Posts Tagged Museums
Museum of Liverpool – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 23, 2011
It's part of a world heritage site, but the showy Museum of Liverpool fails to complement the city's proud past
How can this have happened? How could so many positive words – "regeneration", "vision", "culture" – plus so much public and private funding, plus so much scrutiny by bodies such as the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, have led to what now stands on Liverpool's waterfront? How could so many noble titles – Unesco world heritage site, capital of culture, the "Three Graces" – have been bestowed on what is, to use a sophisticated critical term, a godawful mess?
Last Tuesday, the £72m Museum of Liverpool opened to the public, billing itself as "the largest city museum in the world" and "the largest newly built national museum in Britain for more than a century". It contains busy, impressionistic displays of the city's history and culture – the Beatles, football, Brookside, trade, wealth and poverty – that are light on original artefacts and big on videos and blown-up pictures. The pace is frantic. You hardly get a moment to dwell on the horrors of the first world war before you're on to something else. Slavery gets a single 3ft by 2ft panel, with a couple of small exhibits, there being an International Slavery Museum elsewhere in the city that goes into more depth.
The museum's tone is boosterish, albeit seasoned with sobering data about deprivation, rates of heart disease and low voter turnout. You hear much about the city's fast-talking, cheeky, gobby, independent spirit, its perseverance and endurance, its wacky chaos and madness. "In one word, I would describe the accent of Liverpool as brilliant," says one talking head. A more eloquent quote comes from Willy Russell: "The nature of the spoken word in Liverpool" is, for writers, "as the sky and the light must have been to the impressionists."
The exhibition areas are planned by the Los Angeles-based exhibition and theme park designers BRC Imagination Arts and are the bet-hedging mulch of video, exhibit, text, sound, image and 3-D mise en scène that is now standard in museums. It is like a ready-made school project, or a Wikipedia entry made flesh, a warm gloop of unchallenging information.
To judge by the lively opening day crowds, having their memories prompted by this or that nostalgic nugget, the museum's aim of connecting the city with its past is powerful and important, but those crowds deserve more provocative and insightful displays than they are now getting.
But the main issue is not the presentation of the museum's contents nor, exactly, the design of the building that houses them, but, rather, the composition, or lack of it, of the museum building, combined with other new structures that are rising around and the historic monuments that were already there. For the museum stands in a Unesco world heritage site, between the impressive warehouses of the Albert Dock and the Three Graces, the three great Edwardian commercial buildings that define the city's waterfront. One of them, the Royal Liver Building, was a century old on the day the museum opened.
The Danish practice 3XN is credited as "creative architects" of the museum, which means the company designed it, but was later removed from the project, and it has been completed not entirely in accordance with 3XN's wishes. Inside, there's a big spiral stair conceived as a social heart of the museum, which is nice enough, except that it rises towards cheap suspended ceilings that undermine its splendour. It's like the ramp of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim installed in a Travelodge. And it seems to eat space: for all the museum's boasting about how big it is, the galleries feel squeezed.
Outside, 3XN has created a dynamic twist of a building, in pale white stone, that rises at its extremities to give panoramic views of the Three Graces in one direction and the Mersey in the other. There is also a forbidding-looking slalom of wheelchair ramps and stairs at each end, with the idea that people can wander up, through and down again, choosing to look into galleries or not as the mood takes them.
This idea of casually strolling up ramps and stairs seems over-optimistic, as it's easier just to walk round the outside of the building at ground level. Overall, there's a sense of misplaced energy, with too much in elaborate circulation, and too little in the details, in the gallery spaces.
3XN's Kim Herforth Nielsen has overcome his differences with the museum sufficiently to turn up at the opening day and he claims he wanted to be "respectful" of the Three Graces and not "to compete with them, but do something completely different". So in place of their square, symmetrical, majestic repose, he came up with a restless squiggle, which he says is also inspired by both the shapes of ships and land art.
This approach was probably a bad bet, as it is possible to be different from and respectful of the older buildings without being so ostentatiously their opposite, but it might just have come off if the squiggle had been undeniably brilliant and if the other new buildings in the area had been quiet and unified, so as to offset its individualistic dazzle. But they wanted to be clever and different, too, so in addition to the museum there is a block of flats in the form of giant black crystals, by Broadway Malyan architects, and the Pier Head ferry terminal, a sub-sub-Hadid exercise in odd shapes by Hamilton Architects of Belfast. (The terminal won the 2009 Carbuncle Cup, for the nation's worst building, a prize for which the museum is this year shortlisted.)
Further off are the jerky shapes of flats on the edge of the Liverpool One shopping development. It is as if a huge incontinent dog had deposited them on the pavement, except that the latter's droppings would have had more consistency of form and texture, one to the other. There is no coherence, rapport, sense of wholeness or purpose to the ensemble. The older buildings manage to be expressive, varied, bold, dignified and unified all at once; the new do not.
There is history to the current state of Liverpool's waterfront. In 2002, a "Fourth Grace" was proposed – a public-private enterprise whereby a landmark building would house the Museum of Liverpool, some other ill-defined purposes and a money-making development. It would be the centrepiece of Liverpool's capital of culture celebrations in 2008. Leading architects were invited to suggest ideas and Will Alsop won, with a giant blob called The Cloud.
