Displaying items by tag: interior

Opening this summer at the New Orleans Museum of Art, A Louisiana Parlor: Antebellum Taste & Context is an exhibition featuring the Butler-Greenwood Plantation parlor furnishings acquired by the museum from descendants of the family in St. Francisville, Louisiana. The 1850s/60s parlor suite has survived with original textiles and rich documentation, making it one of the South’s best preserved examples of a pre-Civil War Louisiana interior.

The exhibition explores the relationship between this refined interior and its layered historical context through family portraits on loan from The Historic New Orleans Collection and through documents housed in the Mathews family archives of letters, receipts, and bills of sale held at LSU Library Special Collections.

It doesn’t look like much yet — a chain-link fence around the perimeter of the historic Sarasota High School building, an inconspicuous construction trailer tucked next to the north wall of the building — but work is underway to convert the 1926 Collegiate Gothic building into the Sarasota Museum of Art.

After nearly a decade of fundraising reached (and surpassed) its goal of $22 million in May, structural preservationists conducted a thorough investigation of “every nook and cranny” of the building’s interior, said Wendy Surkis, SMOA president. Now, work begins on the exterior, to ensure the integrity of the building’s “envelope” and to add a glass atrium to the east side of the three-story structure. Interior renovations will follow, with work to be completed in early 2016.

Officials at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia announced that the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas will design a freestanding addition to the institution’s existing structure. Founded by Catherine the Great in 1764, the Hermitage is one of the largest and oldest museums in the world.

Koolhaas, a Pritzker Prize winner, has designed Portugal’s Casa de Música, the Seattle Central Library and Kunsthal Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He has worked with the Hermitage for over a decade and designed the fleeting Hermitage Guggenheim in Las Vegas in the early 2000s. Koolhaas has been working with the Hermitage’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, since 2008 on a rearrangement of the museum’s existing interior. That project is expected to conclude in 2014 and will coincide with the museum’s 250^th anniversary.

The Hermitage’s new building will be located outside of St. Petersburg’s historic center. Contemporary architecture is banned from the area so to preserve the unity of the city’s aesthetic. The Koolhaas-designed structure will include a library, costume museum, a publishing house and various public spaces.  

The latest update to Google’s browser-based map service allows visitors to navigate museums across the world with their smartphones. While sprawling institutions made up of various wings and galleries can appear cumbersome, Google hopes to alleviate confusion by making virtual floor plans for dozens of museums and libraries in nine countries available to users.

The recent update includes interior views of shopping malls, airports, train stations, and convention centers, but the presence of museum layouts is particularly welcomed. While 30 museums in the United States are currently mapped out, museums that are not already included can upload their own floor plans if they wish to be included in the project.

Maps of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Art Institute in Chicago, the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, the British Museum in London, the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, and the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Japan are currently available.