Hasta La Ideas

Opinion: a 1960s institution in Mexico that gives visitors space and time to wander is a stark contrast to the commodified museum experience that has become the norm, says Alexandra Lange.

Is it perverse to be thinking about Herbert Muschamp in Mexico City? In his epic 1997 review of the Guggenheim Bilbao Muschamp writes, in one of his easiest lines, “You can go in, and you can come out.”

Muschamp, quoting Marilyn Monroe from The Misfits, is referring to the way Frank Gehry designs architecture that shapes, and is shaped by, the cities in which it dwells. I have never been to Bilbao, but, as I went in and came out of the galleries, gardens and courts of the Museo Nacional de Antropologia (MNA) in Mexico City, glimpsing fragments of ancient cities and the traffic of the contemporary one, I understood why he emphasised an easy circulation as so critical to a museum’s success.

The MNA tells the story of Mexico through a spectacular array of media, artifacts, cultures and histories, but its building is also embedded without pretense in the here and now, designed in 1964 by Pedro Ramirez Vasquez, Jorge Campuzano and Rafael Mijares to be cognisant of both the body and the eye. The comfort I experienced there, the casualness with which wonders can be discovered, are elements all too rare in today’s internationally commodified Museum Experience. Sometimes you have to see something done right to know what’s been wrong all your life. The MNA is like that.

The plan of the museum (which was renovated in 2001) is relatively simple: a set of boxes, both short and long, arranged around the stretched rectangle of the courtyard. Spaces between the boxes are open, allowing light to leak around the corners, letting visitors see into the surrounding Chapultepec Park and roads passing the museum. The courtyard itself is divided into two parts, the front end shaded by a vast rectangular parasol held up by a single tree-like column, the second half of the courtyard cooled by a fountain planted with tall, rushy plants.

Above the recessed first level of the long buildings floats a metallic crown, a set of geometric fins that screen the upper storey windows and throw complex shadows on the facade and pavement. All the care given to the climate of the courtyard is essential to the way the museum works: nowhere are you exposed to unmediated sunshine, making the outdoor space as pleasant as the inside. You can go in, and you can come out.

The Teotihuacan gallery is the first one on the right. You enter and pass through a series of glass vitrines, some transparent on both sides, into an inner room whose wall is a life-size, towering replica of a temple at Teotihucan. A pair of glass doors leads to a garden on the exterior of the museum – the galleries are bracketed by accessible outdoor space. Down a path made of stones embedded like waves in concrete, there’s a sprawling model of the city in the sun, introducing yet another scale. The museum’s sloped concrete walls create another bridge between civilisations, referencing the Mayan slopes and tweaking international Modernism to suit this site. With every turn, and in every detail, the visitor is wandering the centuries in a rigorously curated way.

This is Mexico’s most visited museum, frequented, on the day I was there, by tourists from many countries – Mexicans, families, old, young, rambunctious, quiet. There was space for them all and there was time for them all. You did not have to read a word (I don’t speak Spanish) to feel that you had learned something. All you had to do was walk and look, and the alternation of indoor and outdoor spaces meant that you tired less easily. The oscillation between small and large meant that you had to adjust your eyes more often and look again. It felt like a walk in the park, but it was a museum. And we need more museums that let us relax into knowledge, showing, not telling us everything by audioguide.

In New York, at least, the friction of timed tickets, crowds and lines are now baked in to many big museum experiences: one can rarely expect to be able to just walk in, buy a ticket, see a show. Lines for the Museum of Modern Art-hosted Rain Room this summer stretched past the four-hour mark – and that’s a separate line from the one for tickets that forms along 53rd Street.

My experience at the MNA caused me to think back on other museum discussions and visits of the past year, big and small: the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, stunts like the Rain Room or James Turrell at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Donald Judd’s House at 101 Spring Street in SoHo. Art may be more delicate than Aztec heads, but there isn’t only one way to show it. Thinking about each of these visits as variations on a theme, I have found what I crave is not more access but less: a discrete, informal, and time-limited chance to look at work in peace. To wander rather than move in lock-step. To walk in the front door, look at art or artifacts for as long as I want, and leave.

At the edges of a number of recent news stories about museums have been critiques of buildings grown too large, too busy, too expensive. Much negative feeling about post-expansion MoMA, specifically about its generic galleries and crowded rooms, was revealed in the recent controversy over its proposed demolition of TWBTA’s American Folk Art Museum and Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s renovation plans. Those plans seem to make more room for circulation, yes, but circulation without specificity, for performance, or events. If you are interested in more people seeing art, and concerned about congestion, selling fewer tickets seems like a more logical step than raising prices and insisting on audio etiquette lessons, as they have at the Barnes Foundation. The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently changed to being open seven days a week in order to spread out their crowds. One wonders whether, as with highways, more capacity simply brings more people.

