Expanding the Museum Extension

Expanding the Museum Extension

Cristina Guadalupe Galvรกn

Expanding the Museum Extension This text is the result of a year research on contemporary art museum extensions for media artist Antoni Muntadas, as part of the research phase for his project Situaci贸n 2011 presented amid his retrospective exhibition Entre/Between, at the Museo Nacional Reina Sof铆a in Madrid (11/11-03/12). Situaci贸n 2011, a site specific project, analizes the relationship between the two buildings, the original building (Sabatini), an old Hospital, and its extension designed by architect Jean Nouvel.

Unfortunaltely the second volume of the exhibition catalogue where this text was originally created for and which relvolved solely around the project Situaci贸n 2011, never saw the light due to a lack of funding. We are happy you can read it here anyway.

More info: http://vimeo.com/30314104

Walker Art Center

Royal Ontario Museum

Cleveland Museum of Ar Milwaukee Art Museum MoMA Chicago Art Institute SF MoMA Philadelphia Art Muse DAM Nelson Atkins Atlanta High Museum LACMA Houston Museum of Fine Arts

rts

eum

TATE

Museum Boijimans

LAM MNCARS

Van Abbemuseum

Expanding the Museum Extension “For a museum, getting bigger isn´t morally neutral, or even mission-neutral” 1 Amy Whitaker. Museum Legs

Historically, the original purpose of the art museum extension corresponded to the lack of space to accommodate growing collections. Initially, the spatial factor was practically the only vector for this transformation. But the significance of an extension in contemporary art museums became more complicated during the 20th century until the start of the 21st century, when complex socio-political, urban and economic relationships come into play and greatly influenced the nature of the meaning, in this case referring to the architecture of an extension and its operation.

The first museums in the modern sense of the term, i.e. totally public, appeared in Europe at the end of the 18th century. The Louvre was the first, created as a result of the French Revolution, when the property of the Crown was nationalised for the enjoyment and benefit of society as a whole. Under Napoleon I, the collection grew rapidly due to the Egyptian campaign and the resulting pillaging, and treaties with Spain, Austria and the Netherlands. This led to the museum’s first project for extension and construction of the wing in the Rue Rivoli, parallel to the Grande Gallerie, designed by Percier and Fontaine.

The Prado Museum, which opened as such in 1819, underwent its first extension in 1918, also due to a lack of space for its collection; subsequent extensions or appropriations of buildings nearby followed for the same reason: lack of space to exhibit the work.

Until well into the 20th century, the main reasons for adding a new wing to a museum were physical: lack of space for a growing collection. The architecture of 1. «For a museum, getting bigger isn’t morally neutral, or even mission-neutral». Amy Whitaker, Museum Legs: Fatigue and Hope in the Face of Art, Hol Art Books, Tucson, Arizona, 2009, p. 155.

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such extensions, when this meant another floor, consisted in increasing the volume or capacity of the containing area; and in all cases efforts were made to harmonize the extension as much as possible with the original building, making the entire structure larger but cohesive, considering the museum as a unified whole. These extensions were carried out by museum or municipal architects, but a project was never conceived as a separate entity, but as an enlargement of an existing structure, respecting the original building as much as possible.

The current situation, in which so many museums are expanding their facilities, is significantly more complex than a lack of space for growing collections. For several decades it has been a fact that museums are dedicating a smaller part to exhibition space in their expansion projects, there now being several varied reasons for such expansion.

The definition of extension in linguistics is perhaps more appropriate for this new type of museum growth: «extension of the meaning of a word to another concept related to the original».

And meaning is exactly what we will talk about next, defining it for different reasons that are no longer merely physical but also social, political, urban, economic, aesthetic, programmatic etc. In their expansion, museums are being transformed into a different animal, and the new idiosyncrasy will rightly depend on the reasons for the change and the greater or lesser success this leads to.

MoMA, Beaubourg, Bilbao: three paradigms Alfred Barr, the first director of MoMA and probably the creator of the first modern museum, was dismissed from his position in 1943 before the museum’s first plans for expansion, once it had established its headquarters in the rationalist building of Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone in 1939. By this time the more innovative and avant-garde years at MoMA had passed, and a series of extensions began, which incongruously drifted away from the original mission of the institution.

These extensions culminated in 1985 with the construction of a dubious MoMA Tower, mainly residential and designed by the architect César Pelli, in order to cover the cost of the entire operation.

