(Jean Nouvel's) (Quai) Branly isn't the first bummer of its kind. The clumsy Tate Modern in London, by Swiss starchitects Herzog & de Meuron, is a sterling earlier example. So is the ghastly Musee d'Orsay here . All such buildings are dancing for attention, trying to repeat the celebrity of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain. Some, like the Guggenheim, don't even have their own collections. The architecture is the principal art. BostonGlobe l previous
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wow, I don't know who this Campbell person is however, I have found that the Tate Modern is anything but clumsy and certainly does not attempt to repeat the celebrity of Gehry!!
a critique that offers the same trite criticisms from a critic who think he's outside architectural fashion and cliché.
haven't been to branly yet, but tate was quite the opposite of over cooked. amazing art in the turbine hall (and elsewhere), and the architecture actually understated more than the opposite. only thing i didn't like was the espresso bar...someone gettin irational over starchitects...?
robert campbell may be overstating things this time, probably out of frustration with the starchitect trends he's seeing.
usually very cogent and considered - so much so that he took the pulitzer prize for architecture criticism - only one that i've heard of.
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