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Like the Guggenheim, the Tate and the Louvre, Paris's Centre Georges Pompidou has gone into the franchising business and spun off its first satellite museum. Opened to the public last May in the northeastern French city of Metz, the Centre Pompidou-Metz was designed by the Japanese/ French duo of Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines. Ban and Gastines not only beat out Herzog & de Meuron and NOX Architects to win the competition, they delivered the museum on budget (10 million euros) and in record time-just three years after construction began.   MORE >>

Like the Guggenheim, the Tate and the Louvre, Paris's Centre Georges Pompidou has gone into the franchising business and spun off its first satellite museum. Opened to the public last May in the northeastern French city of Metz, the Centre Pompidou-Metz was designed by the Japanese/ French duo of Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines. Ban and Gastines not only beat out Herzog & de Meuron and NOX Architects to win the competition, they delivered the museum on budget (10 million euros) and in record time-just three years after construction began.

While the original Pompidou, designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, looks like a factory turned inside out, the Pompidou-Metz excites folksier comparisons. The mayor of Metz called it the "Smurf House," while The New York Times described it as "an enormous snow-white toadstool." One over-the-top critic even described it as a kind of mythical beast, a phantasmagorical hybrid of a duck, walrus and horse.

The Pompidou-Metz may appear to be all those things, but first and foremost, it has a spectacular roof. Imagine a pristine white handkerchief floating down from the sky and draping itself over an undulating, hexagon-patterned, wood-framed canopy. From afar, the white Teflon-fibreglass roof looks like Cool Whip with glass-ended rectangles protruding through its sides. The concrete structure beneath the canopy consists of three stacked "shoebox" volumes, as well as a box and a cylinder that house the museum's exhibition and office spaces, restaurant, cafe, bookstore, auditorium and concert hall.

"The priority of this museum, even before being an art museum, is to be a gathering place for the public," says Ban. "Instead of making a sculptural kind of building, or a box with a door to go in, I wanted to create a strong motivation for people to enter." By stretching a canopy over the entire building, Ban and Gastines have created flexible indoor/outdoor public spaces as an alternative to visiting the museum's exhibitions. The sheltered patio outside the Patrick Jouin-designed restaurant on the second floor is one of these areas. So is the lobby-like Forum on the ground floor with shuttered glass walls that open up entirely to the outdoors in good weather. "Not all people are interested in contemporary art," says Ban. "The roof creates a space that is between inside and outside. In the winter, people will enjoy sitting outside under the canopy. And little by little, they'll come into the museum."

Canopies have long been a subject of meditation for Ban, explored in his temporary pavilion for Expo 2000 in Hanover and an installation piece he created for the Rice University Art Gallery in Houston in 2002, called Bamboo Roof. Like the paper tube structures Ban is best known for-most famously his temporary Paper Church in Kobe, Japan, which was taken down in 2005-canopies function as lightweight shelter. Ban has reconciled the ephemeral, nomadic spirit of a tent roof with the durability and permanence a museum requires. He meets those conditions with the concrete containers, but it's a tense amalgam of a flight-of-fancy roof soaring over concrete geometry. For one thing, combining the two has created substantial unused space. The empty roofs of the rectangular, ground-floor bookstore and first-floor gallery are no-man's-lands visible from the third floor but physically inaccessible, and sure spots for pigeons to flock. Ban argues that the interstitial spaces produced by juxtaposing box and roof constitute the museum's defining areas: the indoor/outdoor Forum lobby where people gather, and the Grande Nef exhibition space on the ground floor, with it's monumental three-story-high walls. "The Forum and the Grande Nef are in-between spaces," says Ban. "The space created between the canopy roof and the boxes … are the most important ones in the museum."

The Pompidou-Metz devotes a grand total of 53,000 square feet to displaying art, making it the country's biggest temporary exhibition space and the perfect showcase for the Paris Pompidou's vast collection of 20th-and 21st-century art. The Pompidou is gambling that its high-powered collections and idiosyncratic new home will turn the Metz museum into a destination spot for cultural tourists. The city of Metz, of course, hopes to lure visitors out of the museum and into town. To that effect, Ban positioned one of the glass-ended galleries to peer out at Metz's Gothic St. Stephen's Cathedral like a telescope. Another, meanwhile, is pointed in the direction the city's main rail station. With Paris only an hour-and-a-half away, Ban has created a subtle link to the institution's mothership. Let's hope it's just the first of many.centrepompidou-metz.fr,shigerubanarchitects.com
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With the opening of the Tampa Museum of Art, Floridians gain not just a new cultural center, but also an ethereal digital sunset courtesy of New York artist Leo Villareal. With a series of multicolored LED fixtures tucked between two layers of perforated aluminum panels in the museum’s facade, Villareal's installation, named "Sky (Tampa)," transforms the building at night into a 300-foot-long, 45-foot-high ribbon of pulsating, colored light.   MORE >>

With the opening of the Tampa Museum of Art, Floridians gain not just a new cultural center, but also an ethereal digital sunset courtesy of New York artist Leo Villareal. With a series of multicolored LED fixtures tucked between two layers of perforated aluminum panels in the museum’s facade, Villareal's installation, named "Sky (Tampa)," transforms the building at night into a 300-foot-long, 45-foot-high ribbon of pulsating, colored light.

