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!)
Full program (big PDF) here.
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”).
Via the New York Times.
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.
A bumper crop: 57 new developments (1-13 March). (Previous list. All past lists.)
- Congo hopes a new museum can heal a nation’s scars.
- McSweeney’s imagines museum work: “Natural Museum of History Interoffice Smackdown.”
- Smart museum idea in here somewhere: brilliant IKEA subway display in Paris.
- Mixed Reactions to News of Dale Chihuly Museum Planned for Base of Space Needle.
- Swiss Museum of Transport: the “most fun, most whimsical, most hands-on and most clever” of them all.
- A smart museum idea is in here somewhere: 3D Optical Illusion Pavement Art
- Juncanoo claims to connect “museums with patrons through mobile interactive tours.”
- Talented museum catalog and book designer Gina Rossi.
- Charming video: Preparing the gowns for the First Ladies exhibit.
- Virtual tour: Strong National Museum of Play
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.
There were 32 new developments:
- In multimedia exhibition, Asian Art Museum captures Shanghai’s vibrancy, present and past.
- Vital 5 Productions’ Portland Art Museum Unauthorized Tour.
- Museum of Advertising Icons opens 2010 (follow Mr. Bubble).
- Museum Attendance Rises Despite (due to?) Recession. 40% are up “significantly,” esp. science museums.
- New exhibit: the art of DreamWorks (Madagascar, Monsters vs. Aliens, Shrek).
- African Burial Ground Visitor Center opens in NYC. Review. (NY Times) Sneak peek.
- Eye Candy: Olafur Eliasson’s Amazing New Art Installation.
- Wow. Interactive showroom, museum + resource center: Herzog & de Meuron’s Vitrahaus.
- Los Angeles Swaps 21 Billboards With Art.
- One of downtown Providence’s busiest streets will become a unique pop-up museum about itself.
- “None of these exhibit techniques are costly .. no computer interactives, no extra-special lighting”.
- “How much does exhibition design cost?” big ongoing discussion in Museum Design on LinkedIn.
- Elaine Heumann Gurian is putting her thoughts online.
- Provocative: Robert Storr* Battles ‘Death Star Museums‘. *Yale School of Art Dean
- “smARTphone” mobile tours launch at Dallas Museum of Art. Mobile web, not app. Also: http://dallasmuseumofart.mobi
- Enough. I declare the recession over. “Harbor Area museums could lose curators in city of LA budget cuts.”
- Great video of Jona Piehl of Land Design Studio on different examples of successful exhibition design.
- Okay, bear with me here: Global Tree Project on Legoclick.com (Lego site alone is worth seeing).
- Faltering state budgets? Cake from the future? Latest Research Roundup for museum futurists.
- Incredible multitouch sphere at the Innovation Lounge at TED.
- Futures of the Past: Where Is Historic Preservation Headed? – Architect Magazine.
- Gesture-based interactivity (think Minority Report) debuts at TED.
- 2010 Whitney Biennial’s “monastically simple installation” – best ever?
- Yeouch. More bad news. Drastic, dreadful cuts to Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.
- Jobs projections for museum curator careers are contradictory, puzzling. Bottom line: “Learn the web”.
- MoMA’s interactive space for kids, ShapeLab.
- Great museum idea: “Looking Into the Past” – hold up old pic in the modern location where it was taken.
- Whoa. Recognizr: augmented reality prototype that recognizes faces and links them to social media accounts.
- Should video art be clumped together when shown in big shows?
- More anti-crowdsourcing: artists “concerned” about a Sesame St. creative contest. I agree. And you?
- European scientists hope to archive world culture, will scan key artifacts in 3-D.
- Are you developing exhibitions, programs, or spaces using technology? AAM TIE 2010 webinar call for presenters.
Langley academy in the UK, designed by architects Foster & Partners, and based on New York City’s renowned Museum School, goes one better: it contains a museum, has museum objects in every classroom, and devotes two afternoons a week visiting museums. Parents, apparently, are thrilled, according to an article last month in The Guardian (UK):
It hardly needs saying, but Annie Renouf Donaldson, headteacher at the £23m Lord Foster-designed Langley academy in Berkshire, is anxious to say it anyway. “Our museum programme is not a bolt-on, it’s at the heart of what we do. Some school trips to museums are just a one-day treat, a nice outing at the end of the term. Our own museum, our work with real museum objects in our classes, our visits to museums, these are stitched into the fabric of what we do in every class, every day.”
Langley specialises in science, computing and sport, but is also the first in Britain to commit itself to museum learning across the entire curriculum, inspired by the New York City Museum School.
The students don’t just experience the work of curators, the students are the curators:
In the Langley museum a pupil-curated display holds the most prized possessions of their English teacher. Beside the photographs and a biographical note on the American guitar hero Les Paul, who died in August, there are two of the legendary Les Paul Gibson guitars, pride and joy of Shane Stritch, who has swooped straight to the top of the coolness league table. The academy is also awash with dinosaurs.
Sometimes a brilliant floor plan is all the exhibit design you need. The Museum of Broken Relationships was created by two artists in Zagreb, Croatia – after they themselves broke up and realized that some of their shared “artifacts” had acquired unique new significance in the process. It has since become a museum with a traveling exhibit of “more than 70 bits of romantic detritus” and the stories that go with them. My favorite artifact: a man’s cell phone he gave to his ex-girlfriend – so she couldn’t call him anymore:
But it’s the floor plan that had me: a broken heart, with visitors walking through the shards. From the New York Times (the day after Valentine’s Day).
More articles like this, please! Yesterday the New York Times revealed the man, and the department, behind the exhibit design of countless shows at the Museum of Modern Art: Jerome Neuner and team. An excerpt:
In hundreds of exhibitions over the last three decades the names of a stunning number of curators and artists have entered the institutional memory of the Museum of Modern Art. But behind nearly all of these shows there has been a constant, a man whose name rarely surfaces anywhere except in invoices. It seems somehow appropriate, then, to find Jerome Neuner, the director of the museum’s department of exhibition design and production, in a windowless office below street level, down an anonymous industrial hallway.
Above: Mr. Neuner with exhibit designer Lana Hum.
There seems to be a bit of a cyan-typography epidemic out there, but I didn’t realize that the symptoms had spread to museums. Both the Philadelphia History Museum and Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry have unveiled new branding efforts recently.
