Parrish Fashions: Inside the Herzog & de Meuron Selection Process

Herzog & de Meuron's design for the new Parrish Art Museum

By Martin Filler, Guest Blogger

I confess a personal prejudice when it comes to Studio as Muse: Herzog & de Meuron's Design for the New Parrish Art Museum, a revealing exhibition opening today at the Architectural League of New York. On view through May 2, the show displays more than 130 drawings, models, material samples and videos, and offers a detailed look at this relatively small but highly visible commission in Southampton, playground of New York art world movers, shakers, and makers. (The Parrish's new director, Terrie Sultan---sister of artist Donald Sultan---assumes her post Apr. 1, succeeding Trudy Kramer, who retired in December after heading the museum for 26 years.)

As I write in Debunking a Myth about Museums that Pay for Themselves in the March issue of Architectural Record, I served on the search committee for the new Parrish, along with art and architecture veterans who included Terence Riley, then the Museum of Modern Art's curator of architecture; art critic and curator Klaus Kertess; architectural historian Alastair Gordon; and Dorothy Lichtenstein, philanthropist and widow of Roy. We provided a shortlist of international candidates long on talent if not name recognition (to avoid the trap of overextended celebrity firms), including Portuguese cult-figure Alvaro Siza, gallery wizard Richard Gluckman, transatlantic low-techies Munkenbeck and Marshall, Swiss minimalists Gigon/Guyer, and Spanish stars-in-waiting Abalos and Herreros. But the Parrish board, bent on glamour that would attract donors, set aside our recommendations and hired Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, then soaring on raves for their de Young Museum in San Francisco.

Here, Herzog & de Meuron proposed a cluster of small-scale pavilions (above), inspired by the artists' studios on Long Island's East End. Nice idea, but multiple walls and roofs are far more expensive than one larger, simpler structure---so much, in this case, that the Parrish now plans to build the scheme *which came in at double the original budget) in three phases, raising fears that the plan may never be executed in its entirety. Thrifty architectural successes like Diller Scofidio + Renfro's $40-million Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and SANAA's $50-million New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York cost much less than the $63 million estimated for part one of the Herzog & de Meuron design. But will the Hamptons summer art crowd, tapped out by big city museums, want to foot the bill?