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The Andy Warhol Museum

Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum

 

Canadians aren’t known for controversy, but Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum stirred up passions when it unveiled “The Crystal” addition in 2007. Architect Daniel Libeskind’s angled steel, aluminum, and glass structure looks as if it crashed into the side of the Neo-Romanesque museum—which is either brilliant or appalling, depending on whom you ask.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the museums we’ve selected fit different definitions of the term. They aren’t confined to major cities, but will inspire you to consider destinations that may not be on your radar and to make a museum a part of your next trip.

After all, they’re more than just a pretty façade. A beautiful museum like the Royal Ontario stirs our emotions and challenges us. As Alain de Botton, author of The Architecture of Happiness, says: “We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).”

Good museums often draw beauty from their surroundings, whether by incorporating local materials or using surfaces that can interact with the shifting light and weather. At Brazil’s Museu Oscar Niemeyer, the glass-encased Annex (“The Eye”) tops a 60-foot-wide yellow pillar above a pool. The mutating reflection of the sky in the glass exterior and in the water below makes each viewing feel unique.

In one famous case, a beautiful museum actually made its location more attractive: Frank Gehry’s buzzed-about Guggenheim put Bilbao, Spain, on the tourist map when it opened in 1997. The museum’s titanium panels look like fish scales, and its 50-foot atrium is partially illuminated by light streaming from the “metallic flower” of the roof.

Justin Davidson, architecture critic for New York magazine, admires the Guggenheim Bilbao for working within its context and for drawing on the past. “The spirit of the Bilbao is essentially Baroque,” he says. “The curvature of its surfaces and in the quality of its forms—I think Gehry reinvented the Baroque for the contemporary age.”

Even though beauty thrives on reinvention, that doesn’t mean the contemporary always trumps the classic. There’s a timeless appeal to a museum like the Hermitage in St. Petersburg or the original Guggenheim in New York. Read on to discover which beautiful museum resonates most with you.

 

The Andy Warhol Museum

The Andy Warhol Museum, located on the North Shore of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is the largest museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist. The museum holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archives from the Pittsburgh-born pop art icon Andy Warhol.

The museum is located in an 88,000-square-foot (8,200 m2) facility on seven floors. Containing 17 galleries, the museum features 900 paintings, close to 2,000 works on paper, over 1,000 published unique prints, 77 sculptures, 4,000 photographs, and over 4,350 Warhol films and videotaped works. Its most recent operating budget (2010) was $6.1 million. In addition to its Pittsburgh location the museum has sponsored 56 traveling exhibits that have attracted close to 9 million visitors in 153 venues worldwide since 1996.



Plans for the museum were announced in October 1989,[4] about 2½ years after Warhol's death. At the time of the announcement, works worth an estimated $80 million were donated to the newly-announced museum by the AWFVA and the Dia Foundation.

By 1993, the 88,000-square-foot (8,200 m2) industrial warehouse and its extensive renovations had cost about $12 million, and the AWFVA had donated more than 1000 of Warhol's works worth over $55 million, a donation that grew to about 3000 works.

On May 13–14, 1994, the museum attracted about 25,000 visitors to its opening weekend. Armstrong, its founding director, resigned nine months after its opening; at the time of his resignation, the museum had had "tense relations" with the AWFVA and the Carnegie Institute, its financial backer, though The New York Times could find no one involved who would say whether that friction played a role in Armstrong's resignation.

 

 

Jan van der Heyden

 

Jan van der Heyden (March 5, 1637, Gorinchem – September 12, 1712, Amsterdam) was a Dutch Baroque-era painter, draughtsman, printmaker, a mennonite and inventor who significantly contributed to contemporary firefighting. He improved the fire hose in 1672, with his brother Nicolaes, who was a hydraulic engineer. He modified the manual fire engines, reorganised the volunteer fire brigade (1685) and wrote and illustrated the first firefighting manual (Brandspuiten-boek). A comprehensive street lighting scheme for Amsterdam, which lasted from 1669 until 1840, designed and implemented by Van der Heyden, was adopted as a model by many other towns and abroad.

Van der Heyden grew up in Gorcum, where he learned drawing from a glass painter. Family moved to Amsterdam around 1650. He later would describe or draw 80 fires in almost any neighborhood of Amsterdam. When he married in 1661, he lived on the most fashionable canal in Amsterdam, Herengracht. In 1668 Cosimo II de' Medici bought one of his paintings, a view of the townhall with a manipulated perspective. Van der Heyden often painted country estates, like Goudestein, owned by Joan Huydecoper II. Though he was exceptionally good at perspective, he was not good in drawing figures or details, and used for his paintings a metal plate for bricks, and a sponge or moss for the leaves. Jan van der Heyden also introduced the lamp post and in 1672 improved the design of the fire engine.

Van der Heyden was a contemporary of the landscape painters Hobbema. For, whilst they painted admirable pictures and starved, he varied the practice of art with the study of mechanics. Van der Heyden, who was perfect as an architectural draughtsman insofar as he painted the outside of buildings and thoroughly mastered linear perspective, seldom turned his hand to the delineation of anything but brick houses and churches in streets and squares. Until 1672 he painted in partnership with Adriaen van de Velde, who populated his architectural scenes with figures and landscape effects. After Adriaen's death, he accepted the government appointment and his productivity was lower. His most important works were painted in the years 1660-1670, most notably views of the Amsterdam town hall, the Amsterdam exchange, the London exchange, and views of Cologne. He died in wealth as the superintendent of the lighting and director of the (voluntary) firemen's guild at Amsterdam.

He was a travelled man, had seen The Hague, Ghent and Brussels, and had ascended the Rhine past Xanten to Cologne, where he copied over and over again the tower and crane of the great cathedral. But he cared nothing for hill or vale, or stream or wood. He could reproduce the rows of bricks in a square of Dutch houses sparkling in the sun, or stunted trees and lines of dwellings varied by steeples, all in light or thrown into passing shadow by moving cloud.


Date: 2015-12-24; view: 953


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