Nowhere is the gulf between digital promise and physical fact more spectacularly evident than at the new Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) in California [...]
Almost a generation in the making, it feels like the final death rattle of a bygone age, the last gasp of an era preoccupied with novel form for form’s sake. Perhaps it is fitting that this flimsy, paper-thin architecture is held together with tape.
— The Guardian
The Guardian critic paid a visit to the new museum building to offer a thoroughly dejecting assessment based on what he observed to be a disorienting entrance, confounding wayfinding system, atrium configuration, and defective cladding panels made necessary by a “performative shell” that has come to be an “expensive and elaborate” trope of its designers.
Morphosis partner-in-charge Brandon Welling claimed the firm was pushed into its October completion date and is still going through its punch list of small details that will complete the design, which Wainwright called a “$94 [million] hymn to the difference between render and reality.”
“I have no interest in completing projects,” says Thom Mayne - too bad for the Orange County Museum of Art https://t.co/RIvHSkUuZE pic.twitter.com/RdYTpOSVSo
— Olly Wainwright (@ollywainwright) December 13, 2022
Builders for the project pinned some of the issues on supply chain delays and said some of the hastily assembled stopgaps like tape and soffit binding clamps were merely “temporary placeholders.”
For her part, OCMA director Heidi Zuckerman says she is unbothered by the faults, adding, “I believe in wabi-sabi — I think there’s a beauty in imperfection. Sometimes you can only appreciate a finished thing by experiencing it unfinished.”
21 Comments
Mayne's heel turn from raging radical renegade to peddling the ossified forms of his youth to the overlords of our time under a greenwashing sheen (Not this project, though it shares the same language) has been pretty disappointing.
isn't there a satisfactory completion deposit to be held against this crook?
“It doesn’t bother me,” says a cheerful Heidi Zuckerman, director of OCMA. “I believe in wabi-sabi – I think there’s a beauty in imperfection. Sometimes you can only appreciate a finished thing by experiencing it unfinished.”
What an arrogant statement!
Aspen snob
"I think there’s a beauty in imperfection," quotes Mayne's lawyer back to the client at the deposition. And who doesn't believe in wasabi? Raw fish is flavorless.
I bet it leaks as well (the museum).
What an arrogant statement!
sorry for the double post it meant for the museum director.
Good piece. I think it could have gone a bit deeper on the relationship between client and architect here.
The design originally had a broad staircase running up from ground level to a public roof terrace, but conversations about ticketing and security scuppered that idea. Instead, a stunted remnant of the stair now lies in front of the museum, marooned like an abandoned fragment of another project, blocking the ground floor cafe and shop from view, and generally confusing visitors....
Just to rub it in, the museum is now free and ticketless, so the staircase could have continued from the plaza to the roof terrace after all....
A locked, unmarked door, with a sign that reads “no roof access”, leads up to the public roof terrace, which the museum hopes to open as the primary daytime route to the terrace.
Great projects require both client and architect to work together collaboratively to achieve something great. This one sounds like the opposite - bad/ confused client and an architect who didn't push them to clarify their ideas or intentions. Probably ran out of design/ re-design money too. Or needed it open by a certain date so the design couldn't be corrected.
To be fair, sometimes a client doesn't really know what they are going to do with a building until a building is built... Had that with a cafeteria once.... this sounds like the sort of thing they should have figured out though...
Ok chat bot ROAST THE PROJECT:
In Orange County, sunny and bright, A new art museum, a wondrous sight, Designed by Morphosis, with skill and care, It was meant to be a beacon of culture, grand and fair.
But alas, the building, it seems, Was poorly built, and now it teems, With cracks and leaks, and broken glass, A symbol of greed and a lack of class.
For this art museum, it caters To the rich and tasteless, who gather To admire the works, with no true heart, Ignoring the building, which falls apart.
A testament to hubris and folly, This Morphosis project, so poorly, Built and maintained, it stands as a reminder Of how not to build, for all of time'sinder.
.
.
This chatbot thing you are doing is excellent! Is this GPT3? Are you using your own prompts or putting in the original article text (like on this or the Studio Gang Amsterdam tower)
It is not just the detailing that is the issue, there seem to be many problems with the circulation too. Kinda like Morphosis' Cooper Union project
Kinda like many student projects.
This obsession with stairs/ramps as a "social mixer" is a cliche right out of the utopian fantasies of the '60s/'70s. Tshcumi did the same at Columbia, at massive cost and to middling effect. Morphosis repeated the trope in Cooper.
Big ass stairs that supposedly serve as a gathering space are a deadly device. It works well, mind you, when designed effectively in tandem with other interior spaces - generously proportioned with a proper "stage" and augmented by actual stairs for faster circulation. Perhaps they are even more effective as an organic outdoor circulation space.
But its criminal to shoehorn in stairs that take more space than they should and yet are too small to serve as proper gathering spaces.
The one at Cooper occupied a hefty chunk of the floorplate but hardly any student uses it to chill out. Same with Columbia - good for some selfies and makes for a cool diagram, but hardly anyone hangs out on those ramps. In contrast, the one at the ETFE-clad IIT building was quite well done - the space is inviting and the steps large enough to hang out on. Ironically, it's probably the most corporate-looking of the three aforementioned - it looks right out of the cliched Silicon Valley office-scape. But I thought it worked well as a space in its own right, more theater than over-scaled stair.
Mono - I think Ronan's student center at IIT works well precisely because it is so subdued, the stair isn't competing with a bunch of other architectural moments and the budget was tight enough that it has to work hard and look good. The courtyard it ascends from is quite well done.
no one wants this garbage anymore. the titans of neoliberalism are falling one by one- i love that this one happens to be self-inflicted.
In full agreement with the garbage comment !
Thom and Team need to spend some time working on real projects like this one and not NEOM. Alas one of these pays much better than the other.
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