Visiting the Met

Masters and Masterpieces: Chinese Art from the Florence and Herbert Irving Collection (January 30—June 5)

An outstanding selection of Chinese art gifted to the Met by Florence and Herbert Irving is the focus of this exhibition. Beginning in the early 1970s, the Irvings built one of the most comprehensive collections of Chinese art in the world. The approximately 120 works on display cover almost all major categories of Chinese art.

P.S. Art 2021 (January 23—June 5)

P.S. Art is an annual celebration of achievement in the arts in New York City public schools. This exhibition showcases the creativity of 152 prekindergarten through grade 12 students from all five boroughs.

Baseball Cards from the Collection of Jefferson R. Burdick (June 3—November 22)

The Burdick collection of baseball cards tells the history of popular printmaking in the United States, In 1947, Jefferson R. Burdick began to give away his baseball cards to the Met. This exhibition features over one hundred cards produced between the 1880s and the 1950s.

Relative Values: The Cost of Art in the Northern Renaissance (January 23—August 7)

Bringing together sixty-two masterpieces of sixteenth-century northern European art from the Met collection and one important loan, this exhibition centers around questions of historical worth, exploring relative value systems in the Renaissance era.

Open

Sunday—Tuesday, and Thursday: 10:00—17:00

Friday and Saturday: 10:00—21:00

Closed Wednesday

Closed Thanksgiving Day, December 25, January 1, and the first Monday in May.

Tickets

$25 for adults; $17 for seniors; $12 for students; free for children under 12.

A homeowner in Massachusetts had a surprise visitor that came down the chimney (烟囱)... and it wasn’t Santa. A barred owl (横斑林鸮) was sitting in the fireplace in a home in the city of Bolton, staring at the homeowner. Not sure how to deal with the bird, the homeowner called Mass Wildlife.

“This individual was very calm and we simply reached in, gently grabbed it, and placed it in the animal carrier,” Mass Wildlife Central District Manager Todd Olanyk says. Before releasing the owl, Olanyk examined the bird for injuries and found none. “It was released just outside the house where it was found,” he says.

Wildlife experts say barred owls may find chimneys enticing during this time of year because they begin laying eggs from February through May. Since they don’t build their own nests, they look for holes. Mass Wildlife has also received similar reports of this happening with other birds. To help prevent wild animals like birds and bats from entering your home, Mass Wildlife suggests placing a metal cap with a screen on your chimney. Chimneys aren’t the only places that pose a danger to birds and other wildlife.

According to a 2014 study, 27% of the more than 100 uncapped bollards (路桩) had dead birds inside them. Bollards are used for traffic control or building security. They’re usually capped but in this case, many of these posts were left open. They also looked at 88 open pipes used as gate posts and 11% contained dead birds. In another study on a nearby highway, 14% of the open pipes had dead birds. “The birds likely investigate the open pipe as a potential nesting site, and once inside they cannot climb the smooth metal or extend their wings to fly out. Alternatively, birds may attempt to land on the upright open pipes and then fall in,” the researchers wrote.

How might architecture aid in solving the housing crisis and help build a more sustainable future? In 2019, 3D printing company WASP and Mario Cucinella Architects (MCA) revealed their concept to design the first 3D printed house made entirely from clay. Today, the joint project, known as TECLA, is finally complete and on display near Bologna, Italy.

Over the past few years, a number of 3D printed homes and communities have been conceptualized. While previous structures were made from concrete or plastic, TECLA was built from soil found at the site mixed with water, fibers from rice husks (壳) and a binder (粘合剂), the last of which is less than 5% of the total volume. Printing with clay does have its weaknesses. It’s a much slower process than quick-drying concrete — the design can be printed in 200 hours but the clay mixture can take weeks to dry, depending on climate, and it also has height limitations.

Building homes from earth, Cucinella pointed out, is not new. “The challenge was really using an old material in the history of architecture with new technology to find a new shape of a house,” Cucinella said. To that end, the Crane WASP printers mixed water with the local earth, and then printed the 60-square-meter TECLA model layer by layer. The design features two circular spaces joined together with skylights, inviting full natural light inside. The residence includes a living area, a bedroom and bathroom. Its furniture, including tables and chairs, can also be printed using WASP’s machinery, while components like doors and windows were fixed post-printing.

The idea behind TECLA isn’t necessarily to copy the same home for any environment, but to adjust the design based on the location. “We are not producing one type of house that you can print and use everywhere, because it’s different if you design a house in the north of Italy, or in the middle of Africa,” Cucinella explained. “The house responds to different climates.” Additionally, the building process can be easily taught and widely used.