Daniel Libeskind
Daniel Libeskind is a Polish-American architect, artist and set designer. Libeskind founded Studio Daniel Libeskind in 1989 with his wife, is its principal design architect, his buildings include the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the extension to the Denver Art Museum in the United States, the Grand Canal Theatre in Dublin, the Imperial War Museum North in Greater Manchester, the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada, the Felix Nussbaum Haus in Osnabrück, the Danish Jewish Museum in Copenhagen and the Wohl Centre at the Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel. His portfolio includes several residential projects. Libeskind's work has been exhibited in major museums and galleries around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Bauhaus Archives, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Pompidou. On February 27, 2003, Libeskind won the competition to be the master plan architect for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan. Born in Łódź, Libeskind was the second child of Dora and Nachman Libeskind, both Polish Jews and Holocaust survivors.
As a young child, Libeskind learned to play the accordion and became a virtuoso, performing on Polish television in 1953. He won a prestigious America Israel Cultural Foundation scholarship in 1959 and played alongside a young Itzhak Perlman. Libeskind lived in Poland for 11 years and can still speak and write the Polish language. In 1957, the Libeskinds moved to Kibbutz Gvat, Israel and to Tel Aviv before moving to New York in 1959. In his autobiography, Breaking Ground: An Immigrant's Journey from Poland to Ground Zero, Libeskind spoke of how the kibbutz experience influenced his concern for green architecture. In the summer of 1959, the Libeskinds moved to New York City on one of the last immigrant boats to the United States. In New York, Libeskind lived in the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the northwest Bronx, a union-sponsored, middle-income cooperative development, he attended the Bronx High School of Science. The print shop where his father worked was on Stone Street in Lower Manhattan, Libeskind watched the original World Trade Center being built in the 1960s.
Libeskind became a United States citizen in 1965. Libeskind met Nina Lewis, his future wife and business partner, at the Bundist-run Camp Hemshekh in upstate New York in 1966, they married a few years and, instead of a traditional honeymoon, traveled across the United States visiting Frank Lloyd Wright buildings on a Cooper Union fellowship. Nina now serves as COO for Studio Daniel Libeskind. In 1968, Libeskind worked as an apprentice to architect Richard Meier. In 1970, he received his professional architectural degree from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art; the same year, he was hired to work at Peter Eisenman's New York Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, but he quit immediately. He is both a U. S. and Israeli citizen. Nina and Daniel Libeskind have three children: Lev and Rachel. Libeskind began his career as an architectural theorist and professor, holding positions at various institutions around the world. From 1978 to 1985, Libeskind was the Director of the Architecture Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
His practical architectural career began in Milan in the late 1980s, where he submitted to architectural competitions and founded and directed Architecture Intermundium, Institute for Architecture & Urbanism. Libeskind has lived, among other places, in New York City, Michigan, Italy and Los Angeles, has taught at numerous universities across the world, including the University of Kentucky, Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania. Since 2007, Libeskind has been a visiting professor at the Leuphana University Lüneburg in Lüneburg, Germany. Libeskind completed his first building at the age of 52, with the opening of the Felix Nussbaum Haus in Osnabruck, Germany in 1998. Prior to this, critics had dismissed his designs as "unbuildable or unduly assertive." In 1987, Libeskind won his first design competition for housing in West Berlin, but the Berlin Wall fell shortly thereafter and the project was cancelled. Libeskind won the first four project competitions he entered including the Jewish Museum Berlin in 1989, which became the first museum dedicated to the Holocaust in WWII and opened to the public in 2001 with international acclaim.
This was his first major international success and was one of the first building modifications designed after reunification. A glass courtyard was designed by Libeskind and added in 2007; the Academy of the Jewish Museum Berlin designed by Libeskind was completed in 2012. Libeskind is most famous for being selected by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to oversee the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, destroyed in the September 11, 2001 attacks, he titled his concept for the site Memory Foundations. Studio Daniel Libeskind, headquartered two blocks south of the World Trade Center site in New York, is working on more than forty projects across the world, he has designed numerous cultural and commercial institutions, concert halls, convention centers, residences and shopping centers. The studio's most recent completed projects include Haeundae Udong Hyunai I'Park in Busan, South Korea, Academy of the Jewish Museum Berlin in Berlin, Germany and additions to the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden and Reflections at Keppel Bay in Singapore.
