Jim Olson: Architecture for Art

Museum of Art at Washington State University

Pulman,

The Museum of Art at Washington State University is organizing "Architecture for Art," the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to the 45-year career of Jim Olson, one of the Northwest's most significant architects.

Founder of the internationally recognized Seattle-based firm, Olson Kundig Architects, Olson has explored artistic, cultural, natural and personal influences in his work. The exhibit will display how these influences have impacted his career, with displays ranging from his notebooks and sketches to stunning large-scale photo displays and models.

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Otto Neurath. Gypsy Urbanism

At a time when contemporary culture is dominated by mass media and we are all glued to many screens, it is fascinating to contemplate the career of little-known Austrian sociologist, Otto Neurath (1888-1945), a polymath whose intellectual and moral compass - forged in the embers of World War I - led him to predict the dramatic growth of the knowledge economy and to develop tools for a universal pictorial language. Ever in the interest of advancing participatory forms of democratic exchange, Neurath was by turn an academic, economic minister, housing administrator, museum director and philosopher of science. He collaborated with the leading planners, designers and artists of his time, - among them Adolf Loos, Josef Frank, Le Corbusier, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and key New Deal intellectuals - and his work had a profound influence on a range of disciplines, including architecture, philosophy, economics, urbanism and graphic design.

On view at the Schindler House from November 4, 2009 through January 31, 2010, the exhibition is loosely divided into three sections. The scene is set with artifacts and ephemera from Vienna's Settler Movement of the 1920s, when Neurath initiated his public career. The centerpiece of the exhibition re-creates works from Neurath's Museum of Society and Economy, the major work of his life.
Santiago Calatrava to Speak at Pratt

Renowned architect, artist, sculptor, and engineer Santiago Calatrava will speak about his work and career as part of the School of Architecture’s spring 2010 lecture and events series at 6 p.m. on Thursday, April 22, 2010 in Memorial Hall Auditorium on Pratt’s Brooklyn Campus. The lecture is free and open to the public, however seating priority will be given to Pratt students with valid ID at 5:30 p.m. Members of the public will be admitted at 5:50 p.m. should seating be available.

Calatrava, a native of Valencia, Spain, won his first competition proposal in 1983 for the design and construction of Stadelhofen Railway Station in Zurich, the city where he established his first office. Since then, Calatrava has earned an international reputation for the design and construction of over 55 acclaimed bridges, transportation centers, and educational buildings. Among his notable projects are the Bach de Roda Bridge, Barcelona; Tenerife Auditorium, Canary Islands; the Alameda Bridge and Metro Station, Valencia; the expansion of the Milwaukee Art Museum; and the new Liege-Guillemins TGV Railway Station, Belgium, which opened in September 2009.

Calatrava established his firm’s second office in Paris in 1989, when he was working on the Lyon Airport Station, and opened the firm’s third office in Valencia in 1991 to facilitate ongoing work on the City of Arts and Sciences cultural complex. He closed the Paris office in 2003 and opened an office in New York City in 2004 to be closer to a number of important commissions he received in the United States, including the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, New York; three bridges over the Trinity River, Dallas; the expansion of the Denver International Airport; and the first building for the University of South Florida Polytechnic’s new campus, which upon completion will be Calatrava’s first educational complex in the U.S.

Calatrava’s artwork was first exhibited in 1985 with the display of nine sculptures in an art gallery in Zurich. He reached new levels of recognition with solo exhibitions at the Royal Institute of British Architects, London, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The latter exhibition included an installation in the museum’s sculpture garden of Shadow Machine, a large-scale sculpture with undulating concrete “fingers.” He has also exhibited work in various other international venues including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery–Alexandros Soutzos Museum, Athens; the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; and Es Baluard Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Majorca. Calatrava has received numerous personal and professional honors for his work in architecture. He was named a “Global Leader of Tomorrow” by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 1993; included on TIME Magazine’s “TIME 100” list of the most influential people in 2005; and received the American Institute of Architect’s Gold Medal in recognition of a significant body of work of lasting influence on the theory and practice of architecture, also in 2005. He has received 16 honorary doctorates to date and is a permanent honorary guest of the University of Zurich.
Events this Weekend: 3.18-21

This weekend, Peter Cook curates an exhibit of the next great architects, the Vitra Design Museum reopens its doors for a new exhibit showcasing modern icons and their influences, the Industry…
Eero Saarinen: A Reputation for Innovation

This exhibition is a tribute to Saarinen’s short and brilliant career which was bookended in the Nation’s capital with two iconic buildings: the Smithsonian Gallery of Art, a museum of modern art on the Mall which remained unbuilt and the nation’s first jet airport, Dulles International Airport which was completed one year after his death.