Other contemporary architects are thinking differently about circulation. In his article last year on Peter Zumthor‘s proposed “Black Flower” addition to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a seven-legged undulating building made of coal-coloured concrete, the LA Times’s Christopher Hawthorne stressed the routes visitors would be able to take rather than the image of the facade, noting, “It has no single main entrance or front staircase.”

“Small museums are great,” Zumthor told him. “Big museums are a drag.” His proposal would allow visitors to enter at any of the seven legs, each one a staircase of a different character, each one leading to a major artwork from a different time and place.

Zumthor has shaped the building to the experience he and Govan want the visitor to have. That experience is less about seeing everything than focusing on one artwork, object or theme, shaping different paths. Zumthor’s design suggests you need something organic rather than orthogonal to create that openness and selection; the MNA suggests something different. The separate entrances off the central courtyard made it very easy to choose your own adventure.

If museums can’t find a way to frame personal encounters with great works of art, how can they create a deeper fandom? Another museum that had me thinking about path and pace was Donald Judd’s studio/home at 101 Spring Street in Soho. Unlike many house museums, it did not feel dead at all, but alive with resonance and purpose.

Donald Judd had ideas about how art should be seen, and wanted to present his own work outside the context of museums. At your appointed time, you just walk in the door. Tours are limited to eight people, with a guide, and give the group 1.5 hours to range over each of the five floors of the historic cast-iron building. That is more than enough time, an extravagance which makes it possible for you to circle back to elements, artworks, details you didn’t know you were interested in when you arrived.

The minimalist art, close enough to (but don’t) touch, is only the most obvious draw. Judd lived at 101 Spring with then-wife Julie Finch and his two children. Over those five floors one is introduced, at close range, to all the variations of his art and design practice. You can spend your time with the million-dollar artworks or in the kitchen on the second floor, contemplating what Judd saw in hand-painted Austrian pottery. You can nod at his choice of highchair, a bentwood Thonet, a readymade already approved for modernist use by Le Corbusier. Upstairs, there is finer furniture still by Gerrit Rietveld and Alvar Aalto. On a stand-up desk are tools carefully arranged at right angles – knolled, as the slang goes. I could believe this was how Judd left them for a meal at the end of the day, so squared-up is everything else in the house, and so loose is the relationship between the fine and old, the fine and new, and the vernacular.

At 101 Spring there is no garden, but the view of the city presses in on all sides. Judd’s installation keeps the blank space within, offering the kind of pauses passages like the gaps and courts at the MNA. I could dwell longer at Judd’s house because I was seeing less.

I would argue, from these experiences and tens more over a lifetime, that the best way to see art is not to saturate, not to march, but to pay what we can for the time we have and to let us spend that time in our own way. You can go in and you can go out. You can buy a snack. You can cool off under the parasol. You can look at the slightly goofy mannequins in native dress upstairs at the MNA, or marvel at a display of coloured baskets, resting on curved transparent mounts. You can be alone or in a crowd.

The question for future designers and renovators of museums seems to be how to make these many paths possible. At 101 Spring, the house is just that big. At Zumthor’s future LACMA, it’s which wardrobe today. At the MNA, the combination of indoor and outdoor installations, and the use of the courtyard as an internal High Street, combine to make it possible to go large or go small, without ever losing sight of the city that gives meaning to the artefacts.

Alexandra Lange is a New York-based architecture and design critic. She is a Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design for academic year 2013-2014 and is the author of Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities as well as the e-book The Dot-Com City: Silicon Valley Urbanism.

The post “We need more museums that let us relax
into knowledge” appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: in her first column for Dezeen, critic Alexandra Lange argues that architects are misusing platforms like Twitter and Tumblr. “Architects need to start thinking of social media as the first draft of history,” she writes.

It’s easy to make fun of Bjarke Ingels on Instagram. Selfie, LEGO selfie, girlfriend (I hope), Gaga, monograph, fog, fox socks. His Instagram has a lot to do with the architecture of self-promotion, but little to do with actual building. The same goes for many architects’ Twitter feeds: lecture, lecture, award, positive review, lecture. You could say that’s just business today. But social media can do more for architecture than showcase pretty faces and soundbites. Architects need to start thinking of social media as the first draft of history.