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MoMA expansion’s chronology

MomA first building by Edward Durrell Stone Associates

Alfred Barr

It is often the case that after investing so much capital in the growth of a non-profit institution there follows great pressure to ensure that the investment is not a failure; and that means taking fewer risks and becoming more conservative, which is rather unfortunate in the case of an avant-garde centre. «What is unusual is that someone like Barr so heartily innovated on the museum as a form. As much as museums have grown - proliferated and expanded – no one has really significantly innovated on the museum as a form since then»2.

The day that a young Barr, just 27 years old, was recommended as director of the museum by his professor at Harvard, Paul Sachs (founding member), is when the museum’s ten years of effervescence and creation as an art project really began.

«Barr’s early influence on MoMA brings up a central paradox: museums eventually grow to institutional proportions, but they are shepherded from inception by highly individual characters»3.

If MoMA is the paradigm of the contemporary art museum as it is understood today, the Centre d’Art Georges Pompidou, designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers (1971-1974) thirty-five years later, represented a new phenomenon of participation and attendance in the museum world; this being the popularisation and appearance of mass tourism at contemporary art centres - which Baudrillard referred to as “l’effet Beaubourg”4 —, remaining to this day one of the most popular tourist attractions in Europe5.

The Pompidou Centre was conceived as a mixed-use cultural centre (a live centre of information), open, extremely flexible and democratic. Its programme makes reference to social utopian and technological architectures that were very much in vogue in the 1960s, such as the Fun Palace designed by the British architect Cedric Price or the paper architecture by the also British architects, Archigram, or even the megastructures of Yona Friedman. Since the early years, the programmatic project (that which is truly innovative) has been in decline and this, according to Renzo Piano, is

2. Ibid, p.162 3. Ibid, p.162 4. Jean Baudillard, L´effet Beaubourg. Implosion et dissuasion. [Éditions Galilée, París, 1977.]

5. “Introduction”. Nathan Silver, The Making of Beaubourg: a Building Biography of the Centre Pompidou, Paris. [MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachussets and London, England, 1994, p. x.]

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Excavation of Les Halles, Paris.

Frame from Marco Ferreri’s movie ‘Don’t touch the white woman’ (1973)

Yona Friedman’s proposal for the extension of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

due to a «disappointing scepticism and ignorance on the part of the administration»6, and he laments all the elements of the project that have fallen by the wayside7.

The Parisian art centre was also one of the first urban operations on a large scale in the heart of a city which was looking to regenerate and re-qualify an urban fabric in decline, with greater or lesser success, through a cultural program. The dismantling of the historic market of Les Halles (1971) and the construction of a terrible shopping centre, which does not work on an urban level, is perhaps the saddest chapter of the entire operation. The architect who refurbished the building that houses the Tate Modern, Jacques Herzog, discusses the transformation of the neighbourhood of Les Halles: «The Pompidou turned the whole neighbourhood into a Disneyworld of art, with galleries and small shops»8.

Effet Beaubourg or Bilbao effect, many of the elements that have been criticised at the Guggenheim or many of the elements which, with more success, appear in the Basque city, were already present at the Pompidou Centre. However, while Beaubourg owes its mega-structure and spectacular aesthetic to a concept of programme and internal flexibility (put all the tripe of the building on the outside to obtain mobile open-plan floors, without columns, lifts or installation ducts), the spectacular nature of Bilbao is pure façade, which has not stopped this museum-franchise from being the promoter of unprecedented urban regeneration; an economic and political success for the entire region, but perhaps also a question mark in the art world.

The architect and urban planner Denise Scott Brown stated in an interview that «sensitivities change when social systems change»9. From MoMA to Beaubourg or from Beaubourg to Bilbao; it is society as a whole that throughout the 20th century has changed. The New York modernity of the 1930s, totally pioneering, is not the same as the Parisian society of the 1970s in the middle of the post-modern boom

6. Ibid, p.162 7. Ibid, p.162 8. Jean Baudillard, L´effet Beaubourg. Implosion et dissuasion. [Éditions Galilée, París, 1977.]

9. “Introduction”. Nathan Silver, The Making of Beaubourg: a Building Biography of the Centre Pompidou, Paris. [MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachussets and London, England, 1994, p. x.]

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and post-May 1968, or the post-industrial societies at the dawn of the 21st century in the global era of information. According to Gilles Lipovetsky, in this step from production capitalism to an economy of consumption and mass communication «post-modernity will have been merely a transitional stage, a short-lived moment»10, between modernity and the hypermodernity in which we now find ourselves, and in which the Bilbao Guggenheim opened. A period, as Debord had already predicted, marked by seduction and the reign of fashion in all spheres of society. This world of hedonistic culture placed on a pedestal the havens of comfort and leisure, with tourism as paramount. And within tourism, cultural tourism occupies an increasingly prominent position.

