Blast from the Past
Auckland’s Museum gets a fresh new look, and two contemporary new galleries to go with it.
History Repeats
When is a brand new house not really new at all? When its facade is an absurd yet picture-perfect rendition of what stood on the site before.
Boom Town
It’s the epicentre of China’s burgeoning economy, known for its razzle dazzle style. Shanghai: the city that the whole world is watching.
The immaculate waif from the Shanghai Urban Planning Centre is gesturing with a bird-boned hand at the sprawling city model before her. She’s explaining that in less than four years, almost seven square kilometres of city is going to be razed, studded with all manner of buildings and pavilions and populated with millions of worker bees, volunteers, tourists and delegates, in time for the World Expo 2010. It seems an impossibly tall order. “Shanghai,”...
American Dream
Architect Philip Johnson was one of the defining forces in American modernist architecture. Now his Glass House, an architectural icon for more than 50 years, will be preserved to inspire future generations.
In 1949 Philip Johnson received his Masters degree in Architecture from Harvard University. For his thesis, he designed and subsequently built his dream house, inspired by Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe’s Farnsworth House. The Glass House, as he entitled it, catapulted forward the modernist movement in post-war America.
When he built the Glass House at the age of 36, Phillip Johnson had...