FOSTER CHOSEN FOR NEW YORK LIBRARY; TWO BRONZES FOR GETTY
Norman Foster, the eminent British architect who has made something of a specialty out of inserting contemporary designs into historic buildings, has been selected for a major renovation of the New York Public Library’s landmark 1911 main building on Fifth Avenue, reports Robin Pogrebin in the New York Times. Foster and his London firm, Foster & Partners, are to create a new circulation library in a space below the library’s Rose Reading Room and overlooking Bryant Park that now houses seven levels of stacks and a basement. “It’s the greatest project ever,” Foster said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. The area, which now measures 1.25 million cubic feet, will be completely reconfigured, with new rooms for children and teenagers and numerous computer workstations. The stacks are to move to an existing three-acre storage area beneath Bryant Park that is also to be renovated. Work is expected to be completed by 2013. “We had to have someone as good as Carrère & Hastings,” said Paul LeClerc, president of the library, referring to the original architects of the library’s Beaux Arts building, a city and national historic landmark. “We had to create a second masterpiece.” The project, which is expected to cost $250 million, is proceeding despite a steep economic downturn in which the city plans major budget cuts and in which fund-raising is expected to be an enormous challenge.
In other news, Suzanne Muchnic notes in the Los Angeles Times that a pair of ancient marble sculptures, Venus de’ Medici and Dancing Faun_, have long been major attractions at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. But two bronze casts of the works will in a few months become the centerpiece of the Neoclassical sculpture galleries at the J. Paul Getty Museum. The Getty recently purchased the life-size Hellenistic figures for an undisclosed sum from London dealer Daniel Katz, after the British Cultural Ministry’s effort to keep the artworks in England failed to raise the officially recommended price of about ten million dollars.
