Architects

Peter Zumthor is now $100,000 richer, and you probably have no idea who he is. The reclusive, introverted Swiss architect won the highly coveted Pritzker Prize. Zumthor is well-known in the architecture field – revered, even – but few know of him otherwise.

At first, little on Zumthor's resume. He's built a one-room chapel in a German farm field. A public bath and a handful of museums also bear his visual signature. Of course, an interpretive center at the size of what was once Gestapo headquarters catches a bit of attention, but that's about it. His style is austere, not what usually forces its way into the headlines.

The Pritzker jury chose Zumthor largely because this isn't the best time to reward ostentation. The Swiss architect's approach, which focuses only on the essentials, is effectively calibrated to global sentiment ... and brutal fiscal reality.

Zumthor will receive his gold medallion and check at the grand Legislative Palace of the City Council on May 29, 2009 in Buenos Aires. Look for him on the red carpet ... kidding.

The avant-garde super-yacht designed by famed British architect Lord Norman Foster for UK fractional ownership firm YachtPlus is nearing completion and should be available next month. My colleague Deidre Woollard first reported on the luxurious project last year. The high-tech 132-ft. Foster-designed "Signature Series" craft is the first in YachtPlus' fleet, each of which will have eight owners at a share price of about $2 million each, bringing the total cost to about $16 million. Construction on the flagship steel-jacketed vessel is in its final phase at the state-of-the-art Rodriquez Cantieri Navali (RCN) shipyard in Italy. Aside from it's eye-popping design, the company claims Foster's yacht offers more deck space, interior comfort and glass surfaces than any equivalent craft of her size.

Kate Taylor writing for the NY Sun has a provocative piece on the massive flood of museum expansions around the world. When the Frank Gehry-designed Bilbao Guggenheim opened ten years ago the world questioned whether or not people would make the trek to Bilbao, Spain for the beautiful building. It almost seems like a foolish speculation now. Since then museum projects have sprung up all around the world with bigger buildings and bigger budgets. But what will the future hold for these massive expansions, will they be seen as the monumental establishment of an arts-based culture or will they seem like just so much architectural foolishness, possibly even bankrupting the museums they tried to expand?

Taylor's article says that the answer is different for each project. The Denver Art Museum for example, which opened a new building by starchitect Daniel Libeskind last fall, thought that the expansion would bring them a million new visitors in the first year. Instead, it received just 630,000. Even the stunningly beautiful Santiago Calatrava addition at the Milwaukee Art Museum caused the museum to go into debt for a few years although now the museum does nearly double the traffic it did before the expansion. For the cities, a distinctive new building, especially one built by a name architect is also a matter of civic pride. But a large new building requires new methods of income often including restaurants, larger museum shops and special exhibition galleries. The focus on revenue rather than arts doesn't sit well with some museum leaders.

The biggest news on the museum front may just be the expansion into markets like China and the Middle East. The government of Abu Dhabi is planning a $27 billion "cultural district" on Saadiyat Island that will be home to a Gehry-designed Guggenheim, a Louvre Abu Dhabi designed by Jean Nouvel and a performing arts center designed by Zaha Hadid. In China museums funded both by the state and private organizations are booming. The branding of museums all around the world with Western names and in some cases borrowed Western collections seems to be a major trend uniting Eastern cash with Western experience. This may not be a situation that sits well with purists but culture is a commodity and even museums are not immune from the power of branding.