In addition to his architectural project
Lancaster Gate tube station
Lancaster Gate is a London Underground station located on the Central line near Lancaster Gate on Bayswater Road in Bayswater, to the north of Kensington Gardens. It is between Queensway and Marble Arch on the Central line and is in Travelcard Zone 1. Lancaster Gate station was opened on 30 July 1900 by the Central London Railway; the original station building was typical of the work of the line's original architect Harry Bell Measures. It was demolished and a new surface building constructed as part of the development above in 1968; the development was designed by T P Bennett & Son as an office block but converted soon after into a hotel. In 2004–05 the lower floors of the hotel were re-clad in white stone to a design by Eric Parry Architects; the hotel received planning permission for the re-cladding to include the station façade. Lancaster Gate was closed from July to November 2006 so that the lifts and other parts of the station could be refurbished; the station's chronic lift failures were considered by Transport for London to be a safety hazard and an inconvenience to passengers.
Patronage has increased over the years and as a result the station's small ticket hall area is congested at weekends. Lancaster Gate station was closed from January to June 2017 for complete replacement of the lifts. Due to the small size of the station, it was not feasible to do one lift at a time, so it was deemed necessary to close the entire station. Despite its name, the station is close to the Marlborough Gate entrance to Hyde Park/Kensington Gardens, about 300m to the east of the Lancaster Gate entrance; the station is within walking distance of Paddington station, providing a convenient interchange between the Central line and the main line station, although this is not highlighted on the Underground map. Transport for London's September 2011 report "Central London Rail Termini: Analysing passengers' onward travel patterns" is based on a survey which failed to include Lancaster Gate as a means of getting from Paddington to destinations on the Central line. London Buses routes 46, 94, 148, 274 and night route N207 serve the station Lancaster Gate station images in the collection of London Transport Museum: Station building, 1924 with Park Gate Hotel above Booking hall, 1955
Gerhard Richter
Gerhard Richter is a German visual artist. Richter has produced abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, photographs and glass pieces, he is regarded as one of the most important contemporary German artists and several of his works have set record prices at auction. Richter was born in Hospital Dresden-Neustadt in Dresden and grew up in Reichenau, Lower Silesia, in Waltersdorf, in the Upper Lusatian countryside, where his father worked as a village teacher. Gerhard's mother, Hildegard Schönfelder, gave birth to him at the age of 25. Hildegard's father, Ernst Alfred Schönfelder, at one time was considered a gifted pianist. Ernst moved the family to Dresden after taking up the family enterprise of brewing and went bankrupt. Once in Dresden, Hildegard trained as a bookseller, in doing so realized a passion for literature and music. Gerhard's father, Horst Richter, was a mathematics and physics student at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden; the two were married in 1931. After struggling to maintain a position in the new Nationalist Socialist education system, Horst found a position in Reichenau.
Gerhard's younger sister, was born here in 1936. Horst and Hildegard were able to remain apolitical due to Reichenau's location in the countryside. Horst, being a teacher, was forced to join the National Socialist Party, he never became an avid supporter of Nazism, was not required to attend party rallies. In 1942, Gerhard was conscripted into the Deutsches Jungvolk, but by the end of the war he was still too young to be an official member of the Hitler Youth. In 1943, Hildegard moved the family to Waltersdorf, was forced to sell her piano. Two brothers of Hildegard died as soldiers in the war and a sister, schizophrenic, was starved to death in the Nazi euthanasia program. Richter left school after 10th grade and apprenticed as an advertising and stage-set painter, before studying at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. In 1948, he finished vocational high school in Zittau, between 1949 and 1951, successively worked as an apprentice with a sign painter and as a painter. In 1950, his application for study at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts was rejected as "too bourgeois".
