Category Archives: Architecture – North America

In Search of Harmony

18 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Architecture - North America, Buildings - Canada, Museums - North America

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AKM Toronto 25

Eighteen years in the planning, the $300m Aga Khan Museum and Ismaili Centre complex in Toronto consists of two important buildings by octogenarian master architects – Japan’s Fumihiko Maki for the museum and India’s Charles Correa for the centre – in a new city park by Lebanon-based landscape architect Vladimir Djurovic. Exhibition design is by Adrien Gardère from Paris, so this is all as international as could be. The aim is to celebrate the artistic, intellectual and scientific achievements of Muslim societies from ancient times to the present, and to serve the Ismaili community of the area.

Read More: In Search of Harmony

See also: The Aga Khan Museum: Faith Healer

Zaha Hadid: Black Square, White Cube, and the Twenty-First Century Museum

11 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by in Architecture - North America

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Zaha HadidThe staircase of Zaha Hadid Architects’ recently opened Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University in East Lansing is sleek and straightforward. Its intention is functional; its design is simple (as simple as a contorted, suspended mass can be). A departure from the use of a traditional grand stairway as a means of announcing the authority of an American cultural institution, its narrow path cuts through three distinct levels of sensory experience, as each floor of the museum has been configured to showcase a varied permanent collection.

Read More: Zaha Hadid and the 21st-century Museum