Constructs 2013_spr

23 SPRING
2013
Spring Events
1.
Protest poster against
the new Kaiser Wilhelm
Memorial Church, Berlin,
1950s.
2. View of Raketenstation
Hombroch with sculptures
by Katsuhito Nishikawa and
Oliver Kruse (foreground)
and the House for
Musicians by Raimund
Abraham (left). Iwan Baan
Photographer.
1
2
“Achtung: Berlin”
A three-day spring J. Irwin Miller
Symposium “Achtung: Berlin,” will be
held from February 14 to 16, 2013.
The School of Architecture will host the
three-day spring J. Irwin Miller Symposium
“Achtung: Berlin,” from February 14 to 16,
2013, organized by Stanislaus von Moos,
Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural
History. Speakers from both Europe and
the United States will cover a wide array of
subjects relative to architecture and urbanism
in Berlin since the end of the Second
World War, with an introductory lecture by
Kurt W. Forster, of Yale, and statements by
artist Thomas Demand, publisher Elisabeth
Ruge, and literary critic Andreas Huyssen, of
Columbia University. Presentations will be
given of recent projects by architects David
Chipperfield, Hans Kollhoff, Peter Eisenman,
Jan Liesegang, and Jürgen Mayer-H.
Comments on Berlin’s recent urbanistic
successes and “casualties,” by architect
Rem Koolhaas, will conclude the event.
Historians, film critics, artists, and
architects will re-examine major episodes
of Berlin’s cultural, architectural, and urban
history. The city has been a magnifying glass
for practically every aspect of modernity
since the early twentieth century. As the
story begins with the era of postwar reconstruction,
architect Léon Krier, of Yale, will
discuss the architectural legacy of the Third
Reich and its leading architect, Albert Speer,
while Katerina Clark, of Yale, will explore
the significance of Moscow as a model for
the reconstruction of East Berlin. Historians
Katie Trumpener, of Yale, Simone Hain, of
the Technische Universität Graz, Marco de
Michelis, of IUAV University Venice, and
Hartmut Frank, of the HCU Hamburg, will
then consider the city’s subsequent status as
an enclave within the Soviet zone of Germany
(later the German Democratic Republic,
or GDR) and the way this determined the
practice of architecture and planning. Greg
Castillo, of UC Berkeley, and Eric Mumford,
of Washington University in St. Louis, will
discuss parallel developments in the West
and their role within western Cold War
politics and propaganda.
In the 1980s, when the triumph of
Modernist planning and architecture in the
city’s rebuilding began to throw a shadow of
boredom on many of Berlin’s neighborhoods,
the ghosts of Neo-Classicism and Socialist
Realism re-emerged under the guise of
“critical reconstruction.” Vittorio Magnago
Lampugnani, of ETH Zurich, one of the
ideologues of the Internationale Bauausstellung
Berlin (IBA, 1986–88), and architect
Hans Stimmann, who in his role as Berlin’s
Senatsbaudirektor in the 1990s transformed
the city into a model of traditionalist
urbanism, will give firsthand reports on this
experience. Esra Akcan, of the University of
Illinois at Chicago, and Dean Anthony Vidler,
of the Cooper Union, will discuss the IBA’s
successes and failures as a social project
and platform of Post-Modern architectural
discourse about the city.
Earlier, in the 1970s, architect Oswald
Mathias Ungers famously proposed the
“Green Archipelago” as a paradigm for the
future of an open, polycentric Berlin, offering
a thought model for “shrinking cities” that
is still relevant today. Ungers’s ideas will be
discussed by Sébastien Marot, of the Harvard
GSD, and architect Regula Lüscher, Berlin’s
current Senatsbaudirektorin, who will use
the symposium and, more specifically, its
discussion of the archipelago, as a platform
for presenting her ideas for the next IBA, to be
held in Berlin in 2020.
—N.R.
