COMMENT OF THE DAY: THIS TIME, SOME REAL GROUNDBREAKING AT TANIGUCHI’S ASIA SOCIETY HQ “Construction has begun! It’s been a while in the making but it appears that progress is now rapidly occurring. I first noticed activity on the site about a week ago and as of this morning there were at least two construction trailers and several earth-movers on the site. Much of the two plots have already been cleared.” [Ned Dodington, commenting on More Images of the Asia Society Headquarters Design]
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Tag: Museums
COMMENT OF THE DAY: A TASTEMAKER’S EDUCATION “I will confess, anonymously, that I once tasted the Menil Museum. Architecture school will cause you to do strange things…sober.” [Guy Incognito, commenting on The Very, Very Good Friends of Hermann Park]
CHIPPING AWAY AT THE MUSEUM DISTRICT 
Those little tree topper signs have been up throughout the larger neighborhood for a while now, but the new Boulevard Oaks Historic District was only approved by City Council this week. The designation means you’ll now have to wait 90 days before you can demolish that rambling South Blvd. mansion you just picked up. At the same meeting, council members approved an 8-acre extension to the Midtown TIRZ that takes a bite out of the Museum District. The area includes the new locations of Asia House, the Buffalo Soldiers Museum, and the Museum of African-American Culture. [Houston Chronicle, via Slampo’s Place] Photo: WhisperToMe
The Richmont Square apartments on Richmond Ave. get knocked down in the new master plan for the Menil Collection campus. Speaking at a public forum last night, British architect David Chipperfield referred to the Menil’s big multifamily property as “this thing getting in our way.”
Cite magazine’s Raj Mankad describes more details of the Chipperfield plan:
The car park along Alabama would be strengthened with the new bookshop, cafe, and auditorium nearby. The key change would be to connect West Main across the site [to Yupon] through the area occupied by the northern end of Richmont Square. The complete street grid would surround a new green space that would also be made possible by the clearing of the north side of the apartments. It would connect, slightly off axis, with the current Menil park between the main building and the Rothko. The Drawing Institute and Study Center and Single Artist Studios would be sited around the new green space. And along Richmond itself, the plan calls for dense residential and commercial development.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHERE’S OUR TANIGUCHI? “What’s the hold up on this thing? It’s still a vacant lot. In the past few weeks, utility work on water/sewer has been done on the street, but not sure if it’s associated with the Asia Society construction. Groundbreaking was in Nov. 2008??? It’s already Sept. 2009 and no sign of construction.” [David Hollas, commenting on More Images of the Asia Society Headquarters Design]
Opening October 3rd in Sugar Land: A branch of the Houston Museum of Natural Science, smack dab in the center of the former prison farm now known as Telfair. The museum is a rehab of the old Central State Farm Prison building, but it has a better-sounding new address: 13019 University Blvd., at the corner of New Territory Blvd.
Meanwhile, far to the north, HMNS’s Woodlands Xploration Station in the Woodlands Mall is shutting down on September 7th. The Woodlands Children’s Museum next door to it will close a little less than a month later. Going into those vacated spaces: Forever 21.
- HMNS at Sugar Land
- Museum of Natural Science at Sugar Land to open Oct. 3 [Houston Business Journal]
- Houston Museum of Natural Science to open Sugar Land satellite Oct. 3 [Houston Chronicle]
- Two museums in Woodlands mall set to close [Houston Chronicle]
Photo of new Houston Museum of Natural Science at Sugar Land: HMNS
Demo artist Dan Havel sends in positive and negative preview photos of Give & Take, a sculpture he and partner Dean Ruck carved and carefully extracted from a dilapidated bungalow on West Cottage St. in East Norhill. The 30-foot-long egg-shaped piece they removed will be on display as part of a group show at the Contemporary Arts Museum featuring Houston-related work by various Houston artists. The exhibit, called No Zoning, opens this Friday.
So what’s the take?
Hey, what happened to Monday? Swamplot spent most of it fighting off a few tech demons. But hey, here’s some news!
- Opened: The new and expanded Children’s Museum had its grand opening this weekend. Now twice its original size, the 90,000 sq. ft. museum features exhibits of children in various states of play. Also inside: an expanded branch of the Houston Public Library.
- Opening: Backe’s Bullpen, a fine drinking establishment in Dickinson, will open with the backing of Astros pitcher Brandon Backe, reports the Galveston Daily News‘s Laura Elder. Last October, Backe was arrested after a run-in with police at a Galveston bar.
- Closed: Mike McGuff notices that the Meyer Park Chili’s, once “the big teen hangout in southwest Houston,” shut down in February.
A bouquet of bathtubs by sculptor Donald Lipski will be the centerpiece of a new Houston Water Museum and Education Center in northeast Houston called The WaterWorks. Named “Tubbs” — apparently after Texas country musician and frequent bather Ernest Tubb — Lipski’s sculpture appears to encourage the recycling of water from one bath to the next, although in a playful way perhaps at odds with the standard “short showers only” messages contained in most water-conservation public-information campaigns. The sculpture’s splashing will be controlled, however: That’s a water-recycling system hidden in the bathtub stems.
The museum, scheduled to open in August, will be adjacent to the Northeast Water Purification Plant at the southwest corner of Lake Houston, at 12121 North Sam Houston Parkway East, in Humble.
