The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland on Friday released designs for a $100 million renovation and expansion, which would grow the museum’s footprint by a third with a dramatic addition to the original I.M. Pei building.
The Rock Hall announced that the architecture firm PAU will lead the project, which will bring 50,000 square feet of programming space and a new band shell overlooking the shores of Lake Erie.
— The New York Times
Besides modernizing the Rock Hall's existing I.M. Pei museum building and infrastructure, the expansion project will also add 10,000 square feet for large-scale traveling exhibits, open space for event and education programming, creation of a museum campus with the neighboring science center, a lakefront gathering place for Cleveland residents and museum visitors, and interactive learning classrooms among other features.
Commenting on the competition win, Vishaan Chakrabarti, Founder and Creative Director of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU), said: "Rock and Roll—like NASA and pizza—brings us together like few other cultural phenomena at this moment when our nation needs to come together. We are beyond ecstatic to have been selected by the Rock Hall to design the expansion of I.M.Pei’s heart of glass, which sits aglow upon Cleveland’s storied industrial waterfront, particularly in light of the architectural luminaries against whom we had the honor of competing. This is PAU’s stairway to heaven."
PAU has partnered with James Corner Field Operations, Cooper Robertson, and L’Observatoire International.
16 Comments
Fantastic choice. Congrats PAU!
so do all architects than haven’t completed a building get write ups in the Times or just the revolving door Bloomberg people with direct access?
Wait, so your complaint is that they talked about the architect more than the project, and you're complaining?
Chemex is not wrong. The lazy NYT writing staff that only reports on a small clique of architects is a problem. I can't wait for their next article on DS&R.
DS&R was the old clique. PAU is the new clique. Arty buzzwords replaced with urbanist buzzwords. The results? They both did Hudson Yards.
And they are both in NYC, the only place an important architect can be located.
PAU is also very active in the media and government - Chakrabarti once got an NYT spread just for his musings on Penn Station/MSG. If you're an NYT critic/journalist looking for a quote or story on urban design, PAU is on top of the list. Getting to know the media well has always been an essential skill for designers. Its symbiotic: Journalists need stories and designers need a platform.
To what extent do you think that this symbiotic system is really open to a broad spectrum of architects rather than just those with the resources to play the PR game? Does PAU really have the best ideas?
Of course its not fair. It takes skill - design and political - to get to this point. Urban planners have to be politically adept by the nature of their trade. PAU was close to the Bloomberg administration and their founder is also Dean of Berkeley's architecture department. Getting prestigious commissions like masterplanning Sunnyside Yards is a result of being at the side of the city's power brokers. Just as Heatherwick has the ears of billionaire patrons, PAU is the expert that the city turns to for urban design matters. Their competition includes the usual acronym firms, landscape designers whose forte breaches the scale of urban planning, and tech giants like Google's Sidewalk Labs.
Being available and known is just as important a criteria as being the "best". The "best" solution or proposal is damn near useless if the designer lacks the ability to execute - the first step of which is getting it to the people with the ability to get the proposal running. While there rarely a single idea or a stroke of genius in urban design, designers are capable of coming up with great ideas or be able to contribute by presenting/visualizing great ideas in a manner that draws public support. Social media has afforded designers from all walks of life a platform to present their own urban visions, for better or worse, but ideas take a lot of work to get to fruition. The Plus Pool in NYC generated plenty of buzz online but through a series of long term problems (Including its viability) and now Covid, might remain a series of renders. On the other hand, the work of Friends of the Highline earned the support of influential patrons and the city despite early detractors.
The big difference between now and the recent past -- the bureaucratic elites used to actively search for design talent and then bring them into larger government/corporate commissions and create showcases to push ideas forward. Today there is a vacuum at the top (MoMA and NYT are largely corrupt and decaying real estate companies) which is filled by dubious interests of the NYT elite which push their own agendas forward. PAU pops up whenever there is corporate interest that needs lobbying -- the AT&T gutting, the 270 Park demo, Hudson Yards, Sunnyside Yards, some "incubator" in Detroit. PAU used the more talented SHoP to launch their own practice-- even NYC greats like Steven Holl were pushed out of the Hudson Yards project to maximize luxury shopping space instead a much better plan. American architecture has suffered because of this kind of corrupt stagnation of the last 10 years.
Agree. I call it lending a secular academic pedigree to otherwise commercially-driven projects. In this regard, they distinguish themselves from the SOMs and Genslers by adopting a supposedly more intellectual and "human" urban approach, largely at the expense of good design at the architectural scale. NYC's post-war urban design has largely been a tug of war between powerful bureacrats and powerful developers, with architects hopping between the shoulders of both. At its worst, you get MSG and perhaps Hudson Yards. At its best, I guess the High Line (before it was overrun by pricey condos) and Brooklyn Bridge Park. Recent open design competitions have largely been confined to the residential scale while participation in big projects with major commercial implications are limited to acronyms and starchitects.
If PAU had more talent, this convergence of developer and architect would be more fruitful. Unfortunately it reeks of those dual major b-school students who crave attention and accolades rather than design in itself--after Hudson Yards, you'd think the Bloomberg people would be discredited, but no.
“Our theme for the project is the Clash,” said Mr. Chakrabarti
take notes folks, this is how you win competitions
the wedge makes it edgy and rock n' roll! Like a Libeskind building, but more affordable!
Nice story, not nice to look at.
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