C102 Article
The
best of spaces, the worst of spaces
(or I don't
know much about architecture, but I know what I like ...)
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Frank Lloyd Wright:
Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1956-59,
interior view; photo David Heald; ©
The Solomon
R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York
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One of the
problems with architectural criticism is that you don't
really know what you are going to get until the building
is built. And by then it seems a little late. Of course
there have been architects' models, technical drawings
and (in the case of art spaces) a long process of consultation,
compromise and consideration, but until you are actually
faced with the building itself, the sense of the space
is impossible to imagine. And once the building is
built, it's a bit of a fait accompli. There's a big gala
opening, and mindful of the millions that have been spent,
and how much the future reputation of the space will be
founded on the efforts of those who work, perform and
exhibit within it, one is encouraged to focus on the good
points. A little later, when the fuss has died down, you
can start to think about the dodgy lighting, the unsympathetic
hanging space, the intrusive atrium... Perhaps, then,
the real key to objective architectural criticism, is
time.
Another problem
with applying the processes of art criticism to architecture
is that, despite the gushing adjectives in many architectural
reviews (sculptural buildings, a work of art
in itself... and so on), architecture is not art.
According to Claes Oldenburg, "The difference between
art and architecture is that architecture has windows
and toilets."1
and while Oldenburg was undoubtedly being facetious, the
remark describes a general blurring of the boundaries
between art and architecture which has gained increasing
currency over the past few years. This has allowed the
use of artistic terminology to become a lazy shorthand
for the assessment of architecture, while also being employed
as a final 'full stop' point in criticism. To call Frank
Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim Museum (1997) "sculptural" begins
to capture the crazy titanium shapes of the building.
But the description is as incomplete as a description
of a piece of sculpture as 'sculptural' would be, leaving
the questions how, why, in what form, how do the shapes
move, relate, work...? unaddressed. The description
of a building as "a work of art itself" is often used
to shut down discussion of its relative functional merits
and flaws, as 'art' becomes the unarguable descriptive
form, subordinating all shortcomings to a higher aesthetic
or creative purpose.
The motivations and processes
of art and architecture are different. The cultural assumptions
about the role of the artist and architect are different,
and the reception and treatment of the finished works
are the most different of all. Argentine-born artist Silvia
Kolbowski, who has collaborated with many architects in
her projects (including Peter Eisenman on the Comme des
Garçons boutique in New York), puts it this way:
The architect's
role as a service provider is to modulate the work so
that a resolution can be reached. Most architects do
this while attempting to compromise their projects as
little as possible, but it is still very acceptable
within the profession... On the other hand, the role
that the artist plays in the culture is different...
Since the historical cliché is that artists are thought
to work only through inspiration and innate talent,
their ideas or visions are considered to be less alterable,
more sacrosanct... So even when one is an artist who
is well aware of this cliché, it is a role that is pre-fabricated
by the culture2
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Richard
Meier: MACBA, Barcelona, 1995,
interior view; photo Raimon Sola; courtesy MACBA
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Sometimes, the intellectual confusion
between exactly what are the differences between art and
architecture leads to situations redolent with unintentional
irony. In San Francisco, Mario Botta's SFMOMA (1995) is
described by the museum's director, David A. Ross, as
"a signal work in the Museum's collection - one that embodies
all the attributes of great modern art."3
SFMOMA dedicates a suite of galleries to its collection
of architectural drawings, carefully conserved, and displayed
in frames as part of the museum's general exhibition programme.
And yet, the Koret Visitor Education Center in that museum
(2002) was designed by San Francisco firm Leddy Maytum
Stacy Architects. The new centre occupies space on the
second floor of the museum, and "its innovative plan echoes
the aesthetic of the Museum established by Swiss architect
Mario Botta in 1995, while addressing the specific demands
of an educational facility." 4
So, at SFMOMA, architectural drawings are art, and the
building itself is described as a work of art - yet it
is a work of art which can be altered by a different firm
of architects (artists?) when the need is perceived to
arise.
