Smithsonian officials are planning a $2 billion futuristic reimagining of the institute’s southern campus that will create clear entrances, expand visitor services and upgrade mechanical systems to the historic Castle and the six buildings surrounding it.
Architect Bjarke Ingels, partner at BIG in Manhattan, unveiled the proposal Thursday in the Smithsonian Institution Building, known as the Castle.
— washingtonpost.com
16 Comments
Photoshop - Diffuse Glow Filter - my favorite.
it's crash and burn or perform time for BIG...anyone want to take wagers?
Crash and burn, but then again they like smoke and mirrors. I quite like the proposal but don't understand why it needs to cost 2 billion.
What's the matter - there aren't any architects in the US?
$400 million for construction, $1.6 billion in lobbying, graft, payoffs and corruption. Preliminary estimate only, actual cost will likely be 2-3x.
@Miles,
Architect Magazine had an answer to your question...Albeit a disappointing one.
http://www.architectmagazine.com/architects/where-to-find-the-most-important-young-architects_o.aspx
As for the BIG scheme, if at first you don't succeed, try, try again. How many times have they published the same peeled up park scheme!?
Maybe they should wait and see what W57 looks like to examine the virtues and negatives of swooping flimsy architecture
@Miles
BIG is in the US. They have an office in NYC. Whats the the nativism politics?
"The new spaces would connect to the S. Dillon Ripley Center, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the National Museum of African Art, which are all underground and, despite aboveground entrance pavilions, can be hard to find."
Correct me if I'm wrong, and I love architecture and stuff, but is it work 2 Billion to make an entrance more visible?
Do you want to tell some kid that he won't have a new school or housing so that these museums can get a new gift shop?
Was this project a public bid? Or did you already need some type of contract with the GSA? Why did they chose BIG? Is there an explanation somewhere?
Also in Michael caton's link why did the author single out those universities in Indiana and Ohio? I think he lumped then together without knowing that notre dame is totally different from the other two.
Ask Douglas Cardinal about working with the Smithsonian.....Most likely they will team BIG up with little and we will have yet another cluster....f...
I have very little regard for the Smithsonian.
rob - the rfq for the master plan (which is, i think, all that big has done to date - i'd have to check) was indeed publicly published and available for anyone to respond to. having worked with gsa myself, i can't imagine the actual design work is in this contract. nor would the construction funding. 3 different funding appropriations. this really will take decades to work through, if at all.
one last thought - this is the opening bid by the smithsonian to see if there's any appetite for a really big, ambitious undertaking. personally, the odds would seem to be rather small it goes forward in this way.
and, yes, i'd have to believe it would be a very large team - with one of the really, really large firms partnered up with BIG.
Definitely crash and burn. Their first public meetings in DC ought to be an educational experience for them to say the least.
Please don't mess up the Hirschorn.
From reading a few sources, I suspect a big part of the cost is the plan to perform seismic retrofits for the buildings - including base isolation for the Castle. This stuff is boring and expensive. Since they've got to dig anyway they want to do as much as they can to improve the basement stuff.
Arch Record had another article which suggests that this masterplan concept is more about soliciting donations to fund back-of-house renovation than actually making anything new. It's hard to get donors on the promise there'll be a loading dock or underground corridor named after them.
I imagine once the retrofits are underway the sloped garden will disappear from the scheme - it's just a figurehead to attract interest, and not really important at all.
As to why BIG - they've done this kind of underground museum work before and it seems to have turned out well. Look at Bjarke's BIG.DK and see.
I like the rendering that suggests the Forrestal Building directly south of the garden will be gone. If that's part of the plan, great! But I doubt it.
The rendering is interesting in the way BIG seems to consider any modernism other than their own to be fair game for destructive "tweaks" (Hirschorn) or complete demolition (Forrestal, Sackler, and Asian Art buildings). The suggestion that the warpy lawn makes for a "more visible" entrance to the underground museums than the current granite pavilions is B.S.
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