Situated in three very
different neighborhoods around Manhattan, the Guggenheim Museum (Frank Lloyd
Wright, 1959), the New Museum (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA, 2007),
and the Morgan Library & Museum (Renzo Piano, 2006) become oases for
artistic and intellectual contemplation away from the business of the metropolis
by orchestrating three distinct spatial experiences: Wright skillfully employs
the concrete spiral that simultaneously serves as a captivating sculptural
exterior, the primary mode of circulation, and the medium of exhibition to illustrate
continuity and a cross-continuum of time; SANAA, however, breaks away from
fluidity, and instead uses two elevators and six boxes composed of modern
construction materials to transport visitors vertically and out into spaces
like the studios of the artist; whereas Piano applies steel and glass
techniques to bridge old with new, past with present, allowing visitors to roam
freely within an amalgamation of traditional and modern galleries, libraries
and study rooms, as though a private fun-mansion rendered public.
The site of the museum in its urban context shapes first impressions of the mood and facade. Known for his passion for nature, Wright chose to build the Guggenheim at one end of a block directly facing Central Park, amid the tranquil and high-end residential area of Upper East Side between 88th and 89th Streets on Fifth Avenue. Removed from the vistas of nature, however, the Morgan Library & Museum rests between 37th and 38th Streets on Madison Avenue, surrounded by tall brick apartments in Midtown South with the Empire State Building in near sight. Unlike these two buildings that occupy their own side of the block, the New Museum appears squeezed to a row of old and short, red-brick, semi-retail, semi-residential row-houses on Prince and Bowery, a gritty but up-and-coming and unprejudiced neighborhood. While the New Museum conforms to the street-line of its neighbors, the Guggenheim sets back several feet from the main road, permitting a spacious sidewalk and a short projecting shelter for shade from rain and heat. The recession presents the architecture as modest rather than imposing but at the same time bold in its audacious abstraction yet elegant in its gracious curves. Like the Guggenheim, the new lobby at the Morgan also recedes with an ascending slope to draw in pedestrians, such that the two Neo-classical buildings on either side protrude like discreet portals of an entryway.
Three available routes to the Guggenheim generate disparate responses from the modern visitor: Firstly, approaching the end of 88th Street towards Fifth Ave and having passed by rows of tall, brownstone apartments, one is suddenly shocked, perhaps frightened, and confused to come across the monumental side-view of an entirely white concrete volume with three circular tinted windows at street level. Disorientation and uncertainty reduce the pace for closer study. The "Museum Restaurant" sign in the South wing quickly comes into view to reveal the function of the building; but unlike the works of Ledoux and Sullivan, the exterior design masks its interior purpose. Secondly, walking from 89th Street to Fifth Avenue, one views the northern side of the museum as a modern building of sorts, which does not really astonish the modern visitor. Upon a left-turn, however, one is inadvertently amazed by the innovative abstraction of the architecture. Finally, approaching northward from afar with Central Park on the left and apartments across the road on the right, one gradually sees a white modern structure looming ahead ambiguously as it seems to blend into the whitish apartment building behind on 89th, stirring anticipation and building up mystery. As the Guggenheim emerges into full view, the white giant spiral sculpture causes one to linger momentarily to comprehend the whole structure; the instinctive unleashing of imagination in attempt to explain the design sets the Guggenheim apart as a work of architecture against its backdrop of domestic buildings.
Approaching eastward from Prince Street and Broadway towards Bowery
recalls the first journey reaction to the Guggenheim, as an almost transparent
skyscraper composed of an unorganized stack of six boxes may be distinguished
from the lower, older brick buildings in SoHo. Drawing closer to the site with
the same puzzlement as the third response in visiting the Guggenheim, the
arrival at the New Museum elicits an inkling of unease as opposed to the
wonderment at the Guggenheim: its oddly tall, bright, irregular and futuristic
presence clutched in the midst of the coarse maroon-brick premise engenders the
stark tension between new and old, clean and grimy,
bright and dark, art and reality. As an extension of the pavement, the large
glass panels on the ground floor span from the sidewalk to the ceiling, giving
absolute transparency and exposure from the streets to the depths of the lobby.
