Charles A. Birnbaum: The Value of View

• April 16, 2011 symposium at Olana, Framing the Viewshed: The Transformative Power of Art and Landscape in the Hudson Valley.

   

October climax set for The Mount – Berkshire Eagle Online

• By Benning W. De La Mater, Berkshire Eagle Staff

  Article Last Updated: 05/14/2008 03:00:18 AM EDT

• LENOX — An agreement between The Mount and its creditors has staved off foreclosure and a May 31 deadline that would have forced Edith Wharton Restoration Inc. to raise $3 million by the end of the month.

• Instead, the historic home of the Gilded Age writer will be open to the public all summer without a threat of foreclosure by Berkshire Bank. The new fundraising deadline has been set for Oct. 31.

• The Mount owes a total of nearly $9 million to its creditors, which also includes another bank and two individuals. More than $875,000 has been raised during its emergency “Save the Mount” fundraising campaign, and $240,000 of that money has come within the past month or so.

• “This relieves us of the month-to-month burden,” Travers said. “It’s a long window to raise the funds, but there’s no guarantee that we will be able to raise this money. It does give us time, though.”

Landscape Design | National Design Awards 2008 | Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Awards

• The Landscape Design Award is given to an individual or firm for exceptional and exemplary work in urban planning or park and garden design.

• Olin Partnership

  Winner: Landscape Design

• Gustafson Guthrie Nichol

  Finalist: Landscape Design

• Stoss Landscape Urbanism

  Finalist: Landscape Design

Whitney Museum Unveils Its Downtown Sanctuary – New York Times

• Mr. Piano’s project for a site on Gansevoort Street, west of Washington Street, is a striking departure from the ethereal glass creations that have made him a favorite of the art-world cognoscenti.

• Mr. Piano has created a contemplative sanctuary where art reasserts its primary place in the cultural hierarchy.

• In a recent interview Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, said the curators had yet to define the relationship between the two buildings. (One possibility is that the Breuer building will be used for exhibitions that focus on one aspect of the collection or a single artist, with the core of the collection relocated downtown.)

• Mr. Piano’s design is certainly distinct from Breuer’s, presenting a strange, even forbidding aura. The building’s faceted surface seems hewed from a massive block of stone. Its main facade is slightly angled to make room for a small public plaza. The roof steps down in a series of big terraces on one side; on the other, it forms an impenetrable block facing the West Side Highway.

  But as you study the form more intently, more layered meanings emerge. The stepped roof, for example, both supports a series of outdoor sculpture gardens and allows sunlight to spill down onto the High Line, the elevated rail bed that is being converted into a public garden. The angle of the facade allows people walking along the High Line to catch glimpses of the Hudson River down Gansevoort Street.

• The feeling of a structure being carved apart to facilitate the flow of light and movement is magnified at ground level. Part of the structure rests on a glass base that houses a bookstore and cafe, so that you feel the full weight of the building bearing down. The underbelly of the building tilts up at one end, providing shade for the plaza and adding a sense of compression as you approach the entry.

• This experience abruptly changes as you cross the threshold, for a window at the back of the lobby opens onto a view of the water and the height of the lobby space suddenly lets you breathe again. From there elevators whisk you up to the auditorium, library and galleries.

  The new museum will have 50,000 square feet of gallery space, compared with 32,000 uptown. The third-floor gallery, at 17,500 square feet, will be the largest column-free space for viewing art in Manhattan, Mr. Weinberg said.

Table of Contents: April 28, 2008: Table of Contents: The New Yorker – Annotated

Magazine only, not online

• 

  Restoration Drama

  Rebecca Mead

  Trouble at Edith Wharton’s house

BBC NEWS | UK | Kew to open botanical art gallery – Annotated

• London’s Kew Gardens is to open the world’s first gallery dedicated to botanical art works – some of which have never been seen by the public.

• Kew has a vast collection of more than 200,000 art works.

  Some of the illustrations of extinct species are thought to be the only surviving record.

• “With one quarter of the world’s species of flowering plants threatened by extinction in the next 50 years, Kew has a vital role to play to inspire and deliver science-based plant conservation. “

Natural Phenomenon: Entertainment & Culture: vanityfair.com – Annotated

Via Archinect.com.

• This fall, after eight years and almost half a billion dollars, world-famous architect Renzo Piano will complete the greenest museum ever built—the new California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park—housing its aquarium, planetarium, and natural-history museum under a two-and-a-half-acre “living roof.”

• by Matt Tyrnauer May 2008

• 

• The Kimball Natural History Museum’s “living roof” with Jules Verne porthole skylights. Photographs by Todd Eberle.

• “Talk about Moses coming down from the mountain,” says Greg Farrington, the academy’s director. “He just nailed it. It was inspiration. His vision was to lift up a piece of the park and slide the museum underneath.”

• 

• The rain forest inside the new academy building is enclosed in a glass dome.

• Few, if any, buildings of this stature come close to making their sustainability programs comprehensible as well as visually inspiring components of their design.

• “The building,” says Piano, “had to be green and sustainable to go with its purpose—study of the earth and science. It is also in a very unusual place, the middle of one of the most beautiful parks in the world. You almost never get a chance to build something in the middle of a great park, so it needed to be transparent. You needed to see where you are.