Archinect - Features

How Art and Design Museums Switched to Working From Home and Sharpened Their Digital Experience

2020-03-28T08:00:00-04:00

While the worsening pandemic and sweeping social-distancing measures have brought normal daily life to a grinding halt around the globe, cultural institutions, typically the civic pride of cities and entire regions, were also forced to abandon their prime mission and temporarily close most, if not all, brick-and-mortar manifestations.

With physical exhibitions now inaccessible and museum staff ordered to work from home, we wondered: How has the switch to remote work been going so far for institutions that rely so heavily on personal interaction with visitors? Have online programs, or even virtual exhibitions, been in place before the crisis hit? Can the self-quarantining public access and enjoy collections via the web, potentially offering a vastly expanded, global audience to most museums?

With Peter Zumthor's LACMA in the Home Stretch, Is Los Angeles Entering its Post-Rational Phase?

2019-09-04T09:00:00-04:00

Despite vocal critical and popular outcry, Atelier Peter Zumthor's controversial Los Angeles County Museum of Art replacement project is moving full-steam ahead and is due to begin construction imminently.

LACMA Director Michael Govan recently sat in conversation with University of Southern California School of Architecture Dean Milton Curry to discuss his plans for the new museum. The plan, derided for offering less exhibition space than the current museum in an uninspiring "blob" building that some have liked to a coffee table, has prompted much head-scratching from the design community, which has shown a surprisingly reverence for the existing William L. Pereira & Associates-designed museum complex.

In an Op-Ed, architect John Southern summarizes and reflects upon the discussion between Govan and Curry and ponders if the success of the museum project signals that "L.A. has stopped being the city that dares to dream and take architecture to the limits of rationality."

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Jerry Saltz is Wrong

2019-07-26T10:25:00-04:00

Yesterday I was sitting in the waiting area of a car dealership outside of Columbus, Ohio. My car was having some service done for a recall and I came prepared for a wait, so I turned on a podcast, got a complimentary cup of coffee, and picked up my Nintendo Switch to continue where I left off replaying Final Fantasy X for the nth time. I’m not prodding for sponsorship (though I will listen to any offers!), but framing the importance of expediency in current criticism and online discourse. As the 15 minute podcast finished, I hopped onto Instagram and the first image that came up struck a nerve.

Senior art critic and columnist for New York Magazine Jerry Saltz had posted his advice for architects designing an art museum. The post had me shook. I felt an immediate urge to form a rebuttal, so I took a break from helping Yuna save the world of Spira, and went into my mobile image editor to challenge his points one by one.

Let's get a little deeper into what is so problematic about th...

Inside the Plan to Save LA’s Southwest Museum

2019-06-11T12:00:00-04:00

It’s an open question whether the Southwest Museum of the American Indian in Los Angeles has its best days behind or ahead of it.

The Spanish Colonial Revival-style mountaintop campus was built in 1914 by architects Sumner P. Hunt and Silas Reese Burns at the behest of anthropologist, historian, journalist, and photographer Charles Fletcher Lummis. Lummis, founder of the Southwest Society, the west coast branch of the Archeological Institute of America, created the museum several years earlier in Downtown Los Angeles to highlight a vast collection of Native American cultural artifacts he had acquired while traveling through the American Southwest. The museum, dedicated to supporting the “history, science, and art of the American Southwest,” contains the largest and one of the most important collections of Native American cultural artifacts in the country.

Today, it also exists today mostly as a shell of its former self.

Extra Extra: A Sprinkle of Defense of the Museum of Ice Cream

2019-03-29T14:35:00-04:00

The Museum of Ice Cream kicked our ass. It beat architecture to a project for a contemporary image-conscious culture in an era of social media. This is a shame considering architecture has a long history of staging the image of social life. From the success of the grand escalier at l’Opera Garnier de Paris and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim to the new and problematic Vessel at Hudson Yards, the faith in architecture to frame and showcase experience itself is unquestioned. An image-based culture has clearly developed and seeks to define its subsequent social media marketing as a major participant in the design process.

Is it a Museum? An Up Close and Personal Review of Diller Scofidio + Renfro's Broad Museum

2019-02-13T12:44:00-05:00

The Broad is much more than a building, so to review it only as a physical object would be to fall for the decoy. The Broad is playing next-level games with art and real estate, in a similar way that Trump played next-level games with the media during his campaign. The benefit to The Broad’s games, of course, is that people can go see some beautiful art for free - or, more accurately, they can go see art at no cost to them, but which nevertheless is considerably subsidized by the City of Los Angeles. (More on that later.)