The original Three Graces were classical goddesses and if you were to imagine Canova's marble statue of them hugged by a giant, full-colour Katie Price, you would have some idea of the effect of the Fourth Grace proposals – by whichever famous architect – inflated as they were by their commercial content. The Fourth Grace plan eventually foundered, but it established the idea that the historic buildings could be honoured by blocking views of them and surrounding them with noisy new structures.
The only improvement is that what has actually been built is smaller than the Fourth Grace proposals, but this is a short-lived relief. Close by, an undistinguished, 55-storey tower is now proposed as part of a £5.5bn scheme called Liverpool Waters, which will poke its way into views of the Three Graces.
According to Building Design magazine, members of Unesco's world heritage committee have expressed "extreme concern" and are sending a delegation to urge Liverpool's city council to reject the plans. The council might finally wake up, but if so it will have to reverse a direction in which it has been heading for a decade.
Museum peace: Japan’s Naoshima island
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 9, 2011
The "art island" of Naoshima is dotted with calming concrete installations a world away from Tokyo's frenetic pace. Pico Iyer enjoys a moment of serenity
Japanese cool has, for decades now, been associated with everything fast, hi-tech and jangly; it's the TVs on taxi dashboards, the control-panels on toilets, the underground universes around major train stations that keep buzzing even after a natural calamity that stunned the rest of us. And if you're looking for a world-defining Japanese art form, you're more likely to turn these days to anime and manga than to any of the country's classical painters or mock-European forms. So it was shocking for me to go to the sleepy, faraway island of Naoshima – now turned into an "art island" rich with museums and installations – and find the coolest thing I've seen in my 24 years of living in Japan. It was, in some ways, the reverse of technology.
The structures around Naoshima are super-hi-tech, 23rd-century constructions of grey reinforced concrete, with every next-generation innovation; but they take you back to the principles of spareness, simplicity and concentration that graced the haiku, brush-and-ink paintings and Noh dramas of old. Where technology makes you speedy, up-to-the-minute and all-over-the-place, Naoshima so calms, grounds and slows you that you feel as if you've stepped into a meditative shrine.
The journey to the old fishermen's haunt in the Seto Naikai, or Inland Sea, is like a journey through the past. I set out from my home in Nara on a brilliant late-autumn afternoon, the trees blazing red, gold and radiant yellow all around me. To get to the remote island involved a bus, a train, another train to Kyoto, a bullet-train to Okayama and then another local train, a slow ferry and a bus before, five hours later, I arrived at Naoshima's Benesse House, the showpiece hotel where I was staying. With each change of vehicle, modernity seemed to thin out a little and I was closer to the old. By the time I left Okayama, I was in the middle of a much earlier Japan of unmanned ticket offices and deserted piers. The faces were simpler here – two local girls, swathed in grey earmuffs, had the countenances of Noh masks – and there were few signs in English.
The train from Okayama clanked along, the opposite of a bullet train, stopping at an empty platform every two or three minutes, and as we inched past, I could see regiments of uniform houses, with grey tiled roofs, bunched against a hillside, smoke rising from the rice-paddies in front of them. By the time we arrived at the ferry town of Uno, I could hardly recall the Godiva coffee-shops and high-rises of Kyoto.
When I reached Naoshima itself, I began to feel as if I'd stepped out of time altogether, in a world so deep in the past – and so far ahead in the future – that I lost all sense of when I was. Benesse House is a stylish and sleek construction, with Bose CD players on every desk – but no TVs or internet reception – and each room individually designed by the self-taught Osaka architect Tadao Ando. Its corridors are full of original contemporary canvasses and eerie light sculptures projecting classic Japanese landscapes through the near-dark. And the effect of all the modern art is, oddly, to take you back to the transfixing simplicity of an old ryokan, or traditional inn, where simply watching the sun make stripes across the tatami mats, or figures cast silhouettes against the paper windows, becomes so absorbing you never want to leave your room.
After the Benesse Company, a publishing firm centered in Okayama, took over the southern half of the island in 1985, working with the then-mayor Chikatsugu Miyake, it called in the minimalist Ando and invited him to design a huge swatch of natural park to be an international centre of art. Rising to the opportunity – surely any architect's dream – he opened Benesse House in 1992, then created a Benesse House Museum (with hotel rooms on the second and third floors) up the road, and then built what is now known as the Oval, a James Bondian series of six more rooms for guests on the top of a mountain behind the museum, reached by private monorail. In 2004, he completed the Chichu Museum which is a 20-minute walk away.
In all my 50 years I've never seen a place as pure and elevating as the Chichu, and it speaks for the pristine futurism that makes Naoshima such a unique place. There are five major pieces – a set of Monet water lilies, a large chamber with a reflecting 6ft granite sphere at its centre by the American land artist Walter de Maria and three light installations by the American James Turrell. Rather than observing these pieces, though, you more or less inhabit them. In one Turrell piece – Open Field – you walk into a room flooded with an unearthly orange light. Then, one at a time, you step up some stairs and into another large room suffused in soothingly deep blue light. Turn around, and the people in the room behind look like art works. Turn back, and you're in a kind of dream state.
Ten minutes walk from the Chichu, I came upon a new museum, opened only last year, to show off the works of the Korean-born Lee Ufan, again in a tall, grey, windowless Ando construction in a field. One of the pieces there, a single rock placed in front of a great earth-coloured slab, with a light shining on it, looked like a moving representation of a figure praying. Walking back from there towards Benesse House, I passed 88 buddhas along the side of the road made from industrial waste. A huge cube sat on a beach, and a "Cultural Melting Bath" hot tub on the cliffs above. At one point, on the silent road framed by glowing trees and the Inland Sea, I realised I could hear water lapping against the shore from two different beaches, each in a different key.
The protected spaces and air of discerning clarity mark every detail in Naoshima. There are no pachinko parlours on the small island of 3,600 people, no video arcades, no clamorous department stores. Cars are rare and you can walk from one site to the very farthest in about an hour. If you look out to sea, you can watch the fishing boats slowly drifting to one of the quiet neighbouring islands; when you head into one of the museums, sometimes slipping off your shoes before entering a room, you're in a prayerful hush again.
While Benesse House is clearly the classic place to stay, budget-minded travellers can sleep in one of 10 Mongolian yurts on the beach 10 minutes' walk away, for less than £30 a night, or in various family-run minshuku, or guest houses, among the island's villages.
In one 18th-century village, Honmura, 30 minutes' walk from Benesse House, six old wooden houses showcase the most contemporary of modern art works. Everywhere you look in Naoshima, the locals, and visiting artists, are coming up with new projects. There's the "I ❤ YU" bathhouse in the port town of Miyanoura – where you bathe surrounded by a zany, eclectic "scrapbook" of work, including an aeroplane cockpit and a collage of erotica – and the Miaow Shima café in Honmura where you can sip coffee among a dozen sleeping cats.
Naoshima is not like anything in the west, but more an ultra-cool reference and homage to what Japan has been doing all along, in cutting away distraction and using frames and light and silence to still the mind and train one in attention.
And at a time when the modern nation has absorbed such a series of shocks, and is thinking about what grounds and steadies it, it makes more sense than ever to seek out this forward-looking shrine to the past.
Essentials
Doubles at Benesse House (00 81 87 892 2030; benesse-artsite.jpen/benessehouse) cost from £246 per night. Yurts on the beach (Tsutsuji-so Lodge, 00 81 87 892 2838; tsutsujiso.no-blog.jp/english) cost £28 per person per night. To get to Naoshima, take the bullet-train to Okayama and a local train to Uno, followed by a 20-minute ferry ride
Pico Iyer is the author of The Lady and The Monk, a novel about the first 24 years he has spent living in Japan
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 26, 2011
In the first of our weekly architecture round-ups, shopfronts breathe, towers flower and the Walkie-Talkie wins light rights
The architectural world was a cabinet of curiosities this week, starting with the opening of the long-awaited glass and ceramic-clad extension of the Holburne Museum in Bath. Designed by Eric Parry, this casket-like building is filled with the collection of art and curios gathered by Sir William Holburne (1793-1874), who saw action as an 11-year-old sailor on board HMS Orion at the battle of Trafalgar. (Collecting must have been a relief after that.) Working with exhibition designers Metaphor, Parry has conjured dramatic galleries, aptly reflecting the displays: a sequence of tiny rooms that surprise the visitor when they suddenly open up into double-height spaces. This is a trick Parry learned from Sir John Soane's Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields, one of the most magical of all collector's treasure troves. On the top floor of the Holburne Peter Blake's temporary exhibition, A Museum for Myself, features General Tom Thumb's boots, Ian Dury's rhythm stick and the mannequin of Sonny Liston that appeared, centre stage, on Blake's cover for the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Over in central London, the shop windows of Regent Street have become a display of architectural curios until 29 May, as part of the RIBA Regent Street Windows Project. Ten architectural practices have dressed 10 windows for 10 shops: Aquascutum, Banana Republic, National Geographic, Duchamp, Ferrari, Gant, Hoss Intropia, Levi's, Ted Baker and Uniqlo. For Duchamp, Honey architects have designed a pattern of colourful geometric forms, a "breathing kaleidoscope" arranged so that "colours, shapes, objects, lights and the images of onlookers are revealed and obscured as it cycles from inhale to exhale". Best try seeing for yourself. Duggan Morris, meanwhile, have come up with a showcase of automotive components for the Ferrari shopfront that hints at shapes, forms and buildings found in city streets: fun, even if you come to Regent Street by bus or bike rather than a 200mph supercar.
In Chelsea, Chetwoods Architects' 9m-tall vertical allotment has arrived on site for the Chelsea flower show. Designed by Laurie Chetwood and Patrick Collins, this decidedly urban allotment will include a 90-room insect hotel with bedrooms fitted out by children.
The most curious new building to be unveiled this week is the Bella Sky Hotel in Copenhagen; the biggest hotel in Scandinavia, its twin 76.5m towers lean 15 degrees from the vertical (that's a lot more than the tower of Pisa). The hotel's architects, 3XN, also won the competition to design the nearly finished Museum of Liverpool, but fell from grace in 2007 when the project was taken over by the Manchester-based firm AEW after a dispute. According to the Architects' Journal, the musuem has issued legal proceedings against 3XN this week.
Back in London, Zaha Hadid told Building magazine she is ready to capture the city's skyline with her own brand of adventurous skyscrapers (she has yet to erect a tall building in London or indeed anywhere else in Britain). That skyline is certainly getting more clown-like by the day as Rafael Viñoly's curious 37-storey Walkie-Talkie office tower creeps towards completion. This week, the design was protected by the City of London Corporation from "rights of light", meaning the owners of seven buildings set to stand in its shadow will be unable to protest over their loss of daylight – the one thing that might have stopped the tower from wobbling up over them.
Let me know below what you've seen or heard about in the world of architecture and design this week – whether curious or beautiful, rational or bizarre. Please include links if possible and I'll round up the best next week.
National museum lauds patriotic China
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 10, 2011
Almost as big as the Louvre, the new exhibition space overlooking Tiananmen Square is very selective in its history
The new National Museum of China occupies a huge building with a colonnaded facade overlooking Tiananmen Square, opposite the Mao Zedong mausoleum. After three years of renovation and extension work, its 192,000 square metres of exhibition space is supposed to give the People's Republic a museum in keeping with its international standing. Only the Louvre in Paris (210,000 square metres) is larger.
It opened to the public in March, with free admission, but only 8,000 visitors a day are allowed to see the permanent exhibition. So the Chinese turn up early in the morning to see the rooms devoted to national resurrection, ancient bronzes, Chinese porcelain and statues of the Buddha. The rooms on ancient China have just opened.
The task of converting this gigantic Stalinist structure, dating from 1959, and redesigning its entrance hall and exhibition spaces, was given to a German firm of architects, Gerkan, Mark & Partners, better known for railway stations, airports and sports stadiums. History museums all over China have been pressed to dispatch some of their greatest treasures to the capital.
But despite its facelift the institution's prime mission is still patriotic education, fashioning and interpreting Chinese history to serve the party line. A perfect illustration is the permanent exhibition entitled The Path to National Resurrection. It starts with the period of humiliation to which western colonial powers subjected China, highlighting the steps on the way to nationalist reawakening and modernisation, with the foundation of the first republic.
The sections focusing on the People's Republic, established when Mao seized power in 1949, take visitors through the key moments in the history of the Communist party, culminating in the economic achievements of recent years, with the conquest of space, fast trains to Tibet and the Olympic Games.
A smiling Mao appears in just one photograph, talking to party members in 1961 after the disastrous experiment with the Great Leap Forward, which caused the deaths of millions of Chinese. Two others allude to the Cultural Revolution, but fail to mention its atrocities. The only picture relating to the events of 1989, in the square outside, is dated 9 June and shows Deng Xiaoping congratulating the troops enforcing martial law.
"I was surprised to see there is so little detail," said a young biology student, Li, born in 1987. "Some of our teachers talk about Tiananmen and we all look on the net," she added. This mutilated history "infuriates" Yang Jisheng, a former journalist at the Xinhua news agency and author of a monumental study of the great famine, which is banned in China. "Those of us who are familiar with the history avoid this sort of museum. Historical facts have been perverted. The refusal to talk about the past is a bit like plugging your ears while you steal a bell, convinced that no one else will hear," he said.
The concepts of reawakening and regeneration are particularly upsetting, Yang adds. "They refer to periods when China was supposedly glorious. But which period should we consider: the first emperor, the Tang or the Qin dynasty? And which aspects should we retain of these periods, which were after all dictatorships?"
In these days of keen rivalry between the world's great museums, the Beijing show highlights a contradiction deep-rooted in the People's Republic: the first exhibition loaned by a foreign organisation is devoted to the Art of Enlightenment. Thanks to this master-stroke of German diplomacy, Chinese visitors can enjoy 600 works of 18th-century art from museums in Berlin, Munich and Dresden.
At the opening of the exhibition on 1 April, the German foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, spoke of the ideals expressed by art, such as respect for human dignity, the rule of law and individual freedoms. Such ideas, he added, led to the fall of the Berlin wall, but the Chinese media made no mention of his comments.
Other museums in Europe are thinking about staging shows here too, and the Louvre is already involved in a joint project. The luxury goods group LVMH has started talks about an exhibition on the Vuitton brand and travel. It is slated to occupy four rooms and last two or three months, according to the LVMH spokesperson in Shanghai.
With its prestige, ambitious aims and vast exhibition space begging to be filled, museums from all over the world are courting the Chinese mogul. But this may not be a simple task. As one expert said: "The editorial line of Chinese museums is not always crystal clear."
This article originally appeared in Le Monde
Holburne Museum, Bath – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 7, 2011
Despite the obstructive tactics of Bath's so-called aesthetic guardians, this museum extension is a triumph
Take Bath, Unesco world heritage site and city of bonnets. Built as a stage set for 18th-century socialites, it is now a TV set for the endless clattering of carriage wheels in endless Jane Austen adaptations. It is a rare example of a city created as a unified set piece, where its crescents and streets create a coherent composition formed with similar classical details, out of the same local, honey-coloured stone: rare, especially in Britain, where the usual tendency is for improvisation and agglomeration of different styles.
It is also a city where some unfortunate additions of the 1960s – despite their use of that same Bath stone – gave rise to the fear that it was being imperilled, desecrated or, to use a word popular at the time to describe such outrages, "raped". So now, when a responsible museum proposes a back extension by a conscientious and skilful architect, it takes the best part of a decade to navigate its way to completion, through the shoals of planning refusals, hostile preservation groups, conservation officers who wanted it buried underground, and taste committees. Its main offence is that its architect, Eric Parry, wanted its ceramic cladding to be dark in colour rather then match the sacred stone.
The museum is the Holburne, whose collection includes bronzes, porcelain and paintings by the likes of Stubbs and Gainsborough. It is based on the bequest of Sir William Holburne who, as an 11-year-old midshipman, experienced the horrors of the Battle of Trafalgar, and – maybe as a form of therapy – later started gathering exquisite objects. It occupies what was once the Sydney hotel, at the end of the grand straight vista of Great Pulteney Street. To its rear are the wooded slopes of Sydney pleasure gardens, the only surviving example of places that, like Vauxhall and Ranelagh in London, were sites of entertainment and assignation. Boring through the gardens, showing much less tenderness than is nowadays expected of new construction, is the cutting for Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Western Railway.
The hotel was at the edge of Bath's great stone composition, with buildings to its front and garden behind. It marks the point where a 1790s credit crunch ended the speculative surge that had driven the city forward, where its classical universe stopped expanding. Grandly named sidestreets off Great Pulteney Street turn out to be stubs, going nowhere. A plan to ring the gardens with development, as John Nash would do around Regent's Park much later, never happened. It is a place of fronts and appearances, suggesting realities that are not quite there. The hotel itself presented a high, wide facade with a rather skinny building behind it. This building is now far from original, having been gutted and remodelled when it was made into a museum nearly a century ago.
Parry's extension is there to answer the needs museums often have, such as more exhibition space (60% of the exhibits now on show were previously in storage), disabled access, a cafe and room for education. It is substantial in relation to the existing building and makes no attempt to mimic its cornices and capitals. Instead, its exterior is built up in layers of glass and moulded ceramic. It grows more solid as it ascends, the reverse of usual expectation. The ceramic is mottled and distressed, with the dark greenish colour that has caused so much trouble.
Now it is there, it makes perfect sense. The glass allows views through the building to the lush trees and grass, while also reflecting them. The ceramic has its own, more subtle reflections, while picking up the colours of the vegetation. It is a melting, shifting thing; while it never loses all sense of being solid, parts of it seem to dissolve and reappear.
Rather than pay plodding homage to the stone city, it plays with the gardens it faces, and with the site's history of appearances, of being a place between town and nature, where nothing is quite what it seems. It is also a clever way of making the new building less obtrusive and, by being so palpably different from the original hotel, it allows you to see the form of the old clearly.
Seen on a dazzling afternoon it is one of the most delightful pieces of wrapping any architect has done anywhere, for some time. The interior doesn't quite live up to the outside, being rather practical and in places a little cramped, while doing a good job of letting the rooms of the old building breathe more freely. Yet this magic wrapping has been achieved in the teeth of opposition from the guardians of Bath's beauty, paid and unpaid, and has only been achieved by years of persistence, and some fancy footwork, by Parry and the museum.
First, planners told him to "lose the dream", then turned down his first application. Then they permitted a version with slightly reduced height, the result of a largely pointless haggle that is unhelpful to the compressed interior. They also demanded that the ceramic match the tonality of Bath stone. Some wiggle room was allowed, in that the tonal range of the stone includes light bits and dark bits, and Parry exploited this to the full, negotiating the colour back towards the one he first wanted. Had he not, and streaks of creamy yellow had been laid on the layers of greenish shadow and reflection, it would have been like putting Tipp-Ex on a Manet.
Meanwhile, the same planning authority has permitted SouthGate, a hefty new shopping mall recently built by the railway station which encloses large chunks of retail with a smear of obsequious hypocrisy. It uses Bath stone and details vaguely like Georgian ones, but without grace or sense: domestic windows are stuck without meaning on to commercial hulks and the stone loses all sense of its noble role as a thing that carries weight. Scale and proportion have gone awry.
Between this and the new Holburne I know which one has the better sense of history and respect for the past and the better understanding of the materials and structure of building. It is the one the planners and protesters did their utmost to stop.
Leo Steinberg obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 13, 2011
Art historian and critic known for his elegant investigations of Renaissance paintings
Leo Steinberg, who has died aged 90, was one of the most brilliant and original art historians of his generation. He wrote as persuasively about the great Renaissance masters as he did about Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. His best-known work was The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983).
I was lucky enough to meet Leo in 1955, and over the decades we continued to see each other – in New York, where he lived for most of his adult life, or on his visits to London. He was impatient of small talk or gossip; conversation was always about particular works of art, which he would discuss intensely. What he said was charged with a sense that art was of overwhelming importance: "anything anyone can do, painting does better".
That passionate involvement with a specific work, and the intelligence which fed it, made him not only an engrossing interlocutor but also a dazzling lecturer (at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, tickets for his lectures sold out on the day they went on sale). He was invited to deliver the prestigious Mellon lectures at the National Gallery in Washington DC (1982) and the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University (1995-96).
He was a devoted teacher, concerned about his students, whose careers he followed. From 1961 to 1975, he was professor of art history at Hunter College, in New York, and then moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he was Benjamin Franklin professor until his retirement in 1991.
Though firmly identified with the New York art scene, Leo was born in Moscow, where his father, Isaac, a distinguished lawyer, was briefly Lenin's minister of justice. Isaac's radical views (he wanted to shut down all prisons) soon led to his dismissal and emigration to Berlin after threats of assassination.
Leo's childhood in Berlin left him with a barely noticeable German inflection to the otherwise impeccable English formed in his adolescence, since the arrival of the Nazis forced another displacement – to London. There, he finished his schooling and studied sculpture at the Slade. He moved to New York with his family soon after the end of the second world war.
In New York, he worked as a freelance writer and translator, studied philosophy and taught life drawing at Parsons school of art. He embarked on a doctoral thesis at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. His study of the diminutive and intricate Roman baroque church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, designed by Francesco Borromini, set out the formal devices employed by the architect to engage the passerby's unsuspecting attention.
While working on his thesis, Leo published criticism in arts magazines and became the most articulate spokesman of the rising New York School of painters. His early advocacy of Rauschenberg and Johns was committed but jargon-free, and he was one of the few critic-historians whose essays were eagerly read by artists for their clarity and elegance. His criticism was collected in a book of essays, Other Criteria: Confrontations with 20th-Century Art, in 1972.
But for all this involvement, he was not really acquisitive and lived rather frugally. In 2002, he donated his collection of 3,200 prints (mostly from the 16th and 17th centuries, but also works by Picasso and Matisse) to the museum of art at the University of Texas in Austin. In 1986 he was awarded a MacArthur fellowship (known as the "genius" grant).
He continued to be prolific, writing with equal enthusiasm about Pontormo and Picasso. The examination of a work was never approached on merely formal terms – although he was a painstaking analyst, always meticulous in his attention to detail, to the way brushwork was used to fragment or to mould space; he would even investigate the implications of words pasted on the printed scraps of collages (treated as abstract patterns by most art historians) in his search for clues to the artist's intention.
Leo was impatient with any criticism which merely analysed the object presented to the spectator, since what really interested him was why the artist had wanted to do it in the first place. This is the key to The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. The book is concerned with what Leo termed "ostentatio genitalium", the display of the genitals which often figured in devotional paintings or engravings of the Renaissance and which had been "tactfully overlooked for half a millennium". He argued that the prominence of Christ's genitals was a presentation of incarnational theology explicit in the sermons and pious literature of the time, in which the blood shed at the circumcision is considered the first offering of the redemptive sacrifice.
It was the embodying of an idea which historians, oscillating between prudishness and pornography, found embarrassing or far-fetched. The book was received with bemused deference at the time; however, it has recently been reprinted with an account of the controversy and has transformed our understanding of Renaissance art, while his reading was confirmed in an appendix to the book by the Jesuit theologian John O'Malley.
Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were the artists who preoccupied him in his later years; Michelangelo's sculpture of the naked Christ in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, to which the church added a loincloth, was one of the key works discussed in The Sexuality.
His book Michelangelo's Last Paintings, on the frescoes of the Conversion of St Paul and the Crucifixion of St Peter in the Cappella Paolina, in the Vatican, appeared in 1975. In 2001, he published Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper, a subtle re-examination of the most famous of Renaissance frescoes, in which he pointed to the combining of the forewarning of betrayal and the institution of the Eucharist which followed it.
When I visited him last year – we both knew we might not meet again – he dismissed the matter of his health in the first few minutes, but for an hour and a half we talked of Michelangelo's Doni Tondo, a circular painting of the holy family, in the Uffizi, Florence. We discussed the affectionate embrace of the figures, and the naked youths who people its background. He was writing an extended essay on the painting and thought that he would leave it unfinished, a fragment.
Leo married Dorothy Seiberling in 1962; the marriage ended in divorce. For more than 40 years, he was much helped by a devoted assistant, Sheila Schwartz. He is survived by his nephews and nieces.
• Zalman Lev ("Leo") Steinberg, art historian, born 9 July 1920; died 13 March 2011
• This article was amended on 13 April 2011. The original stated that Leo Steinberg had also been married to Phoebe Lloyd, and that he was helped by Sheila Schwartz 'in his later years'. These points have been corrected.
Turner Contemporary’s boardwalk empire
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 7, 2011
Margate's brand new gallery stands where JMW Turner painted his epic seascapes. Will it attract artists back to the town?
"The sun is God." These are said to be the last words Joseph Mallord William Turner spoke from his London deathbed as the light streamed through his window. Not quite true: what the artist actually said, to his doctor, was "Go downstairs and get yourself a glass of sherry." The more famous phrase was an invention of Turner's friend, John Ruskin, the critic who made the artist a kind of demigod, championing his every brushstroke.
Turner Contemporary, a brand-new public art gallery that opens on the seafront at Margate next week, glories in sunlight. It rises from the site of the lodging house where the artist enjoyed the ample favours of its landlady, Sophia Booth. It was from this north Kent beach, where the North Sea wrestles with the Thames Estuary, that Turner immortalised in oils and watercolours the sunlight and seascapes that would make him Britain's greatest painter.
The Turner Contemporary project itself began back in 2001. Under the directorship of Victoria Pomery, the arts organisation has been putting on exhibitions and events in a variety of local buildings; to date, more than 690,000 people have visited Turner Contemporary shows or taken part in workshops and courses in Margate, a town of high unemployment and otherwise limited opportunities for artists. As well as providing a place where art can be seen, the building has been built to give artists a space to work with local people.
Its original design, by Norwegian architects Snøhetta and Britain's Stephen Spence, would have been situated right at the end of the town's harbour mouth. Intended to open in 2007, it would have cost around £55m and been prey to the forces of nature that make for memorable paintings, but are no friend to architecture.
"It was a very romantic proposition," says architect David Chipperfield who designed its replacement after a consultation process involving 8,000 locals. "I liked the idea very much, but only on paper. The reality here is a seafront that can be very tough and unforgiving, and any building facing it has to be extremely robust."
What Chipperfield has designed is further inland, a bold yet simple gallery that has cost £17.5m. From a distance it appears to be a sequence of industrial-era boat sheds, but close up reveals itself as an interconnected set of giant artists' studios sheathed in walls of thick translucent glass. During the course of a day they capture, reflect and refract the many moods of the sun and sea. The building changes colour, acting as an architectural canvas on which the light that inspired Turner can play.
"It's very fortunate", says Chipperfield, "that the gallery faces due north, as, of course does Margate, which is not often the case of holiday resorts in the northern hemisphere. But this means that we get the light that works best for artists and the artworks."
As you walk in, a huge lobby window frames the north Kent horizon like a giant Turner painting (the artist's paintings will be displayed here in the upcoming Turner and the Elements show planned for January 2012, but exhibitions of contemporary artists will be the norm). Walking around the ground floor – a serenely austere interior made of little more than polished concrete and glass – natural light seeps everywhere. It brightens the generous lobby, with its corner cafe overlooking the sandy beach, and animates the big study rooms where adults and school parties alike will learn about contemporary art. Upstairs in the galleries, the light is channelled through high studio windows and from bands of glass set into the high, sloping roofs.
"The idea is very simple", says Chipperfield. "The gallery isn't a museum. It doesn't have a permanent collection. It's a place where art is experienced, nurtured and created. So we've made it as much like a studio as possible. We've also made the gap between the entrance and the galleries as small as we could. I'm not a fan of galleries that can seem like air terminals, where the cafes, shops and everything else appear to take precedence over getting people to the art." Indeed, the atmosphere that permeates Turner Contemporary is one of immediacy and purposefulness. There is indeed a studio-like rawness here that artists will like.
This is the first major building that Chipperfield has completed in Britain since the River and Rowing Museum at Henley-on-Thames, which opened in 1998. Since then there has also been the BBC headquarters in Glasgow, which was finished by another architect and opened in 2007 (Chipperfield prefers not to discuss it). He was hugely acclaimed for his Neues museum in Berlin, an inspiring fusion of intelligently renovated and new design that has become a model of how to push historic architecture forward without betraying the past; in 2011, he won the Queen's Royal Gold Medal – which is, along with the Pritzker prize, one of the two most important architectural awards. It was high time this exacting architect completed another new building in his own country.
'I can't design a wacky building'
A lot depends on the gallery's success. As Margate-born Tracey Emin puts it: "The brilliant thing about Turner Contemporary is that is has given [local] people hope that things are going to change here, and also to put Margate back on the map." Much like talk of an Olympic legacy in east London, the big ambition is that the Turner Contemporary will help kickstart urban regeneration. Once a popular seaside resort, in the 60s Margate's economy was fatally wounded by the advent of cheap package holidays to Spain. And yet, though it's rough around the edges, the town boasts a fine seafront and a fascinating mixture of historic buildings, though many are in need of love and care. Can this modestly sized gallery have a similar impact as Frank Gehry's eye-catching Guggenheim museum did in the rundown port of Bilbao?
"It's very hard to say,"says Chipperfield. "Architects can only design buildings to do the best job they can, but of course I understand the hopes here. I can't design a wacky, clown-like building – that's not my style – but I do think the Turner will become a true public place where people can meet, be inspired, inspire one another and feel somehow uplifted."
The result is a quiet triumph for all of those involved, sure to encourage a new generation of artists. "I would like the building to be closer to the sea than it is," says Chipperfield, "but that would have meant rerouting the path of the Margate lifeboat. I would also like to have had more money to spend on the glass facade to give it that bit more subtlety, but, then, we've also been able to do a lot on a modest budget. I hope to prove – although time will tell – that you don't have to design a building that looks like a big toy to make a success of a new public art gallery."
Shortly before I left Turner Contemporary, the sun set to spectacular effect, warming Chipperfield's concrete floors and walls, even though the wind howled mercilessly and darkening clouds threatened rain. Turner would have loved it.
• Turner Contemporary opens to the public on 16 April. Members of Guardian Extra can win two pairs of tickets to attend the gallery preview event the evening of 15 April. The prize includes one night's hotel accommodation. Details: guardian.co.uk/extra/turnercomp
Correction 7 April: This piece may have mistakenly given the impression that David Chipperfield won the Pritzker prize. This has been corrected.
V&A unveils £35m plans for courtyard and underground gallery
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 28, 2011
Architect Amanda Levete's winning proposal for Victoria & Albert museum likely to fare better than controversial 'spiral' plan
Seven years after abandoning Daniel Libeskind's provocative Spiral extension plan, the V&A has announced a fresh proposal: a "new public space" for London above a huge underground gallery for temporary exhibitions.
Details of the £35m extension plan were announced after an architectural competition to develop what is currently office space on the Exhibition Road side of the V&A.
It follows the decision in 2004 to axe Libeskind's proposal – an eye-catching extension resembling an uneven stack of cardboard boxes. It divided opinion fiercely and when people hated it, they really hated it. Journalist William Rees-Mogg went so far as to call it a potential "disaster for civilisation".
Now the V&A is expanding underground, with British architect Amanda Levete winning the contest to build its extension. Levete said she had "dreamed of working on a major public and cultural project ever since I started as an architect, and it doesn't get much better than this".
The V&A is bullish about raising the money in such austere times and has been helped by an anonymous donation of nearly half the needed £35m. It hopes the extension can be completed by 2015.
The proposal would see visitors walking into an open public courtyard off a newly landscaped Exhibition Road through the screen erected by Sir Aston Webb in 1909 to hide the boilerhouse yard.
The screen would become a colonnade. People will enter what Levete described as "South Kensington's drawing room" with the ground having a carpet-like pattern. It will be a space that can be hired or curated with art or music or film as well as a place to simply sit on the steps or have a coffee. Visitors will also be able to glimpse the new 1,500 sq metre gallery space for temporary exhibitions that will be created below.
Levete was for 20 years co-partner with Jan Kaplicky of Future Systems, the firm behind the Selfridges store in Birmingham and the Lord's media centre. After Kaplicky's death two years ago, Levete set up her practice, ALA. The V&A commission is one of a number of projects she is working on. Others include a hotel in Bangkok, a subway station in Naples with artist Anish Kapoor, and a residential tower in Shoreditch, east London.
Levete said the V&A work had been "a very interesting and paradoxical project" because it involved making the invisible visible. "We're creating a vast gallery that is below ground, so how do you create that sense of there being something underground in a way that is subtle?" It is all very different to Libeskind's plan. Levete said of his Spiral: "It was a great building but for me it was in the wrong place and I think the moment for that iconography has passed – it is the moment to do something different."
Paul Ruddock, chair of the V&A's trustees, said the project was essential. "The V&A produces the very best international design exhibitions and the existing exhibition courts, arranged over three separate rooms, are no longer fit for purpose."
The extension is part of the V&A's second 10-year phase of restoration and redesign, called Future Plan.
Also planned is a new fashion gallery scheduled to open in May 2012, furniture galleries for November 2012 and a new textile and fashion centre at Blythe House, Olympia.
Outgoing V&A director Sir Mark Jones said the plan was about creating "stunning new spaces" and returning to the ideas and aspirations of the V&A's founders.
"We've recovered 3,000 sq metres of back-of-house space for galleries and public areas enabling us to show many more objects from the collections better than ever before."
V&A’s new extension: the proposals – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 3, 2011
The Victoria & Albert Museum in London has unveiled seven rival design proposals for a new underground gallery. View the architects' visions here
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 10, 2011
A topsy-turvy week with Kolkata's Eye on London, Chinese architects to transform a Covent Garden law court, Delhi designers the talk of Tyneside, and Watts Gallery to reopen
This week has been a topsy-turvy one for the world of architecture and urban planning. It began with the city of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) announcing a £60m plan to remodel its riverside centre along the lines of London's South Bank. "All the [city's] agencies have come together", said Mamata Banerjee, the newly elected chief minister of West Bengal, "to convert Calcutta into another London." If all goes to plan, there will be a "Kolkata Eye", based on London's, turning above the River Hooghly somewhere close to Howrah Bridge; a new look for the city's Alipore Zoo modelled on Regent's Park Zoo, while Curzon Park, described by the Times of India as "infested with rats ... a dungeon of criminals, pimps and addicts after dark", will be transformed into a public space of "Hyde Park standards".
This plan has historical precedents: Calcutta was founded by the British in 1690, and with its white stucco neo-classical architecture, ambitious parks and riverside setting, by the mid-19th century it was somewhat reminiscent of London. Today, of course, the British capital is much influenced by Indian culture. Restaurants, cinema, literature, music and fashion aside, even the Jaguars chauffeuring senior politicians up and down Whitehall are made by a subsidiary of the Indian manufacturing giant, Tata, whose chairman, Ratan Tata, very nearly became an architect after studying at Cornell University.
From Richard Rogers to Terry Farrell, many British architects have created buildings in China. Until this week however, when Lyndon Neri and Rosanna Hu were announced as the winners of a competition to transform the former Bow Street magistrates court in London's Covent Garden into a hotel, Chinese-based architects had yet to build in Britain. While a report in Building Design magazine suggests that Neri and Hu undercut their British rivals for the commission in terms of fees, there should be no doubt that these US-trained architects, who set up together in Shanghai in 2004, are capable of very beautiful work. Have a look at the Beijing Whampa Club, opened in 2007, a glamorous remodelling of a redundant courtyard house that might otherwise have been demolished.
ADP Architects, which has an office in Delhi, as well as several in Britain, has won a commission to lead a £23m regeneration of Spanish City. This is not some blazing hot Mediterranean metropolis, but the old funfair in Whitley Bay, Tyneside facing the sunny North Sea. Centred on an ambitious domed building of 1908 designed by the Newcastle architects Cacket and Burns Dick, Spanish City opened daily from 1980 to the sound of Tunnel of Love, a song written by Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, who says he heard his first "really loud" rock concert here. The new-look Spanish City – named, by the way, after an Edwardian Toreador dance troupe from the Theatre Royal, Hebburn (Geordies in bullfighting gear) – will feature a four-star hotel and a new YMCA, although for music fans there will be "performance, recording and exhibition spaces".
This week, the reopening of the Watts Gallery in Compton, Surrey, was announced. Both admired and maligned in Britain, the prolific and highly eclectic artist George Frederic Watts (1817-1904) was much feted abroad. He was the first living artist to enjoy a solo show in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and won gold medals at the Paris Universal Exhibitions of 1878 and 1889 (the one the Eiffel Tower was built for). Watts built a gallery for his own art, designed by the Arts and Crafts architect Christopher Hatton Turnor, and now renovated by ZMMA. Close by the chapel designed by his wife, Mary Seton Watts, it is as exotic, or even as happily topsy-turvy, as anything in Britain this side of Spanish City or a super-chic Neri & Hu hotel will be in Covent Garden. It opens on 18 June, and will be reviewed in the Observer on Sunday.
Architecture, Art and design, Comment, Culture, guardian.co.uk, Museums
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