Guggenheim Museum

The Philadelphia Museum of Art on Tuesday pulled off what had to be a first for the city: More than a hundred of Philadelphia's wealthiest, most culturally connected citizens gathered at the museum to celebrate the ground-breaking for a loading dock. Never have so many come to marvel at the site of future truck bays. Trumpets rang out. Smoked salmon-bearing waiters wove in and out of the crowd. At its center was impish, 81-year-old architect Frank Gehry, all in black, shock of white hair riffling in the breeze, confiding with a smile, "I'm just a little guy. " To be fair, all the hoopla was not simply for what the museum officially terms its new Art Handling Facility, about 68,000 square feet of new backstage space.

When in Rome, do as the Rom-coms do? If only. An inert comedy starring Kristen Bell as a workaholic unlucky in love, When in Rome is a rom-bomb. When lovelorn Beth (Bell), scoops up a handful of coins from Rome's "fountain of love" (not the Trevi, but Trevi-like), she doesn't know she's messing with magic. The men who tossed coins in the pool wishing for love each fall for her, complicating her overscheduled life. Beth, a curator at the Guggenheim Museum whose work looks more like party-planning, gets jilted by her longtime beau on what seems to be the same night she learns that her baby sister (Alexis Dziena)

In recent years, Thomas Krens, the entrepreneurial head of the Guggenheim Museum, has turned over the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral in New York to motorcycles and to Giorgio Armani. Curatorial values increasingly take a back seat to the commercial tie-ins that fuel Krens' stated vision of a global Guggenheim empire. With the enormous success of the museum's branch in Bilbao, Spain, it is not surprising that Krens is attempting to franchise its architect, Frank Gehry, through a gigantic retrospective.

Hannah Kohn, 105, of Rittenhouse Square, an artist and dress-shop owner, died Friday at her home. In the late 1990s, Mrs. Kohn's son, Eugene, put on an exhibit of his mother's paintings and invited nearly 300 of the rich and famous to the gathering in Philadelphia. Among the guests was Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan. He promised Mrs. Kohn that if she lived to be 100, he would give her a show at the Guggenheim. So, for Mrs. Kohn's 100th birthday celebration in 2002, her family and friends frolicked among the Picassos and her artwork at the Guggenheim.

Rarely has a new building enjoyed as much acclaim as the Guggenheim Museum's newest branch did when it opened on the esplanade along the River Nervion here in 1997. Its shining fish-scale-like exterior was lavishly praised by international critics, putting this industrial port city on the map for thousands of tourists. Architect Frank O. Gehry's bold design earned him near-mythic status in his profession, and one of his most eminent rivals, architect Philip Johnson, called it the "greatest building of our time.

This year's implosion of the real estate market brought a distinct and frenetic period of architectural creativity to a decisive close. Now that it's all over, it seems increasingly clear that historians will date the start of this just-concluded era to a September day in 1997 when Frank Gehry's paradigm-shifting Guggenheim Museum opened in Bilbao. Gehry's shimmering, still-exciting pile-up of sculpted forms in that Spanish rust-belt city rescued architecture from the last smoldering cliches of post-modernism.

Best bet for Barnes The problems that have beset the Barnes Foundation are well known; how to resolve them realistically and with respect for Dr. Albert C. Barnes' wishes is quite another thing. William Wermuth's proposal ("A Merion option for Barnes," April 18) to create a parking lot and new access to the Barnes on land now owned by Episcopal Academy makes perfect sense, being realistic and sympathetic at the same time. Money, of course, is a big issue. Would the benefactors who are supporting the Barnes in a move and new museum for Philadelphia fund the purchase of the academy property and consider opening a smaller Barnes collection museum in the city?

To visit the Getty Center, this hilltop Xanadu, you leave your car behind and board an air-cushioned, driverless tram for the long ride up the chaparral-covered hillside, as you watch the apparently endless grid of the Los Angeles basin unfold before you. In less than five minutes, you step out onto the travertine-marble arrival plaza - and are literally dazzled. All that sun blazing on bone-white metal, reflecting off glass and bouncing from near-white stone, makes a blinding first impression.

No question about it, art museums in the United States are growing like Topsy. From Boston to Los Angeles, from New York City to Chicago to Dallas, museums are either planning, building or wrapping up wholesale expansion programs - programs that already have radically altered facades and floor plans or are expected to do so in the not-too-distant future. In New York City alone, six major institutions - the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the American Crafts Museum - recently have spread up and out into the neighborhoods and air space around them, or are preparing to do so. The reasons for this confluence of activity are complex, but one factor is a consideration everywhere - space.