To view the question from a different
angle: if Yoshio Tanuguchi's Manhattan MoMA extension project
(currently ongoing) came up with a room too big or too small
for MoMA's Rauschenberg wall piece, would the museum employ
a local artist to cut it down to size, or to paint on an extra
bit to make it fit the new building? The specific absurdity
of the proposition underlines the more general absurdity of
claiming architecture as art, a claim which also holds architecture
back from being judged intelligently on its own merits.
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Frank Lloyd Wright: Guggenheim
Museum, New York, 1956-59,
interior view; photo David Heald; ©
The Solomon
R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York
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Unsympathetic extensions and
renovations have undermined the integrity of galleries
for too long for anyone to believe that boards of directors
and trustees truly value the notion of the artistic integrity
of a museum or gallery building. And attempting to view
galleries as works of art ties critics up in intellectual
knots. In looking at the alterations and additions made
to the daddy of all 'sculptural' buildings, Frank Lloyd
Wright's Guggenheim in New York (1956-59), Victoria Newhouse
wants to have it both ways:
With
the exception of Richard Meier's deferential Aye Simon
Reading Room (1978), slipped into a leftover space off
the main ramp, the various Guggenheim renovations have
mutilated a great work of art, just as surely as slashing
the Mona Lisa,
or chipping The Thinker, would.5
Is she therefore suggesting that
a 'deferential' Richard Meier slash to the Mona Lisa
would be quite acceptable? To return to Kolbowski's point
about the role of architect as service provider, the architect
is also a problem solver. But given the huge costs of
building an art museum or gallery, and the (often factional)
interest groups involved in the project, the compromises
architects are called upon to make can often be key to
what are later perceived to be the failings of their buildings.
One of the main criticisms of the Bilbao Guggenheim is
the massive scale of the main exhibition hall, the Boat
Gallery. 137 m long, and 24.5 m at the widest point, the
ceiling arches high above the 7 m walls. Works by Richard
Serra, Donald Judd and Claes Oldenburg, which were created
to dominate the spaces that would contain them, seem swallowed
up by Gehry's hall, and the architect has been accused
of a grandiosity out of sympathy with the artists his
gallery was built to show. But to blame Gehry is to forget
that as the Guggenheim architect, he had a boss, and his
boss was Thomas Krens, director of the growing Guggenheim
empire. "I designed that gallery with a system of walls,"
Gehry defends. "But Tom [Krens] won't put them in. It's
Tom who likes the big space. I'm tired of taking the rap.
Please tell Tom that for $1.98, I can put in three walls..."6
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Komar and
Melamid: The Most
Wanted Paintings
on the Web, an artist's project for the
web commissioned by
DIA Center for the Arts - www.diacenter.org/km;
courtesy Dia Art Foundation
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Too often, it seems, the basics
of a new art space are dictated by a committee who lay
down the fundamentals of their requirements - relying
on staples such as a big atrium, an impressive entrance,
lots of social space, and a monumental staircase. The
dangers of the design-by-committee approach are wittily
exposed by the Russian conceptual artists Komar and Melamid
in their The Most Wanted Paintings on the Web project
(begun in 1995 in association with DIA), in which an online
poll asked a list of detailed questions about what people
liked to see in a work of art. Collating the answers from
3001 respondents, Komar and Melamid then painted a series
of banal pastoral scenes dictated by the results.7
And yet, in architecture, the needs of a new building's
constituency do need to be taken into account, and this
is particularly the case when creating a space for the
exhibition of contemporary art. What does work?
What has worked (and not worked) in the past? What
elements are crucial? And which buildings have
that ineffable 'extra' which makes them great?