He began his studies at the Academy in 1951. His teachers there were Heinz Lohmar and Will Grohmann. Richter married Marianne Eufinger in 1957, he married his second wife, the sculptor Isa Genzken, in 1982. Richter had two sons and a daughter with his third wife, Sabine Moritz after they were married in 1995. In the early days of his career, he prepared a wall painting for the refectory of his Academy of Arts as part of his B. A. Another mural entitled Lebensfreude followed at the German Hygiene Museum for his diploma, it was intended to produce an effect "similar to that of wallpaper or tapestry". From 1957 to 1961 Richter worked as a master trainee in the academy and took commissions for the state of East Germany. During this time, he worked intensively on murals like Arbeiterkampf, on oil paintings, on various self-portraits and on a panorama of Dresden with the neutral name Stadtbild. Together with his wife Marianne, Richter escaped from East to West Germany two months before the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961.
Both his wall paintings in the Academy of Arts and the Hygiene Museum were painted over for ideological reasons. Much after German reunification, two "windows" of the wall painting Joy of life would be uncovered in the stairway of the German Hygiene Museum, but these were covered over when it was decided to restore the Museum to its original 1930 state. In West Germany Richter began to study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Karl Otto Götz together with Sigmar Polke, Werner Hilsing, HA Schult, Kuno Gonschior, Hans Erhard Walther, Konrad Lueg and Gotthard Graubner. With Polke and Konrad Fischer he introduced the term Kapitalistischer Realismus as an anti-style of art, appropriating the pictorial shorthand of advertising; this title referred to the realist style of art known as Socialist Realism the official art doctrine of the Soviet Union, but it commented upon the consumer-driven art doctrine of western capitalism. Richter taught at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design as a visiting professor.
In 1983, Richter resettled from Düsseldorf to Cologne, where he still works today. In 1996, he moved into a studio designed by architect Thiess Marwede. With an estimated fortune of €700 million, Richter was ranked number 220 of the richest 1,001 individuals and families in Germany by the monthly business publication Manager Magazin in 2017. Nearly all of Richter's work demonstrates both illusionistic space that seems natural and the physical activity and material of painting—as mutual interferences. For Richter, reality is the combination of new attempts to understand—to represent. Richter's opinions and perspectives on his own art, that of the larger art market and various artistic movements, are compiled in a chronological record of "Writings" and interviews; the following quotes are excerpts from the compilation: "I am a Surrealist." "My sole concern is the object. Otherwise I would not take so much trouble over my choice of subjects. "My concern is never art, but alw
Olafur Eliasson
Olafur Eliasson is an Icelandic-Danish artist known for sculptures and large-scale installation art employing elemental materials such as light and air temperature to enhance the viewer’s experience. In 1995 he established Studio Olafur Eliasson in a laboratory for spatial research. Olafur represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and that year installed The Weather Project in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London. Olafur has engaged in a number of projects in public space, including the intervention Green river, carried out in various cities between 1998 and 2001, he created the Breakthrough Prize trophy. Like much of his work, the sculpture explores the common ground between science, it is molded into the shape of a toroid, recalling natural forms found from black holes and galaxies to seashells and coils of DNA. Olafur was a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts from 2009 to 2014 and is an adjunct professor at the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design in Addis Ababa since 2014.
Olafur Eliasson was born in Copenhagen in 1967 to Ingibjörg Olafsdottir. His parents had emigrated to Copenhagen from Iceland in 1966, he to find work as a cook, she as a seamstress, he was 8. His father an artist, moved back to Iceland, where their family spent summers and holidays. At 15 he had his first solo show, exhibiting landscape drawings and gouaches at a small alternative gallery in Denmark. However, Olafur considered his "break-dancing" during the mid-1980s to be his first artworks. With two school friends, he formed a group — they called themselves the Harlem Gun Crew — and they performed at clubs and dance halls for four years winning the Scandinavian championship. Olafur studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1989 to 1995. In 1990, when he was awarded a travel budget by the Royal Danish Academy, Olafur went to New York where he started working as a studio assistant for artist Christian Eckhart in Williamsburg and reading texts on phenomenology and Gestalt psychology.
