BUILDING OF THE YEAR WINNERS; BUDGET WOES FOR LIGHTHOUSE; KULIK TARGETED AT FIAC
The International Herald Tribune’s Kevin Brass reports that the new faculty building at Luigi Bocconi University in Milan designed by Grafton Architects has been named Building of the Year during the first-ever World Architecture Festival, staged last week in Barcelona. The judges said the design “succeeded in distilling the essence of the city into a confident, contemporary form.” The winner for Best Housing Development was Mountain Dwellings, a ten-story development in Copenhagen, designed by Danish architects BIG–Bjarke Ingels Group. The judges praised the project for its “excellent outdoor private spaces.” Sou Fujimoto Architects took home the prize in the Best House category with Final Wooden House. The judges described it as a “captivating work in which building fabric, structure, furniture, and so on merge in an ever changing landscape of habitation. This is a difficult house but one which opens up the way we might think about domestic space.” Images of the winning buildings can be found here.
Scotland’s center of architecture and design the Lighthouse is facing a deficit of $466,000 and has asked for increased funding from the Glasgow City Council to avoid the prospect of closure, reports Phil Miller in The Herald. The Lighthouse is facing the major shortfall after two recent financial blows hit its budget. Director Nick Barley had been expecting the Scottish government to once again fund its major festival, the Six Cities Design Festival, to the tune of $3.5 million, but was told ten days ago that the center would not be receiving this money. In addition, the cost of mounting Scotland’s first appearance at the Venice Biennale of architecture this summer rose to around $388,000—around $155,000 more than the funds the Lighthouse received from both the Scottish government and private sources to stage the high-profile event. Now the Lighthouse has written a new business plan that accounts for the effects of the “credit crunch” on its commercial activity. Plans include a restructuring of its staffing, which may lead to the loss of around ten jobs, and a revamp of the space inside the Lighthouse, which was designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1895.
In other news, police were sent to remove photos by the Russian artist Oleg Kulik from the FIAC international art fair, France’s main contemporary art fair, on the grounds they were zoophilic, organizers and officials said Monday. The AFP reports that the Paris prosecutor’s office dispatched a team of plainclothes officers to the Grand Palais in Paris on Friday after it was alerted by customs officials to the nature of some of the works. Some of the thirty incriminated pictures, taken in the late 1990s, show Kulik naked, appearing to simulate sex with animals. A judicial official said the photographs—which were later handed back to the FIAC organizers—were unhooked on the grounds the show was accessible to minors. The owners of Moscow art gallery XL, Yelena Selina and Sergei Khripun, were hauled in for questioning by police, according to FIAC head Martin Bethenod, who denied the works were pornographic and said the raid “shocked” the art world. “These images have an unquestionable artistic status since they have been shown, bought, exhibited, and edited since the 1990s,” Bethenod said, adding that Kulik’s work was represented in France’s national art collections.
