Latest news with #Brutalist
Los Angeles Times
16 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
The new LACMA is sleek, splotchy, powerful, jarring, monotonous, appealing and absurd
Ever since Brutalist architecture emerged in the 1950s, the style has been polarizing. Concrete might be gray, but public response rarely enters into gray areas. The buildings' raw, unfinished concrete forms, typically simple, are loved or hated. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is nearing completion of its own new Brutalist building, designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, 82, to house the permanent collection of paintings, sculptures and other works of art. For three days and one evening, beginning July 3, museum members will get a sneak peek at the empty interior spaces of the David Geffen Galleries. The fully finished project, with art installed, doesn't open until April 2026. Concrete is not eco-friendly, either in production or in results like heat magnification, and some celebrated architects with a social justice bent refuse to use it. But its visual power is undeniable — a strength of the huge Zumthor design. His poured-in-place concrete gobbles 347,500 square feet, including 110,000 square feet in 90 exhibition galleries and corridors lofted 30 feet above ground atop seven massive piers, crossing Wilshire Boulevard. Some of my favorite art museum buildings are Brutalist in design, like Marcel Breuer's fortress-like former Whitney in New York (1966), and Louis Kahn's refined classicism at the Kimbell in Fort Worth (1972). Brad Cloepfil's Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, which may be the best new American museum built for art in the last 15 years, uses concrete brilliantly to illuminate Still's rugged painting motifs. Zumthor's Geffen doesn't come close. I've written a lot about the long-aborning LACMA project over the last dozen years, focused on the design's negative impact on the museum program, but that's now baked in. (The museum pegs the building cost at $720 million, but sources have told me the entire project cost is closer to $835 million.) L.A.'s encyclopedic museum, with a global permanent collection simply installed geographically as straightforward chronology, is dead, and the Geffen Galleries prevent it from ever coming back. Changing theme shows drawn from the collection, curatorially driven, are the new agenda. Having theme galleries is like banishing the alphabet that organizes the encyclopedia on your shelf. Chronology and geography are not some imperialistic scheme dominating global art. They just make finding things in a sprawling encyclopedic art collection easy for visitors. Good luck with that now. I've pretty much avoided consideration of the building's aesthetics. The exception was a 2013 column responding to 'The Presence of the Past,' a somewhat clumsy exhibition of Zumthor's still-evolving design conception, which has changed greatly in the final form. Reviewing purpose-built architecture is a fool's errand when you can't experience the purpose — impossible for another 10 months, when the art-installed Geffen opens. A press event Thursday allowed entry into the gallery spaces, however, so a few things are now obvious. One is that museum galleries are theatrical spaces — there's a reason they're called shows — and chances are you've never seen so much concrete in one place. Sometimes it's sleek and appealing, sometimes splotchy and cracked. (Surface mottling could soften over time.) But across floors, walls and ceilings of 90 bunker-like rooms and long, meandering corridors, the limitless concrete is monotonous. Grieg's 'In the Hall of the Mountain King' meets Beckett's theater of the absurd. Another is that views from the floor-to-ceiling windows that surround the building will offer lovely, interesting city vistas — welcome relief from the monotony. (Curtains will be installed around the perimeter.) A third is that the light, some entering horizontally from the side windows and a couple thin clerestory slots, but much of it from fixed vertical ceiling cans, is going to be a problem. Those windows are also one of the biggest design losses in the value-engineering, undertaken to control ballooning costs. (Adjusted for inflation, the original Whitney Museum's construction cost per square foot was about $633, Kimbell's was about $469, and LACMA clocks in at $1,400, according to its website. Brutalist, indeed.) The floor plate was originally planned to follow the organic curves of the ceiling plate, with continuous, hugely expensive curved-glass windows linking the two. Now the floor plan is largely rectilinear. The glass panels had to be flat, so the composition is a bit more dynamic. But the roofline overlaps can be jarring. At one end the hovering curved roof looks like a pizza too big for the box below. Also daunting: Art will be hung on all that concrete