Pace Gallery has announced an ambitious architectural expansion for its 540 West 25th Street location in New York, turning the building into an 8 floor gallery and office complex with 60,000 square feet of space.  “The last ten years have seen incredible changes in the art world as creative communities from different parts of the world have started to connect. Now it’s time for the art galleries to change too. This new building gives us the chance to reimagine what we are all about and that’s exactly what we plan to do,” says President Marc Glimcher. (more…)

The Whitney has announced the details for its first exhibition at its newly completed Meatpacking District location. America Is Hard to See will open on May 1st, showing off the vast new exhibition spaces of the Renzo Piano-designed building, and traces the history of the museum alongside the development of American art in the 20th and early 21st century.  “The game changer is the space,” said Donna De Salvo, the Whitney’s chief curator. (more…)

New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has launched an investigation into the financial decision-making at Cooper Union in New York, where protests and lawsuits erupted following the school’s decision to charge tuition after nearly two hundred years of offering free college education to admitted students.  (more…)

The design for the Serpentine’s annual summer pavilion has been announced for 2015, a colorful, cocoon-like structure by the architectural collaborative Selgas Cano that celebrates the program’s 15th anniversary.  Selgas Cano “sought a way to allow the public to experience architecture through simple elements, [a] journey through the space, characterized by color, light and irregular shapes with surprising volumes.” (more…)

Thomas Demand, Backyard (2014), via Matthew Marks

The artifice that drives Thomas Demand’s practice is simple, but the results are impressively commanding.  Utilizing carefully cut and assembled cardboard pieces to create familiar images, scenes and spaces, the artist’s work carries an evocatively nostalgic aura, while emphasizing his own craft in the construction of the scene itself. (more…)

The Met has announced a major redesign plan, with David Chipperfield Architects developing a new design for the museum’s southwest wing, housing its modern and contemporary collections.  “The project will run concurrent with the Met’s installations in the Marcel Breuer-designed building that formerly housed the Whitney,” says current director Thomas P. Campbell, “allowing us to regenerate our permanent spaces in the Met’s main building while maintaining a vibrant program for modern and contemporary art just blocks away.” (more…)

Sarah Sze, Still Life with Desk (2013-2015), via Victoria Miro

Through the month of March, the Victoria Miro Gallery will host a solo exhibition by the artist Sarah Sze that spans all of the gallery’s London exhibition spaces. This is Sze’s third solo exhibition with the gallery and the artist’s first time she has shown in Europe since the Venice Biennale in 2013. (more…)

MoMA has announced the winner of its yearly Young Architects Program design contest, a “party artifact” titled COSMO and designed by Spanish architect Andrés Jaque.  “This year’s proposal takes one of the Young Architects Program’s essential requirements–providing a water feature for leisure and fun–and highlights water itself as a scarce resource,” said Pedro Gadanho, Curator in MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design. “Relying on off-the-shelf components from agro-industrial origin, an exuberant mobile architecture celebrates water-purification processes and turns their intricate visualization into an unusual backdrop for the Warm Up sessions.” (more…)

The Museum of Fine Arts Houston is embarking on an ambitious $450 million expansion project that will seek to place it as one of the city’s cultural hubs.  “It’s all about shaping space,” says , architect Steven Holl. “The collection of buildings there is already outstanding. It’s very delicate, not a site that calls for over-exuberance.” (more…)

Louise Lawler, Dots and Slices (Traced) (2006/2013), via Sprüth Magers

In 2013, Louise Lawler performed a series of “tracings” at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, taking previously executed photographs from Lawler’s broad body of work, and converting the image down to a simple vector graphic in partnership with artist and children’s book illustrator Jon Buller.  These tracings are currently the subject of the artist’s most recent solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers Berlin, as Levine returns to her particularly subtle brand of institutional critique. (more…)

Artist Vito Acconci has contributed a new architectural design proposal to the Tasmanian capital of Hobart, a twisting, maze-like bridge linking two of the city’s main memorial sites.  “All the surfaces of the maze are riddled with holes, from tiny to less or more than tiny; each of the many multiple mazes surrounds an empty open space,” says a spokesman from the artist’s studio. “You retrace your steps back and forth, and find your way from one maze to another, up and down and up again.”   (more…)