There’s an unofficial rule of thumb that you should only tweet about yourself 30 percent of the time. That’s a rule many architects break over and over again. They treat Twitter and Instagram as extensions of their marketing strategy, another way to let people know where their partners are speaking, that their projects are being built, and that the critics like them. Happy happy happy. Busy busy busy. Me me me. In real life, most architects aren’t quite as monomaniacal as their feeds. (There are exceptions.) They read reviews written about others. They look at buildings built by others. Heck, they even spend some time not making architecture. That balance, between the high and the low, the specific and the general, the obvious and the obscure makes life, not to mention design, much more interesting.

That unselfish reading, writing, seeing and drawing form part of the larger cloud of association that, one day, critics will use to assess and locate the architecture of today. A more flexible, critical and conversational use of social media could suggest interpretations before the concrete is dry. As an example, consider Philip Johnson, perhaps the most networked architect of his day. Philip Johnson would have been really good at social media. He understood, better than most, that interest is created by association. That was the principle of his salons, drawing the latest and greatest from a variety of cultural realms. Those young artists and architects helped him stay young and current, he helped them by offering literal or metaphorical institutional support.

Isn’t that how these platforms work too? I look better when I spread the word about everyone’s good work, not just my own. And seeing others’ projects gives me new ideas. Johnson was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, but he was also a “curator” in contemporary parlance, collecting and distributing people and objects and styles.

That’s why his physical library at his Glass House in New Canaan, CT remains of interest: the shelves reveal what he thought worth reading and keeping. Outside, its form reveals the same: the work of architect Michael Graves, promoted and digested. Even earlier, in the September 1950 issue of Architectural Review, Johnson set out the inspirations – possibly decoys – for that same Glass House. There’s Mies, of course, but there are also the less expected references to Suprematist painter Kasimir Malevich and eighteenth century architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux. There’s an image showing the Brick House, the almost windowless box set behind the Glass House where he actually slept, a building often eliminated from later photography of the site. There are many readings of this combination of text and images, few of them straightforward. But I’ll take false fronts and red herrings over pure self-promotion any day. Trails of breadcrumbs like this are catnip for critics then and now. Johnson used a prestigious journal to try out his version of the Glass House genealogy. You architects could be doing this every day.

Instagram is popularly characterised as a more perfect version of everyday life: the artfully mismatched tablescape, the colour-balanced Christmas tree, the accessorised child. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We get enough better-than-reality images of buildings on sites like Dezeen. I’ve started Instagramming my visits to exhibitions and buildings, as a way of sharing the first cut, taking visual notes, and focusing on details and moments that didn’t make the press packet. We so often see the same images of a building, over and over. What about the rest of it? My unprofessional photographs pick up on different things. At Herzog & de Meuron’s Parrish Art Museum, for example, I snapped the sign required to point you to the “Main Entrance.” And the ten-foot, blackened, windowless doors that could flatten a five-year-old. These images can be critical in a different way – fleeter, funnier, like popcorn – from the endangered building review. Could architects point out their own mistakes? Or – with love, of course – those of their colleagues? Of their heroes?

At a higher artistic level, there’s the example of the Instagram of architectural photographer Iwan Baan. His Instagram reveals that he has seen more contemporary architecture (and more of it from helicopters) than anyone. I find something aggrandising, even aggressive, about the relentlessness of his travel and the harsh aerial views. There’s also something humanising about his Instagram as a series of outtakes, capturing the surround for the more perfect images that end up on the websites of the architects. We see the faces of people, the buildings imperfectly lit or weathered. The heroic and the ordinary combine in this extra work, and will ultimately contribute to the way we look at the official pictures too. It would be even better if the architects were right there beside him, taking pictures of what else they see. I know architects make design pilgrimages. Why not take us there?

It isn’t just stolen moments that social media can capture. Tumblr is an ideal platform for context, before, during and after the run of construction. On a campus project, your building may be in dialogue not only with its neighbours and a predecessor, but with the whole history of development and style across campus. A project-specific Tumblr could allow an architect to show a wider audience that they recognise that legacy. That they are able to see a site as more than a blank slate or frame for their contribution. Client and community engagement doesn’t need to be limited to a specific forum. Why not share images of favourite or inspirational details? Moments of conflict? The materials palette of the campus? On a new building at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, I started snapping pictures of all the adjacent modern and postmodern buildings’ backsides, newly prominent now that a plaza has replaced a parking lot. Who but an architect would document those?

The diversity of purpose, the cloud of connections that work so well on Twitter is all wrong on Tumblr. There, you need to specialise, hone your theme to a single word. How else could Fuck Yeah Brutalism have 100,000 followers? Are you obsessed with the architecture of the past? With a particular designer? A place? An ingredient of whatever kind? How better to get that monkey off your back than by creating a trove of the best, most suggestive imagery. Who knew that many people liked Brutalism? As a side benefit, here’s a handy way to mobilise the opposition the next time someone talks about tearing down, say, Government Center.

Architects might also consider the archival angle. Graduate students start Tumblrs for their dissertation research, creating a daily log of their best discoveries. Museums and archives have launched Tumblrs to showcase their collections, or to do a deep dive into a particular archive that is in the process of being digitised. I’m fascinated by the Documenting Modern Living project at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which shows the process of digitising the photographs, fabric samples, architectural drawings and order forms that went in to making Eero Saarinen and Alexander Girard’s Miller House, commissioned in 1953. Making such a house, and maintaining such a house, well documented. Designers of a certain age might think about doing something similar with their own files, again starting the wheels of interpretation and reflection.

A book like The Images of Architects, for which Valerio Olgiati asked famous architects to send him images important to their work, performs a similar task. But there’s something so static, so precious about this presentation. Don’t wait to be maestri or maestrae. Don’t wait to be asked. Start showing what you’re made of now.

Are architects witty? Twitter would be the place to try. Or pop culture mavens? Tell us when you spot the John Portman-designed hotel in the movie Catching Fire? But more importantly, Twitter has proved itself valuable as a place of protest. If architects don’t speak for the quality, importance and ubiquity of buildings, who will? The hashtag #FolkMoMA collected visual and verbal salvos against the Museum of Modern Art’s plans to demolish Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s 12-year-old Museum of American Folk Art. The hashtag #DayDetroit collected posts from 20 art blogs, and then their readers, detailing what would be lost if the art collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts could be sold as just another city asset in Detroit’s bankruptcy proceedings. As Christopher Knight wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

“The premise is simple and elegant: Use the Internet to a) spread the word to a diverse, international art audience about what could be lost if any sale goes forward; b) suggest that readers expand the process by posting their own links and images to social media sites such as Twitter and Instagram; and c) generate support for the Detroit Institute of Arts by asking readers to click through and buy a museum membership (an individual membership starts at $65).”

#DayDetroit was quite beautiful, waking up a wide readership to the contents of the DIA, and generating conversation about the relationships of cities to their art. But it also got me thinking: It’s not only Detroit’s art assets that are being dispersed and destroyed, it’s the architecture too. There’s been a valuable discussion of “ruin porn”, and the aestheticising of structures only after they are too late to save. But what about Detroit’s incredible architecture that’s still standing? Why haven’t we had, over the past five years, any number of #DayDetroits for architecture, where a collective of architects point out the irreplaceable built assets that are also disappearing?

Social media can make criticism, interpretation, dialogue and history part of daily life. Don’t leave it to the critics.

In a more recent example, the announcement that the American Institute of Architects would award its first Gold Medal to a woman to Julia Morgan, dead these 56 years, was announced, praised, dissected, and reconsidered, all in a matter of hours on Twitter. Dezeen’s own post on the matter quoted me from Twitter; Architect Magazine created a reaction story to its own story by Storifying a discussion between several architecture critics (and didn’t have to pay us a dime). What do architects think of her work? What woman would you have nominated? It shouldn’t just be critics in on that discussion.

Architects sometimes forget what other people don’t know – or forget to share the positive assets of the past before, during and after they are threatened. Social media collects in real time. You can hashtag your firm. You can collate your campus work. You can geolocate your project. You can tip your hat to a colleague. You can tell us what you’re reading. In doing so architects contribute to a broader dialogue about what makes a good experience. What social media can do for architects is make criticism, interpretation, dialogue and history part of daily life. Don’t leave it to the critics. Don’t farm it out to your communications staff. That’s boring. Surely you don’t want to be boring? I’d be surprised if one social media platform or another weren’t part of most designers’ daily practice (at least those under 50). Let the rest of us in, so it doesn’t take bankruptcy, demolition or obituary to get people talking about architecture.

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Alexandra Lange is a New York-based architecture and design critic. She is a Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design for academic year 2013-2014 and is the author of Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities as well as the e-book The Dot-Com City: Silicon Valley Urbanism.

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on Instagram” appeared first on Dezeen.