1. Get ready to bro it out at Lollapalooza this year. An early report points to Eminem, Foo Fighters, and Muse headlining the festival, which takes place August 5-7 at Chicago’s Grant Park. [Chicago Tribune]
2. A portrait Picasso painted of his teenage mistress, Marie-Therese Walter, sold for £25,241,250 (about $36 million) at… Read More
With the rise of starchitect culture in recent decades, there has been a subsequent rise in the number of museums designed by celebrity architects. (It was believed that if a big name was behind a building, it would attract more attention, and in turn, visitors. Makes sense.) Click through to check out 10 of the most eye-catching modern museums on the planet — including a few that are still currently in progress — and we think you’ll see why it works. … Read More
[Editor's note: For the next two Fridays, Flavorwire will be counting down our 20 most popular features of 2010. This post, which originally ran on August 9, 2010, comes in at position number 20.] A gray, concrete rectangle isn’t the only option available when it comes to designing buildings. The final shape and style of an edifice is limited only by an architect’s imagination. To showcase some other possibilities, we collected 10 buildings that resemble something else, including an elephant, picnic basket, pair of grazing armadillos, and much more. Click past the jump and let your structural creativity soar! … Read More
Frank Gehry strikes again! The starchitect has revealed the plan for his first-ever Australian building, a business school. We’re wondering how the University of Technology Sydney feels about paying $150 million for a structure that’s been nicknamed The Treehouse and already looks like it’s melting or imploding or something. As for Gehry, he’s… Read More
London’s 40-year-old Serpentine Gallery may have housed works by Man Ray, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, but the gallery’s most impressive feature is its summer Pavilion series, which was created in 2000 by Gallery Director, Julia Peyton-Jones. Today it was announced that controversial French architect, Jean Nouvel, is on board for 2010′s installation. Images from the past ten years of Serpentine Pavilions, plus Nouvel’s mock-ups after the… Read More
Despite the clunky moniker, we read with interest as The Independent UK rattled off the seven — count ‘em, seven — relevant starchitects in the world, constrasting them with commercial building firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. SOM is a workhorse firm (established in 1936) that has put up major projects from Dubai to Beijing including five of the ten tallest buildings in the world — in other words, America’s first “super practice.” What SOM hasn’t hammered down is the je ne sais quoi of its flashier architectural contemporaries. A primer on the heavy hitters after the… Read More
Man oh man, Frank O. Gehry is not having a good month. (Maybe it’s true what they say about the end of January, no matter how starchitect-y you are.) Last week came the news that Gehry Partners is being axed as architect of record on the Museum of Tolerance in Israel; now we’re hearing wind of a stop-work order on New York’s own Beekman Tower. At least the band-aids are coming now, rather than three years after construction as in the case of MIT’s Stata Center, over which Gehry was sued for breach of contract — read: leaks and cracked masonry — in 2007. See what the world will be missing in the form of Israel’s flashiest to-be building, after the… Read More
Edward Lifson of Hello Beautiful! recently took a jaunt outside of Sin City to check out a new Frank Gehry edifice for a medical center devoted to brain health. Currently under construction, the Lou Ruvo Center comprises two wings in different styles that crash and reverberate at a point of connection, creating a very Gehry-like dissonance that may also reference the two sides of the brain. Left side: ordered, linear, logical. Right side: creative, emotional, random. Click through for more images and see if you, too, can understand the architect formerly known as Ephraim Owen… Read More
1. Movies about the world sucking and/or ending dominated the weekend box office. [via Gawker]
2. “That’s the great thing about art. Anybody can do it if you just believe. With practice, you can make great paintings.” – an interesting interview with Damien Hirst in the Guardian
3. Check out the… Read More
Apparently having one of the most iconic museum buildings in the world and a cultural influence so strong it’s spawned its own cute phrase (the “Bilbao effect”) isn’t enough for the Spanish outpost of the Guggenheim juggernaut. The Museo Guggenheim Bilbao has just announced plans for a satellite expansion a scant 40 km from its existing Gehry-designed command center. The proposed site is located in the Basque region near Guernica, itself a cynosure for art historians after Picasso’s rendition of the 1937 bombing massacre there during the Spanish Civil War. Which begs the question: blight on or much-needed economic catalyst to a pristine but underdeveloped coastal region? We break down the numbers after the… Read More
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