The Parrish Art Museum by Herzog & de Meuron; All photos © Matthu Placek

When Herzog & de Meuron speak of their design for the new Parrish Art Museum in the East Hamptons as being “almost banal”, they say more than they mean. The “admission”, of course, is designed to provoke, a kind of polemical (and PR) shorthand for the current state of architectural production where budgets are routinely halved and projects jettisoned with little warning. Found without the finances to pay for more ambitious schemes, the mannered gestures are dropped, swapped out for a formal austerity necessitated by the economic climate but  supposedly enriched by a newfound clarity of space and program. Continue.

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Photo: Gramercy Park Hotel

Ian Schrager is a lot of things. Entrepreneur. Developer. Designer. Now, Architizer A+ Awards juror. While he may have made his name with Studio 54 over 30 years ago, Schrager casts a long shadow over the global hotel industry. He’s credited with the conception of the “boutique hotel”, which he successful implemented with the opening of the Morgans in 1984. Later, he would up the ante with the Delano Hotel in Miami and the Mondrian Hotel in West Hollywood, both proto-”resort hotels” that integrated high-design in spectacular locales. In 2005, after cutting his ties to the Morgans Hotel Group, Schrager founded the Ian Schrager Company, which would go on to shape the cityscape of New York and beyond. Projects like 40 Bond, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, and the renovation of Gramercy Park Hotel, a collaboration between Schrager and artist Julian Schnabel, have set the bar for all others to follow.

We were so thrilled that Schrager jumped aboard for the A+ Awards, we figured we’d round up some of his best and most recognizable projects from the last decade. You’re definitely going to want to click through.

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As Archispotter blazes a trail across the United States, we at Architizer wanted to explore the architecture along her route. Previously, we covered projects between Boston and Chicago, and this week we cover the next 1,000 miles across the northern Plains between Chicago and Rapid City, South Dakota. First, we take a tour through Frank Lloyd Wright’s home state, Wisconsin, before moving on to Minneapolis, one of the most fertile grounds for architectural exploration in the country with projects by the likes of Herzog & de Meuron and Jean Nouvel. Finally, we cover the wide, flat, and endless plains of South Dakota. Here, we feature a couple of that state’s amazing national parks, which feature sculptures of sand and stone that reach architectural proportions. Travel across the middle of the United States with us, and enjoy some great architecture along the way. Continue.

Taliesin.

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Images: Iwan Baan

When we last reported on the Tanks at the Tate Modern, the project was nearing completion and gearing up for a fifteen-week festival to mark its opening. Now, the Tanks is finally open, becoming the first exhibition space in the world exclusively dedicated to performance and live art. The festival has also begun, kicked off by Korean artist Sung Hwan Kim’s optical illusions. The opening marks the completion of phase one of Herzog & de Meuron’s expansion of the museum, phase two being the large ‘twisting pyramid’ to be built above the Tanks which is set for completion in 2016.

The new exhibition spaces serve as a foil to the existing rectilinear museum, both in their roundness and as the antithesis of the traditional ‘white box’ gallery. However, much like the original building of the Tate Modern, the renovation preserves most traces of the Tanks’ past as part of the Bankside Power Station. Rather than presenting a blank slate upon which the art is viewed in isolation, the space becomes part of the context for the works on display. This creates a scenario where the work cannot be separated from the place and time it occurs, making it harder to buy and sell. Which makes us think that the Tanks are at the forefront of the development of a new art for a new era.

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The newly refurbished tanks at the Tate Modern; Photo: Marcus Leith via The Guardian

The opening of The Tanks at Tate Modern on July 18^th will mark the completion of the first phase of the Tate Modern’s expansion, designed by Swiss duo Herzog & de Meuron. The tanks, used to store oil when the structure functioned as a power plant, will be the first spaces in a museum to be exclusively dedicated to live art, performance, and film works. A fifteen-week arts festival will mark the opening.

At twenty-three feet high and one hundred feet in diameter, the tanks are gigantic, and yet it might be difficult to find where the original structure ends and Herzog & de Meuron’s restoration begins. This is because the architects wanted to let the size of the spaces speak for themselves, and allow the art performances to command the attention. While images seem to portray a large, yet simple, space, the tanks are completely deserving of attention. Their distinctiveness as underground structures will add a new dimension to works on display there.

