Critic's Notebook: Eli Broad and the Diller Scofidio + Renfro museum design

The news that New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro has finally, officially been named architect of the new Broad Collection museum in downtown Los Angeles proves a couple of things quite clearly. One is that in a design competition as constrained and carefully controlled as the one Eli Broad has been running, a few big conceptual ideas dramatically presented — rather than an inventive treatment of a building's shape — can go a long way. Another is that a little flattery never hurts.

Because Broad from the start gave the six firms vying for the museum job such tight parameters, the high-powered private competition — which also included Rem Koolhaas, Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron and Tokyo firm SANAA — essentially produced six versions of a steel-framed box. (I was given exclusive access to the competition proposals a few weeks ago, before Broad made a final decision.) Each of the designs featured a rectangular museum building rising above a parking garage, open to the sidewalk along Grand Avenue and topped with skylit galleries.

The veil would be lifted up at two corners, with a particularly large opening at the corner of 2nd and Grand, where the museum comes nearest Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall. The architects see that gesture, in part, as a flirtatious one in the direction of the concert hall.


Read the whole story at Los Angeles Times Architecture Critic, by Christopher Hawthorne

Frank Kermode, 90, a Critic Who Wrote With Style, Is Dead

Photograph: Miriam Berkley
Frank Kermode about 1998.

Frank Kermode, who rose from humble origins to become one of England’s most respected and influential critics, died Tuesday at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 90.

His death was announced by The London Review of Books, which he helped create and to which he frequently contributed.

The author or editor of more than 50 books published over five decades, Mr. Kermode was probably best known for his studies of Shakespeare. But his range was wide, reaching from Beowulf to Philip Roth, from Homer to Ian McEwan, from the Bible to Don DeLillo. Along the way he devoted individual volumes to John Donne, Wallace Stevens and D. H. Lawrence. Unrelentingly productive, he published “Concerning E. M. Forster” just last December.

Mr. Kermode’s critics sometimes faulted him for a deliberately difficult style and what Mr. Lodge called “intellectual dandyism.” Although in “The Art of Telling” Mr. Kermode suggested that innovative French approaches to literary criticism like structuralism and deconstructionism might eventually find at least some place in the mainstream, he took to task some of the more radical attempts to subvert traditional texts through gender or racial perspectives. In “An Appetite for Poetry” (Harvard, 1989) he reaffirmed his belief in the value of reading literary classics as a way of gauging both ideals of permanence and the forces of change.


Read the whole story at The New York Times, by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt