Tag: gilbert and george

Postcard from Palermo, Sicily: ‘Crazy enlightenment project’ bridges centuries

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Above: A contemporary overhead walkway sensuously links galleries in a recently renovated 18th-century palace, Palazzo Butera.

At first, I tried to resist, but Francesca insisted, saying, ‘You can fulfill all of your dreams here.’” 

Massimo Valsecchi, interviewed by Elaine Sciolino for an article published in The New York Times on September 26, 2024

We stayed in the Kalsa District, the old Arab quarter in Palermo, for a month in the spring of 2023. This meant we strolled upon a portion of an impressively long tiled veranda addressing the sea numerous times. However, we were clueless about the possibility of visiting the adjacent Palazzo Butera to discover the beauty contained within its walls.

Freshly renovated, the palace did not open its doors to the public as a museum until 2021 and, when we visited, still seemed the city’s best-kept secret. It certainly hadn’t made the guidebooks yet. The New York Times article quoted above nudged me to retrieve this postcard from the backlog of unmailed ones.

‘Everyone said we were mad,’ a serene Francesca Valsecchi admits with a smile as she recalls the decision she and her husband Massimo took in 2015, when they moved from an apartment in Cadogan Square in London to the colossal Palazzo Butera in Palermo…. what Massimo describes as his ‘crazy Enlightenment project.’”

Susan Moore, Apollo Magazine, August 30, 2022

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Postcard from Bilbao, Spain: Art scarcely has a chance to shine

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Above: Detail of “Tall Tree and the Big Eye,” Anish Kapoor

Guggenheim Bilbao has turned 25. While 25 years is but a small blip on my age chart, I feared it might prove too long to wait to visit architect Frank Gehry‘s monumental project. People described it as a ship, a giant flower, a fish with shimmering titanium scales. Would it simply seem dated, as much contemporary architecture does after a decade?

My answer is no! It’s a massive, awe-inspiring, sculpture – its scale rendering it overwhelming both inside and out. The deconstructive shapes seem not unlike the Pablo Picasso sculptures of women featured in a major exhibition while we were there. Or Richard Serra’s curvilinear weathered-steel sculpture, “A Matter of Time,” drawing people inside like a giant human mousetrap.

Even spectacular, large-scale artworks encounter difficulties asserting themselves inside the soaring sensuous interior. This is a building one would pay to explore even if there were no art inside.

Maybe that should not be a conflict up for debate. So often architecture is dumbed down by budget, with function superseding inspirational design.

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