Yet despite the limited lot area and perhaps due to economic differentiation
against traditional methods, the Museum only features one exhibition at a time
that occupies all of the interior space, such that each exhibition changes the
life of the whole architecture, transforming spatial structure and human circulation
in each floor. Even the facade and roof may be used creatively to display
representational artifacts requested by artists, decorating the streets and the
skyline, reflecting the spirit of the temporary exhibition, and attracting
pedestrians both close by and from afar.
Unlike
the vertical prominence of the Guggenheim and New Museum to be seen from a
distance, and considering the lofty Neo-classical residential towers teeming in
the vicinity, one almost stumbles upon the Morgan by its subdued signage at the
entrance. The glass-and-steel lobby astonishes the visitor in a manner like the
full-glass lobby at the New Museum: while the latter appears compressed, the former
expands generously as an attempt to integrate the northern Morgan House (now
the Shop and Dining Room) with the south Annex. The three combined structures result
in a bizarre coalescence of modern and historic architectural elements. Although
the intrinsic neutrality and transparency of glass attempts to bridge the two
pre-existing edifices, the affiliation of glass to industrial modernity
enforces the obvious fissure and disunity in the tonal and visual harmony of
the establishment.
While
the New Museum extols the virtues of manmade production and material
technology, and relies chiefly on the brightness of white walls and white
fluorescent lights, the Guggenheim and the Morgan strive to invite nature into
the interior, forming a semi-outdoor space to maximize natural light from the
rotunda and glass windows in the former and through the glass-enclosed garden
within Gilbert Court in the latter. Save the new glass courts and lobby
entrance, the rest of the Morgan allows minimal to no natural light inside its
exhibitions and library museum, due to insufficient window installments and the
need to protect the artifacts from damage by excessive light. The Guggenheim
includes greenery on almost each ramp and instills fountains in the lobby and
outside the entrance for a relaxing ambience, whereas the Morgan installs two
trees in awkwardly aloof and separate places; but the outdoor garden inside
Gilbert Court makes the central building appear bigger, brighter, longer,
lighter, and fresher.
Using
different materials, each of the three museums employs three disparate
structural mediums through which visitors travel within the space to orchestrate
unique experiences. Embracing modernity to its fullest, the New Museum, like a
skyscraper, relies on two elevators to raise visitors to the fifth floor to
begin their experience and work their way down. The concept reminds of the
elevator that moves through the realms of dreams or pockets of memories in the
movie Inception. Instead of dreams, the elevator doors in
the New Museum may open into chapters of the artist's personal life or genres
of his career. As the elevator travels up and down, it builds anticipation and
suspense. When the massive door opens to each floor, the built anticipation may
either burst into satisfaction or disappointment; there is a risk in showing
too much at once. Further, the rationale of servicing with both a huge cubed
elevator and a second narrow rectangular elevator perplexes the mind. Apart
from the significance of geometric ideal forms and rational linearity with
reference to modern industrialization, a tint of Cubism, and shadows of
Renaissance humanism, the shaft that accommodates the huge cubic elevator eats
up an unnecessarily large volume and floor-area on each storey. On top of
economic inefficiency, both elevators also take quite a while to arrive, which
impedes on the fluidity of the museum experience, adding to ineffectiveness and
frustration. The choice of green walls in the elevator interior walls remains
unconvincing, save that the color abstractly alludes to new life, youth and
growth. Due to dissimilar dimensions of the six boxes that compose the New
Museum, each floor has slightly different floor plans, but all five exhibition
spaces look exactly the same in color and materials, so it gets boring by the
time one reaches the third floor. Radically diverging from the more serious
mood at the Guggenheim and certainly at the Morgan, the New Museum looks and
feels like a modern department store in the lobby, especially with the loud,
upbeat music, and looks and feels like a factory warehouse in the exhibition floors
above (at least for the Chris Burden exhibition in the present): in addition to
the elevator floor, the wire mesh ceiling and curvaceous shelf in the lobby, the
glossed, cracked concrete groundwork in the rest of the building, accompanied
with the repetition of white fluorescent lights hung from corrugated aluminum
roofing mirror that of a factory, warehouse, or a
laboratory, emphasizing its intention as an industrially and scientifically 'hi-tech' museum. The
materials speak for themselves and function to its rightful purpose, but with a
twist of creativity in their combination. The raw, undecorated effect succeeds
in exposing its ‘true self’ but strikes as aesthetically unrefined in light of
the Guggenheim. As its name suggests, perhaps it celebrates its difference by
pledging the message of being constantly "new", contemporary and
fresh just like a blank, white canvas ready to showcase new imaginations, new
ideas and new art. White also alludes to laboratory coats, the ethos of
experimentation and trial-and-error towards the progress, discovery, ambition,
and sophistication of man. Comparatively, the white concrete at the Guggenheim portray
strength, steadfastness and timelessness; its glass features also produce a
unique simplicity out of the ubiquitous brick surroundings, achieving the
effect of an outlandish spaceship that invites one to be in repose with nature,
as windows look over the trees and fields in Central Park East, vaguely
reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye in countryside Poissy, France.
