Designing exhibits, I’ve always been inspired as much by installation art as any other discipline. Perhaps more. For example, this remarkable image, from a piece by Argentine-German artist Tomás Saraceno, has been haunting me lately:
In the spring Bonniers Konsthall presents a solo exhibition by the artist and architect Tomás Saraceno … In collaboration with spider researchers and astrophysicists, Tomás Saraceno has spent several years developing the 400 cubic metre installation that is exhibited at Bonniers Konsthall. … The gigantic spider’s web, especially made for the main gallery of Bonniers Konsthall, consists of elastic black rope which will span floor to ceiling.
Must-see: an enlightening and (very) information-packed discussion of social media and web strategy. By Sebastian Chan – charismatic director of apparently everything technological at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia – speaking at the Smithsonian (archived at the Smithsonian 2.0 video collection)
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King Tut, or at least the exhibition of the same name, has come to Times Square. A recent review in the New York Times by Edward Rothstein explains that the show is raising money for Egyptian museums, and that doing so apparently means a more commercial focus than ever.
The New York show is hosted by “Discovery Times Square Exposition,” which is related to the Discovery Channel. (Discovery TSX, by the way, is promoted as “New York City’s first large-scale exhibition center.” No offense to Discovery – I am a fan of the TV programming – but I wonder what the large museums of the city, not to mention the Javits Center, must think of that particular claim.) The Metropolitan Museum, host of “Tut I”, the earlier show of years past that helped define the idea of a blockbuster exhibit, declined to host this time around.
The ticket price? $28. That’s a lot, even for a child king. An excerpt from the Times review after the break:
Narrative Space, a conference hosted by the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester in the UK, starts today, despite the volcanic ash cloud. It is an “international conference exploring the interpretive potential of museum architecture and design.” (Sounds great, sad I can’t go!)
The remarkable site Artbabble won “Best Overall” honors in the Best of the Web competition last week at the Museums and the Web conference in Denver. Originally launched in April of last year by the Indianapolis Museum of Art and six partners, the site is has become “one of the premier destinations for art video online”. It’s eminently worth seeing, not only for its implications about how the web changes what museums do, but also for the innovative video-navigation core features.
From the Best of the Web writeup:
Broadening the interactive experience even further, a section for comments allows visitors to share observations and suggest links of their own. Comments can also be embedded directly into the video timeline as well, letting users comment on elements at a particular point in time. Full text transcriptions of videos drive closed captioning features for video playback and because they are rendered to the video page, search engines can index the spoken text for video content. Users can easily skip deep into a long format video picking and choosing only the content that interests them.
Sometimes in the early stages of a design project, an unfortunate physical similarity goes unnoticed until someone coins an unforgettable phase that captures it. I’ve seen perfectly lovely design concepts rejected because of this peculiar phenomenon.
Fortunately in this case, the citizens of Metz, France, seem to like the fact that their new museum, the Pompidou-Metz by architect Shigeru Ban, looks to their mayor like a “smurf house” (one supposes he would have actually said it in French: “chez les Schtroumpfs”).
A great little video of the Dieter Rams exhibit at the Design Museum in London, narrated by museum director Deyan Sudjic. Just lovely. (To me, design exhibits and exhibit design are sort of the same thing, somehow.)
Just in: first look by architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne in the LA Times – with images and commentary – of Frank Gehry’s design for the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, DC. First reaction: very un-Gehry, so to speak, which in this case is a good thing. (The space shown in the model above is immediately off the National Mall.) Via @culturemonster.
In the New York Times today, a review by resident architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff calls Jean Nouvel’s new design for the National Museum of Qatar his “most overtly poetic act of cultural synthesis yet.” From the early images, I’m inclined to agree. Several of us were raving about it today, wondering why no one had used a disc form this way before. A wonderful reminder that there are still good, simple design ideas out there waiting to be found.
PLOT Magazine continues to publish some of the best examples of new exhibition design and museum planning from Europe. In Vienna, the historical exhibit Battle for the City is filled with uncommon design ideas, from the nuanced to the wonderfully new (above, a surprisingly fresh treatment for exhibit walls). Unlike the printed magazine, PLOT’s web text is not in English, so here is a partial translation of the project description (any errors mine):
With Battle for the City, the Künstlerhaus in Vienna presents one of the greatest historical exhibitions in recent years. The show, designed by Viennese firm BWM Architekten und Partner, offers 2,000 square meters [21,500 square feet] of insights into the Vienna of the 1920s and 1930s: the tension between democracy and dictatorship, avant-garde and provincialism, departure and resignation.
My fellow designer parents know that all the well-designed, expensive, eco-friendly, perfectly color-coded Scandinavian brain toys in the world can’t hold a candle to any plastic toy that’s loud and blinks. But perhaps MoMA’s new Shape Lab, an interactive space for children that opened last month, can give us all a helping hand. (It’s rumored to be free, that won’t hurt either.) Via Kidcity.
“Wir und Ihr” (rough translation: you and us) is an exhibition on refugees, immigration and identity in Germany. According to a post from PLOT Magazine, 1.6 million refugees from around Europe and the world live in the southwestern part of the country; this exhibit examines their origins and their lives in their new homeland. The exhibit design, by Stuttgart firm jangled nerves, is stark and powerful, using repetition and mirrors to imply masses of humanity.
Explorations of new developments in exhibit design, museum planning and interactive space by Jonathan Alger, co-founder of the design firm C&G Partners.
