Museums and Libraries: The Latest Architecture and News

Portuguese architects OODA shared with us their proposal (in collaboration with Lencastre Arquitectos) for the Tram Museum International Competition in Porto, Portugal.

More images and architect’s description after the break.

Residents are hopeful that Foreign Office Architects (FOA)’s first museum design (and the firm’s first major US building) will help Cleveland’s urban-revitalization project move forward. Farshid Moussavi of the FOA London has designed a geometric volume that dominates the Uptown area’s site, creating a bold icon for the new Museum of Contemporary Art. Prior to this, the MOCA rented a 23,000 square feet of space on the second floor of the Cleveland Play House complex, but with this 34,000 sqf new home, the museum will be able to showcase a bigger selection and accommodate more visitors.

More images, a cool video, and more about the project after the break.

“The house is a machine for living in.”

- Le Corbusier

With this statement, Le Corbusier acknowledges the relation between technology/mass production and the new ways of living that the modern movement tried to materialize. For him the house was a static car, a designed functional object that could be mass produced. When the Villa Savoye was completed in 1929, 5.3 million cars were produced in Detroit.

From this point forward, architecture and car started a long lasting relation, with examples such as Albert Kahn’s buildings for Ford, Giacomo Matte-Trucco’s FIat Factory in Turin, Archigram’s Drive-In House concept, the Mecedes Benz Museum by UN Studio and the recent Lincoln Rd 1111 parking by Herzog & de Meuron.

Along this line we find the new Nanjing Automobile Museum by 3Gatti Architecture Studio, which was awarded with the first prize on an international invited competition. The project not only shows the car in an unusual way, but it also lets you to experience the museum by car:

The University of California, Berkeley just announced that they have chosen to work with Diller Scofidio + Renfro to design the new Berkeley Art Musuem + Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA). The site of the new museum is a crucial component for connecting the Berkeley campus while also activating the downtown arts and commerce districts.

In his article about Renzo Piano’s revised vision for the Whitney, Nicolai Ouroussoff explains that the neighborhood’s criticism and the museum board’s indecisiveness have continually provided stumbling blocks for the museum during its attempts to expand. Upon agreeing to realize Piano’s design for a satellite museum in the Meatpacking district, hope were high that finally, after 25 years, the museum would complete its much needed expansion.

Yet, it seems that Piano is in the midst of a new struggle resulting from the global economic downturn. While construction costs have dropped, allowing the cost of the project to slide under $200 million (persuading the board to commit to breaking ground), the museum is still struggling to contain costs and begin building before prices rise.

A few months ago, the Guggenheim Museum exhibited Contemplating the Void in honor of the museum’s 50th anniversary. After receiving 200 submissions, curators from the museum selected five winners. We’ve shared different proposals with you previously on AD, and today, we bring you Bad Architects Group’s winning Void Codition. In German, void or “Luftraum“, literally translates to “air-space“. By conditioning the given air, which is already present in the void, the architects create the possibility to access the space as is without interrupting how it currently exists. The proposal “adds another dimension or layer to the existing experience in form of a vertical wind tunnel.”

“You do not have to look at it for long before you realize that this is as sensual a building as New York has seen in a very long time,” stated Pulitzer-prize winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger of the American Folk Art Museum. Completed by architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien in 2001 the museum is 40 feet wide and 100 feet long and is surrounded by the Museum of Modern Art on three sides. It was the first new museum built in New York in over three decades.

More on the American Folk Art Museum after the break.

As part of the Triennial program at the Cooper Hewitt, the showing exhibit Why Design Now? presents some of the most innovative designs of contemporary culture. The exhibition, which addresses human and environmental concerns, includes designers dappling in all areas of the design field – from architecture, to fashion, and graphics to materials.

More about the exhibit after the break.