Archinect - News

Influential 1970s women architects exhibition revisited in new Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation series

2024-04-15T14:03:00-04:00

The Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation (BWAF) has launched a new audio documentary on an influential 1970s exhibition on women in architecture. Part of the BWAF series ‘New Angle: Voice,’ the episode will profile the Brooklyn Museum’s 1977 exhibition ‘Women in American Architecture.’

Curated by architect Susana Torre and sponsored by the Architectural League of New York, the exhibition received significant coverage across national and architectural media, including a review by Ada Louise Huxtable in The New York Times. The new audio episode, ‘Laying the Groundwork: Women in American Architecture, Spring 1977,’ debuts the first program of New Angle: Voice’s third and conclusive season, with later episodes to continue exploring the influences of women in architecture.

Image courtesy: Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation

Last year, we reported on the series’ profiling of Huxtable, the New York Times’ first-ever architectural critic, and Amaza Lee Meredith, a Black woman born in 18...

James Stewart Polshek, academic and designer of important public architecture, has passed away aged 92

2022-09-12T19:14:00-04:00

A rare modest figure in a crowded era of star architects and designers has passed away as the New York Times is reporting the death of James Stewart Polshek on Friday at his home in Manhattan.

Polshek was known as the designer of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum in Little Rock, Arkansas, the Newtown Creek sewage plant in Brooklyn, and Newseum in Washington, D.C., among many others. His colleagues recalled him as a progressive champion who balanced the ideological pull of high modernism with a sensitivity to different forms, themes, building types, and architectural styles. In a statement published by the Architectural Record, Polshek’s former firm partner Richard Olcott said he was "ahead of his time."

William J. Clinton Presidential Center and Park. Photo credit: © Timothy Hursley.

Born in Akron, Ohio in 1930, Polshek studied architecture at nearby Case Western Reserve University and later Yale before pursuing a Fulbright Scholarship in Copenhagen and beginnin...

The first posthumous Virgil Abloh retrospective will showcase at the Brooklyn Museum this summer

2022-02-10T12:57:00-05:00

This summer, the Brooklyn Museum will stage a version of the first institutional survey dedicated to the late fashion designer and creative visionary Virgil Abloh. The show, titled “Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech,” will build on an earlier exhibition of the same name that originated at the MCA Chicago in 2019, and then traveled to ICA Boston, the High Museum in Atlanta, and Qatar Museums.

The Brooklyn Museum’s showcase of the exhibit is organized by writer and curator Antwaun Sargent and will be Abloh’s first posthumous retrospective since his passing at the age of 41 in November.

Originally a mid-career survey, “Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech,” designed by AMO director Samir Bantal, explores two decades of Abloh’s prolific career that saw the creative merge the gaps between seemingly disparate realms, including streetwear, high fashion, architecture, and music.

Previously on Archinect: AMO's exhibition for Virgil Abloh opens in Chicago

The exhibition will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum from July 1, 2022, through January 29, 2023.

The Brooklyn Museum will receive much-needed upgrades thanks to a $50 million gift from the mayor's office

2021-11-24T09:00:00-05:00

The Brooklyn Museum in New York City has received a massive capital investment from the Department of Cultural Affairs — $50 million, the largest single gift in the institution’s history. The funding, announced yesterday by Mayor Bill de Blasio, will support gallery renovations and energy-efficient updates.

The original McKim, Mead & White-designed structure underwent an extensive renovation at the hands of Ennead in the early 1990s and more recent renovations to the 2nd and 5th-floor galleries that were completed in 2019.

The museum has been in a precarious position financially for quite some time, authoring multiple rounds of layoffs and staff reductions amidst sustained losses that it attempted to mitigate by selling off some of its collection in addition to applying for federal coronavirus relief aid throughout the last year.

“We hope to be able to significantly expand our contemporary art galleries and design spaces,” director Anne Pasternak told The New York Times. “We have one of the great American design collections, and absolutely inadequate spaces in which to show it.”