Philadelphia’s best kept secrets are hiding in plain sight. In the 19^th century, the city became embedded with quirky repositories of everything from dolls to dodos. City neighborhoods expanded, engulfing these manic collections as if flies in amber awaiting future discovery.

William Wagner (1796-1885) Philadelphia merchant, philanthropist, and amateur scientist.

Some ten years after I moved to Philadelphia I stumbled upon the wondrous Wagner Free Institute of Science, a luminous, old jewel set firmly within a tarnished urban cluster. Peeling, pale yellow with fading, dark green trim, this Victorian era relic sits just five residential blocks in from bustling N. Broad Street and the teeming campus of Temple University. Who knew?

The Wagner Free Institute of Science, Photo: Joseph G. Brin

Visiting the Wagner is a step back in time. You can see it and feel it. The rippled, sagging glass, the crusty, black wrought iron fencing. Tall, dark green front doors open to a wide staircase worn by the scuffle of countless natural science enthusiasts over almost one-hundred and fifty years. At the second floor landing, long rows of cherry wood and glass-encased exotica blossom before your eyes. The high space is awash in daylight from tall, single pane windows glistening with condensation in the cold. Even splashes of direct sun are welcomed and allowed to penetrate. The display cabinets themselves have that over-the-top, comprehensive look (over 100, 000 fossils, minerals, shells, insects and skeletons) of someone’s hand that seriously thought it could amass all the natural specimens of the entire world — under one barrel-vaulted, wood-trussed roof.

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On the one hand, New Urbanists say that cities should have minimal impact on their natural surroundings, while on the other hand world-class designs are defined by unconventional schemes that strive to minimize the use of non-renewables.  It seems, then, the twenty-first century building is a machine designed to rationalize its inputs while maintaining high function. But the agreement between the two groups ends there.

Should all architectural projects resort to minimalism out of ecological necessity? Or should those who create them strive for ever-inventive ways to trounce gravity? And if the interests of global commerce command the latter course, do these questions even matter?

Two current exhibits in New York showcase competing answers. The free, experimental public space that is the Guggenheim Lab on Manhattan’s Lower East Side (open through October 16th) personifies a democratic, minimalist approach.  Supertall! at the New York Skyscraper Museum (running through next January) posits that natural boundaries exist to be crushed.

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© Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz / David Chipperfield Architects,
Photo: Jörg von Bruchhausen

On June 20, British architect Sir David Chipperfield took center stage at a ceremony in Barcelona to officially receive the much-coveted European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award. Aside from having the longest name imaginable—henceforth shortened by this author to “Mies Prize”—it is also regarded as Europe’s most prestigious architecture honor.

Sir David has been having a good time of it these past two years. He was knighted in 2010 and was the recipient of this year’s RIBA Royal Gold Medal. He has been winning so much that people mistakenly assume he has also won a Pritzker Prize. To set the record straight, no, he has not. Not yet, anyway. There is always the possibility of a Chipperfield trifecta next year.

Why all the acclaim? What is so special about Sir David’s architecture? Read more…

Ok, so New Yorkers may not get the fuss, but we understand that special bond between a person and his car… and that Lamborghini driving down the street… or that blue VW Bug that reminds us of childhood. We may envision a future of vehicles fueled by renewable alternatives, and we  may have had a collective heart attack when the gas bill came this month, but there’s just something special about seeing a pristine, leather interior 1969 Yenko Chevrolet next to its other muscle car “bros”.

Those at the Museo Dell’Automobile di Torino get it. In April, they presented their new offering to the four-wheeled gods: a gorgeous building created by architect Cino Zucchi with the Recchi Engineering Srl company and the Proger SpA firm, and enhanced with displays by Francois Confino. “In the new Museum, we will tell the story of the motor car, its transformation from a means of transport to an object of worship, from its origins right up to the contemporary evolution of creative thought,”  states the website. 

To tell that story, they created what is, essentially, a very expensive garage for their 200 or so original cars, dating from the mid-19th century to present. The new housing is now a stunning mosaic structure with a curved façade reminiscent of the type of winding road you imagine most of the cars zipping down through the mountains. It’s reflective surface and frosted windows silhouetting vehicles such as the Ford Model T creates an inside-outside effect combining luxury with mechanical elements, the illusion of driving with the serenity of nature. 

The plan behind the design was to mesh the museum’s almost 90-year history with advancements in design, architecture and technology, while emphasizing the creative genius behind each car. Here visitors can see these mechanical masterpieces in a new light as ingenious forms, not just another gas-guzzler that took their parking spot.

Photo: Irina Lee.

Last week, the Metropolis art department headed up to MoMA to for a panel discussion between the museum’s design curator, Paola Antonelli and two renowned type designers, Matthew Carter (2010 MacArthur Grant recipient) and Jonathan Hoefler. The event was presented by the AIGA. MoMA recently acquired 23 typefaces for its collection, which are part of the new exhibition, Standard Deviation.

We went to the event that night wondering how a museum acquires a typeface. “We just buy it—or if they’re nice, they give it to us,” Antonelli simply said. But the process is a bit more complex than that. To choose what should go into the collection, Antonelli gathered experts from around the world, including graphic design critics, designers, and historians. Their choices range stylistically from Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum’s FF Beowolf to Hoefler Frere-Jones’s Gotham (which we all know and love/loathe from Obama’s presidential campaign).

She reminded the inquisitive audience that it is not the museum’s objective to give the historical record of design; this is, after all, the Museum of Modern Art. Well, then, what is modern? Modern is everything that does not hide the process of its making. This definition comes from Kurt Varnedoe, the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture till 2003, and Antonelli keeps it in mind each time she curates a show.

