Pritzker Prize

Before architect Renzo Piano and his team drew up plans for their addition to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, they spent months listening to museum staffers discuss the existing building, known as the palace - both its charms and its limitations. Only then, says Piano, a Pritzker Prize winner whose firm has designed and renovated art museums around the world, did they address the Gardner's major needs and concerns: from the soundly practical to the purely aesthetic; from how the museum has functioned for more than a century to how it might thrive for another century or two. "The palace is a...

When architect Wang Shu accepts his field's richest prize in a ceremony Friday at the seat of China's legislature, a symbolic second winner will be waiting in the background — Hyatt Hotels. The Pritzker Architecture Prize has special resonance for communist leaders who want to promote China as a global cultural power. Receiving it made Wang a celebrity in China. Until now, the 49-year-old had been little known outside architecture circles. The $100,000 prize is sponsored by the Hyatt Foundation, a separate entity from the business, Hyatt Hotels, which has no role in picking the...

TOKYO -- Kenzo Tange, a prize-winning architect celebrated for the beauty of his structures, including stadiums for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, died yesterday. He was 91. Mr. Tange, who worked until he was 88, died of heart failure. Mr. Tange saw in the ashes of World War II a chance to create not just new buildings, but new cities. His Peace Center in Hiroshima, built four years after the US atomic bombing in 1945, was designed to become the "spiritual core" of the city, where he had attended high school.

Chinese architect Wang Shu, whose buildings have been praised for their commanding presence and careful attention to the environment, has won the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the prize's jury announced Monday. The 49-year-old architect joins Frank Gehry, Tadao Ando, Renzo Piano and Eduardo Souto de Moura in receiving the honor that's been called architecture's Nobel Prize. Wang, the first Chinese architect to receive the honor, is recognized for the museums, libraries, apartment complexes and other structures that he has designed in China.

ROME Maxxi National Museum of 21st Century Arts: Europe’s newest, and most talked about, art museum won’t officially open until spring. That’s when the now-empty galleries will be hung with work by such contemporary artists as Francesco Clemente, Anish Kapoor, William Kentridge, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha. The museum will also emphasize architectural study, housing the archives of such eminent practitioners as Aldo Rossi and Pier Luigi Nervi. In the meantime, there’s the building’s striking architecture to admire.

GLOUCESTER - When Edward Albee is at his best, no one is more pitiless and penetrating in exposing the lies we tell ourselves in the name of social propriety. “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?’’ does not represent Albee at the top of his form, its 2002 Tony Award for Best Play notwithstanding. But it does represent America’s Greatest Living Playwright, an artistic force for more than half a century now, in full envelope-pushing mode. Within an inherently farcical situation - a happily married architect falls hopelessly in love with a goat - Albee...

PROVIDENCE - The Rhode Island School of Design is one of my favorite institutions. Churning with youth and life, it's a place where a student can learn just about any art. Diversity is the name of the game at RISD (or, as everyone calls it, Riz-D). The 1,900 undergrads, from 50 countries, major in at least 16 different visual arts, and there are graduate programs in most of those. Of course there are painting and sculpture and film/video. But students can also learn the design of clothing, architecture, ceramics, film, furniture, glass, illustration, jewelry, photography,...

Chinese architect Wang Shu, whose buildings have been praised for their commanding presence and careful attention to the environment, has won the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the prize's jury announced Monday. The 49-year-old architect joins Frank Gehry, Tadao Ando, Renzo Piano and Eduardo Souto de Moura in receiving the honor that's been called architecture's Nobel Prize. Wang, the first Chinese architect to receive the honor, is recognized for the museums, libraries, apartment complexes and other structures that he has designed in China.

When architect Wang Shu accepts his field's richest prize in a ceremony Friday at the seat of China's legislature, a symbolic second winner will be waiting in the background — Hyatt Hotels. The Pritzker Architecture Prize has special resonance for communist leaders who want to promote China as a global cultural power. Receiving it made Wang a celebrity in China. Until now, the 49-year-old had been little known outside architecture circles. The $100,000 prize is sponsored by the Hyatt Foundation, a separate entity from the business, Hyatt...

Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer has launched a book with photos and sketches of the churches and chapels he has designed over his long career. "The Churches of Oscar Niemeyer" was launched Tuesday night in Rio de Janeiro. The 103-year-old Niemeyer is responsible for more than 600 modernist projects around the world. They include the sweeping concrete structures that house Brazil's government in the capital of Brasilia, and U.N. headquarters in New York. Niemeyer has won numerous awards, including the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1988.

Before architect Renzo Piano and his team drew up plans for their addition to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, they spent months listening to museum staffers discuss the existing building, known as the palace - both its charms and its limitations. Only then, says Piano, a Pritzker Prize winner whose firm has designed and renovated art museums around the world, did they address the Gardner's major needs and concerns: from the soundly practical to the purely aesthetic; from how the museum has functioned for more than a century to how it might thrive for another century or two. "The palace is a...

ROME Maxxi National Museum of 21st Century Arts: Europe’s newest, and most talked about, art museum won’t officially open until spring. That’s when the now-empty galleries will be hung with work by such contemporary artists as Francesco Clemente, Anish Kapoor, William Kentridge, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha. The museum will also emphasize architectural study, housing the archives of such eminent practitioners as Aldo Rossi and Pier Luigi Nervi. In the meantime, there’s the building’s striking architecture to admire.

GLOUCESTER - When Edward Albee is at his best, no one is more pitiless and penetrating in exposing the lies we tell ourselves in the name of social propriety. “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?’’ does not represent Albee at the top of his form, its 2002 Tony Award for Best Play notwithstanding. But it does represent America’s Greatest Living Playwright, an artistic force for more than half a century now, in full envelope-pushing mode. Within an inherently farcical situation - a happily married architect falls hopelessly in love with a goat - Albee...

PROVIDENCE - The Rhode Island School of Design is one of my favorite institutions. Churning with youth and life, it's a place where a student can learn just about any art. Diversity is the name of the game at RISD (or, as everyone calls it, Riz-D). The 1,900 undergrads, from 50 countries, major in at least 16 different visual arts, and there are graduate programs in most of those. Of course there are painting and sculpture and film/video. But students can also learn the design of clothing, architecture, ceramics, film, furniture, glass, illustration, jewelry, photography,...

TOKYO -- Kenzo Tange, a prize-winning architect celebrated for the beauty of his structures, including stadiums for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, died yesterday. He was 91. Mr. Tange, who worked until he was 88, died of heart failure. Mr. Tange saw in the ashes of World War II a chance to create not just new buildings, but new cities. His Peace Center in Hiroshima, built four years after the US atomic bombing in 1945, was designed to become the "spiritual core" of the city, where he had attended high school.

PARIS - Across from the Pompidou Centre, the Atelier Brancusi offers an exciting perspective into the creative life of Constantin Brancusi, a pioneering 20th-century abstract sculptor. The artist bequeathed everything in his studio to France - finished works, works in progress, sketches, furniture, library, record collection, and tools - on condition that the Musée National d'Art Moderne reconstruct it exactly as it stood on the day of his death. The result is this gem of a small museum designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is seeking a talented landscape designer to hold the inaugural Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Fellowship in Landscape Studies in 2012. The biennial three-month residential fellowship will recognize emerging design talent and focus on the role of landscape design in the contemporary city. The Fellowship will offer designers peer-reviewed recognition of design innovation and a supportive environment to develop the disciplinary and professional capacity for sustained inquiry into topics of contemporary urban landscape.