by drilling holes in the walls and pounding in anchors. Moving the art will be cumbersome, requiring concrete patching. The entire process is labor-intensive and expensive. Zumthor is the sixth architect to have had a whack at LACMA, following earlier efforts by William L. Pereira, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, Bruce Goff, Rem Koolhaas, and Renzo Piano. Koolhaas never got beyond the proposal stage, although his marvelous idea pioneered the teardown-then-build-a-pavilion-on-stilts plan now coming to very different fruition. Only Goff produced a notable building, with a novel Japanese Pavilion that conceptually turned inside out the spiral Guggenheim Museum by his mentor, Frank Lloyd Wright. (Happily, the Japanese Pavilion can now be seen from the street.) The rest were mostly meh, salted with an occasional ugh. Zumthor and LACMA Director Michael Govan pronounce the new Geffen building to be 'a concrete sculpture,' which is why it's being shown empty now. The cringey claim is grandiose, and it makes one wonder why being architecture is not enough. If it's true, it's the only monumental sculpture I know that has a couple of restaurants, an auditorium and a store. Apparently, an artistic hierarchy exists, with sculpture ranked above architecture. That's odd, because we've also been repeatedly told that LACMA built the place to undermine such conceits. Museum officials are still banging away on the absurd claim that a single-story building for art, banishing distinctions between 'upstairs/downstairs,' confers an egalitarian marker on what global cultures produce. Hierarchy, however, is not a matter of physicality or direction, but of conceptual status. Rosa Parks was riding on a single-level bus, not a double-decker, and she knew exactly what her mighty refusal to sit in the back meant. LACMA should be half as savvy. Climb the 60-plus steps up to the Geffen Galleries, or take an elevator, and when you arrive some art will be out front and some out back. Surely, we won't regard that front/back difference as anti-egalitarian. Will the Geffen Galleries be successful? My crystal ball is broken, but I see no reason why it won't be a popular attraction. And that is clearly the museum's priority. An urban environment with a talented architect's unusual art museum design tagged by a monumental topiary sculpture on the main drag — that's a description of Frank Gehry's incomparable Guggenheim Bilbao, the great 1997 museum in Basque northern Spain, where Jeff Koons' marvelous floral 'Puppy' sculpture holds court out front. (Every palace needs topiary, a leafy green power emblem of culture's control over nature; Koons' 40-foot-tall West Highland white dog makes for an especially cuddly symbol of guardianship.) Now the description fits LACMA too. The museum just announced the acquisition of Koons' floral behemoth, 'Split-Rocker,' a rather bland hobby horse topiary that merges a toy dinosaur's head with the hobby horse's head. LACMA is next door to the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum, and the kiddie dino, a natural history plaything, forces a shotgun wedding with a degraded example of art history's triumphant motif of a man on a horse. Govan worked on Bilbao before coming to L.A., and the formula there is being repeated here. L.A.'s eye-grabbing building won't be as great nor its Instagram-ready topiary be nearly as good as the Bilbao ensemble, but when does lightning strike twice? As museums, Bilbao and LACMA couldn't be more different. One has a small, mostly mediocre permanent collection of contemporary art, while the other has a large, often excellent permanent collection of global art from all eras. The so-called Bilbao Effect sent cultural tourism, then already on the rise, skyrocketing. With the David Geffen Galleries, LACMA has put its very expensive eggs in that tourism basket. It might take some time to work. The U.S. is the world's largest travel and tourism sector, but it's the only one forecast by the World Travel & Tourism Council to see international visitor decline in 2025 — and probably beyond. Between erratic pandemic recovery and an abusive federal government hostile to foreigners, worries are growing in L.A. about the imminent soccer World Cup and the Olympics. It's also surprising that the museum is now bleeding critical senior staff, just as LACMA's lengthy transformation from a civic art museum into a tourist destination trembles on the verge of completion. Previously unreported, chief operating officer Diana Vesga is already gone, deputy director for curatorial and exhibitions J. Fiona Ragheb recently left, and chief financial officer Mark Mitchell departs next week. Those are three top-tier institutional positions. Let's hope they don't know something we also don't know.
Miami Herald
08-06-2025
- Business
- Miami Herald
London's ‘Little America' is no more. What's taking its place?
