Here’s another reason to question the explosion in museum expansions over the last few decades: Along with the sins they’ve committed in building architecture that isn’t well-suited to the display of art and the high costs they forgot to account for, etc., museums have shown a distinct lack of sensitivity to the landscape.
Charles Birnbaum, who founded The Cultural Landscape Foundation about a dozen years ago, levels the charges — citing, in particular, the Walker Art Gallery in Minneapolis, the Denver Art Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Tampa Museum of Art. He also worries about the plans of the Kimbell Art Museum, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Museum of Fine Art-Boston (a historic view at left).
Birnbaum starts his comments, which were published in The Architect’s Newspaper and on his TCLF blog, with a softball, calling the recent slowdown in expansions an “opportunity:”
one that would result in built work in which curatorial values previously placed solely on architecture and collections would be extended to include landscape, and both the physical and historical context for the museum would be given weight in planning and design decision making.
But he then chronicles several mistakes, and says:
Collectively, these examples raise questions about the management polices at these institutions and the challenge to extend stewardship practices beyond art and architecture to include landscape.
The Kimbell provides a good example:
The press release for the Kimbell project characterizes Piano’s addition as a “dialogue with Louis Kahn,” an idea echoed by The New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff in his May 27 article “Two Architects Have a Meeting of Minds at a Texas Museum”: Ouroussoff wrote that Piano’s addition is set 90 feet to the west of Kahn’s building in an area that is “currently a vast lawn dotted with trees.”
Not mentioned in the press materials or that article is the dialogue Kahn had with his patron about that “vast lawn dotted with trees.” In a June 1969 letter to Mrs. Kimbell, he wrote: “the west lawn gives the building perspective.” Accompanying the letter was a sketch of the project with portions labeled “MUSEUM” and “ENTRANCE OF THE TREES” in bold-faced caps.
The Gardner, MFA (contemporary view above), and the Boston Globe come in for similar criticism.
Well, we can’t preserve everything or nothing would ever get built. But in many cases there’s something to be said for Birnbaum’s view.
Photo Credits: Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, via the TCLF blog