Displaying items by tag: philip johnson

Billionaire Ken Griffin donated $40 million to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, one of the largest gifts in the institution’s 85-year history.

The unrestricted gift from the founder of Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel will help provide education and exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, the museum said Tuesday in a statement. In recognition of the gift, MoMA will name its 1964 Philip Johnson-designed East Wing after Griffin.

The interior of the Four Seasons restaurant, a vision of Modernist elegance with its French walnut paneling and white marble pool of bubbling water, should not be changed, New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission decided on Tuesday.

The decision was a setback to Aby J. Rosen, the owner of the Seagram Building, which is home to the restaurant. Mr. Rosen had proposed what he characterized as minor changes to the interior that was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson in 1958.

Frank Gehry’s 1987 Winton Guest House will go up for sale at auction on May 19, according to the seller, the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. The building currently stands on a 180-acre site in Owatonna, Minnesota, that the university sold to a health clinic last summer; the seller has until August 2016 to move the house from the new owner’s land. Chicago auction house Wright is organizing the sale, and is noted for previous sales of historic architecture — in particular for the successful 2006 auction of Pierre Koenig’s 1959 Case Study House #21 in Los Angeles.

Mike and Penny Winton commissioned Gehry to design a guest house on their lakeside property near the Twin Cities in 1982, in close proximity to a 1952 Philip Johnson brick-and-glass house that stood nearby on the same plot of land. Completed in 1987, Gehry’s structure is noted for geometric rooms arranged like individual homes; they project from a central 35-foot-tall pyramidal living room, and the entire house covers 2,300 square feet.

On February 2, 2015, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, will start renovating portions of its Philip Johnson-designed building. The museum will remain open during the process, though some galleries will be inaccessible. The project is expected to last four months, with all galleries scheduled to reopen in June 2015.

The Amon Carter Museum was designed by Johnson in the International Style --- a straightforward and unadorned aesthetic that expresses classical structure through the use of modern materials. Although the museum was initially conceived as a small institution, its collection continued to grow, necessitating a number of subsequent expansions, which Johnson spearheaded.