From the Eagle Bar on the top floor of the new Chancery Rosewood Hotel in Mayfair, the views across London are unobstructed, save for a gilded aluminum eagle, its wings spread wide, which crowns the midcentury modern building that once housed the U.S. Embassy to the United Kingdom. The Americans pulled up stakes in 2018, relocating the embassy to a giant fortified cube on the south bank of the Thames. They left behind the eagle, along with a collection of monuments and memorials in the adjoining Grosvenor Square — relics of what was once an American citadel in its ancestral land. John Adams lived on the square. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had his wartime office there. A statue of Franklin Roosevelt gazes across the patchy lawn. Diplomats threw star-spangled election night parties, while hopeful travelers lined up outside for visas. During the Vietnam War, protesters clashed with police under the trees. Now, Grosvenor Square is being recast for a post-American age. The Chancery plans to open to guests in early September, its Persian Gulf owners having converted the Brutalist landmark, designed by Eero Saarinen, into a Rosewood luxury hotel, with junior suites starting at 1,400 pounds (nearly $1,900) a night. The square, which lies in front of the hotel and has a different owner, is closing this week for a 13-month refurbishment. The project will add lush plantings that celebrate biodiversity and link the 6-acre expanse, which has fallen into a state of neglect, more closely to its 18th-century Georgian roots. The owner, Grosvenor Property, insists it is preserving the legacy of a place once known as 'Little America.' But Grosvenor Square attests to how much the world has changed, not least since President Donald Trump returned to the White House. Start with the fact that the embassy was bought by investors from Qatar, whose government recently gave the Trump administration a Boeing 747 as a replacement for Air Force One. 'If you're trying to attract people, if you're trying make money, highlighting America's prominence is not the way to do it,' said Leslie Vinjamuri, the director of the U.S. and Americas program at Chatham House, a research group in London. 'It's a good time to take a step back, to play it down a bit.' Ties between Britain and the United States ebb and flow, she noted, in a 'special relationship' that is neither as serene nor as harried as often portrayed. A new global crisis could swiftly bring these old allies back together. But Trump's acrimonious dealings with Europe have indisputably changed the mood. 'There is just a sense of pulling apart between the U.K. and the U.S.,' said Vinjamuri, who will leave London this month to become CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Trump, who has a soft spot for the royal family and other totems of imperial Britain, complained bitterly about the sale of the embassy. He blamed it, wrongly, on his predecessor President Barack Obama. (The decision was made during the George W. Bush administration because of security concerns.) 'We had the best site in all of London,' Trump said in 2018. The new location, in a redeveloped industrial section of London known as Nine Elms, was 'lousy,' he said, spurning an invitation to a ribbon cutting. Indeed, since the days of Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde, Grosvenor Square has been synonymous with posh London. The Grosvenor family laid it out in the 1720s to anchor the expansion of its property empire into West London. With grand dimensions and an elegant oval shape, it attracted wealthy residents, who were given keys to their own private Eden in the capital. (It became a public park after World War II.) It also attracted Americans, starting with Adams, who lived on the northeast corner from 1785 to 1788 as America's first envoy to Britain. After Eisenhower quartered himself there, it was nicknamed 'Eisenhower Platz.' The Roosevelt statue was paid for with donations from ordinary Britons as a gesture of gratitude to the United States for its aid in the war. Nothing sealed the American connection like the opening of Saarinen's chancery in 1960, a hulking nine-story building that was the first purpose-built embassy of any country in London. In its early days, it was reviled by some critics as a jarring intrusion on the genteel Georgian symmetry of the square. 'It had this sense of America being big and bold, and in a British context, a sense of 'Wow, how American,'' said Matthew Barzun, the last U.S. ambassador to have an office in the building. Barzun, who witnessed ups and downs in the trans-Atlantic relationship over Syria and Brexit, said the old embassy was designed to be 'light and open and welcoming.' But after the terrorist bombings of embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, 'we added more and more fences and bollards,' he said. 'You start out building things to keep people out,' Barzun said, 'but you end up trapping people in.' Converting a diplomatic fortress into a sleek, five-star hotel was a design and engineering test for Qatari Diar, a real estate company backed by Qatar's sovereign wealth fund. The Qataris brought in Rosewood, a luxury hotel chain that was started in Dallas and is now owned by a Hong Kong conglomerate. 'Creating warmth was the biggest challenge,' said Michael Bonsor, the hotel's managing director, as he offered a sneak peek. 