Visitors tend to get swallowed up in midtown, a section so dizzyingly distracting that the rest of the city often goes virtually unexplored, outside of an occasional foray south to Greenwich Village or SoHo, or north to Lincoln Center. But there are other sides to Manhattan. Only by working for awhile as a cook at an upper Madison Avenue restaurant did I get to know the historic neighborhood called Carnegie Hill, just beyond the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on the East Side.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art on Tuesday pulled off what had to be a first for the city: More than a hundred of Philadelphia's wealthiest, most culturally connected citizens gathered at the museum to celebrate the ground-breaking for a loading dock. Never have so many come to marvel at the site of future truck bays. Trumpets rang out. Smoked salmon-bearing waiters wove in and out of the crowd. At its center was impish, 81-year-old architect Frank Gehry, all in black, shock of white hair riffling in the breeze, confiding with a smile, "I'm just a little guy. " To be fair, all the hoopla was not simply for what the museum officially terms its new Art Handling Facility, about 68,000 square feet of new backstage space.

When in Rome, do as the Rom-coms do? If only. An inert comedy starring Kristen Bell as a workaholic unlucky in love, When in Rome is a rom-bomb. When lovelorn Beth (Bell), scoops up a handful of coins from Rome's "fountain of love" (not the Trevi, but Trevi-like), she doesn't know she's messing with magic. The men who tossed coins in the pool wishing for love each fall for her, complicating her overscheduled life. Beth, a curator at the Guggenheim Museum whose work looks more like party-planning, gets jilted by her longtime beau on what seems to be the same night she learns that her baby sister (Alexis Dziena)

This year's implosion of the real estate market brought a distinct and frenetic period of architectural creativity to a decisive close. Now that it's all over, it seems increasingly clear that historians will date the start of this just-concluded era to a September day in 1997 when Frank Gehry's paradigm-shifting Guggenheim Museum opened in Bilbao. Gehry's shimmering, still-exciting pile-up of sculpted forms in that Spanish rust-belt city rescued architecture from the last smoldering cliches of post-modernism.

Hannah Kohn, 105, of Rittenhouse Square, an artist and dress-shop owner, died Friday at her home. In the late 1990s, Mrs. Kohn's son, Eugene, put on an exhibit of his mother's paintings and invited nearly 300 of the rich and famous to the gathering in Philadelphia. Among the guests was Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan. He promised Mrs. Kohn that if she lived to be 100, he would give her a show at the Guggenheim. So, for Mrs. Kohn's 100th birthday celebration in 2002, her family and friends frolicked among the Picassos and her artwork at the Guggenheim.

Best bet for Barnes The problems that have beset the Barnes Foundation are well known; how to resolve them realistically and with respect for Dr. Albert C. Barnes' wishes is quite another thing. William Wermuth's proposal ("A Merion option for Barnes," April 18) to create a parking lot and new access to the Barnes on land now owned by Episcopal Academy makes perfect sense, being realistic and sympathetic at the same time. Money, of course, is a big issue. Would the benefactors who are supporting the Barnes in a move and new museum for Philadelphia fund the purchase of the academy property and consider opening a smaller Barnes collection museum in the city?

In recent years, Thomas Krens, the entrepreneurial head of the Guggenheim Museum, has turned over the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral in New York to motorcycles and to Giorgio Armani. Curatorial values increasingly take a back seat to the commercial tie-ins that fuel Krens' stated vision of a global Guggenheim empire. With the enormous success of the museum's branch in Bilbao, Spain, it is not surprising that Krens is attempting to franchise its architect, Frank Gehry, through a gigantic retrospective.

Rarely has a new building enjoyed as much acclaim as the Guggenheim Museum's newest branch did when it opened on the esplanade along the River Nervion here in 1997. Its shining fish-scale-like exterior was lavishly praised by international critics, putting this industrial port city on the map for thousands of tourists. Architect Frank O. Gehry's bold design earned him near-mythic status in his profession, and one of his most eminent rivals, architect Philip Johnson, called it the "greatest building of our time.

To visit the Getty Center, this hilltop Xanadu, you leave your car behind and board an air-cushioned, driverless tram for the long ride up the chaparral-covered hillside, as you watch the apparently endless grid of the Los Angeles basin unfold before you. In less than five minutes, you step out onto the travertine-marble arrival plaza - and are literally dazzled. All that sun blazing on bone-white metal, reflecting off glass and bouncing from near-white stone, makes a blinding first impression.

Visitors tend to get swallowed up in midtown, a section so dizzyingly distracting that the rest of the city often goes virtually unexplored, outside of an occasional foray south to Greenwich Village or SoHo, or north to Lincoln Center. But there are other sides to Manhattan. Only by working for awhile as a cook at an upper Madison Avenue restaurant did I get to know the historic neighborhood called Carnegie Hill, just beyond the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on the East Side.

No question about it, art museums in the United States are growing like Topsy. From Boston to Los Angeles, from New York City to Chicago to Dallas, museums are either planning, building or wrapping up wholesale expansion programs - programs that already have radically altered facades and floor plans or are expected to do so in the not-too-distant future. In New York City alone, six major institutions - the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the American Crafts Museum - recently have spread up and out into the neighborhoods and air space around them, or are preparing to do so. The reasons for this confluence of activity are complex, but one factor is a consideration everywhere - space.