Archive

Twenty years is a long time to wait for a building. When Peter Zumthor’s David Geffen Galleries opened to the public on April 19, the inevitable question was whether the result could possibly justify the duration — the demolished buildings, the displaced collections, the cost overruns, the public debate that at various points turned genuinely hostile. The answer, like most things Zumthor designs, is both simpler and more complex than expected. Here is a building that does not look like the cultural argument it is, that hides its polemics under a coat of board-formed concrete and a tinted-glass eyebrow, and that has at last been built — not as the project the city debated, but as the project the architect drew. ...

The most interesting new building in London this year is one that borrows its logic from fashion. The V&A East Museum, designed by Dublin- and London-based practice O’Donnell + Tuomey, opened on April 18 in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park — and it is, by any measure, a remarkable piece of civic architecture. What makes it genuinely distinctive, however, is the conceptual framework from which it emerged: the sculptural tailoring of Cristóbal Balenciaga and the Japanese spatial concept of Ma. Most museums begin with a brief about square footage, circulation, and climate control. This one, by the architects’ own account, began with the question of how a Spanish couturier shaped the air around a body, and what a building might learn from that. ...

Milan’s design scene doesn’t stop at the Salone gates. The city itself is a design object — constantly being refined, reinterpreted, and renewed. Here’s where we’ll be eating, drinking, and discovering between exhibitions. Eat Langosteria Café — The Navigli outpost of Milan’s finest seafood restaurant. Book the courtyard table. The crudo is non-negotiable, and the setting — a converted canal-side warehouse — is the kind of space that makes you rethink the relationship between food and architecture. ...