26 Rooms Shaping Culture
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The Shape of Creative Ambition
The Park Avenue Armory
Built in 1880 and designed by architect Charles W. Clinton, the Park Avenue Armory in New York City is a Gothic Revival jewel featuring interior work by a Mount Rushmore of visual design, including Louis Comfort Tiffany and Stanford White.
Now undergoing a $215M restoration by Herzog & de Meuron, the building has deep NYC roots. Commissioned by the Civil War–era 7th Regiment, known for its blueblood members, it served as a command center for the National Guard after 9/11.
Wade Thompson Drill Hall, at a sprawling 55,000 square feet, has served ambitious, large-scale works in the performing and visual arts, including the final performances of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Sam Mendes’s The Lehman Trilogy, and Carrie Mae Weems’s The Shape of Things.
The spring season kicks off in March with Illinoise, an adaptation of Sufjan Stevens’s 2005 album Illinois, conceived by director-choreographer Justin Peck as a singular theatrical experience incorporating dance, live music, and folk storytelling.
The Armory also hosts resident artists—including playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and performance artist Carmelita Tropicana—and guests like fashion designer Marc Jacobs. — Erik Maza
The Shape of Brushstrokes
Kurimanzutto
The art world’s new leading lights are emerging from a Mexico City gallery marking 25 years.
For one afternoon in February, the hottest taqueria in Mexico City was inside a former lumberyard in the neighborhood of San Miguel Chapultepec, not far from Luis Barragán’s famed Casa Gilardi. It was there, at Kurimanzutto, that the art world gathered during the 20th anniversary of the influential Zona Maco fair to toast Gabriel Orozco, who had just opened an acclaimed exhibit that was a shared milestone for both the artist and the gallery he helped establish 25 years ago. Back then, co-founders Mónica Manzutto and José Kuri brought a gonzo approach to exhibiting, staging provocative, genre-busting shows off the beaten path—in a shipping container, in an amusement park bumper car ride, even inside their apartment.
The Shape of Your Collection
The Shape of Phish Head Vacations
Sphere
Vegas’s new $2 billion venue is the only sure bet in town.
When Sphere opened in 2023, the Las Vegas venue—which reportedly cost $2.3 billion to build—was immediately clogging everyone’s feed with its eye-popping exterior. The 366-foot-tall orb is wrapped in LED panels, which means it can look like anything from the surface of the moon to a giant emoji—or a really expensive advertisement. (Spots during the Super Bowl were rumored to run $2 million.)
The Shape of Seating Charts
Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity
Behind the scenes of the Eames Archive Room.
Husband and wife Charles and Ray Eames designed thousands of objects in the middle of the last century, from tables and textiles to houses and—most famously—chairs. Earlier this year the Eames Institute opened a new headquarters in the Bay Area where the public can now see examples of the duo’s work assembled in one place. The seating alone—some of which never made it past prototype—is worth the visit, but the myriad other creations recall Charles’s statement about design: “Eventually everything connects—people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se."
The Shape of Words to Come
MacDowell Sorosis Studio
Things are happening in the New Hampshire woods at the 117-year-old MacDowell artist residency.
“My biggest memory of MacDowell is that I stayed at Sorosis Studio, where historically all the psychics get placed. It’s where I discovered that I could see into people’s past and future to unlock secrets about their present. This wasn’t burdensome. It gave me the chance to understand that that’s what I wanted to do with my work. I know this sounds silly, and in part it is, but it’s also true. Ask Amy Herzog!”—Playwright Jeremy O. Harris, 2015 Fellow
The Shape of Our Faces
The Well Residences
Let’s all just move to the spa?
Today’s true health enthusiast wants to be immersed in wellness 24/7—and is willing to pay for it. As of January more than half of the 54 residences at the Well, in Bay Harbor Islands, Florida, which start at $1.25 million, had been sold, and the property won’t be finished until 2025. Attractions include not just custom air filtration systems, aromatherapy diffusers, in-kitchen hydroponic gardens, and an option for lymph-stimulating showers, but also access to the Well spa and a 24-hour wellness concierge who books classes, sends practitioners to your home for private sessions, and lends state-of-the-art gadgets from a “wellness library” on demand.
The Shape of Future Revivals
The Apollo Stages at the Victoria
Front row at a reborn Harlem icon.
1917: Year the Victoria Theater opened on West 125th Street in Harlem. It was designed as a vaudeville house–cum–cinema by Thomas Lamb, one of the era’s most sought-after theater architects.
27: Stories in the tower that has been constructed above the theater. It has apartments, retail spaces, a hotel, and a restaurant—and is the tallest residential building in Harlem.
7: Years it took to restore the Victoria, which was closed for decades and had been partly demolished. Now the landmark belongs to its neighbor, the Apollo, marking that venue’s first physical expansion in its 90-year history.
25,000: Square footage of the Apollo Stages at the Victoria, as the space is formally known, which feature two state-of-the-art black box theaters with a total of 298 seats.
The Shape of Your Playlist
The Eighth Room
Music’s next big things? Onstage at Nashville’s Eighth Room.
