SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM WILL REMAIN LIGHT GRAY; ROBERT WILSON TO DUMBO
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum will remain light gray, reports the New York Times. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission decided today that the Guggenheim should maintain the same off-white paint shade that it has had since 1992, when a major expansion of the museum by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects was completed, rather than the original light yellow. The spiraling museum on Fifth Avenue, a 1959 masterpiece by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, is in the midst of a twenty-nine-million-dollar renovation. As part of the project, conservators stripped away eleven layers of paint from the original building’s exterior and found that it was originally coated with vinyl paint in the brownish yellow shade known as buff. After a lively discussion that included a presentation by Thomas Krens, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the commission voted, seven to two, in favor of the contemporary light gray (a paint known as Tnemec BF72 Platinum), over the original light yellow (a shade very similar to Benjamin Moore HC-35).
In other news, New York magazine reports on Sunday that four months ago, avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson was evicted from the Vestry Street loft he’d lived and worked in for thirty-four years by developer Aby Rosen. Now Wilson has signed a lease at 111 Front Street, where he’ll unveil a twenty-four-hundred-square-foot gallery in January. “I do not like SoHo so much anymore,” Wilson says. “DUMBO seems more interesting. It reminds me a little of Tribeca thirty years ago.” Wilson’s new building is owned by David Walentas’s Two Trees company, which has a policy of subsidizing the arts to spice up the neighborhood it owns so much of. The company gave Wilson and his Byrd Hoffman Foundation a break on the lease. “We really wanted the esteemed Robert Wilson in DUMBO,” said Zannah Mass, Two Trees’ cultural-affairs director.