The bathtub sculpture is a considerable improvement over Lipski’s first proposal for the WaterWorks Museum, the “magic” overflowing water pitcher pictured here:
THE RICHMOND LIGHTS SHALL NOT BE MOVED Deputy director Emily Todd lists the “guiding principles” behind the Menil’s planned expansion for the Chronicle‘s Douglas Britt: “Just going down the list: environmentally sustainable design principles; no alteration to the original museum buildings or the Cy Twombly (Gallery); the Dan Flavin/Richmond Hall installation cannot be relocated. … The relationship between the Menil buildings to the Rothko (Chapel) and the Byanztine Chapel have to be taken into account – something that is so beautiful. The … scale, ambience and residential quality of the neighborhood is of paramount importance, which I think is sweet. Any new buildings in the immediate vicinity of the president buildings will be of the scale of the Cy Twombly Gallery. Significant trees will be preserved, and building on an outdoor environment that encourages visitors and especially families, which you see if you come over here on the weekends.” [Arts in Houston; previously in Swamplot]
The firm of British architect David Chipperfield has been selected to design a master plan for the expansion of the Menil Collection campus. What’s to be added?
Those facilities include the Menil Drawing Institute and Study Center, an auditorium, a café, additional space for Menil archives and buildings devoted to the work of individual artists.
The Menil Foundation is also interested in developing “income-producing properties” along the coming Richmond rail line, reports Douglas Britt in the Houston Chronicle.
Fitting in so many new buildings, of course, will be a lot easier once the Menil decides which of its many neighboring properties it wants to knock down. And owning 30 acres in the area means there are plenty of possibilities!
Which will go first? The gray-washed arts bungalows? The small rental properties? Richmond Hall? Richmont Square?
WINTER REDUCTIONS AT THE MFAH The Art Newspaper is reporting that the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston has so far lost almost a quarter of its endowment as a result of the ongoing financial crisis. The endowment “fell 22% to around $780m by December, says director Peter Marzio.” [The Art Newspaper, via B.S. Houston Art Blog]
Note: Story updated below.
The mystery buyer of the house at 834 W. 24th St. has revealed herself! Quilter, artist, and Art Car builder Kim Ritter, who says she was “raised mid-century modern,” expects to close on the Museum of the Weird on December 15th. Museum curator Dolan Smith is planning his own art sale on the property two days earlier; Ritter says that the sale will run from 2 to 8 pm, and that the prices will be far less than what you’d expect to pay for, say, a sculpture made of hair:
Come by and get a bargain, stuff starting at 5 and 10 dollars!
Ritter tells Swamplot she’s purchased some of Smith’s work herself, including a piece entitled “Man of Ten Thousand Nails,” which she intends to keep on the property.
Does this mean the museum will be preserved?
Showing at the Contemporary Arts Museum next May: a main-gallery exhibit featuring portions of a Houston home dissected and reconstructed by Houston’s favorite teardown artists. DD Demo, aka Dan Havel and Dean Ruck, has a collection of demolition artworks to its credit, but the pair’s most famous sculpted wreck was the 2005 funnel-shaped bungalow disassembly on Montrose shown here, which became popular enough for the Inversion Coffee Shop now on the site to be named after it.
Havel and Ruck’s CAM work, though, needs a willing victim: another home they can pick apart. The leftovers, Havel says, “could be visited as an off site space during the run of the show.”
Havel asks Swamplot:
Are there any developers/architects you or your members may know that may have a lead on a house? Preferably, it should be an older house, wood bungalow type with ship lap wall construction. We would like to secure a teardown soon that would be scheduled for teardown in June. This project would have high visibility in the press and would give owner/developer/architect press and exposure if they want it.
Couldn’t they just stalk a condemned house and do something like this on the sly?
Conspicuously absent from the MLS listing for 834 W. 24th St. in the Heights: any mention (or photos) of the Scar Room, a small chamber of sculptures and small wood panels on which house owner and artist Dolan Smith and sympathetic visitors graphically documented their physical and psychological afflictions. Sample Scar Room decor: “a submerged doll with a piece of rubber hose wrapped around its neck, representing the umbilical cord that nearly strangled Smith at birth.”
But it isn’t too hard to find exacting descriptions of the home online. The Houston Press, for example, featured this bit of color as it celebrated the home’s come-from-behind win of the paper’s “Best Shrine to the Abnormal” award back in 2002:
Donations of every imaginable variety show up weekly: horns, doll heads, a film canister of Tommy Lee Jones’s spit, balls of Saran Wrap, clumps of hair, an appendix, color photos of fallopian tubes and contemporary art of a disquieting nature. Artist/nutball Dolan Smith has turned his Heights bungalow into a mecca for all things weird. . . .
Smith is supplementing his empire of the bizarre with a two-thirds-complete pet cemetery. Last year, Tropical Storm Allison took its toll on the nascent final resting place for pets. Rising floodwaters filled the jars of 32 dead rats, inadvertently creating biological pipe bombs.
Sure, you’re thinking . . . Who’s gonna buy this place?
No problem. Realtor Weldon Rigby, himself no stranger to homes graced by an occasional mannequin, has already done himself proud. After just a month and a half on the market, the home — listed for $150,000 — went “option pending” on November 14th.