White Cube, Green Maze
White Cube, Green Maze: New Art
Landscapes is on view at the
Yale School of Architecture Gallery from
February 14 to May 4, 2013.
White Cube, Green Maze: New Art
Landscapes, an exhibition organized by
Raymund Ryan (’87), curator of the Heinz
Architectural Center at the Carnegie
Museum of Art, in Pittsburgh, posits a new
type of museum that is closer to a “site”
than a “museum,” mixing art, architecture,
and landscape to create hybrid environments.
Frequently combining existing and
new structures by many hands, these sites
fragment the formerly dominant “white
cube” into several pavilions. Contemporary
design, environmental sustainability, and new
modes of art making and display coalesce to
transform the meaning and experience of the
museum. Since Donald Judd’s installations
in Marfa, Texas, Frank Gehry’s Temporary
Contemporary for L.A.’s MOCA, and the
transformation of London’s Bankside Power
Station for the Tate by Herzog & de Meuron,
museums have evolved to reclaim brownfields
as “green mazes.”
The exhibition focuses on six sites:
the Olympic Sculpture Park, in Seattle,
Washington; Insel Hombroich, near Düsseldorf,
Germany; the islands of Naoshima,
Inujima, and Teshima, in Japan’s Seto Inland
Sea; Inhotim, near Belo Horizonte, Brazil; the
botanical gardens, in Culiacán, Mexico; and
the Grand Traiano Art Complex, currently
under construction in Grottaferrata, a hilltown
near Rome.
Most of the sites have an industrial
past. The sculpture park in Seattle served as
an oil storage depot until Marion Weiss and
Michael Manfredi created an art park that
also brought back aquatic life to that part
of Puget Sound. At Insel Hombroich, Tadao
Ando, Alvaro Siza, and Raimund Abraham
each contributed a project at this former
NATO missile base. In Japan’s Seto Inland
Sea, a former Inujima copper refinery has
been repurposed as an art venue by architect
Hiroshi Sambuichi and Yale-trained artist
Yukinori Yanagi.
Each of the institutions are as much
constructed landscape—green mazes—
as they are museums. On the Japanese
islands, buildings by Ando, Ryue Nishizawa,
and Kazuyo Sejima are mixed with village
houses to serve as structures that host artist
interventions. The three more recent sites
include Inhotim, where the first one hundred
acres were modified based on suggestions
by Roberto Burle Marx and new pavilions
were added by the young Brazilian architects
Rodrigo Cervino Lopez, Arquitetos Associados,
and Rizoma Arquitetos. The revival of
the botanical garden in Culiacán, Mexico, is
a collaboration between the architect Tatiana
Bilbao and landscape architect TOA (Taller
de Operaciones Ambientales), with thirty-six
international artists making interventions.
The Grand Traiano Art Complex has a master
plan by Los Angeles architects Johnston
Marklee, with new buildings proposed by
Johnston Marklee and Basel-based HHF
architects as well as landscape design by
Berlin–based Topotek 1.
Dutch photographer Iwan Baan’s
work, commissioned for the show, complements
the many models and drawings by
architects, artists, and landscape architects,
all included in a catalog, which has essays
by Raymund Ryan, Brian O’Doherty, and
Marc Treib.
—N. R.
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2
Yale University Art
Gallery Reborn
While we may expect prestigious art
museums to be housed in singular edifices
with strong identities, more often than not
they are cobbled together. The Met, the
MoMA, and the Louvre are all eclectic collections
of disparate architectural pieces that
reflect their institutional histories. These buildings
must negotiate between the chronology
of their own aggregate makeup and the
multiple historical, regional, and disciplinary
narratives of the works exhibited within.
