as-architectural-history/68144/ Mon, 17 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST There are times when you walk through Midtown Manhattan, among the soulless slabs and towers of Modernism, and you wonder how an entire generation could have tolerated such unrelenting rectilinearity. Was no one bored? Was no one disgusted? Surely some people were, but their voices went unheard. Or more precisely, they were heard on the streets and around the dinner tables of New York, but not in the studios of practicing architects or in the halls of academe, where Modernist consensus reigned... Staff Reporter of the Sun http://www.nysun.com/arts/foster-to-design-abu-dhabi-museum/68005/ Thu, 13 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Norman Foster — or, at least, his eponymous firm, Foster + Partners Ltd. — is joining the list of prominent architects attached to the planned Saadiyat Island Cultural District in Abu Dhabi. Foster + Partners, based in London, has won a competition to design the Sheikh Zayed National Museum, which will be devoted to the history, environment, culture, and leadership of the United Arab Emirates. The cultural district will also include a Guggenheim Abu Dhabi designed by Frank Gehry, a Louvre Abu... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/civic-center-aging-gracelessly/67478/ Tue, 4 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Forty years after the fact, New York's civic center around City Hall and Foley Square is still reeling from the disastrous construction of Federal Plaza. The two buildings that flank the plaza, the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building and the U.S. Court of International Trade, are now undergoing extensive renovations, the former acquiring a wholly new entrance pavilion along Broadway, while the glass curtain wall of the latter is being systematically replaced and restored to its original purity... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/growing-up-downtown/67217/ Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST Like most things human, the New Museum aspires to the condition of eternal youth. Its new building on the Bowery, which opens to the public this Saturday, is the tectonic projection of an institution that, in its determination to remain always one step ahead of history, famously refuses to form a permanent collection. But the youth that the New Museum wishes so desperately to cling to has already been lost, now that this institution has reached the ripe old age of 30. And yet, it refuses to... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/dispiriting-plans-for-west-side/67050/ Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST Few New Yorkers make it over to the Hudson Yards on the Far West Side of Manhattan, and there is no reason that they should. Only a few blocks from Midtown, the Hudson Yards are the stale butt end of Manhattan Island, the exposed tracks over which the trains pass from New Jersey into Penn Station. There is, at present, no charm in these 26 acres that stretch from 30th Street to 33rd Street and from Tenth Avenue to Twelfth Avenue — not even that charm of abjection that attaches to such rusted... PAULA DEITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/two-museums-one-new-courtyard/67014/ Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST WASHINGTON, D.C. — When the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard opened last week at the Smithsonian's American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery, the public was introduced to a poetic social space — a formerly outdoor courtyard now topped by an undulating glass-and-steel roof that connects the two museums. Norman Foster, the architect of the new space, described this arc of glass as a "cloud floating gently on the skyline." With this elaborate structural innovation, the two museums have... KATE TAYLOR http://www.nysun.com/arts/pennies-to-build-millions-to-restore/66983/ Mon, 26 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST In the 1950s and the early 1960s, Yale University commissioned buildings from a handful of the most important modern American architects: Louis Kahn, Eero Saarinen, Gordon Bunshaft, and Paul Rudolph. Now Yale finds itself at the forefront of a movement to restore modernist buildings to their original glory and bring them up to contemporary environmental standards. The dean of the Yale School of Architecture, Robert A.M. Stern, said that these buildings are all showing their age, particularly... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/new-life-on-east-side/66765/ Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST Two new buildings have recently altered the look of the Upper East Side, but only one of them for the better. The new structure at 1510 Second Ave., occupying the southeast corner of 79th Street, represents an almost-unheard-of development in contemporary Manhattan. Rather than a bank replacing something else — as God would seem to have ordained for every available lot on the Upper East Side — here you have the nearly unique instance of something else replacing a bank (though one will... PAULA DEITZ http://www.nysun.com/arts/berlin-building-new-york-rising/66208/ Fri, 9 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST The crown jewel of Carnegie Hall's first international arts festival, Berlin in Lights, is the Berliner Philharmoniker orchestra. While it was a wise programming decision, the choice also reflects the strength of Berlin's built environment: Hearing the orchestra within its 1960s-era concert hall, the Philharmonie, is a musical experience, as well as an architectural one. Architect Hans Scharoun set a gold standard for design with his orchestra in the round, with balconies lined up like rows on... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/making-something-out-of-nothing/65948/ Tue, 6 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST Before the Ruth and Harold D. Uris Center for Education at the Metropolitan Museum of Art reopened last week, after a three-year overhaul, no one had any great hopes for it. Indeed, few people seem to have had an opinion about the project in the first place: To say that the architectural community remained silent in the matter would be a thunderous understatement. The area occupied by the Uris Center, after all, had been a purely functional basement, rather like the museum's unadorned service... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/in-search-of-governors-island/65526/ Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST Plans to redevelop Governors Island bring to mind the changing relationship of the city to its harbor over the several centuries of its rapid growth. Once upon a time, Manhattan was one island among other islands in the bay of New York, but not the biggest, by any means. Staten Island — despite its diminished scale on our city's subway maps — was, and remains, almost twice the size, and Long Island, of course, is far bigger than that. Even the smaller islands in our midst, those that now go by...