http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/arts/design/millions-of-square-feet-billions-of-dollars-an-arts-universe-expands.html 2016-09-16 19:13:56 Millions of Square Feet, Billions of Dollars: An Arts Universe Expands While the years directly following the financial crisis were quiet ones for cultural construction, all that has changed, and not just in this country. === If you need proof of the adage “When the economy sneezes, the arts catch a cold,” consider this: Between 1994 and 2008, the United States added or expanded more than 700 cultural projects, valued at $15.5 billion, according to a University of Chicago study. By 2010, after the housing bubble had burst, “We were happy just to be invited to compete,” said Chris McVoy, senior partner in the New York City-based architecture firm of Fast forward: Between now and next fall, Mr. Holl’s office will dedicate five major arts projects in the United States. In the same period, dozens of new cultural commissions will open around the world, many by the biggest names in the architectural business, including David Adjaye, Herzog & de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas/OMA, Thomas Heatherwick, Fumihiko Maki, Mecanoo, and Robert A. M. Stern. Architects are once again fully engaged in the invention — and reinvention — of cultural landscapes, for the first time since the Great Recession sent many of these projects into flat files. Thanks to pioneers like the Tate Modern, other institutions are discovering that architectural recycling may be good for more than just the environment. On Nov. 24, London’s expanded Design Museum moves to Kensington. The museum’s But it will do more than that. The Heatherwick Studio’s Heatherwick maintains the impressive visual power of the building’s original appearance by preserving the silos along its perimeter. In slicing through the bundle’s interior tubes — and then capping them in glass — the designer creates spectacular, Piranesian volumes, some filled with circular staircases, others with pistonlike elevators, and a central lobby wide open and streaming with daylight from above. Daylight also will flow into hitherto unseen parts of I.M. Pei’s East Building of the The Tate Modern’s renowned Swiss architects, Herzog & de Meuron, are completing another potential blockbuster, transforming a brooding, 10-story brick warehouse along the banks of Hamburg’s Elbe River into a glittering — and gigantic — No less striking than its mammoth scale is the building’s dynamic form: a scalloped, prismatic glass volume soaring 200 feet above the opaque, triangular mass of the warehouse. The joint between the two is the observation deck (reached by a 200-foot curving escalator). Within the glass volume is the 2,100-seat main concert hall, with acoustic design by The size and cost of the Elbphilharmonie may be eye-popping, but remarkably, they are hardly unique. Finishing construction this fall and scheduled to open in early 2017 (the date keeps changing), Louvre Abu Dhabi drops 55 buildings into an artificial lake at the edge of the Persian Gulf, then shades them all under one faceted metal dome that is 500 feet across and hovers 10 floors above the water. Designed by Still not big enough? The The scale may not equal Kaohsiung, but at several American universities, a push for interdisciplinary research is beginning to yield innovative building types. Steven Holl’s 126,000-square-foot Visual Arts Building at the University of Iowa forms a quadrangle with the firm’s earlier School of Art and Art History (2006). Opening for classes this fall, the building tries to break down the disciplinary and functional compartmentalization that are typical in the academic art world, in favor of flowing spaces that sweep people together, ready or not. The Los Angeles-based architect The upstart New York architects of Finally, at the junction of Kent State University and the town of Kent, Ohio, Weiss/Manfredi’s 117,000-square-foot Urbanism is also on view in what may be the most viscerally satisfying new project of the season. Until now, the Chicago River has been a missed civic opportunity. But this fall, the architect