The Broad

Built: 2015
Architect: Diller Scofidio + Renfro
Executive Architect: Gensler
Location: 221 S. Grand Ave Los Angeles, CA

Building Score: 5.7

Chasper Schmidlin and Lukas Voellmy discuss the design process for Muzeum Susch, a gallery built deep into the Swiss Alps

2019-01-25T09:27:00-05:00

Muzeum Susch, founded by Grażyna Kulczyk, is a new gallery in a remote town in the Engadin Valley designed by the young duo Chasper Schmidlin and Lukas Voellmy, who previously designed the Von Bartha Gallery in Basel. The original building, set on a sloping hillside, has always been integral to the community it is situated within. Prior uses have included a vicarage, a hospice, a monastery, and, in the 19th century, an industrial brewery building. Working with the existing geology of the site, Schmidlin and Voellmy have created a dynamic space that weaves its way through the mountain, tunneling into the existing building—paying homage to its past while creating interventions and new spaces for its contemporary future. Below, the two talk about their process and what they hope the legacy of Muzeum Susch will be.

Audain Art Museum by Patkau Architects

2017-07-31T09:58:00-04:00

Designed by Patkau Architects, the Audain Art Museum, located in Whistler, British Columbia, is a 56,000 square foot museum housing Michael Audain’s personal art collection which spans the history of British Columbia from the late 18th century to the present day. Spacious and minimal, the structure fits elegantly into Whistler's forest landscape, creating a serene environment for visitors. Recently, the art museum received a Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia Awards in Architecture medal in the 2017 AIBC Architectural Awards.

Snøhetta's expanded SFMOMA is 235,000 square feet of egalitarianism

2016-05-10T11:13:00-04:00

Snøhetta’s expansion of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art—which incorporates numerous elements of Mario Botta’s 1988 design while simultaneously introducing a far more egalitarian vibe—seems to be a miniature of the constraints and progressive-mindedness of San Francisco itself. Multiple entrances, an emphasis on intimate scaling instead of grand gestures, and dedicated staff floors that sit blatantly atop the public galleries, invert many of the preconceptions of traditional museum design. Instead of attempting to shape the city with a bold new vision, Snøhetta has allowed the city to shape the museum. It is the anti-Bilbao: if not in effect, then certainly in intention.

The Broad Museum opens its doors for a look beyond the veil

2015-09-23T09:02:00-04:00

The white cube museum to end all white cube museums has touched down in Los Angeles. This past Sunday, the personal post-war and contemporary art collection owned by billionaire philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad, housed in Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s meshed white box, opened for public viewing as the brand new Broad Museum, located just south of Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall on downtown’s Grand Avenue.

What makes an artless museum?

2015-06-16T11:00:00-04:00

Architectural criticism that begins with “it looks like [insert Platonic object here]” is suspect at best, but the temptation to gamble with semiotic stickiness is too great: if I see a contraceptive sponge when I look at the new Broad Museum, I want to say that.

ShowCase: Louisiana State Museum and Sports Hall of Fame by Trahan Architects

2013-09-18T11:00:00-04:00

ShowCase is an on-going feature series on Archinect, presenting exciting new work from designers representing all creative fields and all geographies.

We are always accepting nominations for upcoming ShowCase features - if you would like to suggest a project, please send us a message.

Architecture Photography in the 21st Century: Interview with Bilyana Dimitrova

2013-09-03T19:02:00-04:00

There’s no denying that architectural discourse has drastically expanded with the ease of image-sharing technology. Without even being in the same country as a building, anyone feels entitled to form an opinion of that structure based on photographs that are perpetuated over the internet, to the point where they almost become a stand-in for the actual structure. But the images that reach this singularity are rare, and may only achieve this state through carefully orchestrated harmony with their building-subjects.

ShowCase: Herta and Paul Amir Building, Tel Aviv Museum of Art

2011-10-28T19:07:00-04:00

ShowCase is an on-going feature series on Archinect, presenting exciting new work from designers representing all creative fields and all geographies.

We are always accepting nominations for upcoming ShowCase features - if you would like to suggest a project, please send us a message.