And if architecture is not art,
how do you assess it critically? Architectural
criticism needs to be more than just a criticism of form
and shape. And is there such a thing as the perfect art
space? Lynne Cooke, director of DIA, would say no. "I
don't think there is an ideal museum, only the best possible
for the ideas or circumstances, whether it's a collection,
post-60s art, or whatever."8
Over the past year, CIRCA has conducted an online poll
of its own to find what readers of the website thought
made the optimum spaces for displaying art. The results
show that a 'Komar and Melamid' approach to gallery design
will never work; that there are as many opinions about
the architecture of art spaces as there are about the
art they contain; and that it's possible for an art gallery
to be considered simultaneously the best, and (joint)
worst space in Ireland for showing contemporary art.
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data from online poll at www.circa.com;
poll now closed;
many thanks to all who participated
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First, asked what the best option
for a contemporary art space would be, 32% said a conversion
of an existing historic building, 54% opted for a purpose-built
space, and 14% selected a modern extension of an existing
art space. The second question on the survey looked at
art spaces in more detail. The results can be seen in
figure 1. Taking each of the fourteen points in turn,
the answers, and potential architectural solutions, are
not always as clear-cut as they at first may seem.
So, is 'bold statement architecture'
good or bad for an art gallery? 55% thought it was good,
and 16% bad. But should art have to compete with the architecture
which encloses it?
When art becomes
an excuse for architecture, collecting and exhibiting
decisions can begin to be taken in terms of what will
'set the architecture off' well, and the museum which
defines its identity around an architectural statement
may well come to extend that identity to the art it exhibits.9
Statement architecture is increasingly
used to make up for a lack of strength in a museum's collection:
I
look at the building as an extremely important artistic
statement... we'd have a building which would be at
least as important as anything we'd have inside... I'm
well aware that we are not likely to have a collection
to rank with the world's most important, and I think
that we make up for that to some degree by having a
building that is truly distinguished.10
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Richard
Meier: High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 1983,
interior view;
courtesy High Museum of Art
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In an environment where success
is increasingly measured in terms of volume of visitors,
this quote by Gudmund Vigtel, Director of the High Museum
of Art in Atlanta, Georgia (Richard Meier, 1983) makes
marketing sense.
When a museum, like the Bilbao
Guggenheim, is only ever discussed in terms of its architecture,
and not its collection, it does seem that things are out
of balance. Artist and architect Elizabeth Diller, of
Diller and Scofidio, currently working on the new Boston
ICA, thinks there is the potential to get that balance
right:
Museums are now more than
just galleries, the gallery component is now only about
30%. Architecture is becoming more of a draw for museums,
it is now the first part of the collection. Architecture
has to deal with that development, we as artists and
architects have to deal with that. We have to deal with
the different speeds of visitors, and have the private,
contemplative spaces as well as the social spaces.11
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Frank Lloyd Wright:
Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1956-59,
interior view; photo David Heald; © The Solomon
R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York
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Controllable natural light seems
an easier issue to assess. 96% Of respondents agreed it
was good for a gallery, and it seems an unarguable prerequisite.
And yet, Rem Koolhaas would disagree. According to the architect
of the Las Vegas Guggenheim (2001), and the Kunsthal, Rotterdam
(1987-92),
Contemporary
art needs spaces equipped for the interaction of human
beings and technological implements, people, and apparatus.
Somehow, daylight is not conducive for this kind of interaction...
Whereas painting and sculpture are best revealed in conditions
of (simulated) daylight, new arts need a darker, more
artificial accommodation... there is no escaping the inherent
artificiality of the Museum...12
So what about a large atrium
or foyer? In CIRCA 90, Aidan Dunne discussed 'foyer syndrome'
in his column. "Something seems to happen to an architect
when they are enlisted to design a gallery space...Otherwise
top-notch architects are overcome with the desire to...well,
it's not entirely clear what it is they're trying to do."13
51% of CIRCA poll respondents thought the large atrium
or foyer was a good thing, and only 8% that it was positively
bad. The architects of today's art spaces are well aware
that they are designing for more than just the viewing
of art. That famed maker-of-entrances himself, I.M. Pei
(East Building of the National Gallery of Art, Washington,
D.C. [1978], and Grand Louvre project [1989]) described
his thinking, saying that his "aim from the start in the
East Building had been to design for a 'mob scene.' We
needed to make the visit a pleasant one, so we built a
circus."14 But
a review of the building when it opened suggested that
this approach was not necessarily the right one: "The
question of image is central to our comprehension of architecture:
the fact that the gallery spaces of the East Building
read as ancillary to the atrium space is thus significant."15
My experience of the East Building would agree with this.
