“This space has always been about community,” says Patrick Willingham, executive director of The Public Theatre at Astor Place, the magisterial 19th-century Renaissance Revival building that, since the late 1960s, has served as a multi-stage venue for founding director Joseph Papp’s vision of a new and groundbreaking American theatre. Architecturally, at least, that has never been more the case: the capstone of nearly two decades of renovation/restoration work, to the tune of $42 million, by Ennead Architects (formerly Polshek Partnership), the recently completed revivification of the structure’s entry and lobby have dramatically expanded the Public’s public component–making the place that brought you (among countless theatrical high-water marks) Hair, A Chorus Line, and The Normal Heart a crowd-pleaser in every sense.

Though Papp’s intervention, in 1966, saved it from demolition, the building, at 425 Lafayette Street in Manhattan’s East Village, was hardly insignificant. Completed in three phases (by three architects) between 1853 and 1881, it was commissioned by John Jacob Astor and served as the city’s first free public library. In 1921, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society purchased the property and converted it into a shelter and all-purpose gathering place for newly arrived European Jews; the letters HIAS, in faded paint, are still visible on the northern elevation. Under Papp’s supervision, architect Giorgio Cavaglieri carved out five theatres of varying sizes and configurations, home to some of the great productions of the last half-century. But the communal spaces remained less than stellar: during the HIAS years, the original grand entry podium was lost, replaced by an interior stair that consumed 30 percent of the lobby. And subsequent to Papp’s original renovation, the structure received almost no upgrading until Ennead began substantive work in the mid-nineties.

Things have changed, changed utterly. Without, project architect Stephen Chu restored the original auspicious sense of arrival with a three-sided grand stair, measuring seventeen by seventy feet and constructed from solid blocks of black granite, protected by a new glass canopy. In addition to extracting the steps from the lobby and enabling theatre patrons to enter at the original level of the three arched front doors, Chu’s stoop serves as a welcome outdoor destination on a street previously lacking one, a magnetized urban gathering place akin to the monumental stairs in front of the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue (though less imposing and more boho).
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The museum recently moved into a new home in Two Rivers, and the race is on to reopening day, planned for this summer. According to director Jim Moran, Hamilton desperately needs funding–and an army of volunteers–to physically move millions of pieces of type, plates, presses, tools, and raw materials. Enter letterpress-loving Neenah Paper, which has launched a “Help Save Hamilton” campaign that will donate to the museum all money raised from a series of limited-edition prints. First up is “Form & Function” (above), designed by Two Paperdolls. “I scanned the back of some wood type to achieve an authentic texture,” says Jennifer James of the Philadelphia-based studio, “and adorned the letterforms with ornaments you might find in an ‘old school’ letterpress shop.”

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The Eames House in Pacific Palisades, California is approaching 70 (after a protracted design and building process, Charles and Ray moved in on Christmas Eve 1949) and the beloved landmark is need of some TLC. The Eames Foundation is ready to preserve the house as it existed when Charles and Ray lived and worked in it–plans call for not only conserving the house for the future but also celebrating the Eameses’ legacy and philosophy–but it’s going to need some help, and by help, we mean money.

The foundation recently launched a campaign to raise $150,000 toward preserving and protecting the Eames house for the next 250 years, with an incentive to donate in the form of hand-numbered original prints from Nebo (the interactive agency is also to thank for the campaign website). Each of the four Eames-inspired designs is available in a limited-edition of 500 prints. The prints are 75 tax-deductible dollars a piece, with all proceeds going to support projects of the Eames Foundation, and Herman Miller and Vitra are matching donations for each print purchased. continued…

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“High among the unpredictable variables that endanger the survival of worthy buildings are the vagaries of taste. For example, by the late 1950s, Victorian architecture was held in such low esteem that Frank Furness’s splendidly oddball University of Pennsylvania Library of 1889–1891 in Philadelphia (pictured)–akin to a Venetian-Gothic armadillo–faced impending demolition. Although several commercial buildings by Furness fell to the wrecker’s ball around that time in order to satisfy narrow-minded city planners’ Georgian-only vision of the newly created Independence National Historical Park nearby in downtown Philadelphia, a parallel catastrophe on the Penn campus was averted thanks to the special pleading of Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, among others including [Frank Lloyd] Wright, who after a 1957 walk-through of the Furness library proclaimed, ‘It is the work of an artist.’

