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February 07, 2008, 10:59 AM ET
Shop Talk: on Master Plans and Piano
Sticking to a plan: A lengthy article in The Eyeopener charts Ryerson University’s reinvention through architecture and campus planning. The university hired Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg as its master-planning firm. KPMB, as the firm is called, had some difficulties with projects at the University of British Columbia’s new Okanagan campus. The firm designed a master plan for the campus, based on pedestrian-friendly spaces, but it was never followed. Now the firm is set to bring the same sort of plan to Ryerson. Already pundits and critics have said that Ryerson has an opportunity to create the campus environment it sorely needs.
Needing a plan: Indiana University’s campuses will go through a master-planning process led by David King of SmithGroup, according to an article in The Indianapolis Star. “IU President Michael A. McRobbie, who took office last summer, pressed for the appointment of a new master planner with fresh ideas because he sees the university constructing millions of square feet of new space in the next 20 years,” the article says. The new plan for IUPUI will replace an outdated one created in the 1970s. That campus plans to erect a building every year for the next 10 years.
Piano forte: After hiring him to design scores of civic buildings across the country, “it’s time for timid trustees to give Renzo a rest,” writes James S. Russell, Bloomberg’s U.S. architecture critic. Renzo Piano, who just started on an arts complex at Columbia University, has designed museums at Harvard University and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in the Boston area; the High Museum of Art in Atlanta; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Nasher Sculpture Center and Kimbell Art Museum in Texas; and the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco — just to name a few recent projects. “No architect has ever dominated the design of great civic institutions as Piano now does, not even in the ‘City Beautiful’ museum-building frenzy of a century ago,” Mr. Russell writes. The architect has been brilliant, particularly in designing buildings like the Beyeler Foundation Museum in Switzerland. “Yet too many risk-averse boards run to Renzo asking him to recycle these masterpieces for them. They are shortchanging themselves and their collections.”
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