Welcome back to another Wednesday roundup. Here’s a collection of the art, architecture, and urbanism news you need to know from around the web.
Here’s what’s going on today:
The Hermitage Barcelona might not be dead after all
After the Barcelona City Council rejected plans for a Toyo Ito-designed outpost of the Hermitage last February, it looked like the project had ground to a halt. Now, backers of the museum are pushing ahead once again. Last week on May 26, the Port of Barcelona gave their blessing to the $61 million, 140,000-square-foot development, but the office of Mayor Ada Colau later shot down the proposal on May 28. Despite the setback, organizers are reportedly working with local businesses and Colau’s administration to develop smaller, more “community-oriented” schemes for the satellite museum.
H/t to The Art Newspaper
Everyone’s mad at this ultra-luxe London sky pool
On June 1, the BBC posted an innocuous tweet of swimmers in London enjoying the “Sky Pool,” a glass-bottomed pool spanning the Embassy Gardens in Nine Elms, an ostentatious amenity for the ultra-luxury development. And, of course, Twitter immediately fired back, pointing out that the development had separate “poor doors” for residents in the affordable housing component, and that those same tenants weren’t allowed to actually use the Sky Pool. That’s setting aside all of the snarky comments about how easy it seemed to be swept off of the edge or to have the glass break (some commentators recalled how a glass-bottomed bridge in China was destroyed by the wind only three weeks ago).
Fun fact: residents in the “affordable” flats in these blocks are not allowed to use the Sky Pool, even if they pay. They just have to watch the rich people from their windows. Also the “affordable” flats still cost about 750k. https://t.co/5p0spku8lG
— Dr Eleanor Janega (@GoingMedieval) June 1, 2021
I see…bad things… pic.twitter.com/48ceZD1Jj5
— asimasola (@David_Bagnall67) June 1, 2021
The Whitney Museum of American Art voluntarily recognizes its new union
Two weeks after workers at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan filed a petition to unionize, the museum has taken the unprecedented step of voluntarily recognizing the new union. The 185 workers, incensed by low wages, pandemic layoffs that have thus far reduced staff by 20 percent, and job insecurity, filed to unionize from across all Whitney departments. However, Technical, Office and Professional Union, Local 2110 UAW (UAW Local 2110), the union recognized by the museum, alleges that the Whitney is refusing to acknowledge 60 of its potential union members and won’t state why.
H/t to Hyperallergic
The AIANY is building with mycelium at the Glass House
Today marks the final installment of the AIA New York’s (AIANY) Custom Residential Architecture Network (CRAN) mycelium workshops, where a project team has been exploring the building potential of this mushroom-born material (see The Living’s 2014 Hi-Fy for an example of the fibrous material put to practical use). From 6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. tonight at the Philip Johnson-designed Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, members of the Mycelium Project team will show different visions of mycelium-based installations for Johnson’s Sculpture Gallery, before breaking off to refine their pieces.
Manhattan’s Black Wall Street gallery was vandalized on the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre
A Manhattan gallery on Mercer Street in SoHo was vandalized on Memorial Day, and the NYPD is now probing the attack as a possible hate crime. Black Wall Street Gallery, named after the section of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that was once ground zero for Black prosperity in America before being violently razed 100 years ago, wrote on Instagram that they were the only business vandalized that day, on the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, and that the gallery had to push police to investigate the incident as a hate crime.
H/t to the New York Post
Herzog & de Meuron and Foster + Partners break ground on San Francisco Power Station projects
San Francisco’s Mayor London Breed broke ground on the mixed-use Power Station development today, a project that will expand the Dogpatch neighborhood into a 29-acre, formerly industrial patch of land. That includes a total of 13 new buildings, with 2,600 units of housing, 1.6 million square feet of office space, and a hotel all planned from a number of big-name architecture firms. That includes Herzog & de Meuron and Adamson Associates Architects’ renovation and conversion of the historic turbine hall formerly known as Station A, and Foster + Partners’ stacked residential towers.