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…

Design was in the air this month, and we took in great heaving gasps of it as we ran from one event to another (and from one blog to another). New work was released, exhibitions were exhibited, and awards were awarded. For those who feel like the month passed them by, here’s our shortlist from May’s cornucopia of design news:

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A Pavilion Fiasco at the World Expo

What could possibly go wrong with an event that combines Shanghai and showiness? The pavilions. The U.S. pavilion has been called “a sorry spectacle,” and don’t even get us started on the terrifying animated baby mannequin in front of the Spanish pavilion. The only point of agreement, it seems, was the general nostalgia for the great Expo designers of yore.

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Honored by the AIA

Early this month, the American Institute of Architects announced the 2010 AIA/HUD Secretary’s Awards and the 2010 AIA Housing Awards. But the ones to really look out for are the seven young firms that won the New Practices New York awards: EASTON+COMBS, Archipelagos, Leong Leong, Manifold SOFTlab, SO-IL, and Tacklebox. Their prize-winning work will be on view at New York’s Center for Architecture from July 15.

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The Pritzker Ceremony and the RIBA Awards

A galaxy of starchitects and other glitterati descended on New York’s Ellis Island for the Pritzker Prize ceremony, where the Japanese firm SANAA received architecture’s biggest prize. Meanwhile, 101 buildings received the architectural excellence award of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).

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Frank Gehry Stirs Up a LEED Controversy

Frank Gehry’s cavalier comments on the LEED ratings system raised a few hackles. While the focus of the discussion shifted from Gehry to the legitimacy of the ratings themselves, New York’s Bank of America tower was awarded LEED Platinum, making it the greenest skyscraper in town.

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When it comes to cultural design spaces in New York, I’d have to say that I sometimes get the feeling they are in crisis: Cooper-Hewitt will be closing soon for its renovation (they’ve already closed access to their collections, though they just opened their Triennial, which is worth seeing); the Museum of Arts and Design is continually having funding challenges (will they ever mount that exhibition on George Nelson?); while other spaces, like Storefront for Art and Architecture or the Van Alen Institute, need to figure out exactly where they are headed. So it was great news to hear that the Triennale in Milan will be opening a permanent space in Manhattan in September.

Located in the old premises of the Museum of Arts and Design at West 53rd Street, the new multidisciplinary space will bring the experience of Italian design, architecture, art, and food to the city, in a space designed by the Italian architects Michele De Lucchi and Pierluigi Cerri in collaboration with New York studio CUH2a. We got our hands on some of the renderings. Read more…

SFMOMA announced today its short list for the museum’s highly anticipated expansion. The four finalists are Adjaye Associates, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Foster + Partners, and Snøhetta. An impressive list, but architectural issues are famously fraught in San Francisco. So I emailed a friend in the Bay Area and asked him to do a little Oscar handicapping for me. Here’s his early line on the impending selection:
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I have not studied Adjaye’s work. And I am not sure he has enough of a track record for the board to be comfortable, but he is hot and new. Diller Scofidio now have some big, well-received buildings under their belt. I think they are a favorite. Norman Foster is a fine architect, but not exactly edgy. This will appeal to the trustees, but not to the advisers. Snøhetta is a kind of a dark horse: not so well-known but a great portfolio. However, most of their buildings have space around them. This is a tight urban condition. I would have thought that the board would favor someone who could sell and that certainly is Renzo Piano. He was the safe choice. But his absence suggests that for the time being the architectural advisers/advocates are leading the charge. Despite the city’s left-wing political reputation, it remains conservative in terms of design. We have the DeYoung because no city money went into it and that board (surprisingly) was more daring. The Thom Mayne building was commissioned by GSA and they didn’t have to really deal with the city. The SFMOMA Board, however, has Republicans like Charles Schwab, Art Gensler, and the late Don Fisher. The existing Botta building is understood to be a mediocre solution. I would bet the trustees would go for Foster. The design types for Diller Scofidio or Adjaye…and Snohetta might be a kind of compromise?

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Photo: Richard Barnes/courtesy SFMOMA

The New Museum galleries: “refreshingly unpretentious” or “horribly proportioned and oppressive”?

Attentive readers of the paper of record this week may have noticed an intriguing clash between two of its major critical voices. In an article about plans to expand the Whitney Museum to a new building downtown, the Times art critic Roberta Smith roundly dismissed several recent high-profile museum projects in the city—projects that the paper’s architecture critic, Nicolai Ouroussoff, had initially given glowing reviews. To wit:

The New Museum

Ouroussoff (2007): “It succeeds on a spectacular range of levels: as a hypnotic urban object, as a subtle critique of the art world and as a refreshingly unpretentious place to view art. … By shifting the positions of the various floors, the architects were able to create narrow skylights along the outer edges of the galleries, allowing a soft, diffuse sunlight to wash down their white walls during the day. Rows of fluorescent lights are suspended from the ceilings, and the mix of artificial and natural light gives the spaces a lovely warmth that shifts ever so slightly with the weather or time of day.”

Smith: “The New Museum’s galleries are generally viewed as horribly proportioned and oppressive in their lack of windows.”

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The Qatar Musuems Authority’s insanely ambitious plans for Doha’s cultural infrastructure crept a little closer toward reality yesterday with the unveiling of Jean Nouvel’s design for the National Museum of Qatar. Based on the preliminary models, the new complex is going to look nothing like I.M. Pei’s understated Museum of Islamic Art, which opened there in late 2008. Nouvel has proposed a low-lying pile of tilted, interconnected disks, which form a ring of pavilions around a central courtyard. This arrangement is supposed to suggest a caravanserai, the region’s traditional enclosed roadside inn; the image of undulating, windswept dunes; and the flat crystal “petals” of a desert rose. (So far, Internet commenters have also compared the design to a UFO graveyard and a messy kitchen.) Read more…

Robert, a new restaurant in the Museum of Arts and Design

When Sarabeth’s closes its Whitney outpost in the middle of this month, it will mark the end of the restaurant’s 19-year presence in the museum’s basement (it was the first private restaurant to operate within a New York City museum).

And when Robert, on the top floor of the Museum of Arts and Design, begins dinner service, also in the middle of this month, it will mark the full opening of the city’s latest museum restaurant (the café currently serves lunch and tea).  As Sarabeth’s closes shop—Danny Meyer, of Shake Shack fame, plans to open a new Whitney eatery in the fall and a pop-up café in the meantime—Robert will hope to duplicate the recipe (figuratively, of course) that kept the Whitney fixture in business since 1991.  The food is billed as “American fare,” but, for now, it’s the décor—custom tables and chairs by the architect Philip Michael Wolfson, lighting by Johanna Grawunder, furniture by Vladimir Kagan, and a video installation by the artist Jennifer Steinkamp—that takes top billing.

Previously: We took a quick look at the Guggenheim Museum’s new restaurant and admired a line of  fiberglass furniture by Vladimir Kagan. In 2008, Peter Hall argued that critics of the Museum of Arts and Design missed the real point of the building.

In aerial photos, the Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park—also known simply as “100 Acres”—looks like a remote swath of unspoiled nature, with a forest and wetlands surrounding a pristine lake. In reality, you’re looking at the newest addition to the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The IMA created the park out of an old gravel pit and construction yard—and, next June, 100 Acres will finally be complete with the installation of eight site-specific works by an impressive roster of international artists. Read more…

Pop quiz (and it’s an easy one): which world renowned architect does a museum board turn to when faced with the problem of expansion, when that institution is already housed in a building widely considered to be a masterpiece? The answer of course is Renzo Piano. And the museum in question is the Kimbell Art Museum, in Fort Worth, Texas, home of the 1972 Louis I. Kahn landmark.

Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas; constructed 1969-72
South portico with reflecting pool and its waterfall
Louis I. Kahn (1901-1974), architect
Photograph: Robert Laprelle ©2008 Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth

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