This new contemporary reality in which the museum is no longer a world closed on itself and which enjoys now a similar success and popularity to other leisure and entertainment-related industries, is the cause of the transformation within the concept of expansion that museums are suffering from.

In search of the Guggenheim effect If there were already many cities activating, expanding and renewing their cultural structures during the 1980s and 90s, with the “Bilbao effect”, the museum boom took off even further as a global phenomenon at the core of contemporary art. Most of these extensions are to be found in Europe and the United States due to the historical parallels between modern art and industrialisation during the 19th century and particularly in the 20th century (London, Paris, and New York City being the capitals of this empire). With the collapse of the Communist bloc and the triumph of global capitalism, the new emerging powers have become places of production for the delocalised industries of the Western world. European and American economies, now practically non-producers, are turning to such fruitful emerging economies as that of services, linked to the consumption of leisure and culture.

The extension of a museum today can be read in many cases as a singular building, practically an autonomous project, and an economic opportunity for the city that

10. Gilles Lipovetsky, Le temps hypermodernes. Grasset & Fasquelle, Paris, 2004, p. 80.

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goes beyond a strictly museum programme. There are many provincial museums that, having seen what has happened to Bilbao, now seek similar revitalization and renown through “spectacular” extension projects. Russell Bowman, director of the Milwaukee Art Museum (1985-2002), commented in relation to Caltatrava’s grandiloquent project of extension that: “for us, that became a very important driver of fund-raising, because people began to see the building as a city Project that was much larger than the museum” 11.

In this sense, Victoria Newhouse, architectural historian and author of the book “Towards a new Museum” considers that: «The fact that it is often easier to find funding for a new wing than for the restoration of an existing building means that the first option is usually chosen, this being the ‘sexier’ project »[...]rather than the more prosaic. Members of the Board of Directors and museum staff, many of them with little or no experience as institutional clients, often choose the architect based on questionable considerations»12.

From city museum to theme park An extension project may be just the tip of the iceberg of a political and economic strategy for far-reaching urban revitalization. Since the 1980s, we have seen the appearance in European capitals (and in American capitals from the 1990s onwards) of a museifying phenomenon of historic centres in which complex relationships between the tourist industry, entertainment and culture are interwoven through the pedestrianisation of entire areas (even Times Square in New York is being partially pedestrianised), conservation and restoration of historic buildings, sightseeing tours and buses, generic souvenir shops, etc. Two decades later we are witnessing a second phenomenon of disneylandisation, in which historic city quarters are being turned into a form of theme parks with greater emphasis on the decor and scenery, using new architectural landmarks and through the exploitation of the local culture as a theme. Just like theme parks, the city starts to operate with logic similar to that of a specialized shopping centre13.

11. Blake Eskin, The incredible growing Art Museum (ARTnews oct. 2001) 12. Victoria Newhouse, Towards a New Museum. Expanded Edition. Nueva York: The Monacelli Press, 1998, 2006, p.138 13

City of Bilbao’s postcard after Guggenheim

Disney Castle, Orlando

Tate Modern expansion project by Herzog & de Meuron

A somewhat paradoxical case is that of the Tate. In the 1990s the museum carried out a survey among artists to choose the new centre for its contemporary art gallery.

They decided - based on the survey – to rehabilitate an existing industrial building rather than construct a flagship building consisting of a new floor. The restoration was carried out by Herzog & de Meuron, winners of a competition whose conditions prioritised minimal architectural intervention to the existing structure. A decade later, for its expansion project, the Tate Modern commissioned the same architects to design “an iconic new building”, as stated on the museum’s website. The architectural intentions of the two projects are very different, almost diametrically opposed; the first opts for the preservation of an industrial building through minimal restoration in which art is ‘King’, while the second chooses the construction of an architectural symbol to accommodate, not so much the art, but the unstoppable numbers of visitors, in spaces that are no longer strictly for exhibition purposes.

In just fifteen years between the two projects, we are witnessing an extension and a change in the meaning of this museum. Originally designed to receive annually two million visitors, today, around five million people visit the Tate. This was one of the main reasons for the extension, the overwhelming public rather than an increase in the collection.

Mass cultural tourism and the museum as an experience With the development of cultural tourism, this more than significant increase in the quantity and type of public visiting museums today, has brought museums into direct competition with the world of leisure and entertainment (sports events, multi-screen cinemas, commercial and musical performances, etc.), pushing them to reinvent themselves to be equally attractive.

