Architecture
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Vermont’s Eclectic Shelburne Museum
How Sweet It Is
By: - Jan 12th, 2018Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888-1960) founded the Shelburne Museum which has 150,000 objects and 39 buildings on 45 acres. Her father Henry Osborne Havemeyer was known as The Sugar King. With his wife Louisne they created a vast collection donating 2,000 objects, including French Impressionist masterpieces, to the Met. Electra married polo champion James Watson Webb II of the Vanderbilt family. Well before the controversies of the Berkshire Museum, in 1996, the Shelburne Museum sold $30 million of its art to pay expenses. During the winter just five buildings are open. We viewed two special exhibitions in the Pizzagalli Center for Art and Education which opened in 2013. It was a lively and intriguing experience.
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Artwashing: Gentrification or Cultural Enrichment?
Aiding Derelict Neighborhoods or Abetting Social Inequity
By: - Aug 11th, 2016For the anti-gentrification critics, urban deterioration should be left the way it is rather than reverse it through the introduction of art galleries, performance spaces, work/live lofts, and museums. This is an issue wrapped in controversy that underscores progress while perhaps marginalizing impoverished residents and pioneering artists. It is hard to determine if everyone is right or everyone is wrong.
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American Ski Resort: Architecture, Style Experience
Lavish Book by Margaret Supplee Smith
By: - Sep 23rd, 2014With holiday gift giving approaching consider this book for your ski enthusiast friends. Wake Forest professor emerita Margaret Supplee Smith combined two loves, skiing and architecture in ten years of research. This has resulted in a lavishly illustrated, beautifully designed book American Ski Resort: Architecture, Style, Experience. It will be an absorbing read both for skiers and armchair enthusiasts. Her overview from the Depression to the current era goes beyond a chronicle of the sport to address social, economic, envirnomental aspects of architetural and design issues of resort development.
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National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC
A Visual Journey Through History
By: - Dec 18th, 2016President Barack Obama officially opened the National Museum of African American History and Culture on September 24, 2016, on the Washington Mall. It is actually the 19th Smithsonian Museum. My daughter Olivia and I got up early on a December day, to stand in line for one of the circa 100 free daily tickets. Otherwise, tickets can be reserved online months in advance. The short text and extensive photo essay convey our experiences.
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London’s Design Museum — An Inspiring Experience
One of the Major Venues for Experiencing Art of Design
By: - Jan 23rd, 2017London's newly opened Design Museum is the world's leading museum devoted to contemporary design in every form from architecture and fashion to graphics, product and industrial design. The Design Museum is now open in its spectacular new location on High Street Kensington. It is now a major venue to visit in London.
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Samara by Frank Lloyd Wright in Indiana
One of Some 60 Compact Usonian Homes
By: - Jul 04th, 2017Samara is one of Wright’s Usonian houses, affordable homes for middle-income families. There are about 60 of these houses in the U.S. and they are smaller and less grand than some of the famous Wright Prairie-style mansions like the Robie house or the Avery Coonley house in Riverside. But they are no less uniquely Wrightian and feature the architect’s special touches in design and functionality.
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July 22 for Naumkeag Garden Party
Yo Yo Ma Plans To Attend
By: - Jul 15th, 2017Celebrate the newly completed greenhouses in Fletcher Steele and Mable Choate's historic and recently renovated gardens at Naumkeag in Stockbridge, Massachusetts from 4-7pm on Saturday, July 22nd.
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Naumkeag 'Free Fun Friday' Is Today
Bring The Family To Stockbridge
By: - Aug 11th, 2017On Friday, August 11th, the Trustees of Reservations and Naumkeag, located in Stockbridge, Massachusetts host a free day of fun and education for the entire family.
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Room With a View and an Elephant
RMA’s Soft Thresholds is an Exhibition About Boundaries.
By: - Nov 29th, 2017RMA’s Soft Thresholds is about opening up physical boundaries: an elephant village is one of a number of the firm’s marvelous examples of this commitment. Soft Thresholds: a RMA Architects exhibition in Gund Hall Gallery at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, MA closed October 15 but left lasting memories. An elephant never forgets.
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A Study in Contrast Two Museums in Lisbon
National Tile Museum and MAAT Bookend Art and Culture
By: - Dec 30th, 2017These institutions visually and physically reflected Portuguese art and culture, one embracing the nooks and crannies of history while the other exhibited a vibrant openness to contemporary urbanity.
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Naumkeag Chinese Temple Gardens Opens
Three Years and a Vision
By: - Jul 27th, 2016After a public 'Appeal' for the renovation of elements of Naumkeag, the first phase of the project has finished. Newly restored Chinese Temple Gardens and an updated landscape project have been completed. The new project opened its doors at a ribbon-cutting ceremony recently. Yo-Yo Ma and wife Jill Hornor chaired the event.
