The New Museum, designed by Tokyo-based architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA (2010 Pritzker Prize), is the first art museum ever constructed from the ground up in downtown Manhattan,as well as an architectural contribution to NewYork's urban landscape. Sejima and Nishizawa, who received the commission in 2002, have described the building as their response to the history and powerful personalities of both the New Museum and its storied site. ''The Bowery was very gritty when we first visited it'', they have said. ''We were a bit shocked, but we were also impressed that a contemporary art museum wanted to be there.'' As visitors approach the Bowery, they encounter the building as a dramatic stack of seven rectangular boxes.This distinctive form derives directly from the architects’ defining solution to fundamental challenges of the site: A dense and ambitious program, including the need for open, flexible gallery spaces of different heights and atmospheres. The New Museum is clad in a seamless, anodized expanded aluminum mesh chosen by SANAA to emphasize the volumes of the boxes while dressing the whole of the building with a delicate, filmy, softly shimmering skin. With windows just visible behind this porous scrim-like surface, the building appears as a single, coherent, and even heroic form that is nevertheless mutable, dynamic, and animated by the changing light of day—an appropriate visual metaphor for the openness of the New Museum and the ever-changing nature of contemporary art.

 

New Museum

Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA
Introduction by Lisa Phillips - Photo-essay by de Iwan Baan
80pp./ 14x21cm./ 64il./ paperback with flaps

ISBN:
9788434312449 English

19.50€
 




 

 

The Institute of Contemporary Art, designed by Diller + Scofidio (now Diller Scofidio + Renfro), was the first new art museum to be built in Boston in a century. Opened in December 2006, the ICA is located on a small parcel of land on Boston Harbor and this is the 25th location for the museum in its 75 year history and its first, permanent, free-standing home.
"The ICA's decision to hire Diller + Scofidio reflected our belief in the firm's vision that architecture can shape as well as reflect contemporary experience," stated Jill Medvedow, director of ICA. The architects balanced use of cool and transparent glass with the warmth of wood and the energy of light, as well as their design of spare, flexible spaces for presenting contemporary art, was a revelation for a city and an architectural community.
"Their brilliant and beautiful design of the ICA was a harbinger of change: edgy, bold and breathtaking, transforming the landscape for contemporary art and culture in Boston and for the artists, art and ideas of our time," Medvedow has said.
 

Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA)

Boston
Diller, Scofidio & Renfro
Preface by Jill Medvedow - Photo-essay by Iwan Baan
80pp./ 17x24cm./ 62il./ paperback with flaps

ISBN:
9788434312807 English

19.50€
 




 

 

Designed in the second half of the 90s, the Jewish Museum in Berlin opened in September 2011. The modern architectural elements of the Libeskind building comprise the zinc façade, (described as “An irrational and invisible matrix”), the Garden of Exile (which attempts “to completely disorient the visitor [and] represents a shipwreck of history”), the three Axes of the German-Jewish experience, and the Voids (which refer to “that which can never be exhibited when it comes to Jewish Berlin history: Humanity reduced to ashes”). Together these pieces form a visual and spatial language rich with history and symbolism. In the words of the architect: “The official name of the project is ‘Jewish Museum’ but I have named it ‘Between the Lines’ because for me it is about two lines of thinking, organization, and relationship. One is a straight line, but broken into many fragments, the other is a tortuous line, but continuing indefinitely.” In some way, Libeskind imagines the continuation of both lines throughout the city of Berlin and beyond.
 

Jewish Museum Berlin

Berlin
Daniel Libeskind
Preface by Cilly Kugelmann - Photo-essay by Jan Bittter
80pp./ 14x21cm./ 62il./ paperback with flaps

ISBN:
9788434312920
9788434312937
English
Deutsch

19.50€