The News 01.26.10

A compilation of design-related web finds.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum announced that it has broken ground on a new 70,000 sq ft wing designed by Renzo Piano. I think the expanded space is much needed and it should be beautiful. But what about that whole “the museum has to stay As-Is for perpetuity” thing? Further reading: write-ups from the New York Times and the Boston Globe | Why do we go to museums?, from the Walker Art Center, includes a list of visitors’ motivational identities and characterizations | Paola Antonelli, Architecture and Design Curator for the MoMA, talks to Johnny Holland Magazine about “her process for creating an exhibition, the future of design, and how we make people and objects more elastic” | No, everything is not going to be okay | Why [designers don't have a] place at the table | Gravity is a Force to be Reckoned With at Mass MoCA; “based upon Mies van der Rohe’s uncompleted project, the House with Four Columns (1951), a square structure open to view on all four sides through glass walls. … the house was constructed at approximately half scale and inverted, the ceiling of the original becoming the sculpture’s floor, the floor becoming the ceiling, and all interior elements such as Mies-designed furniture and partition walls installed upside down” | Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future at the Museum of the City of New York; “the first retrospective of this prolific, unorthodox, and controversial 20th-century architect” | Read My Pins: The Madeline Albright Collection at the Museum of Arts and Design in NY | An interactive map of public art and notable architecture on the MIT campus, from the List Center | Trade Show History, a photo archive to spend some hours in | If your interest in New England textiles was piqued by my post about the American Textile History Museum, a short essay from Looking Backward: Why Chicago Made Doors and Boston Made Textiles | Boarded up Buckydome along with Buckminster Fuller’s Everything I Know | Urban Nature Project by Naoko Ito.

Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been fixed, replaced, or replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 26 January 2010.