Ada Louise Huxtable, Architecture Critic, The Wall Street Journal
New Worlds and Dead EndsThis is a subject that's close to my heart. But, I must start by telling you I'm not going to talk about museum architecture. I'm going to talk about architecture. And I'm going to start by saying something that I really didn't think was necessary to say, and yet I want to say it: architecture is a great art, and it's a very important art. Frank Lloyd Wright called it the mother of the arts. It's not just building. And if you build a museum, you set up a tension among the arts, which is going to be either troublesome, or great. Architecture is the art that has to work with the other arts.
I know there are experts here today who will speak knowledgeably and eloquently about museum architecture per se and issues and problems involved, but I want to talk about what's going on now. And I'm going to show you some very scary architecture, because I want to tell you about a creative and technological revolution taking place today that is profoundly affecting how we think about museums in the built world. You could call this new work "extreme architecture." It is the architectural equivalent of hang gliding, and like extreme sport, it explores uncharted territory. This architecture is less concerned with comfort and reassurance than with testing limits and new experiences. Another name could be "edge architecture." The quality of edginess, of creating the frisson of the questionable extension of the familiar and permissible, is part of today's culture.
Like all of the arts, the new architecture is both characteristic and symptomatic of our time. And like all of the arts, architecture does not stand still. Alberti did not have the last word. The range of the new work is also extreme. From aggressively in-your-face to stripped-down understatement, what holds it all together is this edginess, its preoccupation with unorthodox ideas and effects. The conventional word is "challenging," which implies equal extremes of risks and rewards.
New art is never kind to its antecedents. It declares its independence at the same time it absorbs, transforms, and even cannibalizes its history and achievements. This is deeply disturbing to those who would prefer an accommodation of the past to an aesthetic upheaval.
There are several ways of dealing with this kind of radical change. One popular device is to retreat into something called "contextualism," a word being bent out of shape to denote a hybrid of past and present that, to my mind, is a put-down of both. This usually means a copy or a caricature. Seamless continuity only works if there is something to continue. As an add-on, it's a cop-out. I think the word should be banished until the concept is better understood. Because these are high-risk times, in art as well as everything else, the only other option is to choose to live in them. We gain nothing by denial. If we reject the new work, we banish the creative impulse. We lose the game, with art and life.
I am fully convinced of the significance of this work. As a historian, I find this one of the most vital periods in the building arts. As a critic, I believe that it is a great period as well. I don't hesitate to say I think it parallels the Renaissance and the Modernist revolution. Advances in science and technology have given it a potential only beginning to be realized. Mathematics and the computer are providing undreamed-of new aesthetic and technological resources. In a sense we are reinventing architecture, using tools that never existed before to do things that never could be done before. The excitement engendered among architects is genuine. It comes from the knowledge that they are pursuing new dimensions to an ancient art.
For today's museum directors, the safety net is gone. The security of a charmed and closed cultural circle and accepted academic architecture belongs to the past. It's not just that museums have grown. They have a completely new public, social, educational, and urban role. Those who support and run them are in the enviable or unenviable position, depending on your point of view, of commissioning buildings that will creatively accommodate change. What reassures me is the quality, competence, and energy of the talent available today. To those who are equipped to understand and to utilize it, there is the opportunity to commission great buildings.
The potential is so great that it is sometimes terrifying, and I must admit so are some of the more radical new buildings. I have taken exhilarating voyages of discovery through vertiginous spaces with death-defying ramps and stairs. There is something in every architect that hates a handrail. There are disorienting diagonals and see-through floors and sudden changes of level leading to the void. I am torn between feeling like Vasco da Gama and an architecture victim. I have stumbled through the stygian gloom of Jean Nouvel's all-black opera house in Lyons, the consummate exercise in sinister chic. I carry scars from Rem Koolhaas's buildings in the Netherlands and France, marks of valor that distinguish the dedicated voyeur. And I am not the only walking wounded. It takes exceptional commitment or Zen masochism to enjoy the aesthetic avant-garde living arrangements required by some of the more adventurous designs. And as you can see from the slides I'm going to show you now, these places are not for the fainthearted.
