Posts Tagged Museums
‘London’s British Museum is a map of the world, and a time machine too’
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 21, 2012
Our architecture correspondent celebrates London's most popular tourist attraction, the British Museum – at once a map of the world, a time machine and a treasure chest
Will Self on Trafalgar Square
Simon Jenkins on the Tower of London
My walks to the British Museum as a young boy must have been as much a visual and emotional education as they were an untiring thrill. The time I spent there as a child is probably one of the reasons I came to travel so much to remote spots and folds of the atlas in later years.
The museum itself is a map of the world, a time machine, too, offering mind trips to Mesopotamia, Memphis, Athens in the golden age of Pericles and to an encyclopedia of compelling civilisations, or haunting fragments of them. Here, dreams of exotic places, peoples and buildings were brought to kaleidoscopic, three-dimensional and mesmerising life.
I liked, too, and lapped up, the way in which the tight, regular grid of what remained of Georgian Bloomsbury – streets animated by uniform parades of red double-decker buses and ranks of gleaming black cabs – gave way, all of a sudden, to an enormous courtyard set behind glossy black iron railings.
Beyond – up the most generous flight of steps – lay the museum itself, and its compelling collections veiled by a great Greek Revival pediment at the centre of an ambitious colonnade of no fewer than 44 Ionic columns, their design based, as I learned much later, on those of the Temple of Athena Polias at Priene in Asia Minor (now western Turkey).
There was all this to take in even before walking through the doors into the echoing lobby and deciding whether to turn left – into the dark realm of Egyptian mummies and Assyrian gateways guarded by warriors who were half adventurously bearded men and half vigorous blue ceramic bulls – or right into the Corinthian light of the King's Library, with its double-deck rows of gold-embossed leather spines.
Here I could stare at the pencilled pages of Scott's Diary, not knowing that one day I would hold this most moving of documents in my own, white-gloved, hands, turning its heart-rending pages.
I enjoyed the gloom of the Duveen Gallery, built just before the second world war to designs by the American architect John Russell Pope, where the Elgin Marbles – the Parthenon frieze – were on display. I was ignorant then of the controversy around these "stolen" sculptures and the desire of many modern Greeks to see them returned.
I learned to love Sydney Smirke's circular Reading Room set under an iron-ribbed dome in a courtyard of his elder brother's Grecian pantechnicon. Robert Smirke had travelled extensively in Greece and Sicily to sketch the ruins of ancient temples before he turned his cool mind and his elegant hand to the design of what is today, in terms of visitor numbers, Britain's most popular tourist attraction.
What has changed since I was a child? Renovations, extensions, and the exodus of the British Library to Colin St John Wilson's red-brick monument alongside the fairytale Gothic of the Midland Grand Hotel and St Pancras station, Norman Foster's roofed-over Great Court and, most of all, the sheer number of people tramping through the museum's halls and galleries, so many that the last time I came to look at collections from ancient Mesopotamia I was all but swept away on a tide of visitors: the gallery I had chosen has become one of many intensely busy thoroughfares in the museum.
It can be too busy for its own good. And yet anyone who is tired of the British Museum is tired not just of tourism or the crush of central London, but of the entire world and the history of its civilisations captured here in untiring architectural splendour.
• Admission to the British Museum, Great Russell Street, WC1 (020-7323 8299, britishmuseum.org) is free
Military History Museum – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 22, 2011
Daniel Libeskind's visceral redesign for Dresden's Military History Museum has as striking an effect on the exhibits inside as on the facade itself
"You cannot put German military history into a box," says Daniel Libeskind. No, indeed you can't. He wants, moreover, to achieve a "paradigm shift away from the celebration of wars". And so, in creating a new Military History Museum in an 1870s barracks building in Dresden, he has chosen to make the least box-like thing he can think of – a steel-framed, half-transparent pointy thing – and crash it like a meteorite into the barracks' facade of drill-ground neoclassical symmetry. "It's about catastrophe," he says, and his design makes the point. Here be violence, it says, as plainly as a Las Vegas casino tells you there is gambling inside.
No one who knows the work of Libeskind will be very surprised, as he has always shown faith in the power of acute angles to convey pain (even if, confusingly, he also employs pointy things on shopping malls and museums of quite nice stuff, such as art). But the Dresden museum offers a particularly pure form of the anguished angle and tests its effectiveness to destruction.
Some architects specialise in hotels, some skyscrapers; Daniel Libeskind's niche is ministering to sites of disaster and loss. His first architectural commission, apart from an unrealised apartment block, was the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which strove to represent both the intertwining of the city with its Jewish culture and the tearing of the two apart. He has also completed the Imperial War Museum North in Salford, in the shape of a "shattered globe", and a museum of the painter and Holocaust victim Felix Nussbaum, and was chosen as the masterplanner for the rebuilding of the World Trade Centre site in New York.
He won the commission to design the Military History Museum a decade ago, when his much acclaimed Jewish Museum was new. The Dresden building, which if you include large parts of it not yet reopened, is the biggest museum in Germany, already had plenty of history by then. Founded in 1897 as an unqualified celebration of armed might, it then went through Nazi and communist variations on the theme until the fall of the Berlin Wall made its message plainly inappropriate and it closed.
Deliberations followed as to what sort of institution it should now be, or if it should exist at all, out of which emerged the idea that it should have an "anthropological" as well as a historical purpose. It should show the human causes and effects of war rather than be a parade of materiel. Deliberations continued after Libeskind won the job: "It takes a long time to get to grips with history," he says. His client was the Bundeswehr, the military, which here had to take on the role of cultural curator.
The outcome is an intensely and minutely considered representation of modern Germany's complicated feelings about war. It is unsparing in its depiction of horrors, including the skull, the front part blown away, of a soldier who shot himself in the mouth. There is a wall of shoes of Holocaust victims. A line of stuffed animals, from an elephant to a goose, at first looks like a cheerful contingent from Noah's ark, until closer inspection reveals such things as a cat being killed in a laboratory to test poison gas, or a sheep, three-legged after it had been used for clearing mines. Sections are called "War and Memory", "War and Music" or "War and Theatre". "War and Games" shows children's toys, including a metal tank found in the rubble of Dresden, melted by the heat of the bombing, the fate of its owner unknown.
