Sweeping change for the Gardner – Museum to present design for its $118m wing today
By Geoff Edgers – Globe Staff / January 21, 2010
This morning, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum will unveil the design for an ambitious $118 million expansion created by Italian architect Renzo Piano, a new glass and copper-clad wing that will fundamentally change the way visitors experience the museum.
The project, expected to be completed in early 2012, will more than double the size of the museum, creating a new entrance, music hall, gallery space, and other facilities for an institution largely unaltered since its opening in 1903.
Gardner’s original Venetian-style palazzo will remain almost untouched as the wing connects to the existing museum through a glass passageway. A new four-story building will host the gift shop, cafe, and coat check, which are now in cramped quarters. A new 296-seat music hall will allow the Gardner to stop holding concerts in its delicate, often overcrowded tapestry room. A soaring gallery for temporary shows, a visitors’ “living room,’’ offices, and conservation and education facilities will round out the building. A smaller second structure will host greenhouses and apartments for artists-in-residence.
The new wing will add 70,000 square feet to the museum’s current 60,000 square feet. Construction is already underway on the wing, which is located in part on the grounds of Gardner’s former Carriage House, destroyed in July amid controversy over the terms of Gardner’s will and the Carriage House’s historic significance.
New look rewrites museum founder’s vision for her guests
By Sebastian Smee – Globe Staff / January 21, 2010
She was strong-willed, independent, and forward-thinking. We all know that. But it’s easy to forget that, by and large, Isabella Stewart Gardner had a hostile relationship with modernity.
Her extraordinary, inimitable museum was conceived in the midst of great debate about the moral and aesthetic effects of industrialization in Boston. And in this debate, Gardner and her intellectual circle were committed to preserving the past in the face of great social and political upheaval. Inspired by 19th-century Romanticism, they endowed this legacy with heightened powers – the promise of order and beauty, even healing potential.
Just as it did in her day, Gardner’s palace museum still invites us to turn our back on the driving rationalism of modern life: on standardization, on uniform lighting, on the rush to embrace the new. We are invited to enter through an exterior that is deliberately reserved and opaque, whereupon we find ourselves in the most extraordinary sanctuary – a place of mystery and medievalism, of marvels and eccentricities: a jumble of anachronisms that bizarrely combines aspects of a Venetian palazzo, an enclosed medieval garden, and a monastic cloister.
That is about to change.
Deep dish pros deep in debt – Uno pizza chain files for bankruptcy protection as consumers cut back and company’s costs soar
By Jenn Abelson – Globe Staff / January 21, 2010
Uno Restaurant Holdings Corp. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection yesterday as the West Roxbury chain struggled with heavy debt and declining sales as people cut back on eating out during the recession.
The move caps 18 months of negotiations with bondholders and lenders, and the recent shuttering of 16 poorly performing restaurants, including shops in Kingston, Methuen, and Fairhaven.
“This is an important day for the company. This net result of this bankruptcy will be to remove the single greatest impediment to further growing and strengthening our brand – the size of our debt,’’ Uno chief executive Frank Guidara said in a phone interview yesterday.
The privately held company, famous for its deep-dish pizza, makes more than $14 million in debt and interest payments annually – obligations it took on after a 2005 leveraged buyout of the company. Since then, Uno has attempted to grow the brand with an expanded menu of higher quality foods along with new concepts, such as Uno Express.
Resources few, urgency constant for N.E. trauma doctors in Haiti
By Stephen Smith – Globe Staff / January 21, 2010
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – One finger was already gone, stolen by the brutality of last week’s earthquake. Two other fingers on the teenager’s right hand hung mangled and swollen by infection.
The decision was clear, especially here, in a field hospital with limited resources, in a city where the medical network has collapsed: The fingers would have to be amputated.
“These two fingers, they’re dead,’’ said Dr. David Mooney, chief of trauma services at Children’s Hospital Boston, who came here last week as part of a government medical response team. He locked eyes with the boy and his father in a tent clinic, his voice compassionate. “These are no good. I’m very sorry.’’