This new public attends museums more in search of entertainment and experiences

13. «The park allows us space only as consumers and offers a revamped history intended to offset any qualms about that situation. Jane Kuenz, Inside the Mouse. Work and Play at Disney World, The Project on Disney. Duke University Press, 1995. Chapter: “It´s a small world after all”, p.69 12. Victoria Newhouse, Towards a New Museum. Expanded Edition. Nueva York: The Monacelli Press, 1998, 2006, p.138 15

Tate Gallery (London)

MoMA (New York)

Denver Museum of Art (Denver)

Reina Sofia (Madrid)

High Museum of Art (Atlanta)

Boijmans Museum (Rotterdam)

Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) LaM (L’Ille)

0

84.000sf

100.000sf

135.000sf

200.000sf

210.000sf

177.000sf

300.000sf

146.000sf

86.000sf

265.000sf

400.000sf

371.350sf

378.000sf

365.000sf

351.000sf

312.000sf

280.000sf

260.000sf

9000m2

130.000sf

183.000sf

130.000sf

11.8403sf 34.803m2

500.000sf

230.000m2

252.000sf

600.000sf

631.350sf

630.000sf

700.000sf

800.000sf

900.000sf

US Museums

European Museums

Square footage of the museum extensions

Built percentage of the museum extensions Previous to expansion: 75%

Centro Arte Reina Sofia

Van Abbemuseum

Expansion: 25%

Expansion: 40%

Expansion: 50%

Expansion: 80%

Previous to expansion: 60%

Previous to expansion: 50%

Previous to expansion: 20%

Denver Art Museum

Walker Art Center

Expansion: 41%

Previous to expansion: 59%

Tate Modern

Expansion: 57%

Previous to expansion: 43%

High Museum of Art

Expansion: 35%

Previous to expansion: 65%

Boijmans Museum

Expansion: 40%

Previous to expansion: 60%

MoMA NY

PROPORCION DE LA INTERVENCION

than education or culture, which poses a challenge for institutions that for many years had been oriented towards a small and elitist public and that now receive a great quantity of less enlightened visitors. To Jean Baudrillard, who sees “mass production” as a threat to culture and social body, it is an irony: «The masses throw themselves at it not because they salivate for that culture that has been denied to them for centuries, but because for the first time they have the opportunity to massively participate in this great mourning of a culture that, in the end, they have always detested»14.

The term experience economy, created by the economists Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, can be applied to the cultural sector. In their thesis, they declare that:

«Businesses no longer simply sell goods or services, now they are investing in representing memorable experiences to strengthen customer loyalty and build lasting relationships and communities of common interest»15.

Today this is a central theme for any museum. Many institutions that have remained intact for years are now seen to be lacking in space to accommodate these new functions that are not generally as compatible with exhibition galleries, something that will have to be taken into account when a new programme is being prepared.

The phrase “creating the 21st century museum”, forms part of the advertising slogan of many extension projects (Tate, MoMA, Walker) and although occasionally, as in the case of the new MoMA, it is more an advertising slogan than a reality, what this sentence reveals is that the traditional model of galleries of objects is no longer sufficient to cope with the new social realities that museums are experiencing.

Architectural branding In this search for experiences, architecture takes on a very important role as a

14. Baudrillard, op. cit., p.24 15. Pine and Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre and Every Business a Stage. Harvard Business School Press, 1999. Andrew Blauvelt in “Experience the Center”, p. 16. Expanding the Center, Walker Art Center and Herzog and de Meuron.]

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backdrop, not so much for the exhibited art but for the visiting public. The fact of not being in a capital and not having a historical collection like MoMA, has not prevented the Guggenheim in Bilbao from receiving a million visitors a year, who come in search of an experience that is more theatrical than artistic. We recall how in 1991, the discreet and respectful extension of the National Gallery in London, designed by the architects Venturi & Scott Brown, at the height of the so-called “starchitecture”, came in for criticism for being integrated into an existing building and its surroundings in Trafalgar Square. This contextual, unassuming architecture for the second most visited monument of the United Kingdom, was viewed by certain strata of the architectural profession at the time of its opening, as a lost opportunity.

The term “starchitecture” invented by the media and so disliked by the profession, promotes the idea of the building as an image or brand along with the worship of the architect, in a similar way to that of film stars (hence the term). In fact there are just a few architects who, between them, receive many of the most prestigious projects for museums and their extensions.

