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ARTFUL INSIDE AND OUT
Museums across the globe have discovered the power of design. Here’s where to see masterful architecture before you even enter the museum’s doors. By Elaine Glusac
Time was, you had to go to New York or Paris to see the latest and greatest in contemporary design. Enter Frank O. Gehry, architect of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, a middle-of-nowhere city that landed firmly on the tourist circuit with the opening of Gehry’s building, a magnificent doodle in titanium, now celebrating its 10th anniversary. Where Gehry consequently went — no matter how remote — hordes followed in a pattern commonly referred to as the “Bilbao Effect.”
The phenomenon has inspired museums worldwide to seek out “star-chitects” such as Japan’s Tadao Ando and Germany’s Daniel Libeskind to create new, landmark wings — if not entire museums — that drive attendance as much for spectacle of the shell as for the wonders curated within. From Cincinnati to Spain, Celebrated Living tours the latest destination designs.
VALENCIA, SPAIN (pictured above)
A native of Valencia, Santiago Calatrava arguably saved his grandest work for his hometown in his City of Arts and Sciences. The massive complex includes a helmetlike opera house dramatically arched by a central rib and housing several stages. The seemingly winking, eye-shaped Hemisféric contains an IMAX theater, planetarium, and laserium. A concrete rib cage with glass connective tissue forms the skeletal home of the Science Museum Príncipe Felipe, hosting exhibits on DNA, astronomy, and evolution, as well as a Foucault’s pendulum suspended from the ceiling. The final piece of the City, the Ágora, a convention and meeting center, was completed this fall. It neighbors Europe’s largest aquarium, the only structure in the district not designed by Calatrava but well worth seeing, especially architect Félix Candela’s cleverly undulating building. The Hemisféric and Príncipe Felipe are spaced by expansive reflecting pools and all of the City’s structures are heralded by over 100 arches buffering the street. 011-34-96-902-100-031, www.cac.es
And if you’re headed to Spain for the Bilbao Guggenheim’s anniversary, Calatrava’s works in Valencia, or Jean Nouvel’s Reina Sofia expansion, add one more stop to your itinerary: Rafael Moneo’s new expansion of the Museo del Prado, Madrid’s most famous museum. Spaniard Moneo cleverly unites the existing 1785 building with the 17th-century cloister of San Jerónimo el Real behind it, now a sculpture garden. 011-34-1-902-10-70-77, www.museoprado.mcu.es
Also see: Calatrava’s cathedral-like addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum has an exterior sunscreen that opens and closes, resembling a bird on the shores of Lake Michigan. (414) 224-3220, www.mam.org
LONDON, ENGLAND
Long before Sir Norman Foster came along — specifically since 1852 — the British Museum’s interior quadrangle was largely inaccessible to the public. But with the knighted architect’s glass ceiling installation in 2000, the pavilion was reclaimed and renamed the Great Court. From the court’s central, circular Reading Room, also restored with the project, the undulating ceiling of glass tiles fans out, admitting light to the largest glass-roofed square in Europe, fittingly home to a cafe. The new courtyard more logically organizes traffic in the building and allows direct access from it to the museum’s famous Egyptian sculpture gallery and the Enlightenment Gallery. 011-44-20-7323-8000, www.britishmuseum.org
Also see: Though not a museum, the Reichstag in Berlin, Germany, was restored by Foster, who added a glass dome and central mirrored pillar with peripheral walkways in view of the political proceedings. 011-49-30-227-30341, www.bundestag.de
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
In lush Golden Gate Park, Swiss architectural partnership Herzog & de Meuron took on the job of rebuilding the 1895 art institution de Young Museum after it was damaged in the 1989 earthquake. Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, 2001 Pritzker Prize winners, designed the copper skin on the new three-story building that is perforated in a pattern that calls to mind the dimpled pattern of light through the trees. The dialogue between building and park is integral to the design; windows encircle the building, opening the views to visitors inside, while a series of courtyards tempts them outdoors. Interior galleries reflect the era of the collection on view. One example: 17th- to 19th-century American paintings are shown in classically proportioned rooms while contemporary art is staged in open galleries (as are exhibits of objects from the Americas, Africa, and the Pacific) which allow visitors to walk around them. An observation tower twists skyward to 144 feet, offering views of the park and the museum. (415) 750-3600, www.deyoungmuseum.org
Also see: Herzog & de Meuron recently expanded the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis with a crumbled-looking metal cube, housing new galleries and a restaurant from chef Wolfgang Puck. (612) 375-7600, www.walkerart.org
CINCINNATI, OHIO