The exhibition is open for public with free admission!
Chihuly: Through the Looking Glass

Over the course of his career, Dale Chihuly has revolutionized the art of blown glass, moving it into the realm of large-scale sculpture and establishing the use of glass—inherently a fragile but also magical material—as a vehicle for installation and environmental art. This exhibition of new and archival works represents the breadth and scope of the artist’s creative vision over the last four decades.

By 1965, Dale Chihuly was already captivated by the process of glassblowing. Influenced by an environment that fostered the blurring of boundaries separating the various arts, as early as 1967 Chihuly was using neon, argon, and blown glass forms to create room-sized installations of his glass. Although his work ranges from the single vessel to indoor and outdoor site-specific installations, he is best known for his multipart blown compositions. Based in Seattle, Washington, Chihuly works with a team of glassblowers, a process that allows him to work on a grand scale and to explore and experiment with color, design, and assemblage. "Chihuly: Through the Looking Glass" provides an opportunity to see and explore the full range of his artistic achievements by immersing visitors in the beautiful and enchanting environments created through his extraordinary vision.
Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World

Born and raised in New York, Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956) moved at the age of sixteen to Germany, where he became one of the leading practitioners of German Expressionism and the Bauhaus. In the late 1930s, when the Nazi campaign against modern art forced him to flee back to New York after an absence of fifty years, his marriage of abstraction and recognizable imagery made him a beloved artist in the United States. Long acknowledged as a major figure of the Bauhaus, Feininger is renowned for his romantic, crystalline paintings of architecture and seascapes. Less well known are the whimsical aspects of his work: his pioneering Chicago Sunday Tribune comic strips; his figurative, Expressionist compositions; his photographs; and his miniature hand-carved wooden figures and buildings, known as City at the Edge of the World. This retrospective is the first in Feininger’s native country in more than forty-five years, and the first ever to include the full breadth of his art.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated monograph with a feature essay that provides a broad overview of Feininger’s career, tracing his relationships with movements and organizations that defined the development of modern art, including Cubism, the Blaue Reiter, the Blue Four, the Bauhaus, and Black Mountain College. Additional essays focus on Feininger’s comics, his photographs, his musical compositions, and his reputation in Germany.
Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment

Pritzker Prize-winner Kevin Roche is acclaimed for his skillful integration of man-made and natural environments. Drawing on material originally presented at the Yale School of Architecture, the exhibition has been expanded to highlight Roche's contributions to the fabric of New York City, including the Ford Foundation Headquarters and more than four decades of master planning, design, renovations, and new additions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment features original drawings, models, photographs, and ephemera documenting Roche's career, along with extensive video presentations of projects and interviews with the architect.
Palladio and His Legacy: A Transatlantic Journey

Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) is considered among the most significant and influential architects in the Western world. His clean, elegant interpretation of the architecture of classical antiquity was to spread throughout Europe and North America, and his finished buildings, drawings, and writings have become cultural touchstones.

Now, for the first time in New York, The Morgan Library & Museum presents a collection of thirty-one rarely seen drawings by Palladio from the outstanding collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects Trust. The drawings, together with Palladio's architectural texts and pattern books, highlight the growth of his design sensibility. They range from early studies and sketches to perfectly executed later drawings of villas and other commissioned works. Also on view are a number of detailed architectural models, demonstrating the spread of Palladio's architectural theories to America, most notably in the work of Thomas Jefferson and in designs for monumental buildings in Washington, DC.

The exhibition is organized by the Royal Institute of British Architects Trust, London, in association with the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, Vicenza, and The Morgan Library & Museum, New York. Plaster models are by Timothy Richards.