The problem is that the proposed new work is something else altogether to Venturi and Scott Brown’s playfulness and personality. It has curving glass balustrades, white walls and oak-clad pillars, and expanses of plain paving outside. It is an architecture of near-emptiness, the default style of international art-world good taste. — The Guardian
Moore ran through the litany of changes Annabelle Selldorf is making in replacement of the current iteration’s “bum notes,” which the critic pinned on a rift between the original expansion's benefactors and what was then called Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates.
This is now the second Denise Scott Brown-designed museum that Selldorf has laid her (very capable) hands-on after the recently opened Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego revamp, which she said engendered a “greater clarity across the history of all the building types.” Moore, seizing on the difference in intrusion levels between the two similar projects, said “there could be more rapport between the current and the proposed and more cleverness and wit” before making a surprising turn to his own long-distant past.
Moore concluded, “by refusing to align themselves with any one architectural camp, traditionalist or modernist, Venturi and Scott Brown won too few friends for the Sainsbury Wing when it was new. A young critic (me), overly enraged by the prince’s arrogant interference, railed against a 'dermatological exercise', and I wasn’t the only one. But I was wrong. It is precisely this in-between quality, what was later called 'a bravura resolution of conflicting demands,' that is special. I only ask for the same from the remodelling."
8 Comments
Did Selldorf monotonize Venturi's quirky California museum too? The SMOCA, I think it was called?
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD)
it was essentially erased by the corporate Selldorf architects. Very similar butchery to Folk Art Museum in NY.
Selldorf is the safe, elegant option - similar to RPBW's recent academic portfolio. They deliver quality buildings on time and budget - just without the moments of wonder that riskier projects could deliver.
Aside from some hospitality design for bars and hotel lobbies, there is no appreciation right now for any kind of dark or atmospheric interior. Everything has to be all white or beige and lit like a medical operating room. Even if it's just a lobby or corridor that people pass through quickly. The idea that a building can have a sequence of spaces with varied lighting levels has been lost.
This addition looks like a joke. I know that was the point, but years later, its post modern 'concept' has worn thin and all we're left with this mess. This is the problem with a lot of work that favors its concept over it's physical reality. It lasts as long as its concept is fashionable.
And, adding insult to injury. This is how Selldorf said that VSBA's work would be preserved back then when she got the project and when the architectural community start to question the new project. Totally missing the pergola's role as a museum piece. She wanted to get rid of the pergola, erasing the major part of the museum's architectural past and thinking the history is there to alter to make it about Selldorf.
It shouldn't be that easy to demo or remove the work of architects who played a major role both theoretically and as-built works in American culture and its architecture.
What is the cultural mission of a museum?
Of course, all this is irreparably done now. But what they did shows the caliber of Selldorf and the director types at MCASD.
I always found it unfair to VSBA that their work somehow got lumped into '80s POMO along with Graves and Co. Some of VSBA's work has aged badly, no doubt, and are weak when stripped off their in-group humor. But the Sainsbury had strengths in its own right even without the references.
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