Every effort is made to avoid fetishising equipment. A V-2 rocket is in a constricted space such that you can only see it close up, in "fractured" views, as Libeskind puts it, "otherwise it just looks like a big skyscraper". You are shown such things as the drugs given to the pilots of tiny submarines, so that they could withstand the fear of their all-but-suicidal missions.
A jeep blasted in which three German soldiers were seriously injured in Afghanistan is shown alongside voting cards showing the support of chancellors Schröder and Merkel for involvement in the conflict, to make a point about the connection of politics to war. Installations were commissioned from artists, with various degrees of success, to give their interpretations of the themes. At times it gets mawkish, as when the words "love" and "hate" are projected in splatters on the walls, but mostly the displays make good use of telling detail and direct information. They go beyond the obvious point – that war is hell – to unravel its human ramifications.
All this takes place within an exhibition design by HG Merz and Barbara Holzer, which fits within the architecture of Libeskind, which internally consists of jagged, sloping planes thrust into the regular, spacious grid of the old barracks, with voids pierced from one floor to another. The old central staircase, broad enough for battalions to ascend, fragments at its edges into compressed spaces, crevices and fissures winding through concrete geology. You are oppressed and released, disorientated and reorientated.
At times, as happens with this kind of geometry, it gets embarrassed by necessary verticals and horizontals – by lifts, for example. Its energy also dissipates rather too rapidly when you are returned to the world of the right angle, in flanking galleries dedicated to more conventional chronological displays. It gets better the more enmeshed it is with the exhibits and with the old building, where the strange shapes are not spectacles in themselves, but means for affecting your perception of the things on show.
At the top you are discharged into a space about bombed cities, and then on to a platform for viewing Dresden, the fantastical city of rococo and gothic that was splintered like porcelain in two nights of bombing in 1945 (splinters of which are still being stuck back together in the heroic but impossible attempt to recover what was lost). This viewing platform, it turns out, is within the meteorite you saw from the outside and the view can only be seen through its mesh.
The platform is in fact the only thing that happens inside the five-storey-high steel structure, which otherwise contains inaccessible void. This discovery is disappointing, as something so large and conspicuous should surely be more than a gesture. As it is, it resembles an immense statue or redundant cupola on a 19th-century building, something pompous and somewhat empty. It is also irritating, as the panorama would be better enjoyed if it were not from inside the meteorite. It must mean something to put so much metal between you and the view, in this architecture where everything seems to have a meaning, but it's not obvious what. This thing is at once breathtaking, verging on the wonderful, and breathtakingly dumb.
The design's weakness is its belief that sheer shape can speak on its own. There are not enough notes or else too many of the same kind. Too often you find yourself peering at a form or space that is not as fascinating as it ought to be. Sometimes the spaces feel underpopulated by exhibits, as if the architecture had not left them enough room. Perhaps in future decades the steel meteorite will be retro-fitted in such a way that it makes more sense. I hope so, as the rest of the museum – the power of the exhibits, the thoughtfulness of their selection and the more complex and intricate of Libeskind's interior spaces – deserves it.
Dresden Military History Museum – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 22, 2011
Images from Daniel Libeskind's visceral redesign for Dresden's Military History Museum
V&A to celebrate British design with Olympics-spanning show
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 7, 2011
The Haçienda club, Concorde and Harlow to feature next year's showcase of design from 1948 Games through to those of 2012
There will be Concorde, an E-type Jag, a recreation of Manchester's The Haçienda nightclub and …well, Harlow, included in what is expected to be the most comprehensive survey of postwar British innovation and design ever staged.
The V&A announced on Friday plans for its big show next year which will showcase more than seven decades of the best British design with a timeline that runs from the austerity Olympics of 1948 to the less austere 2012 Games.
The exhibition's timing, in the depths of economic turmoil, could not be better in that it will show that some of the best ideas have emerged from the worst of times. It will, said co-curator Christopher Breward, "demonstrate that in times of economic downturn, actually that idea of the British inventor, the British maverick, the old Victorian idea of the engineer-hero has both a long history and is a very important way of looking beyond the immediate financial mess".
The show, he hoped, have "a positive message. The evidence is there in the objects".
The exhibition launch was held on the top floor of the Gherkin, a building that will feature in the forthcoming show. From there other important examples of postwar architecture which will be in the exhibition could just be made out through London's dingily grey morning skies: the Lloyds building; Erno Goldfinger's brutalist 1960s Balfron Tower and Zaha Hadid's Olympic park aquatics centre, for which the V&A has commissioned a new model.
The show will also feature the growth of new towns with models and drawings for urban utopias such as Milton Keynes and Harlow which has the Frederick Gibberd-designed residential block The Lawn, one of the earliest examples of British high-density housing.
There will be about 350 exhibits on show, over two-thirds of them from the V&A's vast collections and it will cover everything from fashion to fine art to video games.
Breward said The Haçienda was so important in youth culture that it had to be an important part of the show and the club's original designer, Ben Kelly, is working on the V&A show. "You'll almost feel like you're there," said Breward. "Within an exhibition context."
There will be the more obvious exhibits – Dyson's bagless vacuum cleaner, say – as well as unsung heroes such as the Topper dinghy and the Moulton folding bike.
Ghislaine Wood, the show's other curator, said the show represented three years of work and it had been a good opportunity to research the V&A's own collection. "We have acquired contemporary material right from the beginning of the V&A's history and it is at moments like these that you realise how important it is to keep collecting contemporary work."
• British Design 1948-2012: Innovation in the Modern Age will be staged between 31 March and 12 August.
Spain’s €44m Niemeyer centre is shut in galleries glut
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 4, 2011
Squabble over spending on hotels, trips and meals at complex designed by celebrated Brazilian architect
A dazzling €44 million (£37.7m) arts centre in the northern Spanish city of Avilés is to close after six months amid political squabbling as the country asks itself what to do with a glut of glittering new museums.
The Niemeyer centre, which was designed by the celebrated 103-year-old Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, was intended to have the same impact on the industrial Cantabrian sea port as the Guggenheim museum has had on Bilbao, 150 miles to the east.