This phenomenon ultimately ends up creating the idea of architectural branding, evidently very useful in terms of tourism as it is now included in advertising brochures, TV commercials, posters at airports and stations; even reaching merchandising. Mugs, erasers, t-shirts and pencil cases printed with sketches of the project are disseminated throughout the world generating considerable funds to pay off the debts of the enlargements.

Although for the urban planner Manuel de Solà-Morales it is something very different to the meaning of creating the city: «In the past it was only large cities that acted like this, but now it is medium and small cities too; everyone wants to have an emblematic building and any sense of civility disappears»16.

16. Manuel de Solà-Morales. Interview for Construtecno, 13th October, 2008 19

GIO PONTI

LIBESKIND LIBESKIND

Denver Art Museum Complex Royal Ontario Museum expansion by Libeskind

Frame of the movie ‘Brazil’ by Terry Gilliam (1985)

Land speculation Another of the effects of this emblematic architecture within the framework of a process of urban regeneration is the reclassification of the land. A good example is the extension project for the Denver Art Museum. This institution, which already occupied a fantastic building by the great Italian architect Gio Ponti (the only one he designed in the United States), famous for his Pirelli Tower in Milan and founder of Domus magazine, decided to give the commission for the extension, without a previous competition, to the architect Daniel Libeskind. The day that the Museum, together with the City Council’s Department of urban planning, revealed the model of the project, it also revealed a residential complex, in addition to the new building, constructed by Mile High Development on a commercial podium of two floors with a parking area. Interestingly, Libeskind’s building relates better to the housing complex, designed by the architect himself, than to the museum designed by Ponti to which it belongs. The museum is one more chapter in the project for the transformation of the city centre which, in its path, has demolished the iconic Plaza Zeckendorf of the 1960s, designed by I. M. Pei; the building of the Denver Post newspaper, built in the 1940s, the work of the great modernist architect Temple Buell; Currigan Hall of the 1960s; and the Terracentre Tower of 1982.

Another extension by Libeskind, this time for the Royal Ontario Museum, also forms part of a government project that aims to put Toronto on the international cultural scene. In this case the project does not turn its back on the first building, but instead splits it right in half. This blatantly aggressive design that shows so little respect for the original structure is, however, very much appreciated by government agencies, who see it as an original and striking beacon. This “cultural lifting” has more in common with the plastic surgery in the film Brazil (1985), by Terry Gilliam, than the enhancements of film stars.

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MNCARS (Madrid)

TATE Modern (London)

Van Abbemuseum (Eidenhoven)

Walker Art Center (Minneapolis)

MoMA (New York)

DAM (Denver)

High Museum (Atlanta)

1982

1982

1982

1982

1982

1982

1982

1986

1986

1986

1986

1986

1986

1986

1990

1990

1990

1990

1990

1990

1990

1998

1998

1998

2002 proyecto de extensión

Jose M.Bonet 2000-2004

2002

2002

2002

2002

proyecto de extensión

proyecto de extensión

Jose Guirao Cabrera 19942000

1998

1997 GUGGENHEIM BILBAO 1994

1994

1994

Jan Debbaut 1986-2003

1994

1998

2006

Ana Martinez Aguilar 2004-2007

2006

2010

2014

Manolo Borja 2007-...

2014

2014

2014

Chris Dercon 2011-...

proyecto de extensión

2010

2010

Vicente Todoli 2006-2011

2006

Charles Esche 2004-...

2010

2014

2006

2010

Olga Viso 2008-...

2006

2014

2014

Christopher Heinrich 2009-...

2010

2010

2006

2006

proyecto de extensión

2002

2002

Michael E. Shapiro 2000-...

proyecto de extensión

Lewis I. Sharp 1989-2007

1998

Glenn D. Lowry 1995-...

proyecto de extensión

1998

Kathy Halbreich 1991-2008

1994

1994

1994

Ned Rifkin 1991-1999

Museum director’s chronology

Role of the director In an extension project it is the very identity of the museum that is at stake, a process that begins with the correct definition of the objectives and transformations to be carried out. This is the work of an administrative group, but ultimately the director will act as the element of cohesion and suture between all parties. This process is so long and costly that many directors leave their post before, during or after the works have been completed. This is the case of Russell Bowman, who left the management of the museum in 2002 after the extension of Calatrava; of Anthony Hirschel in 2004, after the extension of the Indianapolis Museum of Art; of Kathy Halbreich in 2005, two years after the extension of the Walker Art Center, which she left after sixteen years as director; or Ned Rifkin, who left the High Museum at the beginning of the extension plans in 2000. It is also the case of Lewis I. Sharp, who, in 2007, left the Denver Art Museum one year after the extension designed by Liebeskind, and Glenn D. Lowry, who took on the post at MoMA in 1995, three years before starting the extension project. Jan Debbaut also left the Van Abbemuseum in 2003, a year after the new building opened, and Vicente TodolĂ­ announced his departure from the Tate Modern before the extension plans started (Chris Dercon took over in 2011 and took on the responsibility of carrying out the project). Even Thomas Krens, director of the Guggeheim, left his post after twenty years.