Now I’m eager to check out the exhibition and learn the design process of the 23 chosen ones. This collection, said Antonelli, is only the beginning. She will be adding more typefaces and is open to suggestions. What would you add?

To read more about Paola Antonelli’s thoughts on Matthew Carter’s Verdana typeface, check out Essential Designs in April’s Metropolis.

It is going to be a while before Jean Nouvel’s celebrated National Museum of Qatar blossoms in the desert. But in the meanwhile, an architecturally modest museum with a far more ambitious mission is ready to open its doors for the New Year. The Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art aims to be a new pan-Arab center for culture and creativity, showcasing the work of modern artists from the region.

The Mathaf, pronounced MAT-haff and simply meaning “museum” in Arabic, is the third large museum project to be announced in Qatar in recent years. The expansive Museum of Islamic Art, which opened in 2008 in a building by I. M. Pei, is concerned with history – its collection dates from the 7th to the 19th centuries. Jean Nouvel’s desert rose will mostly be a Qatari exercise in national pride. The earliest pieces in the Mathaf’s collection, however, date to the 1840s. This is a museum primarily concerned with Arab modernity, considering through art some very complicated questions of identity, values and geography. Read more…

The architect Kevin Roche on the construction site of the Oakland Museum of California, circa 1969.

When we featured the Ford Foundation Building two years ago, I interviewed the landscape architect Peter Walker, who in talking about the importance of that Kevin Roche/John Dinkaloo-designed structure spent as much time extolling another building by those architects: the Oakland Museum of California. For our story on the restored building, I talked to Walker again. Peter has an encyclopedia grasp of landscape architecture history and the verbal ability to create a vivid picture of place. Here are his (slightly) edited memories of the building, as it was 41 years ago when it first opened.

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The architect Guy Zucker inserted an elegant, light-filled penthouse into this 1960s-era apartment building on Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square. Photo: courtesy Z-A Studio

It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but during a recent 12-hour flight from New York’s JFK airport to Tel Aviv, two Midwestern evangelical tourists on their way to the Holy Land could be overheard excitedly swapping notes on top upcoming destinations—Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Masada, the Dead Sea. “Why would you even want to go to Tel Aviv?” asked one, for whom the city was clearly an airport and little else. “I don’t know, the politics?” offered his friend. The unintentional punch line (last time we checked, Jerusalem was still the seat of government in Israel) was made all the more comic for its blithe indifference to the recent buzz over the city’s regeneration. Tel Aviv is the secular antithesis to everything that ancient Jerusalem represents; it’s young, cosmopolitan, progressive, energetic, and gritty. And in the past few years—as numerous magazines have been tripping over themselves to report—it’s seen a rising generation of artists, architects, filmmakers, restaurateurs, fashion designers, and other creative types.

I was headed there for the architecture. Tel Aviv is home to both the largest and densest concentration of Bauhaus-style buildings in the world, and to an impressive array of new projects by emerging and established architects. Specifically, I was in town for Houses from Within, a 48-hour event during which the city opens its doors and allows access to all kinds of buildings, large and small, public and private, historic and contemporary, obscure and celebrated (more than 160 sites in all). This urban steeplechase, now in its third year, is an ideal (if exhausting) means by which to assess the current moment in the city’s rebirth, and to see up close how the often contradictory municipal attitudes toward development, planning, and preservation play out in the built environment. Read more…

And the winners are… Snøhetta founders Craig Dykers (left) and Kjetil Thorsen.

You heard it here first: The architecture firm to lead the highly anticipated, $250 million expansion of SFMOMA will be the Oslo- and New York–based Snøhetta, which beat out fellow finalists Adjaye Associates, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Foster + Partners. Our anonymous Bay Area insider predicted last May that the SFMOMA board’s conservative types would go for Foster while the more design-minded folks on the selection committee would choose DSR or Adjaye—thus leaving the “dark horse” Snøhetta as a kind of compromise. Of course, SFMOMA’s director, Neal Benezra, has a different version of events, telling the San Francisco Chronicle that it was the committee’s site visits that ultimately set Snøhetta apart. “After our visit to Oslo, there was no question that we had found our architects,” Benezra said. “It was a beautiful moment.” The museum plans to unveil a potential design next spring.

In the June issue of the magazine, David Sokol writes briefly about the lighting manufacturer iGuzzini’s new U.S. showroom. Below is an expanded version of Sokol’s text, with more details on the company’s history and products.

Even if you’re not yet familiar with the iGuzzini name, you know its work. The Italian lighting brand manufactures Piero Castiglioni and Gae Aulenti’s 1993 Cestello design, which company president Adolfo Guzzini says is “the most copied light fixture ever, for sure!” iGuzzini also partners with that other great Italian architect, Renzo Piano, notably on the California Academy of Sciences.

Guzzini partly credits celebrity collaborators like Piano for his own company’s success. “Architects and designers are always on the move, they ‘pollinate’ different continents,” he says. Not only have global nomads taken iGuzzini products along for the ride, but also they have inspired specifiers in those places to emulate the visiting design dignitary, spelling far-flung orders.

When iGuzzini launched in 1958 as Harvey Creazioni, architectural and decorative lighting was but an afterthought. Quickly the company redirected its efforts, from copper objects and lighting parts to luminaires. A willingness to experiment has defined iGuzzini ever since. Much of the company’s stock was originally conceived as one-offs for architects. Work with Piano yielded the products Lingotto and Le Perroquet, for instance. Moreover, iGuzzini places importance on the science of lighting: “Some of our research activities have led to specific products, such as SIVRA, the first biodynamic light system,” Guzzini says. “Another important issue is the effect of artificial light in museum lighting—on color perception or the shape of the exhibits. Read more…