The father lifted his hands skyward.
This is catastrophe medicine, where resources are scarce, time short, options few. It is a world apart from the exacting standards of the high temples of mod ern medicine in Boston and other US cities where members of two disaster teams now working in a Port-au-Prince school yard usually ply their trade.
Students respond to Haiti disaster
By Bill Shaner/Huntington News Staff – January 21, 2010
The Haitian Student Unity (HSU) is working to raise awareness and collect donations for the people of Haiti, who have recently been struck by a 7.0 magnitude earthquake 15 miles southwest of the country’s capitol, Port-Au-Prince, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS).
Many members of HSU have family in Haiti who are affected by the earthquake, said HSU public relations coordinator Williana Desravines.
“I know a lot of people who have lost family,” she said. “There’s no words to explain how they’re feeling.”
Desravines lived in Haiti for 13 years before moving to New York. She also has family that were hit by the earthquake.
On Tuesday, HSU hosted a clothing drive out of its office in Curry Student Center (CSC). Desravines said that it was a bigger success than anticipated.
“We collected a lot,” she said. “We were surprised by how many people actually showed up and donated that much stuff. We had full outfits, children’s clothes and shoes. Things people would really need in Haiti.”
She said many other student organizations came by to help, including the Carribean Student Organization (CSO), The Northeastern Black Student Association (NBSA), and the Latin American Student association (LASO). The groups donated, brought boxes, helped carry boxes to a storage facility in West Village A and then sorting the clothes once they got there, Desravines said.
“It was a really big turnout, we were happy,” she said. “A lot of people came and donated a lot. We appreciate all the support people have been giving us and if people still want to donate they can bring clothes by our office in the Curry Student Center.”
Obama boosts business on Huntington Ave
By Amanda Cedrone/Huntington News – January 21, 2010
President Obama’s visit to Northeastern University on Sunday brought a boom in business for some restaurants and shops on Huntington Ave.
An area normally filled with Northeastern students was instead packed with older couples and families with small children. Marie Arroyo [CQ], assistant manager of Qdoba Mexican Food [CQ] on Huntington Avenue [CQ], said that she saw an estimated 70 percent increase in the number of customers for a Sunday.
“We usually see a lot of college students,” said Arroyo. “But today we’re seeing a lot of older people who have never tried our food before.”
Rob Adelson of Concord, Mass. was such a customer.
“We were at the museum and we came down to check out Obama,” he said.
While Adelson said he didn’t wait in line for the chance to see Obama in the Cabot Center, he saw the crowds and excitement while enjoying a burrito from the glass windows of Qdoba.
Boloco Burritos, another burrito restaurant on Huntington Avenue, was no exception to this sudden boom in Sunday business. Brian Keith, manager of Boloco Burritos on Huntington Ave., said that he saw an approximate 25 percent increase in business.
BU opens up to sustainability
By Annie Ropeik/BU Daily Free Press – January 21, 2010
A Tuesday headline in The Onion read, “‘How Bad For The Environment Can Throwing Away One Plastic Bottle Be?’ 30 Million People Wonder.” Today at Boston University, the administration, in a cooperative effort with faculty, staff and students, is taking that satirical message to heart.
Sustainability@BU’s new website, launching today, marks the realization of a complex and far-reaching university plan over a year in the making, centered on providing candid statistics about BU’s resource consumption and creating a portal by which the BU community can learn how to help remedy the situation.
Though it may seem trivial, the site represents a novel effort by the university to be transparent. Sustainability director Dennis Carlberg said the statistics on the site are meant to spur people to action and provide a jumping-off point for further information down the road.
“It’s important to provide the information for people to understand the resources that the university consumes and the waste we produce,” he said. “I think for people to understand that, then people can begin to respond to it. That’s the fundamental thing.”
The site’s homepage is a cycle of seven images detailing BU’s consumption or waste production through visual means.
Representations such as piles of trash, rows of high-powered spotlights or huge floes of water are superimposed against the scale of Marsh Plaza to give a sense of the alarming scale on which BU negatively affects the environment.