After the scale of the atrium, the galleries are dark
afterthoughts, and the art in them somehow diminished.
Robert Venturi puts this idea
another way:
...when you finally
make it to the art, you may be either worn down by the
banality of the maze you have traversed, or jaded by
the drama of the spatial, symbolic, or chromatic fantasies...
the art, when you reach it has become a kind of anticlimax
- in fact
dull, as you perceive it with your constricted pupils,
jaded sensibilities, and loss of orientation.16
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Richard
Meier: MACBA, Barcelona, 1995, exterior view;
photo Raimon Sola; courtesy MACBA
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And yet, sympathetically handled,
the foyer/atrium serves both as a social and catchment
space, and also as an orientation court, to make the transition
from street to art more complete. Architects Benson and
Forsyth named the first space one encounters on entering
their National Gallery of Ireland Millennium Wing extension
(2002) a "decompression chamber." This idea has been explored
with more drama and scale by Richard Meier in his MACBA
in Barcelona (1995). The building has been criticised
by some17, but
with his bare entrance passageway and lobby, deliberately
devoid of the usual gaudy cluster of shops and café/restaurant
areas, Meier has at least induced visitors to leave the
hot-earth tones and clamour of Barcelona behind as they
move through into the cool white spaces of his galleries.
And what about that favourite,
particularly of the Temple Bar architects, the large glass
'shop-window' frontage? 35% thought it was good, and 18%
bad. Glass has quickly become an architectural metaphor
for transparency. It serves as a quick trick to demonstrate
openness, saying "come on in, this art's for everybody"
... And it's next to useless when it comes to showing
art. Delicate works on paper are damaged by direct sunlight,
which also reflects off glass for framed works. Digital
art is impossible to view in such conditions, which makes
it all the more difficult to believe that ArtHouse (Group
91/Shay Cleary [1996]) was really purpose-built as Ireland's
Multi-Media Centre for the Arts. At ArtHouse, the expanse
of inviting plate glass left only a small rectangular
space to the left of the reception desk, and the rather
forbidding basement, as areas actually suited for showing
the art the building was supposed to promote. Even Aileen
MacKeogh, first Director of ArtHouse, was unable to give
the building her unequivocal endorsement when it opened.
Mentioning the "creative strains in the client/architect
relationship," she went on to say, "Now, as an end-user
of this arts centre, I ask myself did all the thoughtful
research and consultation deliver a building that works.
The honest answer is, I still do not know."18
Meier's MACBA uses a different
solution to attempt to have its architectural cake and
eat it. Light plays in from the large glass-fronted façade,
but is partially screened off from the galleries with
brise-soleil partition walls. The effect in full sunlight
is stunning, although more stunning as architecture than
as an ideal space for looking at art. At the High Museum
in Atlanta, Meier ultimately had to replace the atrium's
glazing with light-reducing glass, and also to cover the
vertical windows with interior, and fibre, screens. While
transparency and openness are high on the agenda of arts
councils and policy makers, they are way down on the scale
when it comes to actually looking at art.
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Shay
Cleary (renovation): IMMA, Dublin, 1991, interior
view;
photo & courtesy IMMA
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The rest of the CIRCA survey will
be discussed in the next article in this series (in CIRCA
104), but in the meantime, which art space in Ireland
came top as both best and worst? - IMMA.
Gemma Tipton is a writer.
This essay is the second in a series
of four, supported by the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon's
Bursary in Contemporary Architectural Criticism.
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