The newly expanded Yale University
Art Gallery (YUAG)—designed by Ennead
Architects (formerly Polshek Partnership),
of New York City, with project leads Duncan
Hazard (B.A. ’71) and Richard Olcott—
combines three “Yale Art Galleries” from
distinct times in the university’s history. It
embraces the museum’s heterogeneity
through the dynamic interplay between the
shell of the buildings and the inner sleeve of
the galleries. There is no clear one-to-one
relationship between art and architecture,
but rather a loose fit bound together
through curatorial crossings and alley-like
passages between the galleries and building
façades. These compressed spaces
reveal YUAG’s institutional history through
an animated collection of stairs, surfaces,
styles, and campus views.
The connection and renovation of the
Peter Bonnett Wight’s 1866 Street Hall (the
Yale Art Gallery from 1867 to 1928), Egerton
Swartwout’s 1928 Old Yale Art Gallery, and
Louis Kahn’s building from 1953 (renovated
in 2007 by Polshek Partnership) occupies
one and a half city blocks. Of the three, the
Kahn building is the best and still provides
the strongest challenge to our conventional
expectations of the “neutral gallery.”
The threshold from the Kahn building
to the Old Yale Art Gallery (now called
Swartwout, after its architect) is handled
differently on each floor, (but what i would
call the curatorial transition on the third level
and the urbanstic transition on the fourth)
demonstrating strategies that are deployed
throughout the complex. On the third floor,
the curatorial extension of the spatial and
thematic qualities of twentieth-century art
and design across the building threshold
blurs the difference, with the only marker
of crossing being the emergence of Kahn’s
iconic “waffle” concrete ceiling treatment.
One recognizes the power of the architecture’s
presence in Kahn’s galleries in comparison
to the generic, renovated ‘neutral’
large galleries that occupy the Old YAG for
contemporary art, which, while effective as
spaces of display, lack a relationship with the
building shell. The transition is seamless as
one moves from the Old Yale Art Gallery over
the connecting bridge to the more intimate
spaces of Street Hall.
Still more dynamic is the urbanistic
threshold on the fourth floor, created by a
half-level stair perpendicular to the gallery
flow, which negotiates the height difference
between the Kahn building and the Old Yale
Art Gallery. The resulting alley leads the
visitor out of one building before entering the
other while maintaining visual connectivity
between the two. Narrow alley stairs inhabit
spaces between the gallery and building
façade on the east end, placing the visitor
between the art and views of the campus in
tall narrow spaces that reveal the building
shell, occasionally breaking it to access an
outdoor terrace or raised gallery. The sliverlike
stair between the building façade and the
tower-like Study Gallery, recalls an atelier and
the many idiosyncratic spaces that inhabited
the building before the renovation, while
bringing visitors to a level to look out over the
campus and the city.
The museum falters in moments
where these subtleties halt abruptly. The new,
muscular glass stair and elevator insertion
in Street Hall displays neither the complexity
of the surrounding gallery circulation nor the
interest to match the Kahn stair. This statement
of transparency and efficiency is at odds
with meandering slippages and accidental
discoveries that enliven the rest of the renovation.
The unfortunate decision to tuck the
reception desk into the northwest corner of
the Kahn building’s entry lobby creates an
awkward arrival and an expansive void that
only heightens the difference between the
Kahn building and Swartwout at the ground
level. The museum would have been better
served by keeping the reception island,
designed by Joel Sanders Architect in 2007,
which created a more centralized arrival that
better uses the space.
But, altogether, the Yale University
Art Gallery challenges the assumption that
a museum should be all about focusing on
the art. This eclectic collection of architectural
styles, spaces, and vistas situates one
between gallery, campus, and city, and in
doing so reminds us of the value of weaving
art into the urban experience.
—Sunil Bald
Bald is a critic at the Yale School of Architecture
and principal of Studio Sumo, which
recently completed the Mizuta Museum
of Art, in Sakado, Japan.
1. View of ancient art sculpture hall, Yale University Art
Gallery. © Elizabeth Felicella, 2012
2. View of modern and contemporary art galleries, Yale
University Art Gallery. © Elizabeth Felicella, 2012