A roof can be exciting ... honest
The National Portrait Gallery* has reopened after extensive refurbishment. The highlight is the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard .. with a $63 million roof by Foster + Partners.
The roof is fascinating. When you look straight up it appears to be a symmetrical flat roof, but actually it is subtly curved and because the columns are tucked into the corners and near the walls, the roof appears to float.
http://americanart.si.edu/reynolds_center/courtyard.cfm
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/arts/design/19fost.html?_r=1&n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Organizations/S/Smithsonian%20Institution&oref=slogin
http://www.aia.org/aiarchitect/thisweek07/1221/1221d_portrait.cfm
The water feature are the ‘water scrims’ by Kathryn Gustafson. I have never been a fan of her work. The Diana Memorial was a costly disaster :
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/10/12/uk.diana.memorial/index.html
The terrible garden at Millennium Park in Chicago was a disappointment in an otherwise impressive display of architecture and sculpture. But I must be fair, these water features in the Kogod Courtyard greatly enhance the space. I bet that in summer they are even more effective.
* The building was the former Patent office and now houses Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery.
New Museum of Contemporary Art
Short walk in Central Park .. trees in blooms and a very sunny warm day .. beautiful. I took a bus all the way to East Village (Houston) and after quite a bit of confusion found the Bowery and New Museum of Contemporary Art.
“The New Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by Tokyo-based architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA with Gensler, New York, serving as Executive Architect, is a seven-story, structure located at 235 Bowery between Stanton and Rivington Streets, at the origin of Prince Street in New York City. The first art museum ever constructed from the ground up in downtown Manhattan, the NewMuseum will open to the public on December 1, 2007, coinciding with the institution’s 30th anniversary.”
Source:
http://www.newmuseum.org/
The building is impressive .. 7 stories of off set boxes .. covered in a steel mesh. Alas, I found nothing indoors to reflect this unusual structure. Large lean white rooms are suitable for contemporary art but finishing of building was a bit too industrial for my taste .. stairways in particular are dull. It has a smart café and bookshop.
I walked north to St Mark’s Place .. Bowery still has missions for the down and outs .. but also a very smart hotel (Bowery Hotel), nightclubs and smart restaurants.
http://www.theboweryhotel.com/
All this is set in a semi-industrial atmosphere of restaurant supply and repair (people spray paining used kitchen equipment …).
Long ago and far away
Central Park behind Metropolitan Museum is the "new home" for an ancient monument..
“The obelisk was erected in Heliopolis around 1500 BC and was moved to Alexandria around 12 B.C. by Rome's Augustus Caesar. By then, the lower corners of the stones had been broken off, so the Romans had bronze supports in the form of sea crabs placed under them. (Two of the original crabs are in the MetropolitanMuseum of Art; the other two were stolen in Egypt.) There it remained until 1879 when it was shipped to the United States. This was either as a gift of the Khedive of Egypt, who offered it to the U. S. as a token of good faith to help stimulate economic relations between the two countries. Or it was swiped by William H. Vanderbilt against the wishes of the Egyptians. It depends on who you ask.
Even more unlikely than the actual presence of the monument in Central Park is the monumental moving job undertaken to get it here. Stand at the bottom and look up and imagine taking it down, putting it in a ship in 1879, sailing across the ocean and up the Hudson and than moving across town, (The cross town journey alone took more than 4 months!), and then setting it upright again on Greywacke Knoll, its present site. The installation was completed in 1881. This Herculean feat was accomplished by a U.S. Navy engineer, Lieutenant-Commander Henry Honeychurch Gorringe. “
Source :
http://www.centralpark.com/pages/attractions/obelisk.html
The fine print
Date of travel : April 2008
Country information :
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html