The tanks under construction

The second phase of the Tate Modern’s expansion, set to open in 2016, has been called a ‘twisting pyramid’ and, it is hoped, will do above ground what the tanks now do under it: bring yet more energy and interest to what is already one of the most successful modern art museums in the world.

The tanks before renovation

The second phase of the expansion, rendering by Herzog & de Meuron

[via Happy Famous Artists]

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The 2012 Serpentine Pavilion opens to the public today! Crane.tv was at yesterday’s preview to cover the event and talk with the pavilion’s architects Herzog & de Meuron, who discussed what it was like to work with project’s third designer, artist Ai Wei Wei, in absentia from the opening proceedings. The artist, who is currently restricted from leaving China following his arrest and subsequent sentence last summer, was forced to participate remotely from his Beijing studio, communicating with the rest of the team mostly via Skype and email. Ai filmed a video commentary of the project that was screened for the press, a clip of which is featured in the video above. The pavilion, Ai says, continues his pursuit in “combining art, design, architecture, and social change”, while de Meuron spoke of the project’s formal and atmospheric qualities that “speak to all you senses.” For more on the pavilion, see our coverage from yesterday.

Photo: Iwan Baan

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The 2012 Serpentine Pavilion; Photo: Getty

The 2012 Serpentine Pavilion was opened to the press this morning under muted skies and damp grounds. Designed by Pritzker laureates Herzog & de Meuron and Chinese artist and dissident Ai Wei Wei, the work is the the twelfth in the series of pavilions to have graced Kensington Gardens. While the architect duo was on hand for the opening ceremony, Ai, currently barred from travelling outside his native China, was conspicuously absent, represented by a pre-recorded video message in which elaborated on the work’s conceptual “archaeology”. “We focused on memory and the past,” Ai said of the subterranean design, “We made a study to dig into the meaning of this total act and from that a very interesting result came out, which I think gives this pavilion a new meaning.”

The designers, who originally collaborated on the Bird’s Nest Olympic National Stadium in Beijing, made much of the pavilion’s excavation of the previous 11 structures that once stood on the grounds. Yet, when construction began some 2 weeks ago, the”traces” of these foundations were nowhere to be found. According to Royal Parks rules, the foundations must be cleared immediately following the closure and dismantling of the temporary pavilions, a setback that didn’t deter the architects who forged onward, completing the structure in record time.

As it stands completed, the pavilion is an understated affair, partly for its retreat below ground which renders the work nearly illegible from afar, the opposite of the fireworks show of its predecessors, best epitomized by Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel‘s installations. A giant mirrored circular pool hovers over a fabricated landscape of cork riven with ledges that are formed by the intersection and overlapping of the virtual foundations. The jagged platform steps down toward a stage where the press convened for the proceedings. Herzog & de Meuron expressed pleasure with the finished pavilion, with the former explaining that the structure’s subdued presence was intentional. “We are in a beautiful park, and you don’t want here an object that’s crying, ’Look, I’m the pavilion of 2012.’”

The 2012 Serpentine Pavilion opens to the public June 1.

Herzog & de Meuron at the press opening of their pavilion

Photo: Iwan Baan, via

Photo: Iwan Baan

Photo: Iwan Baan

Photo: Iwan Baan

Photo: Iwan Baan

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Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei have released plans for their collaborative design for the 2012 Serpentine Pavilion. The project, which will be featured in the London 2012 Festival to close this summer’s Olympic Games, recreates the same creative  partnership that produced the Bird’s Nest for the Beijing Olympics four years ago. The team’s surprisingly offering is a conceptual archaeological excavation of the ground, which has seen the erection and dismantling of works by the luminaries such as Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, Oscar Niemeyer, and SANAA.

The structure will dig down five feet down into the site to reveal the “traces” left by pavilions past. In doing so, it will make physical, if only temporarily, the archive through which the previous 11  projects are collected and “preserved”. The fabricated landscape, which will be clad with cork (“a natural material with wonderful haptic and olfactory qualities with the versatility to be carved, cut, shaped and formed”), transforms the ghostly footprints of these predecessors into a veritable topography, marked by grooves, angled voids, and tiered, extruded surfaces to allow for seating. A thin, reflective roof coated in a film with water is suspended overhead 1.4 meters (4.5 feet) above the subterranean site, supported by 12 columns each of which has been shaped by the convergence of the “convoluted lines” that comprise the resultant “sewing pattern” form.

