An overscaled monument flagrantly aloof from its surroundings, the addition is a laggard symbol of an era when the Netherlands, like this country, was awash in capital for boldly sculptural new projects.
As such it's a reminder of how slow architecture can be. The $159-million extension is the architectural personification of boom-time thinking.
— Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times
12 Comments
The world's largest bath tub
http://www.teijinaramid.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Case-study-Stedelijk-Museum2.pdf
Not one of Hawthorne's best reviews. Reads like a first draft, a bit disjointed, as if banged out from notes. Does anyone else get the same impression from the piece?
Baroque Modernist expressionism. That's the best I could come up with. I like how the Dutch are saying it's too agressive for thier cultural sensibilities. They're so polite!
Eric, you are right, I agree with you. Also, few references to art with words like "smashing" "fantastic" are very .., umm.., commercial, Hollywood? This is what happens when you are given a tour by the museum director and the architect. You are kind of left on the fence and the review oscillates between the honest impressions, infomercial writing and the damage control of your own conflicting thoughts. Corporations you are writing for and your own livelihood as a critic further complicating the +,- thousand word space. It is becoming increasingly difficult to write about things and walk the tight rope of special interests. Yet the publicity machine still operates on positivist formula earnings.
Another shipwreck.
At least cruise-liners have windows.
Isn't it clever how they 'respected' the existing context by matching the height.
And the 'human scale' is all in the banal metaphor!
@TD 'Baroque Modern' was also a neologism used to describe the Piano and Rodgers Centre Pompidou, a term which was then also misused. In what sense are you using baroque?
@Orhan. Yeah, walking the tightrope, Like Hollywood journalism with celebrity architects as the stars to hang the public's interest from.
I remember when Variety, the Hollywood trade paper, fired lead critic Joe McBride, under pressure from Paramount Studios for his negative review on Patriot Games. That episode chilled alot of criticism, especially anything that alluded to political themes.
John Pastier was fired for his (correct) critique of the LA Times expansion, Times was his paper. The Hollywood parallel is appropriate
When your livelihood is at stake, critics become reviewers, reviewers become PR flak copyists.
Hernan Diaz Alonso would have fit in better.
Baroque Modern meant that modernism's formalism and abstraction is here taken to an absurd level of expressionism whereby the building as object is so litterall that it looks like another object altogether. In this case, Paul Bunyon's bath tub. But who needs all that word salad when one can just say, it's attrocious.
At least Kahn, in his Yale University Art Gallery extension, pulled FOUR to FIVE lines from the existing context (representing the floor levels of the existing building).
These monolithic sculpture buildings (especially those with huge hovering canopies) brood over the space below, and the complete absence of connectivity between the interior and the street above the first floor compounds that effect.
But, let me guess, the extension will integrate the simplistic shape of the design into their new logo.
while this building has a great deal of gag factor going on, you'd have to be a know nothing about the baroque to even bring it up.
"Baroque Modern meant that modernism's formalism and abstraction is here taken to an absurd level of expressionism whereby the building as object is so litterall that it looks like another object altogether."
Someone obviously took their architectural education in the wrong end.
what an absolutely vapid thing to write. You can see that cant you?
I'm not sure destroying a sence of place and scale deserves to be described as a "gag" unless you're LeCorbusier. Modernism as a rule is minimalist, abhoring anything that seems remotely decorative, except for the building , which becomes a decorative object in itself. Where the modernists denied the public decoration, they more than made up for it in decorative words through their "concepts" which, while the public will never read, no matter, the buildings are for the appreciation of like minded individuals.
What happens when this ethos goes to such an extreme that it's concept becomes extravagantly ornate, florid, and convoluted in character or style and it's object like quality moves so far away from architecture as to seem like one giant sculpture? You get Baroque Modernism, or what some in the know refer to as Formal Expressionism.
It's a conceptual formalization. No need to be so litteral. But then again, why deal with the substance of the criticism when you can pick a fight
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