CRONOLOGIA DE LOS DIRECTORES

Various factors contribute to the making of these decisions, but perhaps the most obvious and understandable is the exhaustion at the end of a long process of enormous responsibility. Once the extension works are finished and the new museum is in operation, many directors feel they have fulfilled their obligations and need a change. Others leave their post before starting an extension project to avoid having to deal with such a strenuous process that, in addition, involves dealing with tasks that would hardly correspond to the head of a museum under normal circumstances.

But in any case, an extension project requires a very active director, not only during the construction but above all in the previous phases, which can last for several years and in which the future of the institution will be defined. However good an architect is, without the clear vision of a museum team (client) and clear and constant monitoring, a coherent project will not, in many cases, be built.

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MNCARS connective area between buildings

MNCARS patio and museum entrance

The Reina Sofia Museum went through a succession of three directors (José Guirao Cabrera, Juan Manuel Bonet and Ana Martínez de Aguilar) from the beginning of the works, in 1997, until the end of the construction of the extension designed by Jean Nouvel in 2005. In 2007 a new director, Manuel Borja-Villel, took over the management of the new museum. This constant change of directors during the construction process can only lead to problems of syntax and definition. The extension was conceived in the first instance to absorb all the administrative and educational functions, freeing up the whole of the Sabatini building exclusively for exhibitions. But the foundations of the project, which were already underway, changed, consequently altering the mission of the new building, introducing temporary exhibition rooms that truncated and complicated the operation and circulation in the whole complex.

It is quite common to come across lost visitors in the circulation block, looking for one of the temporary exhibitions.

The most successful extension projects are those in which the architect has been very much involved in the work on paper for a long time before the first stone is laid. “You can stimulate things, but more in terms of the programme than the form, therefore the issue of the programme – its conceptualisation, including the relationship with the client - is of great importance»17.

Kathy Halbreich, current Associate Director of MoMA, talks about her experience as active director during the extension of the Walker Art Center when it was decided not to hold a competition but instead directly commission the architects Herzog & de Meuron with the project, as they wanted to begin the process with a lengthy series of conversations rather than with a stack of preconceived ideas or partially digested drawings18. At the same time, Halbreich commented on the importance of the sense of collaboration: «There was also a shared sense of collaboration, of freedom derived from talks without ties. From the beginning they saw that Richard Flood (head of exhibitions) and I were very interested in both small and large decisions, and thus they encouraged our involvement»19.

17. Jacques Herzog, op. cit., p.10] 18. Kathy Halbreich, Expanding the Center, Walker Art Center and Herzog & de Meuron, op.cit., p.6.]

19. Ibid., p. 7.]

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SFMOMA

by Snohetta MoMA (New York) Tate Gallery (London) LACMA (Los Angeles) MAXXI

by Zaha Hadid

0

Detroit Institute of Arts

by M. Graves High Museum of Art (Atlanta) Walker Art Center (Minneapolis)

$50 M

$100 M

$150 M

$200 Millions $250 M

MoMA Manhattan

$300 M

$350 M

$336 328.000

$400 Millions $450 M

$480 000.000

$425000.000

$336 328.000 phase1 + Resnick P. (phase2) Still to finish phase 2 and all phase 3

$200 000.000

$158 000.000 + $40.000 (asbestos repair) = $198 000.000 + $178 400.000

$130 000.000

$125 000.000

$117 900.000

Milwake Art Museum

by Calatrava Reina Sofia (Madrid)

$110 000.000

(49 500.000 pounds)

29 700.000 euros

$63 538.000

$72 000.000

(92 000.000 euro)

Denver Museum of Art (Denver) Seattle Art Museum Bra Coepfil Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum (Heindhoven) LaM (L’Ille) Manuelle Gautrand

