The big news of the weekend broke late on Friday: The Art Institute of Chicago has closed the top floor of its Modern Wing for a sudden renovation. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that the third-floor European galleries will not be re-opened until April 2014. The Modern Wing is only four years old.
The Modern Wing's designer, Renzo Piano—who turned 76 on Saturday, hbd!—spent the weekend in the news. The Boston Globe ran a story on the Harvard Art Museums project nearing its completion. (That story's buried behind a paywall; here's the latest update from ARCHITECT explaining the construction on those museums.) And Michael Granberry previewed Piano's new roof system for the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.
Piano, who is now an honorary Italian senator, finds himself in the cross-hairs of one Lee Rosenbaum, who has written recently on what she describes as his "fussy and pricey" roof systems.
More news—starting in Chicago. The Institute for Market Transformation announces that the Chicago City Council has passed an energy use–benchmarking ordinance. [IMT]
Energy security and productivity in the U.S. is better than the nation has seen in decades. [The New York Times]
More on building energy use, from Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.). [National Journal]
Calvin Tomkins on David Adjaye's National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is two years away from opening. [The New Yorker]
Enrique Norten and Handel Architects will team up on the Mexican Museum. [San Francisco Examiner]
Harvard University architecture professor Daniel Schodek has died at 72. [The Boston Globe]
Profile of a young Montana architect, Dani Cloutier. [Great Falls Tribune]
Image used with permission courtesy a Creative Commons license with Flickr user David B. Gleason.
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