I must warn you, photographs lie. They emphasize eccentricities. You need to visit these buildings. It's the only way to understand and experience and grow to love them. And if you can stay upright, you may experience an architectural epiphany. What I'm showing you is a very small selection. They're just a few of the architects and the buildings that are changing the art of architecture today.
I'm starting with the Guggenheim, Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim, because many of you know it, and it's no exaggeration to say that it is the most famous new museum in the world today. But something far more important is going on here than cutting-edge style. The computer has made buildings like this possible. We can now build complex shapes and curves which may be of the architect's own devising, as in Gehry's case, or they can be the computer-generated forms derived from the new mathematics. Both move architecture closer to sculpture. Using new materials and techniques, architects are pushing the envelope, eroding the boundaries between the arts. Gehry's love of sculptural forms led him to a French computer program for the aerospace industry, used for the design of fighter planes. But he starts as architects have always started, with rough sketches that explore the building's forms and organization. These are a product of his eye and his hand and his mind and his taste as an artist. He develops these ideas in paper and cardboard models. And when the forms and functions have fused, the design goes on the computer for structural and cost analysis, and final specifications. Every structural detail, every detail of every drawing, is then worked out on the computer. In this building, the container and the contained are one thing. The visitor is both participant and spectator. For me, the Bilbao Guggenheim fully and uniquely expresses in a very special way, a very important way, the unity of the arts in our time.
This is Steven Holl's Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki. Holl is another architect who begins intuitively and traditionally with beautiful, evocative watercolor sketches. But once the concept is set, he too relies on the computer. His Helsinki museum combines a curving arc of sculptural volumes with a straight run of traditional galleries. The entrance where the two meet is a space of Piranesian surprise. The spiraling ramps lead to the galleries, and they always take you back to the glass-walled entrance façade that catches Helsinki's limited northern daylight, and the long, slanting rays of the sun. And I show you his watercolor. This is the sketch that is so close to the finished product. This is the way he begins-not on the computer, but as an artist. The galleries still have that quality of the watercolors. Sometimes it's hard to tell them apart.
Holl won the commission for the extension of the Kansas City Art Museum with a series of connected, glass-walled pavilions, separate from the main building, set into the surrounding landscape's sculpture garden. This was the only proposal that did not directly add onto or increase the size of the existing, perfectly proportioned Beaux-Arts building. It was both the most radical and the most respectful of the designs submitted.
Then there are architects, like the others, who start with superb drawings, and then turn them quickly over to the computer for analysis. Zaha Hadid begins with elements of the landscape or site as the basis of her design. These are amazingly beautiful images. They are almost a new art form. This is a rendering of the site of the fire station in Weil am Rhein. She has also done, in Weil am Rhein, an exhibition building, and her studies of the long, sloping site are the source of the building. They evolved into a structure echoing the landscape, and woven into it. You can see the evolution of the circulation, and the building forms, in these computer studies. A promenade goes from the lower level across the building, right up into the landscape. Her first building in this country will be an arts center in Cincinnati, and I am thrilled that you are going to see Hadid's computerized presentation of this later on this morning. This is the completed German building, and the interior, and that is an early computerized rendering of what the Cincinnati building will be.
The next one I want to show you is by Peter Zumthor, which is a complete contrast to the kind of dramatic complexity that Hadid works with. There are other architects who are paring their buildings down to an extreme minimalism, but there is much more to this seductive simplicity than meets the eye. After you have succumbed to the almost mystical serenity of this kunsthaus in Bregenz, Austria, which is designed for contemporary art, you realize that its reductive elegance is as radical as anything it contains. The glass wall is actually double, and you can see ghostly silhouettes of the stairs and the services right through the glass, because they're contained between the two walls. Because the space between the walls that contains all of this, the building itself has absolutely no interruptions. And the entrance is a room of luminous austerity that really makes you gasp when you go inside. Four of these rooms are stacked above each other as galleries, and there's a six-foot space between each floor to allow daylight to be channeled from the exterior walls, through a translucent glass ceiling, at each level-which delivers natural light to all the galleries. It's a magic trick. Every stripped-down detail has enormous elegance and power.