$500 M

$550 M

$600 Millions

$650 M

$700 M

MoMA whole operation + PS1

$750 M

$800 Millions

$858 000.000

US Museums

European Museums

Expansion budgets

For the expansion of MoMA, although a competition was run, a series of previous meetings and seminars were convened, and finally the whole set of these preliminaries was collected in a publication that sought to understand the needs of the museum and the directions it had to take. As its director, Glenn D. Lowry wrote: «The museum of modern art could not afford to enlarge itself by simply expanding, as it had done in the past; if it wanted to meet the challenges of the future it had to create a new museum»20. The constructed reality has been less visionary. According to the late New York Times architecture critic, Herbert Muschamp, even though they invited all those young architects and confirmed that they wanted to define the museum of the 21st century, the truth is that MoMA is a classical corporate institution that chose the correct and traditional solution within its classical modernism, keeping the same museum mission it had prior its expansion.

Budgets and number of visitors The budgets for these projects vary from the tens to the hundreds of millions of dollars. They are very risky investments, and although a museum is not a corporation, both end up working with a similar logic. We are talking about investments, which in the case of MoMA, represented 858 million dollars, of which 425 million went on the construction and remodelling of the Manhattan museum. If we compare this with the 110 million dollars that the Reina Sofía Museum cost, the 100 millions of the Guggenheim in Bilbao or the 67 millions of the Walker Art Center, it is easy to understand the enormous pressure that the director would have been under. Add to that the challenge of trying to achieve some kind of profitability. As the writer Judith H. Dobrzynski points out: «Some institutions are already trapped in a vicious circle: the bigger they grow, the more money they require»21.

20. Glenn D. Lowry, Imagining the Future of the Museum of Modern Art, Nueva York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1998, p.12 21. Amy Whitaker, Museum Legs: Fatigue and Hope in the Fact of Art, Hol Art Books, Tucson, Arizona, 2009, p.99 27

New mechanical stairs at MoMA

Mall of America, Minneapolis (MN)

Economic operations of this magnitude seek, above all, to increase the number of visitors. It is the number of visitors that will boost the economy of the museum, of the neighbourhood and even of the city, following the same market logic as that of companies and the American model of infinite growth. «Like it or not, the museum is from now on confronted with the hard law of the market. Ignoring this, would not expose an omission, it would simply be suicide»22.

Museums are increasingly concerned about growth strategies (increase in public, socio-economic impacts, tourist attraction, cultural planning of the region, etc.) at the same time as the development of different sources of funding (entrance fees, commercial activities and restaurant and catering services, rental spaces, sponsorships...). One of the triumphs of the new MoMA is, precisely, the ability to absorb and circulate the public visiting it. The clarity in the movement diagram, with efficiency and emphasis on the route, is one of the strengths of Taniguchi’s project, with escalators - as in a conventional shopping centre-, visually connecting corridors and large spaces; all aimed, among other things, at generating maximum profit from the number of visitors.

The Museum was shouting out for changes. In the “Conversation iv” of the conference in Ponticano, Rem Koolhaas, one of the speakers, stated that «If the Museum (MoMA) has proved anything it is that you can be a successful institution in mediocre architecture»23. For his part, Terence Riley, Head curator of the department of architecture and design for eleven years (until 2006), said: «Frankly, if art was not so wonderful, no one would want to come to this building»24. And he adds: «Ironically, the original Museum of 1939, designed by Goodwin and Stone, despite its small size, achieves this diversity of experiences through means that are no longer evident»25. This declaration by Riley means that MoMA, with its departmental structure created by Barr, would paradoxically be seeking a coherence and logic that it had lost during its expansive career. The new project streamlined the flows, connections of spaces and buildings, renovating the whole complex, but its scale is of such magnitude that it is impossible to find the intimacy and domesticity of that first project.

22. Jean Michel Tobelem, Le nouvel âge des Musées. Armand Colin, Paris, 2005, p. 9 23. Imagining the Future of the Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1998, p. 62.

24. Ibid. p 134 25. Ibid. p 134 and 119.

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THE TOWN SQUARE Denver Art Museum

URBAN SPECULATOR High Museum of Art

CAMPUS OF THE ARTS

ADMINISTRATION WING

Tate Modern

THEME PARK

Walker Art Center LACMA

SOCIAL FORUM

Centro Arte Reina Sofia

Public Square

Van Abbemuseum

CORPORATE GIANT

MoMA NY

Museum typologies after expansion

In the words of Victoria Newhouse in the revised edition of her book on museum types Towards a New Museum, «it increasingly looks like the headquarters of a corporate giant». She also catalogues it as «museum as entertainment» and compares it with the criticism that Baudrillard made about the Pompidou Centre in his book l’Effet Beaubourg (1977).