As Spain tries to digest the museums and arts centres designed by world-famous architects during the boom years of public investment in culture of the past two decades, a new regional government has forced the centre to shut its doors for at least the next two months.
The last show, featuring a piece choreographed by flamenco dancer Maria Pagés, will be on Saturday. Recent sellouts at the centre included a Richard III directed by Sam Mendes and starring Kevin Spacey.
Several thousand people took to the streets on Sunday in a display of support for an arts centre that locals hoped would put the city on the global culture map. But the regional government of Asturias, which owns the buildings and part finances the centre, forced the closure, alleging "serious irregularities" in the accounts.
"Receipts and invoices needed to justify some of the spending are absent," said regional culture chief Emilio Marcos, who alleged that too much had been spent on hotels, trips and restaurants.
Administrators said they were "shocked and perplexed" by the accusations, claiming the "very modest" €900,000 annual budget had been stretched a long way. "It has transformed the city, multiplying the number of tourists by four and acting as a spur for the local economy," they said.
Although politicians say the Niemeyer will not become an empty white elephant, its name can be added to a growing list of ambitious publicly-funded projects in Spain which have run into trouble.
They include not only arts centres and museums, but also airports and high-speed railway stations planned during the bonanza period before Spain's economy slumped three years ago.
Some have become burdens simply because they cost so much to maintain. The Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia recently highlighted a raft of small local theatres, libraries and other amenities that have closed because they are too expensive to run.
The Niemeyer brought in big names, though not always to do the things they are most famous for. Woody Allen came to play jazz, film director Julian Schnabel exhibited his Polaroids, while the actor Jessica Lange has shown her photographs. Critics claim that it has concentrated too much on celebrities, but the centre has proved a draw for locals and out-of-towners.
Among those protesting on Sunday were hoteliers and restaurateurs, who see the Niemeyer as a key driver for local business. "I believe the Niemeyer has become a first-class engine for the economy and we are not going to waste the things that give us wealth," mayoress Pilar Varela said.
White elephants
• City of Culture, Santiago de Compostela
Construction of two of the six buildings for a huge culture campus in the capital city of the Galicia region has been postponed indefinitely. The cost of the scheme, designed by Peter Eisenman, is €300m (£257m) so far.
• Huesca airport
Built four years ago at a cost of €40m to bring tourists to the northern province's ski resorts, it received just four commercial passenger flights in the three months to August.
• AVE train station, Guadalajara
Only 60 passengers a day use the high-speed trains at this station built in farmland six miles from the Madrid dormitory city of Guadalajara. Commuters say the service is too expensive and too far out of town.
• Castellón airport
Formally inaugurated in March, with a promise that it would start receiving passengers by September, this €150m airport on the east coast has now put back its first commercial flights to April next year at the earliest.
Antonine wall fills gaps in story of Roman occupation of Britain
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 20, 2011
Wall that once marked Roman empire's border in Scotland will give up some of its secrets for Glasgow's Hunterian museum
One of the Roman empire's most enigmatic monuments – the Antonine wall between the firths of Forth and Clyde in Scotland, which briefly marked the northernmost point of the empire between the 140s and 160s AD – is set to reveal some of its secrets.
The elaborately carved sculptures from the wall, brought together for the first time, form the centrepiece of a new gallery at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, which has reopened after two years' refurbishment.
The Antonine wall was built early in the reign of Antoninus Pius, Hadrian's successor as emperor, who pushed the Roman border north from Hadrian's wall in order to secure a military victory that would play well back in Rome. According to the director of the Hunterian, Professor David Gaimster: "It was an act of propaganda by an emperor who had not held any significant military command, and its success ensured his position."
The soldiers of the II Augusta, VI Victrix and XX Valeria Victrix legions who built the mighty turf wall – many parts of which can still be seen – carved elaborate "distance slabs" commemorating the sections they had built.
The sculptures are, in general, more elaborate and richly decorated than their counterparts on Hadrian's wall, featuring such scenes as Victory placing a laurel wreath on a Roman legionary standard, and the distinctive mascots of the soldiers' legions: a running boar for the XX; a Pegasus and a Capricorn (after the Emperor Augustus's star sign) for the VI.
The sculptures also clearly project the move north as a splendid military victory: several depict Caledonians being trampled by Roman cavalry, or simply crouching in submission, bound and naked.
The northernmost tip of the empire is frequently imagined as an inhospitable, barbarous zone for its occupiers – but that image is far from the truth, according to Gaimster. The occupiers were, he said, enjoying "as sophisticated a Mediterranean lifestyle as legionaries would have done anywhere else in the empire".
For example, there were bathhouses along the wall, including in what is now the Glasgow suburb of Bearsden, where research has shown the occupiers were eating a diet including olives, figs and wine. Also in the new gallery are fragments of a richly decorated mausoleum found near Kirkintilloch, carved with images of togaed figures reclining on couches. Other objects include precious fragments of glass, delicate intaglios, red Samianware for dining, and – as fresh as the day they were made – adult and children's leather sandals. There is also a hint towards the multi-ethnic makeup of the Roman occupiers: a 15-year-old Middle Eastern boy called Salamenes died near Kirkintilloch, and his tombstone was erected by his father. A single woman – Verecunda – is recorded by her tombstone.
Indeed, the indigenous aristocracy seemed to be enjoying prestige goods from the Roman world before the area was annexed. An Iron Age settlement at Leckie in Stirlingshire has yielded finds of Roman Samianware, glass and a delicate mirror.
Sixteen of the 19 surviving distance slabs have been put on display. The missing three – one is in Edinburgh's National Museum of Scotland, one at Glasgow's Kelvingrove art gallery, and one, having been sold to America, perished in the 1896 fire in Chicago – are represented by casts.
They have all had a richly varied history since their brief service for Rome in the second century. Several were acquired by Scottish antiquaries, and given to the University of Glasgow as early as the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, before the Hunterian was founded in 1807. One was seen built into the side of a cottage in 1603, and another turned up in a farmer's field in 1969, and Emeritus Professor Lawrence Keppie, an expert on the wall, remembers one of his first jobs at the museum: cleaning off the whitewash with which had been splashed during its sojourn in the farmyard.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 16, 2011
The design world hits high-voltage this week, with flash openings at historic houses, electric cars racing to the future and RIBA unveiling the British pylons of tomorrow
London Open House takes place this weekend, allowing us to see inside hundreds of historic buildings normally closed to the public. Some, such as the hugely popular Midland Grand Hotel (fronting St Pancras station) and Jimi Hendrix's flat in Mayfair's Brook Street are sold-out, but the choice of buildings to visit is still vast.