The Wall Street Journal profiles the ongoing collaboration between Rem Koolhaas and Dasha Zhukova to create the new home for Zhukova’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow’s Gorky Park.  “The building is basically a found object,” Koolhaas says. “We are embracing it as it is.” (more…)

The Fondazione Prada has unveileved a new design for its space in Milan, designed by Rem Koolhaas’s architecture firm, OMA.  This will be the second space for the Fondazione, which will continue to operate out of its location in Venice as well. (more…)

The Guggenheim has released a list of finalists in the competition to design the prospective new Guggenheim in Helsinki, Finland. The final six selections include a variety of designs, including repurposed buildings and a series of pavilion-style structures linked through an interconnected walkway. The design contest “opens extraordinary possibilities for a Guggenheim in Helsinki and asks us to imagine what a museum of the future can be,” according to director Richard Armstrong. (more…)

Artist E.V. Day’s Brooklyn home is the subject of a recent profile in New York Magazine this week, an open design which she shares with her husband, food writer Ted Lee.  “Everything we put in was very clean—new and crisply detailed, to contrast with the industrial materials,” says architect Elizabeth Roberts. “The best features of the existing space were the unpainted wood ceiling and columns.” (more…)

The Oslo city council in Norway has approved a proposal for a new Munch Museum design on the city waterfront, created by firm Herreros.  The process in building the museum has moved slowly over the past years, with a number of critics challenging the tilting, “Lambda” design.  A vote on zoning is due to take place in November. (more…)

Frank Gehry is reportedly in talks with Philip Vergne and the rest of the MOCA board regarding a potential renovation of the Geffen Contemporary branch in downtown Los Angeles.  “It is a priority and a necessity to make the Geffen a true public space and to use the plaza and the canopy as a civic, urban and spontaneous gathering place for our visitors and for the citizens of downtown. It should be a town square,” Vergne says. (more…)

The New York Times profiles the work of Bernard Arnault in building the Museum for the Fondation Luis Vuitton’s expansive art collection, a massive structure in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne.  “We don’t speak of numbers when we speak of a dream,” he says when asked about the final cost of the building. “Let’s just say it is a very expensive sculpture.” (more…)

The Guggenheim Museum has announced plans to open a new location in New York City, which will house the institution’s archives and library, with possible new space for public engagement.   (more…)

Pace Gallery has announced that it will be installing three late Alexander Calder sculptures at the foot of the Seagram Building.  Calder’s work was always intended to be installed in the plaza of the International Style icon, but financial reasons prevented his work from making a permanent home there.  “So in our minds, it’s always been a Calder plaza,” says the artist’s grandson Alexander S.C. Rower, “and it’s always nice to see works back there again.” (more…)

Monika Sosnowska, Tower (2014), via Art Observed

Following the gallery’s exhibition of Sterling Ruby’s slurred, industrial run-off and massive assemblages earlier this summer, Hauser and Wirth New York returns for the first show of its fall season with a similarly inclined, yet considerably more restrained take on architectural and industrial forms.  This time, the work is Monika Sosnowska’s, and the subject is that of high architectural modernism, reinterpreting the forms and elements of “International Style” as developed and professed by landmark German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Monika Sosnowska, Tower (2014), via Henry Murphy for Art Observed

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The New York Times reports on the opening of the third and final section of the High Line Park renovation, stretching a loop from 30th to 34th Street and looking out on to the Hudson River.  The $35 million renovation was recently the site of an expansive installation by artist Carol Bove, with more projects planned for the future. (more…)

The Guardian notes the ongoing backlash in Helsinki against the Guggenheim’s proposed expansion, as many doubt the actual benefits a Guggenheim branch may offer the Finnish capital.   “I’m not paying my taxes to be handed over to an American corporation to do with what they want,” says one interviewee. “If we’re spending that kind of money, it should be on our own national museum, not another outpost of a global company.” (more…)

Artist Grayson Perry has designed a special holiday home in Essex, part of a special commission by Living Architecture, and developed in collaboration with the FAT architectural firm.  Appropriately titled A House for Essex, the home boasts a golden copper alloy roof, and a secret narrative incorporated into the space by Perry, focused around an imagined previous inhabitant.   (more…)