Another Museum Expansion Gets Off The Ground

“After a yearlong search, trustees of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History have chosen Fentress Bradburn Architects of Denver, a firm known for its highly memorable airports and museums, to design its expansion and renovation.” No timetable has yet been set for construction, but the museum has asked the firm to present a proposal within six months.

Conviction, Prison Time In Hermitage Theft

“The husband of a late curator at Russia’s most famous museum was convicted Thursday in the theft of dozens of art objects and sentenced to five years in prison. Nikolai Zavadsky also was ordered by Dzerzhinsky District Court to pay $283,000 (U.S.) in damages to the Hermitage… [The] museum announced last July that 221 items, including jewellery, religious icons, silverware and richly enameled objects worth about $5-million had been stolen.”

LACMA’s Sudden Interest In Real Estate

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is embarking on an ambitious and unprecedented plan “to collect significant pieces of midcentury residential architecture, including houses by Rudolf M. Schindler, Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright and his son Lloyd Wright, and to treat them as both museum objects and as residences for curators… The idea has already started to generate chatter in the architecture community.”

The Musical Of 1,000 Creators

Bringing a musical to Broadway is always an uphill battle, but for the first new Kander & Ebb musical in years, it’s been a theatrical melodrama of epic proportions. The death of lyricist Fred Ebb in 2004 threw the production into uncertainty, and the eventual completion of the work was thanks to an almost unprecedented level of collaboration.

From Mario To Mozart

Just as the people who design video games are finally gaining respect as artists of one sort or another, those who write the music for the adventures are starting to be recognized in the same way that film composers have been for decades. And while gaming music has only recently embraced the full symphonic scale that epic games have long demanded, one Japanese composer has been churning out the hits ever since Mario and Luigi started bopping turtles.

Norman Foster Building Remakes Corner Of Moscow

“The project will replace one of the most notorious buildings of the Soviet period, the gargantuan 1960s-era Rossiya Hotel, on a critical site overlooking St. Basil’s Cathedral and the Kremlin. A sleek complex of buildings with classical overtones, it will include 470,000 square feet of retail space, four hotels and a 2,500-seat performance hall, making it the largest single development in the historic core of Moscow since the Soviet empire collapsed 15 years ago.”