What about that trip to Ruislip you never promised yourself, to see 97 Park Road, an unexpected house built by Connell Ward and Lucas in 1936 in the style of Le Corbusier's white Parisian villas of the 1920s? This is the best-preserved of a row of three houses that dumbfounded its neighbours (Ruislip is awash with mock-Tudor and neo-Georgian homes) when they were built. Today, though, it is No 97 that is so very desirable.
Or how about the political and architectural drama of Wrotham Park in Barnet, a magnificent English Palladian country house designed by Isaac Ware in 1754 for Admiral John Byng. The house has featured in numerous films and TV shows including Gosford Park and Sense and Sensibility; doubtless you will spot others. Voltaire satirised poor Byng's death in 1759's Candide: "In this country [England], it is wise to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others."
British design is to be encouraged in future at the Commonwealth Institute, Kensington, open to the public this weekend for the last time in its original state before John Pawson converts it into a new home for the Design Museum. With its dramatic hyperbolic paraboloid copper roof (as beautiful to look at as the words that describe it are clumsy), this "tent in the park" pavilion was designed by RMJM; it first opened in 1962.
Details of Open House, Dublin were also revealed this week. Clearly a passionate event, it offers (along with visits to many historic and new buildings) a "Destruction of Dublin" walking tour: all too much of the Georgian city has been destroyed by mindless new development over the past 50 years. Not an event, then, for those heading to Dublin for hen or stag parties and the "craic", but a time to get intelligently under the city's grey stone skin.
This Way Up: 15 Years of Architecture, Design and Fashion at the British Council is a show opening in Hoxton, east London, as part of the London design festival. It tells the story of the Council's attempts to get British creativity noticed by people worldwide. Designs by Tom Dixon, Peter Kennard, Pearson Lloyd, Sebastian Bergne, Nigel Shafran, Michael Marriott and Anthony Burrill will be on show together with four one-off dresses by Basso and Brooke, inspired by their British Council exchange to Uzbekistan.
Designers will be on hand to recycle materials left over from British Council exhibitions. Other objects will be auctioned off, including "everything from giant rolls of Sellotape to fascinating chairs commissioned for shows in Venice," says Vicky Richardson, the British Council's director of architecture, design and fashion. "We wanted to clear out all this stuff, but we didn't want to throw anything away." The money raised will fund a new British Council scholarship giving young British designers the opportunity to work in Brazil.
Audi evoked memories of the intriguing relationship between architects and automobiles when it announced its Urban Concept car this week in time for the Frankfurt motor show. This lightweight, electric two-seater has been designed, says Audi, according to Mies van der Rohe's guiding principle "less is more". More than Mies, though, it calls to mind Le Corbusier's influential, if overlooked, 1929 design for a city car.
Even Le Corbusier never had the hard task of designing an electricity pylon. Contemporary architects, however, have been much involved in the competition organised by RIBA and the Department for Energy and Climate Change for a new standard British pylon. Models by the six pylon finalists will be on show at the V&A during the London design festival. The most convincing is Silhouette by Ian Ritchie Architects and engineers Jane Wernick Associates. It takes the form of a needle-like steel obelisk with well-resolved arms to carry the cables; seen in profile, it would be fairly unobtrusive. Other designs are a little top-heavy (T-Pylon by Bystrup Architects), too flamboyant (Flower Tower by Gustafson Porter with Atelier One and Pfisterer), or simply too dramatic for mass production (the taut, bow-like Plexus by AL_A and Arup). Whichever design wins – final judging takes place on 11 October 2011 – it may yet be back to the drawing board if the existing standard design, dating from 1928, is to be superseded, both technically and aesthetically.
The connection between architecture and engineering is realised memorably in the design of Norman Foster's 1978 Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. This week the Twentieth Century Society announced it was putting forward the building for listing. Expect Grade I status. Unlike Wrotham Park, 97 Park Road or the Commonwealth Institute, this hi-tech masterpiece is open to the public throughout the year.
Has postmodernist design eaten itself?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 12, 2011
Gaudy and irreverent, postmodernism was once an iconic chapter in design history. Now it sells gimmicky corkscrews. Can the V&A's forthcoming retrospective tell us why?
When Daryl Hannah decorates Charlie Sheen's apartment in Oliver Stone's 1987 movie Wall Street, she whips up a quintessential postmodernist pastiche. The faux-ruined walls and clashing colours personify the aspirations of the nouveaux riches, a shallow world of image and artifice. In a rare moment of design slapstick, Michael Douglas (as Gordon Gecko) puts his drink on the coffee table and it falls through – he thinks there's glass there. You can hear the modernists tutting. With its deceptive surfaces and furniture that doesn't do what it's supposed to, postmodernism is not just the backdrop to but a metaphor for unbridled capitalism, where a plump balance sheet conceals all manner of sins and where marble-effect formica hides chipboard. But was postmodernism really so bad?
Already we're in cliche territory. If there were a critic's rulebook, it would stipulate the need to begin any piece on postmodernism with a pop culture reference and a tone of moral ambivalence. That mandatory disapproval is based not so much on the carnival of bad taste that romped through the 1970s and 80s, but on the fact that this bad taste was only skin deep. For, according to the standard reading, postmodernism was fickle and ironic, obsessed with style for its own sake. Where modernism was about high-minded notions such as essence and truth to materials, perhaps even a social agenda, postmodernism was about surfaces and signs. As Fredric Jameson put it in his brilliant Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, "it is like the transition from precious metals to the credit card".
With a major retrospective of postmodernism opening at the V&A Museum later this month, the question is whether we have anything new to say about this phenomenon. Will the show reinforce old cliches, or will it manage to capture some of postmodernism's complexity?