And then I go to another architect, Rem Koolhaas who, again, is completely different, working in a way unlike any of the others. I think the diversity, the pluralism of this new architecture, is one of its great strengths. And many of these architects are rethinking existing building types. Some of the most intriguing solutions come from the Netherlands, which I've always thought of as a very controlled country, and these architects really let it all out. The Educatorium is a building in Utrecht, at the University of Utrecht, by Koolhaas and his Office of Metropolitan Architecture. It's a complete departure from this most boring of standard academic facilities. I think there is nothing more deadly than the lecture and examination hall of most universities. Here there are no endless blind corridors, no airless fluorescent-lit rooms, none of the forgettable furnishings and placeless anomie endured by generations of captive students. This place is alive with movement. It's conceived as a continuous ramp, as you can see clearly from the construction, and from the exterior. The whole building is just this curved ramp, which is the basic circulation system. It's how you get to everything, and on every level there is a meeting place or a lounge for students. And materials and colors change along the route. You are never bored. You are always seeing something new. There's a section of transparent floor at the main level; it's disconcerting but delightful when you hit it, because you can see the activity below. Glass walls replace all ordinary sealed and scaleless rooms. There is an enormous cafeteria, completely glass-walled with views outside. And there is this no-doze lecture hall. And that tight curve of the ramp at the very top is beautifully lined with wood like a ship. It's actually a site-specific work of art, and the students love it. They skateboard in it.
Now, can you remember the last building that really surprised or delighted you, or when being in one was just fun? Among my favorites are two in Hilversum by the Dutch firm of MVRDV. This office building reveals its unusual floor plan in its exterior design (you can see that cutaway at the bottom) because it's actually very open-it's all layered and stacked trays of space. It's not just routine floors that you can reach by stairs and elevators. And these trays are open to other work areas, and to small outdoor terraces, and people seem to work in them very happily and very creatively. It is a creative firm-a TV and media production firm, I believe. A glass elevator goes up to the roof, and the roof is planted with grass and furnished with benches. And you find yourself anticipating each unexpected feature that plays with and humanizes familiar uses.
This is another office building in Hilversum, an exquisite version of a Miesian glass box raised elegantly above the ground on slender columns. The site is a rare Dutch hill that includes a public footpath from top to bottom. And what happens under the structure along the path would give Mies pause. To reach the entrance you climb a stair through an underworld landscape of massed lava rocks lit by fake glowing coals. After years of High Modernism's high solemnity, this is very witty and polished work.
And this is a building in London, in Peckham, one of London's poorest sections, a small public library that is also guaranteed to make you smile. The building, by Alsop and Stormer, serves as a badly needed community facility and children's center. One side is a colorful patchwork of brightly tinted glass. The other has a huge overhang supported by slightly tipsy columns protecting the entrance. Inside, among the books, are three distinctly retro sci-fi pods on canted wooden legs, used for meetings, lectures, and performances. Beam yourself up into their interiors, and you are in a magical, light-filled cocoon, another world.
And then there are architects who have moved the net even farther. Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio incorporate conceptual, performance, computer, and video art into an imaginative architectural mix. This is their Blur building, a temporary exhibition structure for a Swiss lake. It's an oval enclosure of mist, formed by pipes on a metal frame set in the water. Surrounded by luminous fog walls, visitors, who have filled out a questionnaire when they enter, will wear computerized white raincoats programmed to blush pink when mutual interests are revealed. And they'll work. Diller and Scofidio make these things work beautifully. The visitors can then repair together to an international water bar to drink the waters of the world. Water, obviously, is the theme. In the real world, Diller and Scofidio have built innovative housing in Japan and have designed New York's most refreshing restaurant interior, the Brasserie in the Seagram building, which leaves all other restaurant design in New York, as overreaching as it is, in the dust. They recently received the commission for the new Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.