'You have this juxtaposition of one of the most secure, fortified buildings in London, where Marines used to run around with machine guns. It wasn't the most hospitable building in the world.' Dapper and discreet, Bonsor could have been a diplomat if he hadn't gone into hospitality. He said the hotel would make nods to its past, but would avoid becoming a Cold War-style theme park. In addition to the eagle, which is a protected landmark, the hotel has reinstalled statues of Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan that once flanked the building (the statues are wrapped in tarp to protect them during construction). Inside, the Chancery has retained some of Saarinen's design elements, notably his exposed-concrete ceiling. But prizewinning British architect David Chipperfield has reconfigured the building to add an atrium with cascading chandeliers. Two palatial penthouses are named after Elizabeth and Charles, monarchs not presidents. The hotel said their scale would appeal to guests from the Middle East. Across the street, the proprietors of Grosvenor Square are similarly aware of the tug between past and present. While they will retain the FDR statue, as well as a memorial to victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, they plan to add serpentine paths and extensive plantings to soften the square's stark appearance. 'The austere design, which was important during the Cold War period, has had its day,' said Cordula Zeidler, a heritage and design expert who advised Grosvenor Property. 'Having more plantings is both a Georgian concept and something people want today.' James Raynor, the newly named CEO of Grosvenor, acknowledged the complicated political backdrop to the project. But he said, 'I don't think we should be altering it for the long term on the basis of short-term noise.' In turbulent times, Raynor even holds out hope that the 18th-century square can still serve as a 21st-century bridge. 'Will the park by itself change the diplomatic relationship between the countries?' he said. 'I doubt it. But it will allow us to recognize what the two countries have done for each other.' This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Copyright 2025
Tatler Asia
07-06-2025
- Business
- Tatler Asia
Brutalist by Design: M Residences Katipunan's homes are stunningly versatile
Despite their seeming rigidity, these concepts are deceptively versatile. Each layout can be customised as the homeowner sees fit, giving them the agency to design a distinctly personal home. Clients can freely choose from these three home types with various configurations, then adjust room dimensions, fixtures and finishes that appeal to and resonate with them. 'The concrete materials offer an advantage in that they can be cast in any shape,' VCDC founder and CEO Victor Consunji explains. 'This makes it easier for a space to evolve over time in harmony with the changing needs and preferences of our M Residents.' This philosophy extends throughout the entire development. The central lifestyle club ties together the swimming pool, basketball court, jogging trail and residents' lounge within one singular structure. The exposed structural forms and liberal pathways resemble the homes around it, making it a cohesive part of the community. Form and function seamlessly intertwine at M Residences Katipunan. The thoughtful choice of Brutalism as its main medium offers its residents a modern style of living in the city. It is a symbol of strength and functionality that leaves plenty of room for adjustments to suit one's way of life. Book a private tour at to see the possibilities of Brutalist architecture, right at home in M Residences Katipunan. NOW READ Inside the historic debut of Philippine design at Révélations Paris 2025 Envisioning city life at M Residences Katipunan From sunrise to sunset: The Mactan Newtown Beach
Metro
06-06-2025
- General
- Metro
People stuck in 26-storey tower block after lifts broke offered £100 voucher
Residents trapped up an iconic Brutalist tower block have been offered only £100 in compensation despite being unable to leave their homes. Those living in the top floors of the 26-storey Balfron Tower, east London, have been periodically stuck in their flats as the lifts keep breaking down. They told Metro one of the lifts in the Grade II-listed tower is temperamental and the second one stopped working completely last in May. Vasundhata Gupte, 22, cannot walk up and down the stairs because of a hamstring injury. She said: 'I am coming back from recovery sessions for my leg, but I then have to walk up 15 flights of stairs so what is even the point in trying to fix it.' The Ernő Goldfinger building, on the Brownfield Estate, is managed by property firm Way of Life and two-bed flats typically cost around £2,300 a month to rent. Fellow resident Peter, 58, has a spinal injury so cannot use the stairs at all. He said: 'What if there is a fire? What if I have a heart attack? Who will come and get me? Lives are at stake here.' Residents have since been offered an e-voucher from Poplar Harca, which owns the building, worth £100 for the 'inconvenience', the Standard reports. Peter, in a letter to MP Apsana Begum, said: 'After everything we've endured, to be offered a flat-rate token – not even per person – is not only inadequate, it is downright insulting. 'This gesture minimises the severity of the situation and shows a complete lack of understanding (or concern) for the distress and damage caused.' Harca said: 'The service outage was the result of a unique, highly unfortunate and unlikely component failure, that could not have been foreseen or prevented. 