“Curation is everything, isn’t it? When you’re in the music business, you always have it in your head that it would be cool to own your own bar. This location was an old music venue, and when it closed we got the idea that we needed to save this stage. I’m not looking for the average local band. I’m looking for the local band that wants to come in and become rock stars—and there is a difference. I believe that our stage is something that you’re going to have to work hard to get.” —Jason Hollis, owner
The Shape of The Top 40
The Shape of the New Classics
Louisville Orchestra
Look for the man behind the curve.
“Podiums are funny, because in many concert halls they’re an afterthought,” says Teddy Abrams, the music director of Kentucky’s Grammy-winning Louisville Orchestra. “That was certainly the case with us.” That is, until Irish designer Joseph Walsh, whose work is in the permanent collections of the Met and the Centre Pompidou, stepped in. Walsh wanted to honor his friends Julie and Bill Ballard, and since “he knew they loved the orchestra,” Abrams says, “he wanted to build us a conductor’s rail.” When the resulting piece makes its debut during an April gala performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the conductor’s rail at one of America’s most celebrated orchestras will never be an afterthought again.
The Shape of Summer Reading
Amor Towles’s Table for Two describes the Beverly Hills Hotel lobby perfectly.
“To refer to that space as a lobby was to commit a crime of nomenclature. In such a room did Kubla Khan hold court. It was a geographic pinpoint through which within the hour the world would come and go. Misguided financiers newly arrived from Manhattan with a single change of clothes would soon be signing the registry. Delivery boys would be appearing with elaborate flower arrangements commissioned to express admiration or regret. And the town’s young Turks on their way to the bar would pass the late-lunching titans they aspired to supplant.”—Amor Towles
The Shape of Triumph
Musée d’Orsay
What awaits you in Room 9 at the Musée d’Orsay’s Impressionist show.
Some 130 works by 31 artists are on display at the Musée d’Orsay in “Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism,” which marks the 150th anniversary of the show that launched the movement. But of all the pieces across the 10 galleries, one stands out.
The Shape of Power
The White House Situation Room
An insider inside the Situation Room.
We’ve seen glimpses of it over the years, with presidents Johnson, Reagan, or Bush inside it during national emergencies, or Barack Obama watching the Osama Bin Laden raid unfold. They were in the Situation Room, the high-security White House command complex where presidents go when things get complicated. It was until recently an “unbelievably unremarkable” physical space, says George Stephanopoulos, who was communications director for Bill Clinton and who just released a book called The Situation Room. Last year the complex got a $50 million makeover, and now, Stephanopoulos says, it looks the part. “It has interior glass dividers that can go opaque and wall screens that can automatically be wiped of classified information if somebody without clearance walks in.” Still, one aspect remains the same: “It’s like being in a capsule where thought is concentrated and the closest calls have to be made. You feel that when you’re in the room.”
The Shape of Fun
Luna Luna
Watch Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Ferris wheel at Luna Luna go around.
Thirty-seven years ago an Austrian artist and showman named André Heller got 30 or so fellow artists to help him build an avant-garde amusement park called Luna Luna. Keith Haring covered a merry-go-round with his signature figures. Salvador Dalí decorated a surrealistic funhouse with mirrors and images of fried eggs. Rebecca Horn built the interactive Love Thermometer. And Jean-Michel Basquiat transformed an antique Ferris wheel with paintings and music by Miles Davis.
The Shape of Blockbusters
The Shape of Fancy Dinners
Café Carmellini
Big deals are happening at Café Carmellini, table 31.
Andrew Carmellini wants you to feel comfortable at Café Carmellini, but not completely at home. “It still should be a New York night out. If you can’t do a restaurant like this in New York, what’s the point?” he says in the dining room he opened in November, the first of his places (which include Locanda Verde, the Dutch, Lafayette, and Carne Mare) to bear his family name. The room has the soaring ceilings of a Gilded Age landmark, but look down and there’s a perky white porcelain “bread basket”—they call it the Chicken Monster—that holds towering grissini.
The Shape of Political Power Lunches
Six More
Pace has nabbed prime real estate for its Tokyo debut. The gallery, which opens this spring, is located in the verdant new Azabudai Hills neighborhood, designed by Heatherwick Studio.
In addition to bringing his think tank to Venice, Nicolas Berggruen is opening Palazzo Diedo, a space dedicated to art, to the public just in time for the Biennale.
Legendary Mayfair boîte Tramp, where Michael Caine, Madonna, and Princess Anne liked to party, is coming back to life this fall with a face-lift by Campbell-Rey.
Visit Tiffany & Co.’s Fifth Avenue Landmark for Bird on a Rock; stay for the Lalannes and Hirsts from the Peter Marino Art Foundation, through May 20.
L.A.’s hottest housewarming is at Woodland, Robert Evans’s former house, which Warner Bros. honcho David Zaslav is redoing with designer Michael S. Smith.
Put Penn State on the list of colleges to tour this summer. Its Palmer Museum of Art is reopening in June with double the space—and a site-specific installation by Dale Chihuly.
In gastronomically exciting Athens, how do you stand out? With good food, natch, but you surprise with great vibes. Go to Gallina, and you’ll see what we mean.
This story appears in the April 2024 issue of Town & Country, with the headline "26 Rooms Shaping Culture." SUBSCRIBE NOW
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