Albuquerque-born Villareal, 43, is fast becoming the art world’s most accomplished magician of large-scale light fields. In 2008, he created "Multiverse," a wall and ceiling installation involving 41,000 computer-controlled LEDs at Washington DC's National Gallery of Art, where a 200-foot-long hallway billows with illuminated data clouds. In 2007, he completed "Microcosm" for the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas -- a 12,000 LED pixelated kaleidoscope that hangs above the museum's entrance. The San Jose Museum of Art will exhibit a survey of Villareal's rapidly expanding portfolio this August, and he's also at work on what is sure to be an enlightening installation for New York's Broadway-Lafayette subway station.
 
Villareal, a graduate of New York University's brainy Interactive Telecommunications Program, dabbled in virtual reality technology before finding art. He derives the patterns that play out across his architectural installations from custom software and patient experimentation. "I started out working with rules, different structures and code," he says. "Then I started thinking about patterns you’d find in nature, like waves, and boiling them down to their essence." He also pulls freely from math and science, exploring everything from mathematician John Conway's Game of Life to Sir Isaac Newton's law of universal gravitation to create patterns that appear to come from Mother Nature.
 
"Leo's work is not just the sum of the lights that are used," says Leigh Conner, owner of Washington DC's Conner Contemporary Art gallery, which represents Villareal. "The actual artwork is the digital code." And even though bits and bytes represent a distinct departure from paintbrush and palette, Conner knew she was witnessing something important the first time she saw Villareal's creations in 2002: "I thought, 'This is it -- this is the new way of abstract painting.'" Only this time, the compositions refuse to sit still. villareal.net   << LESS

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The day before his inauguration, Barack Obama made an appearance at the Washington, DC, homeless-youth center Sasha Bruce House, pulling down a stubborn curtain and rolling cerulean paint on the walls according to a redesign by New York-based architecture firm HWKN. And while studio namesakes Matthias Hollwich (the HW) and Marc Kushner (KN) admit their $1,500 scheme merely created cleaner and more private spaces, the outpouring of responses to the project pegged it as revolutionary. Scores of TV viewers contacted their SoHo office to learn how they, too, could construct a more socially responsible reality.   MORE >>

The day before his inauguration, Barack Obama made an appearance at the Washington, DC, homeless-youth center Sasha Bruce House, pulling down a stubborn curtain and rolling cerulean paint on the walls according to a redesign by New York-based architecture firm HWKN. And while studio namesakes Matthias Hollwich (the HW) and Marc Kushner (KN) admit their $1,500 scheme merely created cleaner and more private spaces, the outpouring of responses to the project pegged it as revolutionary. Scores of TV viewers contacted their SoHo office to learn how they, too, could construct a more socially responsible reality.

Since 2006—when Hollwich, a 38-year-old German, and Kushner, a New Jersey-born 32-year-old, met in the office kitchen of progressive Berlin-based architect Jürgen Mayer—the partners have wanted to get more people talking about their craft.

That method entails making observations. Instead of performing a typical young-architect renovation, in 2008 HWKN lined part of a 4,000-square-foot Manhattan apartment with built-in storage that changes volume to accommodate an extensive Judaica collection and other trappings. Although built from familiar materials such as MDF, cork and bleached ash plywood, the so-called Wall Unitizer articulated its homeowners' lifestyle more expressly than the foyer table, breakfront and desk they had originally requested.

Their method also means taking positions. For the annual Evolo Skyscraper Competition in 2006, HWKN's Skygrove tower features multiple legs resembling a mangrove tree, which can better withstand flooding from rising seas. "It's too late to avoid global warming, so it heightens awareness of that reality," Hollwich says. Indeed, Skygrove personifies HWKN's concept of "econic" design—creating green-minded icons that galvanize people to embrace sustainability in every aspect of their lives.

But the pair's growing body of work is not limited to the physical realm. "Architecture is about communication," Kushner says. "And to communicate, every tool is at your disposal." Their latest tool is Architizer, an online social networking site and project database for the architecture community. Echoing a familiar theme, Kushner says, "It's a way to reach a greater population, to show them what we do and to make architecture consumable instead of an out-of-reach art form."