Now these are the last pictures I'll show you. They're the most extreme. A younger group finds its fun and games in cyberspace. This is architecture's most far-out, experimental edge. Greg Lynn of Los Angeles designs directly on the computer, and so do a lot of younger practitioners. He uses the fluid, folding, morphing forms that he calls "animate forms." This is a computer model for a school, and a study for an embryonic house. Not surprisingly, this is all the rage in architecture schools, and you see project after project like this. I don't think we're all going to live in a Matrix world, but this kind of experimentation is extremely important.
I do not mean to imply that everything we know and do now is going to be obsolete. The backs of envelopes and cocktail napkins will always function as conveyors of ideas. Any architect who fails to understand how to relate to great classical buildings like Cleveland and Kansas City doesn't belong on the short list at all. In the case of Kansas City, Steven Holl's crystal necklace is a complementary gesture to a Beaux-Arts beauty. There is both continuity and contrast in this new work. Historical and academic sources rich in sophisticated references also play a part. They've been skillfully absorbed into a contemporary vocabulary. And a perfect example, which I know you are going to see, and I'm delighted you're going to see it, is the extension and renovation of the classical Getty villa in Malibu by Machado and Silvetti. This is allusion, not illusion, recall without imitation, a mix of source and site that I believe is genuinely contextual, a continuum full of messages about the past and present.
If new buildings disappoint, the architect always gets blamed. But it is usually the client who has demanded the signature building that upstages the art. Celebrity hype and the artful snowjob have overwhelmed reason and taste. There is enough blame to go around, however, among artists, architects, and museum directors (notoriously not a humble lot). And critics deserve some of the blame, too, with their enthusiastic endorsements, because they've never built a museum. Arrogance and intransigence are fairly equally distributed. Everyone wants a Bilbao. The superstars are supersalesmen, and we are all vulnerable to the tyranny of the new. The problem usually comes down to wrong choices, and bad clients.
Most boards feel insecure about architecture. They're very expert in their own fields, but they're awed by the importance and the permanence of their decisions. When they have been badly advised, or not advised at all, or the match is wrong, or the architect is unreasonable, or the client fails to insist on the museum's real needs or is unsympathetic to the design, disasters are waiting to happen. In the end, with all possible safeguards in place, architecture is still a high-stakes gamble, although for those who can read the hand, it has already been tipped.
We have learned that the ideal of neutral space does not exist. One art profoundly affects the other. What is seldom noticed is that in almost all of the most radical of those structures, and of the buildings that you have seen and of the new museums that you know, there is a beautifully contained, cleverly incorporated enfilade of galleries of much more conventional size and shape, and for the traditional collection, this is still the heart of the matter. But when you come away with a sense of light and space that endures long after you have left, when the art is served by its surroundings in subtle and exhilarating ways, when even the act of moving through the building gives pleasure, you know that this is what the museum should be, and that someone has understood, and worked very hard to make it happen. The difference between the banal and the beautiful is clear, and the distance between the past and present disappears.
Audience question to ALH: Thank you for the excellent talk. You are also an excellent preservation spokesperson, and I can't resist asking you some questions about this specific building. We've talked in the past about how museums have selected top architects, and we might agree now that in 1958 the museum made a mistake by not respecting the original building with the 1958 wing, by adding onto it and modernizing its interior spaces and so on, and yet, when the museum chose Marcel Breuer, they thought they were doing the greatest, latest thing, and something that would last for a long time. And now here we are, considering and debating whether the Breuer wing should stay, and whether we can make a great work that will really last. What do you think that we should do as a museum to avoid having to face this issue 30 years from now? Whatever we build now will be seen as something that doesn't work very well, and maybe should be replaced. Secondly, do you have any specific thoughts or suggestions regarding the Breuer wing, or any personal opinions you'd care to express about it?
ALH: We'll be here the rest of the morning! Well, I do want to say something. First of all, be true to your own times. Don't try and second-guess the future. And don't destroy the past. Don't destroy the Breuer wing. I'm sure I've stepped into a hornet's nest here. But I really think that preservation is a matter of preserving something that already exists. Respect the past. Respect the present. Pick an architect who respects them all, and will know what to do with them.