Everything is geared towards constant movement and cultural consumption at the new 20-dollar entry price. After extensions, entry prices rise and one can better understand the need to make the public circulate. Renzo Piano, who sees the solitary and personal enjoyment of art under threat, says that «museums can end up as victims of their own success»26.

New typologies For the former director of the Walker Art Center, Kathy Halbreich, «the metaphor for the museum is no longer a church or temple but a lively forum or town square»27.

The idea of the museum as a public space for the city or the analogy with the traditional main square as a democratic space that «reconsiders the civic role of the museum» is the starting point for the expansion of the museum of Minneapolis. To this end she says that «they analyzed multiple models, ranging from science museums to the Mall of America - the largest shopping centre in the United States - located in the same city».

The popularity and success of current attendance at contemporary art museums puts them in direct competition with other forms of leisure and entertainment.

To compete, exhibitions have to be more commercial or mainstream, so that they attract a wider public. This has led to the label “Blockbuster” exhibitions. Many local governments and provincial museums have decided to plunge into the adventure of expansion, attracted by the public success of these itinerant mega-exhibitions that require greater spaces for temporary exhibitions and for the desired growing number of visitors.

26. Victoria Newhouse, op. cit., p. 306.

27. Halbreich, op.cit., p. 28.

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In contrast, local museums or art centres usually have a very carefully considered and particular programme. In the absence of capital and big international names, the programming at smaller centres is also interesting because it usually includes less commercial artists, which promotes more diversity in an increasingly polarized cultural panorama. Each centre puts together a single programme with its own vision that serves the community through in this highly educational and local role. This is what smaller museums have in their favour, but they are eager to exchange this for an increase in visitors and a more generic programme.

A question of size?

When is a museum too big? The LACMA in Los Angeles, which belongs rather to the “arts campus”, type of centre, is in the process of expansion and has recently opened the Resnick Pavilion, designed by Renzo Piano for the Broad collection. The building is a large hangar type box reminiscent of industrial spaces from the beginning of the 20th century with its diaphanous, single ground floor, and a roof striped with skylights to let in controlled daylight, as in AEG’s turbine factory designed by Peter Behrens (precursor of the modern movement). The Resnick pavilion, as well as Piano’s masterplan for the LACMA, puts emphasis on obtaining spatial clarity as, in the words of the architect “You also need calm, serenity and even a voluptuous quality linked to contemplation of the work of art”.

We seem to have reached a stage, post-Bilbao effect, in which Rome’s MAXXI (which has taken ten years to build) designed by Zaha Hadid, is perhaps the beginning of the end of a very expensive and somewhat reactionary typology. The economic crisis has also curbed the museum debacle, if only psychologically as the SFMOMA is going to spend 480 million dollars on its expansion project, designed by the Swedish firm Snøhetta. And although the emphasis placed on the wrapping is softening, the same cannot be said for the size, which is becoming increasingly bigger to accommodate more visitors and larger works of art.

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To conclude, we will introduce a new paradigm which includes Piano’s new pavilion and which is being repeated in several institutions following the success of the Tate Modern. A typology that opens up another avenue of discussion regarding the characteristics, this time internal, of new exhibition spaces. This Tate effect, as christened by Rem Koolhaas at the inaugural conference of the Festival of Ideas for the New City, in May, 2011 - organized by the New Museum of New York and which just three years after its inauguration is already spreading to adjoining premises in the Bowery, involves creating new colossal exhibition spaces, the Tate’s Turbine Hall being the instigator and one of the first although almost the smallest in this new series (Gdanks, Mass MOCA, Hangar Bicocca, day Beacon, etc.). The scale of future expansions, if we carry on with this new typology that seems to accommodate the most avant-garde art, will catapult us to another physical relationship with the space and the work, far from the original intimacy and tranquility of museums. «The spaces are changing, so does the art contained within them»28. Only apocalyptic exhibits seem appropriate to fill these huge spaces (Olafur Eliasson, Anish Kapoor, Doris Salcedo, etc.), although perhaps this is appropriate for these times of crisis and opportunity that we are living through. As Paul Virilio, philosopher par excellence of the apocalyptic says: «the Apocalypse is not the end of the world, it’s its revelation»29.

Doris Salcedo- Shibboleth, 2007

26. Koolhaas. Keynote speech at the Festival of Ideas for the New City, in May, 2011 at NYU. 27. Paul Virilio, interview for Quaderns d’Arquitectura i urbanisme #255 33

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