Following a 2009 commission at LA's Virgil Skilled Nursing Center, the pair has set its sights on geriatric environments. In addition to overseeing the mid-April New Aging Conference at UPenn, HWKN is on track to complete a retirement facility in Africa's Ivory Coast for elderly priests in 2012. Residences are arranged in a village configuration, an on-site school allows priests to teach the local population and other radically communal gestures all banish the ascetic spaces that today define the end of life. It promises to position the duo as architects who are as sensitive as they are fearless. hwkn.com   << LESS

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When Zaha Hadid won the commission to design a new art museum in Rome's Flaminio neighborhood, Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao was two years old, Zaha's office was twenty-strong and the world was heading into a boom period. Ten years later, the 312,000-square-foot MAXXI (National Museum of the 21st Century Arts) seems at first glance like just another starchitect project. Instead, the MAXXI, developed and run by Italy's Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities as a way of bringing the nation fully into the current century, is a leap forward in museum architecture as remarkable as Gehry's Guggenheim.   MORE >>

When Zaha Hadid won the commission to design a new art museum in Rome's Flaminio neighborhood, Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao was two years old, Zaha's office was twenty-strong and the world was heading into a boom period. Ten years later, the 312,000-square-foot MAXXI (National Museum of the 21st Century Arts) seems at first glance like just another starchitect project. Instead, the MAXXI, developed and run by Italy's Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities as a way of bringing the nation fully into the current century, is a leap forward in museum architecture as remarkable as Gehry's Guggenheim.
The project transforms the idea of a museum from a central and coherent block and moves it in a new direction. "We wanted to compose a building out of a field of elements," project architect Gianluca Racana says of the MAXXI, which is built mostly from concrete, steel and glass, and incorporates galleries for art and architecture produced since 2000. The building also includes an auditorium, library and conference rooms. "It's a space you have to explore, visit and navigate before getting a full grasp of it," he says.
One of the firm's biggest challenges was in engineering the concrete facade, a surface that also functions as the galleries' interior walls, requiring the material to incorporate both strength and sleekness. Overall, the coiled, snake-like building exemplifies motion—forward and back, up and down, twisting and turning.
This playfulness sets the building apart from so many others that have opened in the post-Bilbao craze. As much as Gehry’s curved-titanium ship was a marker for so-called helicoptered-in structures, the MAXXI, which appears to grow out of the ground, is the perfect architectural expression of our diversified and ultimately elusive museum culture. maxxi.beniculturali.it, zaha-hadid.com   << LESS

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Romanesque. Georgian Revival. Collegiate Gothic. Mention any style that swept across America’s built landscape in the last 200 years, and you will probably elicit emotional responses. But the glass boxes that have come to define modern architecture? Not so much. "Over the past century, architecture has become exceedingly intellectualized, sometimes eclipsing emotion and a range of aesthetic sensations," says Mark Foster Gage. "Our work is trying to reinvigorate the way architecture resonates with people."   MORE >>

Romanesque. Georgian Revival. Collegiate Gothic. Mention any style that swept across America's built landscape in the last 200 years, and you will probably elicit emotional responses. But the glass boxes that have come to define modern architecture? Not so much. "Over the past century, architecture has become exceedingly intellectualized, sometimes eclipsing emotion and a range of aesthetic sensations," says Mark Foster Gage. "Our work is trying to reinvigorate the way architecture resonates with people."
 
Before founding the firm in 2002, Gage worked for New York-based Robert AM Stern and Takenaka in Osaka, while his partner Marc Clemenceau Bailly did stints with Ferguson & Shamamian and Peter Pennoyer, both in New York. Together, they run Gage/Clemenceau Architects from a muscular storefront in Manhattan's Lower East Side. It's a long way from Notre Dame, where the friends earned their bachelor's degrees in architecture and where they accumulated the historical knowledge that informs their work today.
 
However, building a bridge between old and new architecture does not mean replicating the past. Rather, Gage/Clemenceau's complex plans, intricate forms and undulating surfaces are largely unprecedented, and the principals achieve these jaw-dropping geometries with digital programming and fabrication. The pair frequently works with software maker Autodesk to ensure programs like Maya and Mudbox—both originally used for Hollywood special effects and computer-generated imagery—and the automotive-design tool AliasStudio are suitable for architectural design.
 
The results of Gage/Clemenceau's mission include installations such as this year's Valentine to Times Square, a giant heart constructed of laser-cut stainless steel, translucent Corian and computerized LEDs that stood temporarily in Duffy Square. "The heart project was an unabashedly cheerful exercise for our office, allowing us to use the newest design technologies, advanced materials and robotic fabrication techniques for the express purpose of producing, well, a little bit of love," Gage says. In the pipeline for 2010, the firm's first freestanding house and a line of jewelry should stoke emotions further.
 
Yet, Gage also notes that the studio creates products and spaces not merely as aesthetic exercises. The curving, lace-like facades submitted to the February 2008 competition for the Estonian Academy of Arts were intended to forge visual links between occupants of the building’s elevated public courtyard and passers-by. And for a recently completed three-bedroom apartment overlooking Central Park, Gage/Clemenceau differentiated rooms with various undulating walls and patterned three-dimensional surfaces. As Bailly puts it, "We’re trying to inject a little more beauty and emotion into the form-versus-function equation." gageclemenceau.com   << LESS