The Airstream Museum

The NY Times has a piece about a novelist who has "a traveling museum of oddities and handmade optical illusions." The article is mostly about his work as a writer, but it reminds us that a museum doesn't have to be a building, or even in a fixed place. Plus, I like the photo.

"Artists contend with Libeskind"

No comment is really necessary about this article from ARTINFO:

Daniel Libeskind’s 2006 addition to the Denver Art Museum (DAM) is a difficult building to like. It greets visitors with an empty, cavernous lobby and houses galleries with bizarre geometries and sloping walls, features that make it almost impossible to show art coherently, despite the heroic efforts of curators. It is a design that at times seems determined to displease. The museum has decided to confront this architectural awkwardness by commissioning 17 contemporary artists to craft site-specific works in response to the new building. . . .more

It should at least be an interesting exhibit.

New Zaha Hadid Museum

I missed this one in the holiday hectics. Zaha Hadid is designing a new art museum for Michigan State University with significant funding from Eli and Edythe Broad.  The ArchTracker web site has a few renderings and quite a nice fly-through of the design concept. It looks somewhat like Libeskind's Denver museum, but perhaps with a few more walls that are plumb enough to hang a painting. With a project budget of $40 to $45 million they may just have enough money to make the project happen. Last week's issue of the New Yorker (Dec. 21, 2009) also has a good profile of Hadid by John Seabrook.  The best part is that I finally have some sense of what "tektonic" means.