One of the awkward things about the postmodernists was that few of their leading lights actually wanted to be one. Ettore Sottsass, arguably the godfather of postmodernist design, felt that it was an American architectural movement. And in some ways he was right. In architecture, the agenda was set across the Atlantic, by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's embracing of Las Vegas neon, by the historicist references of Michael Graves, the vertiginous corporate lobbies of John Portman and the assemblage style of Frank Gehry's house. But in design, the main impetus came from Europe. There were exceptions, such as the American Peter Shire, whose Bel Air chair does a fair impression of a cornice abusing a beach ball. But when Sottsass founded the Memphis group in Milan in 1981, along with Michele De Lucchi and Marco Zanini and others, he unleashed postmodernist design's boldest force.
Memphis was garish and irreverent, trawling history for allusions and splattering them with previously unthinkable patterns. It was a self-conscious riposte to modernism's steel-tube sobriety. Martine Bedine's Super lamp was like a child's toy, part ferris wheel, part puppy on a leash. Sottsass's Casablanca sideboard has something Aztec about it, and that kind of arbitrary reference was pure postmodernism – it might be neo-Mesopotamian, like Sottsass's 1972 Lapislazzuli teapot, or neo-art deco primitivism like the 1982 Murmansk fruit bowl.
But what Memphis is chiefly remembered for is the plastic laminate that gave these pieces their dizzying visual effect. Thanks to this emphasis on shock-and-awe surfaces, it has become common to suggest that Memphis products were designed merely to look good in photographs – that it was mediatised furniture for an image economy. Jameson made the same point about postmodern architecture. This may be true, although in Memphis' case I'm not sure it was as conscious as that. Certainly, news of Memphis travelled fast – influencing some of the worst design of recent times – but Memphis itself was never a commercial success. The only people who seemed to do well out of it were Abet Laminati, the Italian laminates company that produced the riotous veneers Sottsass and co made all the rage.
The problem with the conventional reading of Memphis as ironic, mediatised furniture was that Sottsass, at least, was not that cynical. A romantic, he believed that domestic objects could take on an almost sacred quality. A truer postmodernist was his compatriot Alessandro Mendini, who had established the Studio Alchimia group even before Memphis. Sharing none of Sottsass's optimism, Mendini was much more the ironist and iconoclast, seizing the opportunity to break all of design's rules – such as originality. His Proust armchair, a baroque confection daubed in pointillist brushstrokes, crosses furniture with an impressionist painting. He once described it to me as "hermaphrodite design" – nothing is his except the act of creating a hybrid. It was literate, sophisticated and meant as a joke.
Just as architectural postmodernism descended into the pejorative "PoMo", with pastiches such as Philip Johnson's AT&T building (which crossed a skyscraper with a Chippendale cabinet), so postmodernist design fell into gimmicky merchandising. Mendini was a key culprit, with his toy-like Anna G corkscrew for Alessi, shaped like a woman in a dress. Even more literal was Michael Graves's kettle, also for Alessi, with its whistling plastic bird perched on the spout. Abandoning the old form-and-function dogma, design embraced its new nature as kitsch – kitsch that still sells rather well today, we might add.
From here, the link to pop and street culture is an easy one, and the V&A retrospective promises to regale us with instances of where postmodernist design culture simply became popular culture. Hip-hop sampling, Peter Saville's New Order record covers, Grace Jones's eclectic styling and the Levi's ad in which Nick Kamen strips off in a launderette are all claimed as a groundswell of the postmodern ethos. There's a good theoretical basis for a lot of that, but it threatens to confuse postmodernism with 1980s popular culture generally – and resuscitating Neneh Cherry as a postmodern icon feels like the 80s revival run amok.
In fact, revivalism seems to be one of the permanent legacies of postmodernism. Retro has become a perpetual condition. You can see it in ultra-conservative magazine design and referential fashion statements. If chameleon style-shifters such as Madonna and Grace Jones are postmodernists, then so is Lady Gaga. What is Apple if not neo-modernism, a revival of the minimalism preached by Dieter Rams and the Ulm design school in the 1960s? And the image economy (if that really is a Memphis legacy) is now so advanced that designers publish computer-generated images of work that is not only skin-deep, but doesn't even exist. In architecture, meanwhile, PoMo didn't die so much as find itself exported to the new bastions of turbo-capitalism: mirrored glass (and the lack of financial transparency that goes with it) abounds in Moscow, while the towers with the funny crowns migrated to Dubai and Shanghai. The V&A ends the story in 1990 (well, shows have to end somewhere) but postmodernism is proving a difficult habit to kick.
The sights and sounds of summer
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 9, 2011
What's your favourite gallery, painting, building or song? Artists, writers and musicians reveal what cultural highlights they associate with the holiday season
• What are your cultural summer highlights? Share your tips by posting a comment
MUSIC
One of the things I missed when I was living in Portland, Oregon was the art scene in the UK. Martin Creed's just refurbished the Scotsman Steps in Edinburgh, using beautiful marble slabs. I though his Mothers sculpture [shown in London this spring] was amazing – a huge neon sign saying Mothers spinning on a pole. My friend asked him what was the inspiration for it, and he just said: "Mothers are scary."
Johnny Marr, musician, on the UK arts scene
THEATRE
The memory of walking through the dark, slightly sinister, narrow streets of the Spanish Quarter in Naples always stays with me. I climbed a hill to a small church in a back street called Pio Monte della Misericordia where there were no guards, no entrance fee and no security. But, on entering, there is a glorious Caravaggio over the altar waiting to be enjoyed in total silence and peace.
Sonia Friedman, West End and Broadway theatre producer
The 798 Art District in Beijing, set in what used to be factories, in the east of the city. It's like arriving in a small town. The buildings vary in scale; spaces like the Tate's Turbine Hall sit next to galleries the size of sheds. I occasionally found myself unsure whether I was looking at an installation or an abandoned bit of machinery. Some of the artwork is perplexing, some of it is really beautiful and quite wild, but what's most exciting about the place is that you get to go really deep into the imaginations of lots of young Chinese artists. I found China hard to get under the surface of but this place was a real eye opener.
Bijan Sheibani, associate director, National Theatre
It's hardly unknown, but the Uffizi in Florence is a treasure: endless corridors filled with beautiful paintings. The light in the city is extraordinary but my tip would be to go towards the end of the day when the crowds have receded and the heat is not so great. The first time I went, just as I emerged into the dusk from seeing Giotto's incredible works, a violinist in the courtyard began playing [Samuel Barber's] Adagio for Strings. It was a breathtaking moment – you could have put it in a play, but no one would believe you.
