Jean Nouvel visiting the Mohawk Theater, with the scale model of the Empire State Building under construction for the forthcoming Extreme Model Railroad and contemporary Architecture Museum in Heritage Park. Image Courtesy of North Adams Office of the Mayor
Jean Nouvel is engaged in talks to provide master planning concepts for the town of North Adams, Massachusetts, home to the renowned art institution MASS MoCA and a few miles from the Tadao Ando-designed Clark Art Institute. Initial discussions have included preliminary design proposals for three buildings in the city center along Heritage Park and on Main Street.
The new plan would be tasked with contributing to the economic revitalization of the city’s downtown, and would need to respond to the MASS MoCA campus, itself master planned with consult from Frank Gehry, Robert Venturi, David Childs and Simeon Bruner of Bruner/Cott & Associates.
Jean Nouvel taking a tour of MASS MoCA with Director Joseph Thompson. Image Courtesy of North Adams Office of the Mayor
“The concept of a cultural corridor in northwest Massachusetts is unique,” said Nouvel in a statement. “The existing institutions are phenomenal. The combination of elements that exists here is like no other that know of. The landscape, the topography, the colors, and the collision of Main Street, the overpass, and the railroad lends itself to an extraordinary and precise intervention or series of interventions that would preserve the scale of the city, and build on the concentration of cultural resources in the region.”
Also planned for the area is the new Global Contemporary Art Museum, designed by Gluckman Tang and founded by former Guggenheim Foundation Director Thomas Krens.
Left to Right (Jean Nouvel, Nicolai Ouroussoff (former chief Architecture critic of the New York Times) and Richard Alcombright, Mayor of North Adams. Image Courtesy of North Adams Office of the Mayor
News via North Adams Office of the Mayor.
Sig Nordal 