Olafur received his degree from the academy in 1995, after having moved in 1993 to Cologne for a year, to Berlin, where he has since maintained a studio. First located in a three-story former train depot right next door to the Hamburger Bahnhof, the studio moved to a former brewery in Prenzlauer Berg in 2008. In 1996, Olafur started working with Einar Thorsteinn, an architect and geometry expert 25 years his senior as well as a former friend of Buckminster Fuller; the first piece they created called 8900054, was a stainless-steel dome 30 feet wide and 7 feet high, designed to be seen as if it were growing from the ground. Though the effect is an illusion, the mind has a hard time believing that the structure is not part of a much grander one developing from deep below the surface. Thorsteinn's knowledge of geometry and space has been integrated into Olafur's artistic production seen in his geometric lamp works as well as his pavilions and camera obscura projects. For many projects, the artist works collaboratively with specialists in various fields, among them the architects Thorsteinn and Sebastian Behmann, author Svend Åge Madsen, landscape architect Gunther Vogt, architecture theorist Cedric Price, architect Kjetil Thorsen.
Studio Olafur Eliasson, which the artist founded as a "laboratory for spatial research", employs a team of architects, engineers and assistants who work together to conceive and construct artworks such as installations and sculptures, as well as large-scale projects and commissions. As professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, Olafur Eliasson founded the Institute for Spatial Experiments, which opened within his studio building in April 2009. Early works by Olafur consist of oscillating electric fans hanging from the ceiling. Ventilator swings forth and around, rotating on its axis. Quadrible light ventilator mobile is a rotating electrically powered mobile comprising a searchlight and four fans blowing air around the exhibition room and scanning it with the light cone; the weather project was installed at the London's Tate Modern in 2003 as part of the popular Unilever series. The installation filled the open space of the gallery's Turbine Hall. Olafur used humidifiers to create a fine mist in the air via a mixture of sugar and water, as well as a semicircular disc made up of hundreds of monochromatic lamps which radiated yellow light.
The ceiling of the hall was covered with a huge mirror, in which visitors could see themselves as tiny black shadows against a mass of orange light symbolizing the sun. Many visitors responded to this exhibition by waving their hands and legs. Art critic Brian O'Doherty described this as viewers "intoxicated with their own narcissism as they ponder themselves elevated into the sky." Open for six months, the work attracted two million visitors, many of whom were repeat visitors. O'Doherty was positive about the piece when talking to Frieze magazine in 2003, saying that it was "the first time I've seen the eno
The Serpentine
The Serpentine is a 40-acre recreational lake in Hyde Park, England, created in 1730 at the behest of Queen Caroline. Although it is common to refer to the entire body of water as the Serpentine the name refers only to the eastern half of the lake. Serpentine Bridge, which marks the boundary between Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens marks the Serpentine's western boundary; the Serpentine takes its name from its snakelike, although it only has one bend. Fed by the River Westbourne and Tyburn Brook in the 1730s, the lake's water was pumped from the Thames in the 1830s; the water is now pumped from three boreholes within Hyde Park, the most recent being installed in May 2012 as part of the 2011–2012 restoration of the Lake. The Serpentine provided a focal point for The Great Exhibition of 1851, more was a venue for the men's and women's triathlon and marathon swimming events in the London 2012 Olympics. Since 1864 the Serpentine Swimming Club has organised a 100-yard race every Christmas morning.
In 1913, the Peter Pan Cup was inaugurated for this race by J. M. Barrie, the creator of the fictional character Peter Pan. There are many recreational facilities around the Serpentine, as well as boating on the lake itself. In 1860 the Serpentine was to be modified into a skating pond with formal edges; this scheme was not implemented. Among the landmarks near the lake is the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain; the lake was fed by the River Westbourne entering at the Italian Garden at the north-western end of the Long Water. The Westbourne ceased to provide the water for the Serpentine in 1834, as the river had become polluted, so water was pumped from the Thames; the water is now supplied by three boreholes drilled into the Upper Chalk. The first borehole is located at the Italian Gardens, the second at the Diana Memorial and the third, drilled in 2012 to a depth of 132 m, is within 50 m of the Diana Memorial; the Long Water runs south-east from this point to Serpentine Bridge, where the lake curves to the east, following the natural contours of the land.
