Zaha Hadid, considered by many to be today's hottest international architect, has been selected to do the preliminary design for the Haymarket expansion of the Sheldon Museum of Art.
Associates from Hadid's London-based firm, Zaha Hadid Architects, will be in Lincoln on Thursday to present the initial design to University of Nebraska-Lincoln officials, including Sheldon Director J. Daniel Veneciano, representatives of the chancellor's office and the University of Nebraska Foundation.
As previously announced, the new building will be at Ninth and S streets in space now occupied by the University of Nebraska Press warehouse. No start date for the project has been set. It will not be completed before the end of 2011.
Money to pay for the building will come entirely from donations.
Veneciano has seen what he called rough designs for the new museum.
"It has the curvatures of Zaha's work," he said. "It's not a boxlike structure. What intrigues me about it is it kind of combines a futuristic architectural sense with a kind of, what I call, pioneer architecture.
"It calls to the future and looks to the past in some ways. But it interprets the past in a forward-looking way."
The footprint of the new building will be slightly smaller than the warehouse it would replace, but it will be twice as tall, at four floors the same height as the hotel being planned for the adjoining property.
Veneciano said he is confident the expansion will happen, providing a new entryway to Lincoln featuring a building by one of the world's top architects.
"It is too important a project to not complete," he said. "Given the architect at this time, the project is now too dynamic, too exciting to let go. ...In my opinion, this will be the most important building in Lincoln since the Sheldon."
As a former Lincolnite, born and raised, I'm so excited about this. What a great choice of architect. Omaha should really take note and farm out some future buildings to young, world-renowned architects. I'm thinking a new downtown library and Joslyn satellite gallery.
Hadid is one of the world's premier architects. This is exciting stuff. Â I think the Sheldon Museum has one of the best collections of 20th Century modernism in the country, but not many people outside of Nebraska have even heard of it. Â World renown architect Phillip Johnson designed the original building in 1963. Â Now all we need is to find the money to build a museum to house the Phillip Schrager collection, Omaha's best kept art secret.
The proposed Haymarket expansion of the Sheldon Museum of Art will be a curved, rounded, organic-appearing structure with several terraces, and it will be porous in design to create multiple views inside and from the inside out.
That description of the building was provided Tuesday by Patrik Schumacher, director and senior designer of Zaha Hadid Architects, the London-based firm that has created the preliminary design for the new building that would be at Ninth and S streets.
Have they released any of the starkitectural drawings yet?
"The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city."
Lewis Mumford, The Highway and the City, 1963
The earliest(that I'm aware of?) mention of an expansion for the Sheldon was an underground extension of the existing museum building to the west, under the current sculpture "garden". Â As a purest (protect the Johnson design, don't dilute it with an addition/ satellite location), that was my choice, but who sees "underground" architecture, anyway?
We're now into the "we have the world renown architect..." Â etc. for our project to expand the Sheldon. Â The future will be driven by economics... as if Philip Johnson wasn't god enough, (pun intended).