Michael Attenborough, artistic director, the Almeida theatre
Austria's Felsenreitschule, which is a glorious old writing academy built into a mountainside, is the most amazing place to be during the Salzburg festival. Max Reinhardt resurrected it in the 20s and established it as a place to stage operas. It remains a beautiful space. I directed Romeo and Juliet there last summer and there was a great tradition of going to the Triangel afterwards, which is the restaurant opposite where everyone goes to eat and people-watch.
Bartlett Sher, director, South Pacific, Barbican
My favourite district of Paris is Montmartre and it's there, nestling in front of a beautiful tree-lined square, that you'll find Théâtre de l'Atelier. It's a gorgeous Georgian theatre, wonderfully intimate, and dating back to 1822. It makes me wonder what Bristol Old Vic was like when it was built 50 years earlier. Then, the theatre was an unlicensed playhouse, prevented by law from staging anything so subversive as a play. It was more like a speakeasy or a rave than the kind of bourgeois entertainment we now think of when we say theatre.
Tom Morris, artistic director, Bristol Old Vic
A trip to Harmony Hall, Brown's Mill, on the east coast of Antigua is well off the beaten track but worth the bumpy ride to get there. It was an old sugar plantation and is now an art gallery and restaurant overlooking Nonsuch Bay. It's secluded, the setting is picture-perfect and the food absolutely delicious. You can take a dip before lunch or a boatride across to Green Island nearby. The cocktail bar serves the best rum punch on the island and the art gallery displays the work of the most prestigious local artists so you can pick up a Caribbean print to remind you of the sunshine when you get home.
Nikki Amuka-Bird, actor
BOOKS
Seattle residents check out more books than people in any other US city, so don't miss their matchless new library, opened in 2004. Rem Koolhaas's extraordinarily bold design in glass and steel has surprises all over, from shocking yellow escalators to vertiginous viewpoints. But it's welcoming, efficient and comfortable, has all a library needs, and is appreciated by everyone from the tired, bag-toting homeless to the passionate child reader. Best of all, it's a shining rebuke to anyone who thinks the public library's day is done.
Anne Fine, writer
Thessaloniki is an amazing city, with some great Byzantine treasures. There's a building there called the Rotunda which is an absolute must-see It's a round, beautiful, reddish stone building, built around 300AD by emperor Galerius to be his mausoleum. But when he died, Constantine said it should be a church. In 1590 it became a mosque, then in 1912, when the city became Greek again rather than part of the Ottoman empire, it was reconsecrated as a church. You look at it and think, this tells the history of the city.
Victoria Hislop's new Greek-set novel The Thread is published in October
The Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp has become one of my favourite museums in the world. It's a museum of printing. Christoffel Plantin was a 16th-century printer, and it was his family home as well as his place of business. It's a house from the late middle ages, built round a courtyard, where the family lived and worked for generations. Plantin was interested in philosophy and religion and his house became a centre for humanist thought, discussion and debate. I love the atmosphere of the place. You can sit in the courtyard in the sunshine and let what you've seen sink in. The museum gives a history of printing, but it's very personal because it was Plantin's home.
Val McDermid, writer
The Musée Marmottan is an unbelievable museum which I only really discovered when writing Paris Revealed, looking around for hidden cultural gems. It's on the edge of Paris and features all of the impressionists but especially Monet, including a lot of the paintings he himself had in his home. Even the painting that inspired the name impressionism is here: an impression of a sunrise in the north of France, a wonderful foggy picture of water with what looks like a dab of Marilyn Monroe's lipstick in the middle. All this is just 10 minutes extra on the Metro, and you get to see all these paintings without having to queue at the Musée d'Orsay.
Stephen Clarke is the author of Paris Revealed
Last year I realised a long-held ambition to go to Russia and took a cruise from St Petersburg to Moscow. Passing through lakes, rivers and canals, the trip takes in rural villages, towns and cities ranging from epic grandeur to rustic simplicity. There were many highlights to the trip – the White Lake, Kizhi Island, Red Square, the Tretyakov Gallery – but a genuine stand-out moment was the Peterhof in St Petersburg. Inspired by Versailles, Peter the Great took the best of European and Russian architecture and created a palace of monumental proportions. Be warned, this is not for the faint-hearted: this is the baroque on a jaw-dropping scale.
Erica James's Promises, Promises is published on 18 August
ART
I always go to Venice for the Biennale at the end of August with my family, when it's not so hot. By then we've already heard other people's favourite picks so we know where to head. Then we always go over to the Giudecca, the island opposite, and have a glass of wine. And we always check out the Museo Fortuny – especially the James Turrell room. My daughter, who's about to turn 10, loves it. It's a light installation and it changes all the time, so we like to have a nice quiet moment in the top of the museum watching the lights change. Venice itself is very visual and just a lovely place to be.
Cornelia Parker, artist
The West Kennet long barrow in Wiltshire is a great free attraction – a neolithic burial site, opposite Silbury Hill, clothing optional. It's a great day out for the family, just a half-mile walk to this burial chamber – built in a time before shopping – which you can enter before you walk back. It's not Alton Towers, that's for sure; there's not much to do apart from walk around and get fresh air.
I first went there in my early teens. Silbury Hill is an iron age manmade hill, and the long barrow is almost in its shadow – the whole area is full of these ancient pre-Christian sites. There's a certain mystery to them which I like. Silbury Hill is an amazing structure, the biggest manmade hill in Europe – an engineering feat the equivalent of the Pyramids, but in Wiltshire. It's not clear what the long barrow was used for, and it's that lack of clarity that's interesting and in a way inspiring, because you can make up your own stories.
Jeremy Deller, artist
I love the Greek islands and have done so since the early 80s when I went backpacking. Hydra especially resonated with me – it didn't have cars but donkeys, it had a fantastic club called Disco Heaven, and it was also incredibly beautiful. I went back there several times, and then in 1999 I was invited to exhibit at Hydra Workshops, a gallery owned by the art collector Pauline Karpidas. You might think it an unlikely place to find contemporary art, but Hydra has a long history of artistic patronage. Leonard Cohen lived there and it's where he met Marianne, who inspired the song So Long Marianne – I saw her on the island in 1999. The painter Brice Marden has a house there and now the art collector Dakis Joannou has opened a branch of his private museum the Deste foundation on the island. I can't think of any other small island boasting that much contemporary culture.