The following year saw the founding in London of the Victorian Society, the pioneering group dedicated to preserving that long-derided style, and in 1966 a sister organization, the Victorian Society in America, followed suit even as urban homesteaders from Brooklyn to San Francisco were rediscovering the quirky charms of the diverse range of fanciful design subsumed under the portmanteau term ‘Victorian.’ By the 1980s there was widespread disbelief among a younger generation that there could ever have been such contempt for this delightfully imaginative mode.”

-Martin Filler on architectural preservation in the New York Review of Books

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Located on Japan’s Shikoku Island, Hizuchi Elementary School was designed by Japanese municipal architect Masatsune Matsumura and completed in the late 1950s. It’s a rare example of a modern structure that’s constructed primarily of wood and features dual-façade fenestration, a glass exterior hallway that runs the length of the school, and, taking full advantage of its riverfront site, a suspended outdoor reading balcony off the library and a floating staircase that protrudes over the Kiki River. After incurring serious damage from a 2004 typhoon, the school was at the center of a two-year debate over whether to demolish or preserve the structure. The meticulous restoration, carried out over three years, won the 2012 Annual Award of the Architectural Institute of Japan.
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You know Google Maps and the spiffy 360-degree navigation of Street View, but what if you want to get a closer look at Antarctica or dive into Australia’s Shark Bay? For that, you’ll want to consult the search giant’s new World Wonders Project, a cultural digitization platform created in collaboration with organizations such as UNESCO, the World Monuments Fund, and CyArk. The World Wonders website features an index of 130 places (and counting), ranging from Stonehenge and Rome’s Temple of Hercules to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. In addition to panoramic views of the cultural sites, there are photographs, 3-D models, and videos.
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And speaking of valiant efforts to thwart the growing threats to modern architecture, our sharp-eyed friends at the World Monuments Fund are now accepting nominations for the 2012 World Monuments Fund/Knoll Modernism Prize. The $10,000 prize will be awarded this fall to a design professional or firm in recognition of “innovative design solutions that preserved or saved a modern landmark at risk.” The deadline for nominations is July 31. Click here for full details.

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Philip Johnson‘s Glass House will soon have a new leader manning the transparent and modern ship. Today, the National Trust for Historic Preservation announced that Henry Urbach will be taking over as director of the historic architectural landmark in New Canaan, Connecticut. Urbach most recently served as curator of architecture and design at SFMOMA, having taken leave from the position last spring to work independently, which included research work at the Glass House itself. Previously, he’d also run a popular gallery in New York for nearly a decade, the eponymous Henry Urbach Architecture. It is currently planned that he will take on the roll at the Glass House on April 2, replacing its current interim director, Rena Zurofsky, who had this to say about his selection:

I met Henry last spring and was struck by his energy and enthusiasm for the site. He seems to me ideal to lead the dedicated Glass House team into even more innovative and exciting programmatic terrain, and to push restoration programs on track. I congratulate Henry, and also Estevan Rael-Galvez, Vice President of Sites at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, on his astute choice.

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It’s now been more than a year since landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh‘s was awarded the project to redevelop the area around St. Louis’ Gateway Arch, and more than ten months since the project suddenly doubled in estimated costs. Now, like with many ambitious building efforts, reality seems to slowly be creeping back in. Despite having just landed a $20 million grant from the government to help the redevelopment, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that the organizers have already had to start scaling back the project’s grand scope, as well as starting to consider what they can feasibly have done by 2015, when the Arch celebrates its 50th anniversary. Perhaps most telling is that the paper reports the project has raised just $57 million thus far, which includes that $20 million grant. Given that the effort was expected to cost somewhere in the $600 million range, that’s a lot of ground to make up. The new, scaled back plans are expected to be released sometime in January.

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Since Werner Herzog’s 3D film Cave of Forgotten Dreams was such a big hit earlier this year, should we now expect a follow up, wherein the adventurous director travels to the wilds of central London and dares enter a small apartment? If you’re a certain professor of archeology at the University of York, you apparently might consider it. The Telegraph reports that a handful of cartoons drawn by John Lydon (or Johnny Rotten) of the Sex Pistols have been discovered behind a cupboard in what are now offices. The archeologist in question is Dr. John Schofield who has compared the find with the cave paintings at Lascaux in France, or at the very least, perhaps even more important than the “lost early Beatles recordings” the BBC found in the mid-90s. In that case, Schofield is careful to remind that a producer at the time of that finding said the discovery was “like finding Tutankhamen’s tomb,” so his comparison to ancient cave paintings shouldn’t sound so absurd. That said, the Guardian‘s Johnathan Jones isn’t buying any of it. Writing that “archeologists should know better” and that anyone from that field who agrees with the importance of the find is merely doing so “to provoke their own profession” without really understanding that modern culture constantly “glorifies the immediate.” In a general sense, his argument seems to boil down to: why stoop to pop culture’s level when there’s legitimate, albeit less sexy, work to be done? Our personal addendum is that, while we genuinely like Lydon’s drawings, and realize their importance to the comparatively very recent history of music, isn’t it a bit premature to label something a major archeological find when the guy who drew them is still alive, and could likely redraw the same cartoons today?

