Well, that didn’t take long: It’s only Jan. 3, and another new museum designed to be an “attraction” is about to open. It’s a statement museum in a statement complex.
Now don’t get me wrong. I love architecture, beautiful architecture. It’s just that I think many new museums are pretty inhospitable to art. And most new museums are not the Guggenheim Bilbao, we have all learned to much dismay.
Set to open on Feb. 17, this one, billed as the “world’s first ArtScience Museum” is part of a $5.5-billion multi-use complex (the casino, hotel, shops, etc., complex is above) in Singapore known as Marina Bay Sands. Designed by Moshe Safdie for the Las Vegas Sands company, MBS has nine elements, according to the fact sheet posted on Safdie’s website, and No. 6 is a 161,500 sq ft museum with 64,580 sq ft of gallery space.
It was designed somewhat like a lotus flower, with 10 fingers emanating from a round central base — it’s at left in the picture at left.
Las Vegas Sands chairman Sheldon Adelson called it the “welcoming hand of Singapore,” according to published reports. Reuters added: “The design of each finger reveals different gallery spaces featuring skylights at the “fingertips” that illuminate the dramatically curved interior walls.”
What’s in it?
According to its website,
The Museum’s showpiece exhibition, the ArtScience Gallery, is an homage and introduction to the nascent field of ArtScience. What unites Art and Science is the instinct to observe, connect, take risks and explore new ideas and ways of understanding nature’s wisdom and experiences that shape our culture. Visitors to the ArtScience Gallery will explore these mysterious connections between the arts and the sciences through three galleries – Curiosity, Inspiration and Expression – thus undergoing their own journey of creativity.
And there’s a little more here, but not much more. I do like the mention of “a meditative path of Floating Stairs which invites you to question the relationships between art and science.”
Reuters mentioned Leonardo da Vinci’s Flying Machine, a Kongming Lantern and robotic fish.
Truth be told, we must wait and see. So far, I don’t hear much about art.
The site, however, also includes eight “monumental” public art projects, with the artists selected by Safdie: James Carpenter, Antony Gormley, Ned Kahn, Sol LeWitt, and Chongbin Zheng.
Safdie’s website has a slide show of the entire project (here).
And whether or not this is good for art, it’s going to be a spectacle.