Exhibitions conclude PST with free admission

Nineteen Southern California cultural institutions, including the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, will bid farewell to Pacific Standard Time with free admission on Saturday, March 31. (Note: The AD&A Museum at UCSB, included on the list, always offers free admission.) Click here for a flyer with links to all participating exhibitions.

New Google Street Views of the Amazon and Russian Highlights

Google Street View, which in the past created the Google Art Project, now offers the armchair tourist two new areas to explore: the Amazon River and Rain Forest or famous Russian buildings and parks. The unveiling of the Amazon collection coincides with World Forestry Day (March 21) and World Water Day (March 22) 2012 and includes behind-the-scenes videos of how they captured these spectacular views.

To experience other Google Street View collections, click here.

Getty announces Conserving Modern Architecture Initiative (CMAI)

Among the Getty Conservation Institute‘s current projects is the Conserving Modern Architecture Initiative (CMAI), “a comprehensive, long-term, and international program…to advance the practice of conserving twentieth-century heritage, with a focus on modern architecture.” This includes the Eames House (Case Study House No. 8; photo above), but the CMAI website includes an image gallery and related materials to all the projects in the CMAI program. Starting mid-year 2012, the GCI will also host a series of talks relating to issues and challenges in conserving modern architecture.

Today at 6:00 – Kenneth Frampton lecture

Columbia University Professor of Architecture Kenneth Frampton will be giving the 2012 Albert Frey lecture today, March 16, at 6:00 at the Loma Pelona Center.  The lecture is entitled “Megaform as Urban Landscape,” and “seeks to trace the emergence of the megaform as a potential critical strategy for dealing with the de facto, space endlessness of modern, urban development.”  Click here for additional information, or visit the UCSB museum website.

National Gallery of Art launches new image resource with open access policy

Public and educational access to the National Gallery of Art’s collection just got a whole lot easier – all of its images believed to be in the public domain are now available for educational use, publication, and “personal enrichment”.  NGA Images contains more than 20,000 open access images, searchable and browsable through a very clean interface.   Users can save images to a “lightbox”, download a teaching size image (1200 pixels) or download a publication-quality image (after signing in and reading the use agreement) free of charge for any use.  The open access policy is available to read here.

Ernst L. Freud: Architect to the Bourgeoisie of Weimar Germany

Update to our post from December 2011 on the recent publication by UCSB architectural historian Prof. Volker Welter, Ernst L. Freud, Architect: The Case of the Modern Bourgeois Home:

A new essay in the online journal Berfrois (“Intellectual Jousting in the Republic of Letters”) elaborates with a personal angle.