Gillian Wearing, artist
I fly to Madrid as often as possible and stay within shouting distance of the Prado. I go every day and look at the same paintings until I have them secure in memory. After my last trip I can conjure Goya's paint choices and techniques for royal clothing, numberless scabrous defeated demons, El Greco's favourite flesh colours, and Velásquez's reworked horse legs. I walk the Prado for hours so I'm marginally fitter and blissful by the time I leave.
Jenny Holzer, artist
I'm not keen on holidays; I find tourism sad. Visiting places that have become a fake version of what they really were, seeing how small and standardised the world is becoming since tourism became the main industry. It's a trancelike state. Tourists want their home comforts, en suite, burger and chips . . . There's no real adventure in it. Of course there are many interesting things to see in the world, but wandering around gawping and taking snaps is not my idea of really being somewhere. I travel a fair bit, for work, and that's preferable. A real engagement – with real people – that's about something.
Sarah Lucas, artist
CLASSICAL, WORLD AND JAZZ
2011 is the bicentenary of Franz Liszt, the great composer and pianist and perhaps the biggest pop star of the 19th century. Now that I have a chance to take a break from playing and recording his music, I will be spending my summer reading about him. Alan Walker's monumental three-part biography is a reference I return to again and again. Apart from the meticulous research, I love how he includes so many interesting stories and writes with such great enthusiasm. I am also looking forward to dipping into Oliver Hilmes's new German biography, with the help of my German dictionary. Subtitled Biographie eines Superstars, I am hoping for lots of colourful anecdotes.
Lang Lang, pianist
The main thing I've been listening to lately is the wonderful English singer and pianist Liane Carroll and her new album Up and Down. There's so much life and love and happiness that goes into her music, which I believe is fundamental, to what we do as jazz musicians. There's so many different moods in the album, but the emotion she puts into the ballads especially is very naked. There's one particularly beautiful track, Turn Out the Stars, which features the wonderful flugelhorn player Kenny Wheeler, who's 82 now. But the whole album is wonderful - full of standards that we know and love, and it's amazing to hear Carroll sing them.
Gwilym Simcock, jazz and classical pianist
Whether I'm stageside or poolside I listen to a lot of Imogen Heap's music. Parachute's album Losing Sleep is a favourite too. The three things I've listened to most this summer are Dario Marianelli's music for 2005's Pride and Prejudice. Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona is my perfect hot summer Latin-lover-esque soundtrack, also genius is the soundtrack from the brilliant film that Zach Braff wrote and directed, Garden State which is my poolside must-listen. There is another film staring Braff, The Last Kiss. The film is OK, but the soundtrack is wonderfully mellow, and perfect for relaxed inspiration.
Danielle di Niese, soprano
I'm not going on holiday this year, but I will hopefully be spending a good deal of time in the back garden by my daughter's paddling pool, probably listening to her making up dirty versions of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. She is two, so this usually involves either bogeys or her bum. To play through the back door or open window I am still very fond of Paolo Nutini's last album, or if I'm feeling authentic, some good old ska compilations or something in a field recording selection like Southern Journey: "Sheep sheep, dontcha know the road?". As the evening draws in I'll listen to Sam Amidon, or Laura Veirs's first album The Triumphs and Travails of Orphan Mae, as I am a sucker for a strange fiddle and a sad old banjo. With gin.
Eliza Carthy, folk musician
TELEVISION
I'm off to Cape Cod to a coastal village of wooden houses and a white wooden church with a spire. There's very little culture that doesn't involve the freeway. But every Wednesday something comes along to perform beneath the spire – I avoid the Scottish pipers, but the pianist who plays Brahms will light my fire. By the end of three weeks, having exhausted the drive-in cinema, we may head for Boston and take in the amazing, eclectic Gardner Museum. But in truth we go for the culture in the dunes, the sea, and the sky. We do it ourselves and paint watercolours.
Jon Snow, Channel 4 News presenter
I went to Madrid for the new year with a friend who new his way around, and he took me to what they call the Golden Triangle: the Prado, the Thyssen-Bornemisza and La Reina Sofia. You can literally walk to them all in 10 minutes We saw Guernica, which is awesome. It's fascinating because Picasso knew he was making a masterpiece before he even painted it. The Thyssen collection is the biggest personal art collection in history: you have to go back a few times. I found myself in front of a Frank Auerbach, one of the north London set. You have to pay an entrance fee – we don't realise how lucky we are that you can just wander into the Tate for free in this country - but it's worth every euro.
Russell Tovey, actor
Interviews by Kate Abbott, Nosheen Iqbal, Alison Flood, Daniel Martin, Imogen Tilden and Richard Vine
National Museum of Scotland: suspend your disbelief
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 27, 2011
Newly renovated, the National Museum of Scotland at last gives a collection of Victorian curiosities the extraordinary showcase they deserve. Jonathan Glancey takes a look inside
A hippopotamus suspended from the rafters. A colour television dating from 1937. A giant Victorian lighthouse lens that once illuminated the Firth of Forth. A seal gut anorak, looking like plastic, made by Inuit hunters in the 1850s. An exotic bird stuffed by Charles Darwin.
The collection of the old Royal Museum stretching along Chambers Street in Edinburgh's Old Town is an engaging but initially baffling affair. Where did all this stuff come from? And why has so much of it – at least 8,000 objects – only now gone on show for the first time since the museum was formally opened in 1866?
Housed in a magnificent Victorian building designed by Robert Matheson and Francis Fowke, the former Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art forms one half of today's National Museum of Scotland. The other half, next door, dates from 1998 and was designed by the architects Benson & Forsyth in a style that is half Scottish castle, half Le Corbusier monastery. Now, after a £46m renovation, the 19th-century museum reopens on Friday, and the two halves have finally been joined together.
While the Benson & Forsyth building is dedicated to showing objects made in Scotland, its restored Victorian sibling is a gloriously eclectic archive of the objects that Scottish explorers, inventors, soldiers and scientists brought back from their travels – as well as pieces from people such as Charles Darwin, who trained in Edinburgh.