The pavilion will also collect London rainwater and funnel it into a waterhole, the deepest point of the “site”, to engage the “otherwise invisible aspect of reality in the park”– the water beneath the ground–and, thus, further accentuating the project’s time-capsule like quality. The methodology employed by the pseudo-archaeologists is reminiscent of Peter Eisenman and Jacques Derrida’s collaborative (and terrible) entry for the 1982 Parc de la Villette competition in Paris, which similarly constructs an affected “excavated” site of so-called traces and fragments to establish a history of place.

In a statement, the designers note how the pavilion’s form is “a serendipitous gift”, one that will offer a “perfect place to sit, stand, lie down or just look and be amazed.” Or even dance, it seems, as the floating roof can be drained to be used as an elevated platform for parties. The team hope that the project’s versatility and its programmatic variance will prove “the ideal environment for continuing to do what visitors have been doing in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilions over the past eleven years – and a discovery for the many new visitors anticipated for the London 2012 Olympic Games.”

[via Bustler]

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425 Park Avenue; Photo: flickr user d. guija

A new Manhattan skyscraper is an event. We are far removed from the days of the city’s erstwhile competitive tower builders who manically thrust their stone edifices up in an intense race to the top. Things have changed, and the skyline must now be protected from the invasion of the new indignant glass towers, whose very materiality, it seems, is inherently inferior to that of their stone and brick forebearers. Yet, it cannot be said that there has been insufficient opportunity to produce a contemporary tower that at least approaches the exemplariness of New York’s greatest skyscrapers–few of the towers built in the last generation can be described as good, let alone great. But that may change, as 11 world-famous architects will be given their chance to recast the typology on their own terms.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, developer L&L Holding Co. has shortlisted Zaha Hadid, Foster + Partners, Herzog & de Meuron, Jean Nouvel, Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano, Richard Meier, and other top international firms to develop ideas for a new office tower to be built at 425 Park Avenue, which, ironically enough, is situated near the Seagram Building–easily the greatest structure to be erected on the island in the last half-century. The list will be soon narrowed, and those remaining will have till next month to present their proposal. The city hasn’t seen this many architectural egos since the (ongoing) disputes forged during the World Trade Center competition or when the UN Building committee pitted Wallace K. Harrison and Le Corbusier against one another in a battle of wills. Who will triumph and who will retreat, their prestige battered and bruised?

The site is currently inhabited by a 32-story building dating from 1957. Given Park Avenue’s peculiar zoning laws, leveling the structure in its entirety would prevent L&L from constructing the iconic skyscraper that they hope will rival Seagram and nearby Lever House both in height and quality. To work around this obstacle, the developers are planning to leave 25% of the existent steel structure intact, atop of which the new tower will rest.

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Ai Weiwei having a feast with Herzog & de Meuron

In London today, the Serpentine Gallery announced that Herzog & de Meuron and Chinese artist Ai Weiwei will reunite four years after designing Beijing National Stadium to design the 2012 Serpentine Pavilion. The annual commission has become a major event in the art and architecture community, with a short yet impressive heritage including designs by Oscar Niemeyer, Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, and Zaha Hadid.

The 2006 Serpentine Gallery designed by Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond

The decision to call upon the team behind the iconic Olympic Bird’s Nest is “tremendously exciting,” Julia Peyton-Jones, director of the Serpentine, tells the Guardian. “What is so fantastic,” she adds, “is that it is this extraordinary link of the two games, a Beijing-London axis… it is a continuation of a conversation that began in Beijing to great effect, and [Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron and Ai Weiwei] have conceived something really remarkable for our lawn.”

Ai Weiwei is perhaps most recognized these days not for his work but for his flighty rapport with the Chinese government. Last April, the outspoken artist was arrested and held without charge by authorities for almost three months, allegedly for breaching tax laws. As the Guardian reports, Ai has been working with the Swiss architects over Skype, and whether or not he will be able to leave China by the time the pavilion is up in June remains to be seen.

Currently, the team has revealed a few details concerning their plan for the 12^th Serpentine Pavilion, including a low platform roof (barely 5 feet off the ground), 12 symbolic columns, and a means to collect rainwater and reflect the sky. In a joint statement, Herzog, de Meuron and Ai promised the pavilion would be “the perfect place to sit, stand, lie down, or just look and be amazed.”

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