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2008 Hadrian
Award |
WMF's 2008 Hadrian Award will be presented to Houghton,
Doreen, and Graeme Freeman and the Freeman Foundation for their
unparalleled commitment to historic preservation in China and Japan.
The gala award presentation will take place at the Plaza
in New York on Thursday, October 16, 2008.
For
additional information or to purchase tickets, please contact WMF at
(646) 424-9594 or visit our
website. |
WMF Watch Sites on
Google Earth! |
We have teamed up with Google
to put all of our 2008 Watch sites on Google Earth. To check it out,
click
here. | |
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Significant New Grant for
Angkor |
In June, WMF announced a major new phase of work in the
ancient city of Angkor, Cambodia. The U.S. Department
of State has awarded WMF nearly $1 million to continue our
conservation work at Phnom
Bakheng (pictured above), one of the
oldest temples at Angkor and one of the most heavily visited. Its
spectacular sunset views have drawn increasing numbers of tourists
who are unwittingly damaging the
site. |
Bauhaus
Design Wins First WMF/Knoll Modernism
Prize |
(L-R: WMF
Executive VP Henry Ng, school representative Stephen Schwarz, Knoll
CEO Andrew Cogan, WMF President Bonnie Burnham, winning architects
Winfried Brenne and Franz Jaschke, jury chairman and MoMA curator
Barry Bergdoll.)
WMF awarded the first World
Monuments Fund/Knoll Modernism Prize at a
dinner in New York City on July 10, 2008. Partners Winfried Brenne
and Franz Jaschke of Berlin-based firm Brenne Gesellschaft von
Architekten mbH won the prize for their superb restoration of a
masterful 1930 Bauhaus-designed former trade union school in Bernau,
Germany. The Modernism Prize, which will be given every two years,
is part of WMF's Modernism at
Risk initiative, which represents
extraordinary, yet threatened, 20th-century sites and brings
education and advocacy to the forefront.
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Modernism at
Risk: Adaptive Reuse vs. Demolition |
We at WMF, along with thousands of others across the U.S. and
around the world, were saddened and disappointed to learn that the
school board of Sarasota, Florida, voted in June to demolish Paul
Rudolph's iconic Riverview High School (above), part of the 2008 "Main Street Modern" Watch
listing, and replace it with a parking lot for a new school
being built. A viable strategy to restore the building and convert
it into a music quadrangle was rejected by the board 3-2, even
though this project was estimated to cost $25 million, much
less than the $135 million required to build a new
school.
On a more positive note, however, we learned our
$50,000 grant to Marcel Breuer's Grosse Point Library in Michigan,
also part of the "Main Street Modern" Watch
listing, funded a study that determined the building was fit for
reuse, spurring a $1 million donation from a local philanthropic
couple to aid in the library's preservation. The
contrasting examples of Riverview and Grosse Point highlight
how important the local community can be in the conservation of
significant
architecture. | |