The Museum of Modern Art’s plan to demolish the neighboring former American Folk Art Museum incited a fierce reaction, including a massive petition by designers to save the architecturally significant building, which opened in 2001. Crushed under the preservationist crusade, MoMA has left open the door of retaining the building. “We’re going to try to create the best building we can create,” MoMA board chairman Jerry I. Speyer told the New York Times. “Whether we include Folk Art or not, as is, is an open question.”

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By Sabrina Wirth, a candidate for the M.S. Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices degree in Architecture at Columbia University’s GSAPP.

New Yorkers by definition are creative people; they’re also ambitious, and a little bit competitive. First, New York challenged Paris as the Center of the Art World at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Then during the 20th century, it surpassed London as the Center of the Financial World (though the UK capital has since caught up). And for the past decade, the Big Apple has been steadily competing with Silicon Valley for the Center of Innovation. But now New York is staking its claim for a new title: Center of Design. So, if you’re planning on spending a quiet time in the city this month, fuggedaboutit—New York is about to get very busy.

Bookended between the Frieze Art Fair and the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, the first annual NYCxDESIGN festival officially kicks off tomorrow (May 10), with hundreds of events celebrating architecture, art, fashion, and design taking place throughout the five boroughs through May 21. (Including the Architizer A+ Awards gala on May 16!) The celebration aims, as Speaker Christine C. Quinn announced last February, to “demonstrate that New York City is the design capital of the world.” The event is organized by the New York City Council along with NYC & Company and a 33-person Steering Committee made up of leaders within the local arts community.

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Photo courtesy of OLIN

Most museums push the majority of their collections so deep into climate-controlled storage that they’re rarely (if ever) seen by the general public. But sometimes these crates have been in storage for so long that no one—not even the museum’s directors and curators—knows what’s inside of them.

Such was the case at the Rodin Museum. Set between the Barnes Foundation directly across the street and the Philadelphia Museum of Art further down, the Rodin Museum is a frequently overlooked jewel of a building in Center City Philadelphia. Paul Phillipe Cret, the architect responsible for most of the buildings lining the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, designed it; he also designed the original Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania. Like the Barnes, the Rodin Museum houses the collection of one man, Jules Mastbaum, an early film mogul with an obsession for, yes, Rodin. The collection of sculptures, notes, and drawings is actually the largest group of Rodin’s work outside of France. Read more.

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Photo: Eva Franch Gilabert

Karen Wong, for those who don’t know of her, is totally awesome. The NYC art maven serves as deputy director of the New Museum, co-founded the Ideas City Festival, and sits on the board for Storefront for Art and Architecture. (Oh, she’s also an A+ juror and writes a ton for us, but we would love her anyway.) The Huffington Post—an Architizer A+ Awards media partner—recently spoke with Karen about her experience with the downtown art scene and her involvement with one of the largest competitions in architecture. Click through to see some highlights, and check out the full interview on HuffPo.

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Doug Aitken, the multimedia artist who has turned the Hirsshorn Museum into light show, orchestrated concerts with dripping faucets, and captured the sounds of the Earth’s rotation with underground microphones, will unveil his latest work at the Seattle Art Museum on Sunday, March 24. At dusk, LED screens embedded in the museum’s facade will begin playing MIRROR, a video installation that pulls imagery from hundreds of hours of footage Aitken shot around Seattle and Washington State.

The artist conceived the work as a kind of living kaleidoscope: It feeds shots of everything from crowded streets to mountain vistas back to Seattleites in a stream of footage that changes according to environmental data around the museum, including weather, traffic, atmospheric conditions, and pedestrian density. “With MIRROR I was interested in the idea of creating a living museum, a downtown building that could change in real time in relation to the environment around it,” Aitken said in an announcement. “Seattle is a very complex and fascinating city and MIRROR was an attempt to reflect the simultaneity of the culture and landscape you find there.” Read more!

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Today’s A+ finalist spotlight includes museums, theaters, and cultural centers around the world. And trust us, these buildings are as beautiful and rich as the art that they hold. Click through to see them all!

Spot a favorite? Make sure to vote for it over at the A+ Public Voting site!

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Story by Karen Wong, New Museum deputy director and A+ Awards juror.

It’s bustling in Louis Kahn’s lobby at the Yale University Art Gallery. There are no stanchions, no ticketing desks, and no signs imploring you to become a member. The informality of hang-a-ski-jacket-at-your-own-risk-on-wheeled-in-coat-racks is as refreshing as its admission policy: free to the public.

The Yale Art Gallery has recently re-opened, in full, after extensive renovations by Ennead Architects (formerly Polshek Partnership), and I was eager to see the changes. So, in homage to the museum’s three buildings—Kahn’s 1953 concrete-and-steel wing, the Gothic Revival limestone Swartwout Hall, and the Ruskinian brownstone Street Hall—I have invited two friends to join me on a self-guided tour of the renovated spaces, where we lose one another in a labyrinth of galleries. Up or down, left or right? We refer often to the large, and fortunately well-placed, maps. Read more!

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Aerial view from Howard Street.

The expanded San Francisco Museum of Modern Art won’t open till 2016, but we’ve been waiting only sort of patiently since 2011. SFMOMA has been parceling out details here and there, and today they’ve thrown us a few more pieces of CAD bait to feed on. It’s hard to puzzle together the total logic of the new components—from the pearlescent double-wide of a tower to the rejiggered connections between the museum and its side streets—so we’ll have to resist the temptation to speculate. For now. Go ahead, click through for the renderings!

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Story by Karen Wong, New Museum deputy director and A+ Awards juror.

It’s been a long, arduous journey, but the Drawing Center has finally made its way home.

The New York City institution, founded in 1977, had been searching for bigger digs for years. It was originally part of the redevelopment at Ground Zero, until its “political” art programming scared off the authorities. Next was the South Street Seaport, where it had plans to build a $60 million museum, but the financial downturn squashed that plan. But an unexpected opportunity presented itself in 2010, when the apartment above the original Drawing Center became available. And with that, Director Brett Litmann has decided to stay put, expanding the museum’s 35 Wooster storefront premises. Wise move: As any developer will tell you, it’s all about “location, location, location,” and there aren’t too many locations that beat the perennially trendy SoHo. Read more!

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Story by Karen Wong, New Museum deputy director and A+ Awards juror.

As we turn into the driveway of the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton and see its shimmering façade, I breathe a sigh of relief. In November, the Parrish opened its new home designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, and given the duo’s previous museum work, there was reason for trepidation. Herzog & de Meuron had previously helmed the extension of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the new building for the de Young Museum in San Francisco, meaty, flashy projects that generated much fanfare when the buildings opened in 2005: glistening-copper and crumpled-aluminum facades and odd-shaped boxes punctuated by even odder-shaped windows screamed, “Look at me!” Perhaps too loudly.

Herzog & de Meuron’s initial plan for the Parrish included two-dozen faceted farm buildings—like VitraHaus imploded and scattered on a field. But the 2008 financial crisis forced the museum to slash the budget and implore the architects to rethink their design. The resulting building–a low-slung, double-pitched, elongated form–recalls the firm’s 1990s heyday, including such projects as the Goetz Collection in Munich, SBB Switchtower in Basel, and Dominus Winery in Napa Valley. But more important, the new Parrish pays tribute to the history of this area, its art, and its painters, whose barns-cum-studios took advantage of the northern light. Read more!

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