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While the National September 11th Memorial was met record demand, received generally positive reviews, and has already had more than half a million visitors, that doesn’t mean the rest of the larger project is progressing along as smoothly. In a story nearly as old as when the rebuilding effort began, and a slowness you might recall 60 Minutes once called “a national disgrace,” there’s been yet another slowdown in the construction efforts on the Snohetta and Davis Brody Bond-designed museum portion. The Wall Street Journal reports that the two bodies overseeing the effort, the Port Authorities of New York and New Jersey, have “stopped approving new contracts and extensions of existing contracts,” all stemming from disagreements with the foundation behind the project, as well as financial issues, which have seemingly plagued the development from the very start. This latest series of hurdles seems to indicate that once again the opening of the museum will be pushed back from its original planned opening date next September.

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We don’t want to toot our own horns here, but we’d just like to remind you that we’ve been talking about the importance of dinosaur bone auctions and purchases for years now. Heck, we even went so far as to label 2009 “The Year of Dinosaur Sales.” So here we are at the very end of 2011 and Bloomberg, the very bastion of business and economic news, has published a piece about “the escalating demand for dinosaurs.” In the piece, they report that both prices and demand for all those dusty prehistoric bones has risen considerably, and that “the U.S. remains the world leader in mining luxury dinosaurs.” There’s also a lot of information about the growth of the dino auctions and an interesting profile on some of the people who do both the digging and the sales, but we think the really important takeaway from all of this is that we are clearly market visionaries who saw this budding financial opportunity coming years ago and therefore you should probably wire us all of your savings so we can invest in the next big boom. And just to show we mean business, our first hot tip is free: eco-friendly mega-yachts are going to be coming back in a big way. We’re certain of it (probably).

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Looks like a major redesign to a staple location within a large metropolitan area is just the sort of thing that draws in a batch of architecture’s heaviest hitters. There was speculation that the contest to redesign Chicago’s Navy Pier, which launched at the start of last month and which seeks to turn the large space into something better and more functional than its current status as the city’s central tourist trap, would bring in some substantial and well-known talent. Cut from a list of 50, there are now eleven teams selected. Among them, as if the top names like Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas‘ OMA/SGA weren’t enough as the leaders of the teams, the groups are also made up of others high-profile firms, like Bruce Mau Design and nArchitects joining James Corner Field Operations, Diller Scofidio + Renfro getting set up with Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, and Arup among the list on SHoP‘s squad. These eleven impressive teams will eventually be cut down to just five, who will then be given $50,000 each to develop proposals, which are set to go on public display sometime early next year. One thing we’d be willing to bet on is that design firm Pentagram will at least make it to the next round, if not all the way to the finish line, given that they’re included in no fewer than four different teams at the moment.

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It was a bit of a shaky restart for the recently rehabbed Musee d’Orsay in Paris. Planning to reopen on Thursday after a reconstruction effort to the 200-year old former train station that cost nearly $30 million and required a closure of two years, the museum was hit by staff protests, which pushed back its opening. The NY Times reports that the staff, most of whom were security guards, were angry over planned “broad government cutbacks that see retiring civil servants – including museum workers – not replaced by new hires” and decided to use the reopening as a publicity-heavy method of getting their message across. That temporary disruption eventually lifted on Friday, giving people a first look at the addition of more than 20,000 square feet, the newly hung Impressionist masterpieces, and most importantly: get a look at the color of those new walls. Perhaps one of the more talked about aspects of the rehab effort is the museum’s decision not to go with the standard all-white gallery walls. Saying that “white is the enemy of painting” given that it can reflect light too brightly and create a subtle aura that washes out the works of art, the museum decided to go with subdued shades of green, gray, etc. Thus far, no one seems particularly bent out of shape over the decision, but the Guardian‘s Jonathan Jones has stood up for white walls in one of his most recent columns, arguing that “there are lots of whites, good and bad” and that sometimes it’s just the best color for art to exist alongside.

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