All photos © Elizabeth Felicella

This week, Yale will pull back the final curtain on a project 18 years in the making: the much-trumpeted overhaul of the Yale University Art Gallery, led by Ennead. The $135 million project entailed major interior and exterior renovations, in addition to linking Louis Kahn’s 1953 masterwork—made of masonry, glass, and steel—to two neighboring structures, both built in the 1800s. Now totaling nearly 70,000 square feet, the Gallery is one of the largest university museums in the country. It opens to the public on Wednesday. Read more about this project in the Architizer database!

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St Paul Episcopal Church, 1853, Caldwell, Liberia. Photo: Max Belcher 1978

Widely regarded as the father of Western architecture, Andrea Palladio’s influence can be found in unexpected places. Case in point: A photography exhibition at the newly renovated Palladio Museum shows the Italian architect’s influence on homes built by freed American slaves upon returning to Africa. Featuring the great works of photographer Max Belcher, ”Genealogies” is on view until March 31, 2013. Click through to see photos.

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Image: Andrea Tognoli

One of the most breathtaking structures in the world, the Duomo di Milano is the symbol of this great city and its history. It took six centuries (!) to build this amazing cathedral, the fourth-largest world-wide, all clad in intricate decorations carved in white Candoglia marble. Its grandeur is surpassed by few other structures, with some even comparing it to the Pyramids. Now, you can have your name engraved under its 135 spires if you support its restoration! Continue.

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Lady Liberty’s year-long internal makeover, courtesy of Mills + Schnoering Architects (M+Sa), is just about finished. The design firm that specializes in preserving historic structures has been working meticulously since last October to make the National Monument safer and more enjoyable for visitors. Renovations include revamped stair rails and protective glass throughout the stairway up to the newly reopened crown. Read More.

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Image © John Lewis Marshall

One of the most imposing landmarks of Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum is reopening this weekend, restored and with a brand new wing designed by by Mels Crouwel of Benthem Crouwel Architects. The addition re-orients the entire museum to face onto Amsterdam’s Museumplein (Museum Plaza), activating a vital public space for Stedelijk and its distinguished neighbors: the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum and the Concertgebouw. In stark contrast with the old red structure conceived by architect A.W. Weissman back in 1895, the 10,000-square-meter (98,400 square feet) extension sports the smooth curves and brilliant white of a bathtub, a simile which the architects have fully embraced. Read more!

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Photo: The Los Angeles Times

While post-Gaddafi Libya is looking to build a beacon of a newly free nation, war-torn Afghanistan has recently restored an architectural relic of its glorious past. After three years of painstaking renovation, the Citadel of Herat, a fifteenth-century fortress overlooking the western Afghan city of Herat, has returned to its original state and now houses a lively museum and cultural center looking to lift the spirits of a country beaten down by years of relentless warfare. Read on.

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Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, England. Photo: John Ecker

When one imagines the architectural forms of today’s computer technology, a few things may come to mind: the sprawling modern office buildings of the Silicon Valley, the minimalist glass walls of an Apple store, or perhaps the still mythical “smart cities” developing in South Korea, rumored to be bound together with the seamless everyday technologies once reserved for fanciful science fiction.

But as we are realizing more and more, the invisible workings of technology can still come in rather dated architectural shells: case in point, the 24-story Art Deco building that houses a sizable chunk of the internet’s physical infrastructure. Moreover, as we learned from the BBC, even the increasingly formless technology giant Google has turned its attention to a sort of search for concrete origins, a hunt for the ancient Rome of the Internet. This brought them to a dilapidated old Victorian compound in Buckinghamshire, England. Read on.

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Image via Naked Philly

Earlier in August, Naked Philly reported on the crumbling state of the 19^th Street Baptist Church in Philadelphia, remarking on the harsh, bright orange citations taped to its windows and doors and floating rumors of demolition if immediate action were not taken.

Looking past the disintegrating façade and the gaping holes in the roof, one can see a rather remarkable structure made of striking green brick and asymmetrically cobbled together Victorian Gothic forms. As locals lamented the impending bad news, a certain Steve S. sounded the alarm with his pithy response: “I’m about to make it worse: It’s a Frank Furness!”

Since then, a mob of Philadelphia-based blogs, along with a group called the Preservation Alliance, several University of Pennsylvania professors, local building professionals, and even the city mayor, has rallied to save the building from demolition. As the deadline for repairs looms ever closer, many fear that one of the few surviving artifacts of Frank Furness’s built legacy is seriously under threat. Read on.

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Photographed by Navid Baraty

The whimsical artist couple Victoria and Richard Mackenzie-Childs has recently restored the last surviving Ellis Island Ferry into an eclectic private houseboat, studio space and showroom. More photos after the jump.

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The last remaining Frank Lloyd Wright-designed hotel has reopened its doors. Built in 1910 in Mason City, Iowa, the Park Inn Hotel quickly fell into disuse, battered by financial woes, until being converted into a retail space in 1926 and, eventually, a complex of apartments in the ‘70s. Over the past thirty years, the property has further witnessed an array of inhabitants, including offices and even a strip club, before being completely abandoned. At one point, the Mason City Council even listed the building for digital auction, offering the site for a relatively inexpensive $10 million. Recently, however, the site’s fortunes were on the up, when a small non-profit rescued the property from further decline. More after the jump!

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