Caruso St John’s New Art Gallery, Walsall (2000), Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork (2004), by architects O’Donnell + Tuomey, and even Herzog & de Meuron’s Tate Modern (2000) all suggest visual subservience to curatorial demands yet remain alert to the need for strong media positioning. Perhaps in response to the apparent architectural excesses of the New Iconic Museum, the past decade has seen several notable attempts at what might be called dramatic pragmatism, the combination of material and textural restraint with the traditional free planning and spatial exaggeration offered by a museum programme. It is a visual mnemonic to Modernism and iconism, both homage and pastiche. OMA’s cascading tumble of ostensibly conventional slab blocks uses both the International Style aesthetic of Chicago’s John Hancock Center and Sears Tower, with its comfortingly visible structural elements, and the deconstructed, ‘collapsed’ style popularized by Daniel Libeskind. ‘Ever since we saw the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, we’ve asked why not in Louisville’1, said Steve Wilson, one of the project’s investors. The proposal from the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) for Museum Plaza in Louisville, Kentucky, is designed explicitly to attract attention. For museums this has meant an inevitable diversion from the collection towards place and activity. Icons will always exist the cultural perception of the building as object – rather than a functional series of spaces – now forms the primary way of interpreting architecture. The museum’s lasting legacy was to identify an apparent correlation between a building’s physical appearance and the fortunes of its location a dramatic, curvy structure for an exuberant, revitalized city. The Bilbao Guggenheim was initially extolled as a triumphant physical manifestation of digital processes. In Paris, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s Pompidou Centre (inspired in part by the paper fantasies of Cedric Price and Archigram in the 1960s) reopened the debate about the role a dynamic physical environment could play in artistic perception, the start of a process that culminated with Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim, a building that revealed – perhaps unintentionally – how architectural aesthetics could shape and inform content.Įnter the iconic age. In many works from the era – Marcel Breuer’s looming, insular Whitney Museum of American Art (1966) or Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1968) or his addition at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts (1974) – architecture had almost entirely ceased to embody any kind of narrative or structure it was simply a vessel for holding art. Johnson’s self-conscious dullness was the nadir of Modernist un-invention. Art overflowed the constraints of the canvas architecture followed meekly. The gradual reduction of the decorated façade into a muted, abstract composition took place in parallel with the most significant American art movement of the postwar era, Abstract Expressionism, an integration epitomized by Philip Johnson’s Rothko Chapel in Houston (1971), a self-consciously pared-down structure built to house a Mark Rothko triptych. Sober, self-effacing, functional museum architecture stems from the Bauhaus-era fascination with purity and simplicity. Iconic monumentalism was a reaction against the anodyne Modernism that had become the de facto house style of museology. As the new century progresses, the architecture of high culture is evolving still further, and a new museum now carries with it the weight of cultural expectation, anticipated by both critics and town planners as a potent symbol of place, be it a district, city or even a whole country. Within the eight exhibition halls, that total 10,000sq m of space, MICA is holding its first exhibition by MOTSE, a team of 40 Shenzhen-based artists, scientists and musicians using interactive devices and new media to explore contemporary culture.Towards the end of the last century major cultural institutions established themselves as generators of urban activity rather than just repositories for artefacts and information. Opened to the public on 30 November, the contemporary art museum, MICA, was the final structure to be completed in the 8-year-long project. Spanning 115,000sq m, it is the largest and most versatile cultural centre in Hunan province, including in its span a contemporary art museum, a large theatre, and a small theatre each with slightly different aesthetics. Standing out in the smoggy city landscape, these three alien structures comprise the recently completed Changsha Meixihu International Culture and Arts centre – one of the latest creations of Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA). Juxtaposed with the Meixi Lake in the historic city of Changsha, southern China, are three distinct, white structures resembling flower petals when viewed from atop, and something of whipped cream when viewed from the side.
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