At the eastern end, water flows out of the lake via a sluice in the dam, forming a small ornamental waterfall at the Dell. The outflow has not maintained the waterfall, re-circulation pumps were installed in the Dell, below the dam, to sustain this feature; the restoration work in 2012 restored the flows into the Serpentine and this waterfall is now restored as designed. The river flowed due south from this point, marking the boundary between Westminster and Kensington, but since 1850 it has been diverted into a culvert, running underground to reach the Thames near Chelsea Bridge; the lake has a maximum depth of 17 ft. The lake is reported to be deeper, but bathymetric surveys by the Royal Park in 2010 revealed the design of the lake. There are two lakeside restaurants and various recreational facilities on the lake shore. In 1730 Queen Caroline, wife of George II, ordered the damming of the River Westbourne in Hyde Park as part of a general redevelopment of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. Original monastic ponds may have existed in the location and these were modified as part of the 1730–1732 scheme to create a single lake.
At that time, the Westbourne formed eleven natural ponds in the park. During the 1730s, the lake filled to its current shape; the redevelopment was carried out by Royal Gardener Charles Bridgeman, who dammed the Westbourne to create the artificial lake, dug a large pond in the centre of Kensington Gardens to be a focal point for pathways in the park. At the time of construction, artificial lakes were long and straight; the Serpentine was one of the earliest artificial lakes designed to appear natural, was imitated in parks and gardens nationwide. The lake achieved notoriety in December 1816 when Harriet Westbrook, the pregnant wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, was found drowned in the Serpentine having left a suicide note addressed to her father and husband. Shelley married Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin less than two weeks later; the lake formed a focal point of the 1814 celebrations which marked a century of Hanoverian rule and re-enacted the British victory at Trafalgar nine years and of the 1851 Great Exhibition, with the Crystal Palace standing on its southern shore.
Following the introduction of more stringent regulations to protect the environment in the park, the relocation of the Crystal Palace, the construction of the nearby Albertopolis complex of museums and exhibitions, large-scale events ceased to take place on the banks of the Serpentine. However, it was the location for the 1977 Silver Jubilee celebrations, a venue for the 2012 Olympics. In the 1820s, the park was extensively redesigned by Decimus Burton. At the same time, John Rennie built the Serpentine Bridge to carry the newly built West Carriage Drive along the boundary between Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, dividing the lake into the Serpentine and the Long Water. In 2011, The Royal Park embarked on the restoration of the Serpentine to combat growing concerns about the status of the water and the quality of the aquatic environment; the project resulted in a substantial change to the hydrology of the lake, which had a turnover time of 10 years, is now reduced to 4–5 months as a result of new borehole water being pumped into the lake.
The three boreholes, drilled into the Upper Chalk, now supply the lake with up to 900,000 cubic metres of water per annum ensuring that the lake remains fresh and does not stagnate. In addition, the contaminat
Ian Hamilton Finlay
Ian Hamilton Finlay, CBE was a Scottish poet, writer and gardener. Finlay was born in Nassau, Bahamas, to James Hamilton Finlay and his wife, Annie Pettigrew, both of Scots descent, he was educated at Dollar Academy, in Clackmannanshire and Glasgow School of Art. At the age of 13, with the outbreak of the Second World War, he was evacuated to family in the countryside. In 1942, he joined the British Army. Finlay was married twice and had two children and Ailie, he died in Edinburgh. He is buried with his parents and wife in Abercorn Churchyard in West Lothian; the grave lies in the extreme south-east corner of the churchyard. At the end of the war, Finlay worked as a shepherd, before beginning to write short stories and poems, while living on Rousay, in Orkney, he published his first book, The Sea Bed and Other Stories in 1958 with some of his plays broadcast on the BBC, some stories featured in The Glasgow Herald. His first collection of poetry, The Dancers Inherit the Party was published in 1960 by Migrant Press with a second edition published in 1962.