'Throughout the period when lifts were not operational, all building safety requirements were fully adhered to. The safety of all residents was and remains our absolute priority and our contingency plans for this situation were signed off by the London Fire Brigade. More Trending 'The Balfron Tower team brought in additional on-the-ground support for residents, and provided specific support to those with additional needs. 'Engineers worked hard to restore service as quickly as possible, which required the expedited production and delivery of bespoke components from a supplier in Germany. The first lift was operational from 20th May and the second lift was operational from 23rd May. 'The lifts were and continue to be serviced on a frequent and best practice schedule.' Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: Three men appear in court accused arson attacks on properties linked to Keir Starmer MORE: Hot weather to finally return but not before we endure a drenching MORE: Enjoy a sky-high brunch at The Shard for £55: 10 unmissable Time Out deals
Belfast Telegraph
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Belfast Telegraph
Artist makes mini versions of Brutalist buildings to champion ‘unloved' style
Adam Carthy, 39, started his business called Spaceplay around 2016 – the same time as the demolition of Birmingham Central Library which was heralded for its Brutalist architecture, a style popular in the 1950s to 1970s and characterised by block-like, hulking concrete structures. His mission is to champion Brutalist buildings by replicating them in miniature. Mr Carthy, who is from Balsall Heath in Birmingham and has an architectural background, has so far made tiny versions of around 60 buildings, many from around the UK including Trellick Tower and Alexandra Road Estate, both in London, and the University of East Anglia library. He has also made his own small takes on international buildings including the Jenaro Valverde Marin Building in San Jose, Costa Rica, and Torres Blancas in Madrid, Spain. 'A lot of Brutalist buildings are being demolished now, a lot of them are being neglected, a lot of them are unloved and so we're losing part of our urban heritage, and particularly urban heritage that my generation and the previous two generations grew up with,' Mr Carthy told the PA news agency. 'There were a lot of exciting buildings that came from the 60s and 70s, some that are still very successful and loved or have had a kind of renaissance, like the Royal National Theatre or the Hayward Gallery. 'What we are trying to do is bring attention to something that is unloved and giving it value.' He often visits the buildings he recreates and says holding his models up to their larger counterparts feels 'magical'. 'I visited Alexandra Road Estate last week and to hold the model and see the estate in the background felt magical,' he said. He said that recreating Trellick Tower was especially meaningful as he got to tour the inside of the building with someone who has lived there since it was opened. 'When I started making London buildings, it was Trellick Tower that stood out like nothing else and just how many people know about that building and feel connected to it,' he said. 'There's nobody that doesn't know it – it's so iconic – and I love every time I drive into London on the A40 and I can see it just standing there, clear above everything else in the landscape. 'I've also had the fortune to connect with people that live there and be shown around by a lady who has lived there since it opened and I was blown away by how connected the people there felt – everyone coming in and leaving seemed really happy and it felt like everyone knew each other.' He said it can take anywhere between a month to two months to create the miniature models, depending on the level of detail required. As for the process, Mr Carthy starts by creating a brand new digital model of the buildings he is depicting based on things like architectural drawings and photographs he has taken from visits to the sites. He 3D prints those files using resin printing before making moulds and then the concrete is involved. 'Concrete is a wonderful material, it's so versatile, and I love the process of how you start with a powder and then it becomes a liquid and then it sets into a solid,' he said. 'You can't remould it, you can't adjust it, so you have this one-time process of the set-up and the action and then it's done forever and you can't undo it. 'I embrace that process and really enjoy it and over the years, I've introduced more refined processes through talking to people, through watching videos, testing and trial and error, trying out different mixes and different types of aggregates.' He added he also uses a vibrating table which vibrates the concrete so air bubbles are reduced, and a compression tank to make the models compact. He said he has achieved thousands of sales as he often makes multiple versions of the same model for those with a similar love of Brutalism, with his work being requested as far away as America and South Korea. 'There's definitely a sense of community around the love of Brutalism and to be part of that and connecting to people through the work I do is amazing,' he added. 'I've designed the models so they can sit in the palm of a hand so people can feel connected to them because they might have a particular memory linked to the building. 'People can feel a sense of ownership over it – it's your place and it's part of you.'