Iraq-born, London-based architect Zaha Hadid put Cincinnati on the design world map with the 2003 Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art. Pathways into the concrete assembly of galleries slope up, leading inside to a ramp bound for the mezzanine, thus organizing the flow of the space. This main level offers access to variably sized, often glass-walled galleries that toy with the concept of solids and voids while accommodating installation pieces of various sizes. After the debut of the museum, Hadid went on to win the prestigious Pritzker Prize for architecture in 2004. The building, too, drew attention to the art of the CAC. The museum was founded in 1939 and is dedicated to exhibiting contemporary “art of the last five minutes.” It boasts a history of showing Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg before they were world-famed, and a reputation for defending the first amendment rights to artistic expression brought on by its 1990 show of Robert Mapplethorpe’s controversial photographs. (513) 345-8400, www.contemporaryartscenter.org
Also see: Hadid also drew the under-construction Glasgow Museum of Transport on the River Clyde in Glasgow, Scotland, to open in 2009. 011-44-141-287-2720, www.glasgowmuseums.com
FORT WORTH, TEXAS
Before it was trendy, Fort Worth, neighboring city to Dallas, assembled a clutch of destination designs in its collection of museums, including the Kimbell Art Museum by Louis I. Kahn and the Amon Carter Museum by Philip Johnson. Tadao Ando’s 2002 Modern Art
Museum of Fort Worth adds a third star to the city’s cultural constellation. In his serene plan, five flat-roofed, glass-walled pavilions are arranged around a large reflecting pond, engaging visitors in a tranquil contemplation of nature in counterpoint to the mental stimulation of the art on exhibit. While generating interest in the landscape, the design also cleverly supports the exhibition of art, using cantilevered roofs to shade the glass walls which filter in natural light, while an interior frame of concrete walls protects the artwork from exposure. One of the leading modern art museums in the country, the Modern holds more than 2,600 works in its permanent collection including paintings by Jackson Pollock and Gerhard Richter, photos by Cindy Sherman, and sculpture by Richard Serra. (817) 738-9215, www.themodern.org
Also see: Ando’s minimalist The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis, with a courtyard reflecting pool, features a massive Serra sculpture in the garden. (314) 754-1850, www.pulitzerarts.org
TORONTO, ONTARIO
Executives at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum hired architect Daniel Libeskind for its new expansion, which debuted last summer. Appending the natural history and world cultures museum originally built in 1914, Libeskind’s angular, broken façade of glass and aluminum for the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal wing juts from the ground up 120 feet on central Bloor Street West, announcing the museum’s presence with a landmark threshold (the name “crystal” references the addition’s resemblance to a gem-like shape). Plenty of natural light filters into the soaring lobby, and Libeskind’s fondness for sloping walls and criss-crossing bridges is fully expressed in the addition with no right angles. It houses seven permanent galleries, including those devoted to dinosaurs and mammals. In spring 2008 ROM will open rooms showcasing South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the Americas, and Asia Pacific, as well as textiles and costumes. The expansion is part of a $270 million overhaul of the museum that, when complete in 2009, will create permanent galleries for each area of specialty within the museum. On Libeskind’s top floor, C5 serves as the museum’s fine dining restaurant and lounge, the most stylish spot for literally drinking in the design. (416) 586-8000, www.rom.on.ca
Also see: The angular new addition to the Denver Art Museum, also by Libeskind, echoes the Rocky Mountain peaks in the distance. (720) 865-5000, www.denverartmuseum.org
PARIS, FRANCE
From Gustav Eiffel to I.M. Pei, many influential designers have left their mark on Paris. Last year French architect Jean Nouvel added to the list of the city’s constructed wonders with the Musée du quai Branly, uniting the non-Western collections of two prior institutions with art and objects from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. Four connected buildings house the museum on a prime stretch of Left Bank real estate along the Seine, with one long pierlike wing suspended above a plaza garden. This dramatic, slightly curving arm contains a 600-foot-long central gallery where towering totems take advantage of the soaring ceiling. A ramp from the grand hall leads to exhibition space aloft where African masks, Mayan sculptures, Bolivian headdresses, and more perch on boxes in a forest of displays. Outside, one wall is devoted to a vertical garden bedded with 15,000 plants. 011-33-1-56-61-7000, www.quaibranly.fr
Also see: In Madrid, Nouvel added glass galleries as well as a lacquer-red building which houses theaters and a restaurant to the 18th-century hospital occupied by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. 011-34-1-91-774-1000, www.museoreinasofia.es
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