The third edition, published by Fulcrum Press in 1969, included a number of new poems and was inaccurately described by the publisher as a first edition and which led to a complex legal dispute. Dancers was included in its entirety in a New Directions annual a few years later. In 1963, Finlay published Rapel, his first collection of concrete poetry, it was as a concrete poet that he first gained wide renown. Much of this work was issued in his magazine'Poor. Old. Tired. Horse'. Finlay became notable as a poet, when reducing the monostich form to one word with his concrete poems in the nineteen sixties. Repetition and tradition lay at the heart of Hamilton's poetry, exploring' the juxtaposition of opposite ideas'. Finlay began to compose poems to be inscribed into stone, incorporating these sculptures into the natural environment; this kind of'poem-object' features in the garden Little Sparta that he and Sue Finlay created together in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh. The five-acre garden includes more conventional sculptures and two garden temples.
In December 2004, in a poll conducted by Scotland on Sunday, a panel of fifty artists, gallery directors and arts professionals voted Little Sparta to be the most important work of Scottish art. Second and third were the Glasgow School of Art by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and The Skating Minister by Henry Raeburn. Sir Roy Strong has said of Little Sparta that it is "the only original garden made in this country since 1945"; the Little Sparta Trust plans to preserve Little Sparta for the nation by raising enough to pay for an ongoing maintenance fund. Ian Appleton, Stephen Bann, Stephen Blackmore, Patrick Eyres, Richard Ingleby, Ian Kennedy, Magnus Linklater, John Leighton, Duncan Macmillan, Victoria Miro, Paul Nesbitt, Jessie Sheeler and Ann Uppington are trustees. Finlay's work is notable for a number of recurring themes: a penchant for classical writers, his 1973 screenprint of a tank camouflaged in a leaf pattern, referring to the Utopian Arcadia of poetry and art, is described by the Tate as drawing "an ironic parallel between this idea of a natural paradise and the camouflage patterns on a tank".
His use of Nazi imagery led an accusation of neo-Nazi sympathies and anti-semitism. Finlay sued a Paris magazine which had made such accusations, was awarded nominal damages of one franc; the stress of this situation brought about the separation between his wife Sue. Finlay came into conflict with the Strathclyde Regional Council over his liability for rates on a byre in his garden, which the council insisted was being used as commercial premises. Finlay insisted. One of the few gardens outside Scotland to permanently display his work is the Improvement Garden in Stockwood Discovery Centre, created in collaboration with Sue Finlay, Gary Hincks and Nicholas Sloan. Finlay was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1985, he was awarded honorary doctorates from Aberdeen University in 1987, Heriot-Watt University in 1993 and the University of Glasgow in 2001, an honorary and/or visiting professorship from the University of Dundee in 1999. The French Communist Party presented him with a bust of Saint-Just in 1991.
He received the Scottish Horticultural Medal from the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society in 2002, the Scottish Arts Council Creative Scotland Award in 2003. Awarded in the Queen's New Year's Honours list in 2002, Finlay was a CBE. Finlay's work has been seen as austere, but at times witty, or darkly whimsical. Ian Hamilton Finlay is represented by the Wild Hawthorn Press, the Archive of Ian Hamilton Finlay, which works with the Ingleby Gallery and the Victoria Miro Gallery in the U. K. Finlay's designs were most built by others. Finlay respected the expertise of sandblasters and printers he worked with having one hundred collaborators including Patrick Caulfield, Richard Demarco, Malcolm Fraser, Christopher Hall, Margot Sandeman, he worked with a host of lettering artists including Michael Harvey and Nicholas Sloan. A partial list of Finlay sculptures and gardens. A few photographs are reachable through the external links. Little Sparta, Lanarkshire, Scotland, 1966 Canterbury sundial, England, University of Kent, near Rutherford College, 1972 UNDA wall, Schiff, W
Lancaster Gate; South Kensington
.jpg)
.JPG)