Keen to plunge in, I head towards the grand steps leading up from Chambers Street to the even grander Lombardic Renaissance museum entrance. Dr Gordon Rintoul, director of National Museums Scotland, and his project architect, Gordon Gibb of Glasgow-based Gareth Hoskins Architects, stop me. "The entrance is this way," says Gibb, pointing to a dark, wide-mouthed opening in the base of the right-hand side of the museum's imposing 19th-century stone facade. While it seems odd to ignore the obvious way into the museum, this crypt-like entrance proves to be a dramatic and highly effective architectural manoeuvre.
Step inside, and you enter one of Scotland's finest and most unexpected new public spaces. Gibb has opened up a labyrinth of former storage spaces and dungeon-like workshops under the main museum floors. This brooding, low-lit vault – like the undercroft of a medieval cathedral – will receive visitors, feed them in a fine new brasserie at one end, offer them cloakrooms and then send them up from an atmosphere of romantic gloom into the soaring, daylit galleries above.
"The vault was originally divided by a stone wall," says Gibb. "We took that out to open up the space." This meant propping up the centre of the crypt with heavy-duty steel columns. "At the same time, we lowered the floors by over a metre to give us the height we needed to make this a public space. But, we wanted to keep the light levels low to create an atmosphere of . . ."
"Expectation?" suggests Rintoul.
Glass lifts and broad stairs lead up through apertures cut in the stones to the spectacular heart of the museum: a soaring, four-storey cast iron and timber structure surrounded by delicate and intricate galleries. Even on a dark and thundery day, the Grand Gallery seems almost unnaturally awash with daylight.
"It's like a giant Victorian birdcage," says Rintoul, and with its thin iron columns set close together and arched timber roof, that's exactly what the structure resembles. It is the Scottish masterpiece of Fowke, the Irish-born British military engineer best known for designing the Royal Albert Hall. Fowke, who died in 1865, worked on the museum with local architect Matheson. While the facade of the building is more Matheson, the "birdcage" hidden behind is far more Fowke, clearly influenced by Joseph Paxton's revolutionary Crystal Palace of 1851.
"We've stripped it back to its Victorian glory," says Gibb. "It was so clear from early on what we needed to do. Clear away the clutter, open up vistas and connect all the galleries leading off the Grand Gallery."
The architects' touch has been strong yet sensitive. Today, every part of Fowke and Matheson's design, built in stages from 1861 to 1889, does indeed link together. Here is a museum in which it is impossible to get lost. Wherever you walk, you will find yourself returning to the Grand Gallery. And, throughout, there is daylight: this is the least claustrophobic of museums.
The original museum was established in 1855 by George Wilson, an Edinburgh doctor and chemist, and his elder brother Daniel, secretary of the Society of Antiquities in Edinburgh. In the mid-1950s, the society moved into the Royal Museum, and the collections of the two institutions were merged.
When I ask Rintoul if the museum is a bit of a rattle bag, he corrects me. "A rattle bag? The collection is very wide-ranging, but it represents the sheer diversity of thought and activity that came out of the Scottish Enlightenment. Every object here tells a special story related to the ways in which Scotland went out to the world from the 18th century."
Part of the building's charm lies in the dramatic contrast between its grandiloquent stone facade and its light and airy interior, made even more theatrical because the exterior has been left untouched. Its stones bear sooty witness to 19th-century grime. Shrubs still sprout from cornices. Until a way is devised to clean these stones without razing layers of history, they will remain weathered and aged.
Before the current renovation, Fowke's crystal clear interior had become not so much dirty as cluttered. Rintoul's aim, from his appointment in 2002, was to sweep it out. As layers of paint were stripped away and bricked up doorways reopened, the building gave up its secrets. "We were helped by the fact that Fowke's original work was so very good and reusable," says Rintoul. "When we stripped the carpets from the galleries around the Grand Gallery, we were delighted to find the original American red oak timbers." The curators also discovered thousands of objects in store, most of them wrapped and crated in what is now the crypt-like entrance hall.
The clarity of Fowke's design gave the architects the lead they needed. "We wanted the architecture to stand on its own," says Gordon Gibb, "with the exhibits layered in." The architecture of the building can now be read as clearly and cleanly as it was when the museum first opened.
This approach is very much in tune with Gareth Hoskins's other projects. The Architecture Galleries at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, which opened in 2004, house fragments of buildings, models and drawings of many ages and styles, and yet the overall feel is as clear and illuminating as a shaft of light. With the Culloden Battlefield Memorial Centre, near Inverness (2007) – a building rooted in the landscape – the practice has helped tell a rich and complex story through a clear-cut design free of gimmicks. Yet the centre has a quietly powerful presence inside and out, reinforced by a long stone and timber wall projecting uninterrupted to the battlefield and countryside beyond.
Back in Edinburgh, the clear layering of objects on show in the renovated museum is a joy. The displays, designed by museum installation specialists Ralph Appelbaum Associates, gather collections of objects into particular stories that explain where they came from, how they were gathered and why they matter.
Dr Henrietta Lidchi, the museum's keeper of world cultures, walks me through its uppermost galleries. "Museums try to contain cultures," she says, "but here we like the idea of cultures moving on, morphing and changing. We work with peoples from around the world making connections and using the museum's resources as a tool for sparking off new ideas; these can be in jewellery, fashion – the list goes on."
So just as Scots went abroad to collect the objects displayed here, so the new National Museum of Scotland is now taking its message out to the world. Director, curators, designers and architects have revitalised a superb building that you will surely want to experience for its own sake before plunging, layer by layer, into the depths of its beautifully presented collections.
Before I leave, I do another turn around the galleries, looking at some of the newly found objects, lured first by the scaly throated tree-creeper stuffed by Darwin during his expedition around the world onboard HMS Beagle, then by the Nobel prize medal awarded to Alexander Fleming, the Scottish biologist and pharmacologist, for the discovery of penicillin, and, then by a painted buckskin worn by a native American chief long before Custer's last stand. Above all, though – and happily encasing these things – here is one of the truly great, and beautifully remodelled, Scottish buildings.