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Alexander Calder: The Latest Architecture and News

Herzog & de Meuron Collaborates with Piet Oudolf to Design the Calder Gardens in Philadephia

Herzog & de Meuron and landscape designer Piet Oudolf are collaborating to create Calder Gardens, which will house and display artworks by American sculptor Alexander Calder. Located between Vine Street and Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, the 6,500 square meter site will house a two-story building, half of which is developed underground. Instead of developing the site as a typical museum, the team decided to transform it into a garden as an attractive alternative for the people of Philadelphia.

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Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie Reopens with an Alexander Calder Exhibition

After being closed for six and a half years for a renovation by David Chipperfield Architects, the Berlin museum reopened Sunday, August 22.

A New Landscape in Montreal Weaves Together Icons of the City’s Expo 67

Encompassing a Buckminster Fuller–designed geodesic dome and an Alexander Calder sculpture, the intervention shows how the city is rethinking its world’s fair treasures.

The contemporary urban fabric of Montreal, perhaps more than any other Canadian city, was shaped by a single event in its modern history: the 1967 International and Universal Exposition, popularly known as Expo 67. With its record-breaking number of visitors, it was the most successful world’s fair of the 20th century and fueled a construction boom in the city that stretched into the late 1970s.

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Why Are Alexander Calder Sculptures So Overused in Architecture Renders?

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OMA, Park Grove Condos, Miami, featuring Calder’s Flamingo, 1973. The work is actually installed in Federal Plaza in Chicago. Image Courtesy of OMA

This article was originally published by The Architect's Newspaper as "Rendering LOL: How architects are absurdly using Calder sculptures."

Why do so many architects use Alexander Calder sculptures in their renderings, even when the works have nothing to do with the institution or project depicted? The Calder Foundation has been tracking this phenomenon, and the results are featured in the images for this article.

A new exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York explores mobiles—kinetic sculptures in which carefully balanced components reveal their own unique systems of movement—created by American sculptor Alexander Calder from 1930 until 1968, eight years before his death.

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