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Venice will fete a Gehry at this fall’s Biennale — but it’s a Guggenheim whose star will first be honored. Before starchitect Frank Gehry receives a Lifetime Achievement award — and perhaps a little inspiration to complete his spectacular boat-and-air terminal at Marco Polo Airport — the Peggy Guggenheim Collection celebrates 60 years in Venice. Now through December, there are free tours, special exhibits and daily biographical “Peggy Talks.” The highlight, though, is a jazz concert on August 26, the birthday of the collection’s founder. An American expat, heiress and Pollock patroness, Guggenheim lived her last 30 years in the palazzo (pictured) that is now one of the world’s finest contemporary art museums.
Just five minutes from the Guggenheim, another Grand Canal palazzo is about to make art-history as the city’s newest Design Hotel. Scheduled to open this summer, Palazzina Grassi now awaits completion since Roman ruins were uncovered in its subterranean quarters. When the hotel is finished, it will harbor 32 “hypermodern” guestrooms behind a classical 15th-century façade. Each individually styled room will “marry the ancient with the futuristic” — including the Attic Suite, which has a slanted roof accented with wooden beams and a grand colonnaded window overlooking the Canal.
Palazzina Grassi once belonged to the same aristocratic family that held the neighboring Palazzo Grassi. Today it is a cultural center that exhibits another vast modern art collection — this one belonging to Gucci billionaire Francois Pinault (his son, Francois-Henri, is Salma Hayak’s baby-daddy). Word on the street is that the museum’s 2006 opening inspired Gucci’s archrival — Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton’s Bernard Arnault — to announce plans for his own cultural center in Paris: a $127-million structure designed by the Biennale’s laureate, Frank Gehry.
read more: 02. Sleep | 10. Culture | architecture | art | historic