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The Olana Summer Party
Olana '66: Fifty Years of Art & Style
By: - Jul 07th, 2016Fifty years ago, Olana was saved from the brink of destruction. The Olana Partnership is celebrating the past fifty years of art and style with a lawn party
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M.I.T.’s Memorial to Officer Sean Collier
Mundane Rather than Marvelous
By: - Jan 11th, 2016Seeming to be set in an empty MIT campus corner space, this memorial does not elicit a strongly felt aesthetic or visceral reaction. Perhaps, it was a prose statement expressed too soon rather than physical poetry done with more thought?
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Naumkeag's Exceptional Garden Party
Restoration at the National Historic Landmak is Evident
By: - Jul 30th, 2015The Trustees of Naumkeag host the yearly Garden Party for an enthusiastic crowd of local and out-of-town well wishers. Bellinis , hors d'oeuvres and sweets entertained the crowds appetite on this glorious, sunny afternoon in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
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Edward Hopper Tour in Gloucester Aug. 7
Houses painted by the Artist
By: - Aug 03rd, 2015American realist painter Edward Hopper is known to have painted in Gloucester on five separate occasions during the summer months in the years 1912, 1923, 1924, 1926 and 1928. His earliest visit in 1912 was made in the company of fellow artist Leon Kroll. The Cape Ann Museum will present a guided walking tour of select Gloucester houses made famous by American realist painter Edward Hopper on Friday, August 7 at 10:00 a.m.
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Westward Ho Ho Ho! Berkshire Museum
2015 Holiday Theme at the Berkshire Museum
By: - Nov 16th, 2015Each year, the Berkshire Museum, hosts the Festival of Trees. Both a fundraiser and a social event, this years theme is 'Westward Ho Ho Ho!' The goal is for the eighty participants to decorate their holiday trees in the theme of the event. The theme coincides with the museums 'American West' and 'Go West' exhibition.
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Tom Krens Outlines Plans for a Cultural Corridor
Former Governors Dukakis and Weld Share North Adams Podium
By: - Dec 05th, 2015Using a satellite image Tom Krens commented on a six mile line connecting North Adams and Williamstown. It was a part of an engaging power point presentation to develop a cultural corridor connecting world class resources including a new for profit museum and one in North Adams featuring model railroads and maquettes by renowned architects. Former governors Dukakis and Weld attended the presentation.
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Frank Lloyd Wright's Stunning Theodore Baird House
The Only Wright Structure in Massachusetts Located in Amherst
By: - Dec 20th, 2015A hidden jewel in a wooded residential neighborhood of Amherst, MA, the Theodore Baird House By Frank Lloyd Wright is an early Usonian style residence built in 1939 for an Amherst College professor and his wife. It is a unique example of the flamboyant master architect's craft. It is an architectural icon by an architectual legend.
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The Pentalum at Lawn on D
A Marvelously Trippy Light Show
By: - Jan 10th, 2016A temporary structure set up for a few days by an English/French consortium that uses maze space and color to transform awareness and spatial sensation. This environment is just a lot of fun to experience--an aesthetically infused inflatable bouncy castle to the nth degree for the whole family. This was one of two exciting environmental art events produced at the Lawn on D (a park adjacent o the Boston & Convention Bureau in South Boston) in 2015.
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John Stomberg Discusses Hood Museum
51 Million Expansion Designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien
By: - Jan 13th, 2016Recently we visited Dartmouth College where we learned that the Hood Museum of Art will close in March for renovations to begin this summer. We discussed these plans with an old friend, John Stomberg, who has just arrived in Hanover as the new director of the museum.
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Design Biennial Boston 2015: Hit or Miss
Younger Architectural Firms Expressing Themselves Through Sculptural Forms
By: - Jan 11th, 2016Contemporary architecture is not an easy fit in Boston. Hoping to stimulate higher quality and innovative design in the region, Design Biennial Boston was introduced during the dark economic days of 2008. Its mission is to showcase the distinctive work of emerging Boston architects, designers, and landscape architects. This past year, four younger firms were chosen to create an architectural statement in the form of a sculptural form. Were these pieces metaphorical or symbolic or something else?
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The Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate
Less May Just Be Less At Senatorial Memorial
By: - Apr 16th, 2015To commemorate the life and service of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a new educational and research institute was recently opened adjacent to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum on Dorchester Bay overlooking Boston Harbor. Though created by a star architect Rafael Viñoly, the structure is spare and initially uninviting. If such a thing can exist, it is minimalism light.
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ICA to Expand
Lucky Break After Poor Initial Design Issues
By: - May 19th, 2015After less than a decade the land locked ICA on the waterfront has run out of space. There is a desperate plan to expand into two floors of a 17 floor adjacent building which is under construction. It has become ever more obvious that the award winning design by Diller, Scofidio + Renfro. is proving to be an utter dysfunctional disaster.