Cultural Center: The Latest Architecture and News

ArchiPlan has won first prize in an international competition for a contemporary art museum designed solely for the work of Korean painter Kim Tschang-Yeul. Planned for the volcanic Jeju Island, a province in South Korea, the single-story museum is designed to be the physical manifestation of Kim’s philosophy regarding the water drop.

“We spent a long time understanding [Kim] - understanding his life, intention and his philosophy,” described the architects. “It is necessary to transform his philosophy into a constructed architectural space.” 

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As we reported last week, The Menil Collection has unveiled details on the Menil Drawing Institute (MDI), designed by Los Angeles-based Johnston Marklee, in Houston, Texas. The building will be the first freestanding facility in the United States created especially for the exhibition, study, storage, and conservation of modern and contemporary drawings.

Situated in an extensive 30-acre masterplan designed by David Chipperfield Architects, the institute will be located amongst Renzo Piano's main museum building, Piano's Cy Twombly Gallery, the Dan Flavin Installation at Richmond Hall, and the Rothko Chapel. More info on the design, and all the renderings, after the break.

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Amsterdam-based NL Architects has been shortlisted, alongside three other prestigious teams, to design a new “ArtA” museum and film house for the city of Arnhem. Uniting four main programs - a cinema, art square, museum and park - the “wedge-shaped” structure is designed as an “urban moraine” that cascades towards the city and invites residents to experience the Rhine from an elevated parkway. This formation grants pedestrians two options for museum access: up the Baroque-inspired rooftop park or through the ground level “Art Square” which serves as a “public intermediary” between the building and city, as well as the museum and film theatre.

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Kengo Kuma, one of four renowned architects competing to design the highly anticipated ArtA cultural center in Arnhem, has shared details about their shortlisted proposal. Enveloped in an “elegant filigree screen” of contextually prevalent red clay roof tiles, the “multileveled Arts Square” is designed to serve as “the living room of the city.” Its main programs, the Focus Film Theatre and Museum Arnhem, are united by a series of green terraces whose main purpose is to reconnect the inner city to its “unexploited resource,” the Rhine River.

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New York-based SO-IL, together with Architectuurstudio HH (AHH) and ABT, has unveiled details of their shortlisted design for Arnhem’s highly-anticipated ArtA cultural center. One of four shortlisted proposals, SO-IL’s “energy-neutral” building aims to serve as a transformative link that connects the inner city to the Rhine River. “Generous and flexible programmatic volumes,” which were shaped by the surrounding context, are designed “support the production and experience of culture, as well as create a place for reflection and wonder – a transportive experience.”

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Latitude Studio, based in Barcelona and Beijing, have unveiled designs for a showroom exhibition centre in China's capital city. Integral to the design is how visitors circulate and interact with the spaces centred around the "future shopping mall". Including an auditorium, model spaces and views onto an area which is expected to see enormous retail development, the building's central atrium and "thematic sightseeing walk" offer a unique journey for the visitor.

As we announced yesterday, four impressive teams have unveiled their shortlisted proposals to design a new house for an existing art museum and film theater on a waterfront site in Arnhem. Competing to design the “ArtA” cultural center includes BIG, who teamed up with Amsterdam-based Allard Architecture to propose a scheme that would merge the two facilities by constructing “a simple building volume of two poles: The Film Theater facing the city and the Art Museum facing the river.”

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London based practice Juice Architects has unveiled designs for an offshore visitor centre as part of the proposed tidal lagoon for Swansea Bay, Wales. A series of overlapping shells are sculpted to form a bowl like structure, providing shelter from the wind and waves of the Welsh coast. Sat on a manmade island platform at the end of a collection of land piers, the building will act as a cultural and educational base housing public galleries, a café, a lecture theatre and exhibition space with working turbine propellors visible through the the ground floor gallery. As an entirely self sufficient building all energy will be captured from renewable sources.

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UNK Project Architects' entry for the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation's National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA) competition centres around the interplay between art and architecture: "It’s what touches our soul and motivates us to pursue radical new ideas." Reaching the second stage of the international competition, which has been won by Heneghan Peng Architects, UNK Project Architect's proposal offers an intriguing, "almost airtight" space veiled by a monolithic façade facing landscaped urban space in the centre of Russia's capital.

Located on a small and irregular shaped island at Columbus Circle, one of the busiest intersections in Manhattan, lies 2 Columbus Circle, formerly known as the Gallery of Modern Art. Famously described as a “die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops” by Ada Louise Huxtable, the New York Times architecture critic at the time, the 10-story poured concrete structure has been a source of consistent controversy and public response since the 1960s. Designed by Edward Durell Stone, an early proponent of American modern architecture, 2 Columbus Circle represents a turning point in his career. Uncharacteristic of Stone’s prior work, his use of ornament on an otherwise modern structure can be seen as an important precedent of the development of the soon-to-emerge Postmodern movement.

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