The top-bottom circulation at the
New Museum aligns with Wright's original intention[1] for the Guggenheim with
visitors traveling to the top via an elevator and strolling down the ramps of
the spiral structure while viewing the paintings en route. While this offers a
visually aesthetic and spatially meaningful effect when everyone proceeds in
the same clockwise direction down the spiral like the hands of a clock, it
actually restricts freedom and flexibility in the viewing of the paintings,
compromising ascension for a one-way descending procession. Further, the
exclusivity of hanged paintings on the walls as opposed to sculptures,
artifacts and modern mediums of exhibition forced the need to later convert the
annex into traditional gallery spaces[2]. In these aspects, Wright
failed to fulfill the maximum potential of the museum space. The Guggenheim eventually
liberated the top-bottom system involving a logical bottom-top then top-bottom
route that allows one to follow the life and works of the artist
chronologically to the top, then revisit and relive the odyssey by going back
in time, as if retrospectively admiring and understanding the life and works,
tracing back to where and how the artist and the visitor himself had started.
As such, one embarks on multiple journeys on one spiral: (chronologically) from
the earliest to the latest works of the artist, (metaphysically) from life to
death of the artist, (spatially) from the lowest ramp rooted on the ground to
the top ramp with closest proximity to the rotunda featuring the true sky, and
in effect, (spiritually) from Earth to Heaven. Unlike the New Museum that
offers a disconnected and interrupted transition between levels, the unendingly
circular nature of the spiral raises the imagery of a spinning top frozen in
time, halting a motion to appreciate, study and preserve; a desire to treasure
the fleeting seconds. It also draws on the cocoon as the incubator of life, a natural
transition from past and present to the future. Both cases capture motifs of continuity,
infinity and cyclical flow, as in nature.
In
comparison to the seamless voyage at the Guggenheim, the Morgan, like the New
Museum, embodies a haphazard and incoherent arrangement of exhibition spaces.
On one hand, the logical and cost-effective adaptation of the original study
quarters and earlier Library into the program of a public museum induces sentimentality
and authenticity, vis-à-vis
the Soane Museum in London. However, the addition of the central glass building
falls short in its lack of spatial orientation to newcomers: it offers too much
freedom with a dominant emphasis on the soaring heights of the steel-and-glass
panels of the Gilbert Court in relation to inconspicuous signs above narrow
doors to the galleries and exhibitions. In effect, unlike the Guggenheim and
the New Museum, the Morgan forces one to wander and explore autonomously as
though the piazza and adjoining mansions belong to one’s own. One then realizes
that the architecture also houses two gallery rooms in the Annex, one new
gallery above the renovated lobby, and one open-concept exhibition space in the
basement, in addition to scanty sculpture displays along the right wall of the
ground floor. The traditional galleries in the Annex resemble that of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery in London but on a smaller
scale: concrete screens act as dividers to vary circulation, and, as in the
Guggenheim but unlike the New Museum, people predominantly walk the perimeter
of the walls to view the exhibits. Although a rational and most straightforward
method, viewers solely focus on the objects whereas the Guggenheim engages the
spatial movement such that people fully participates in the architectural
experience as well as the exhibition. In contrast, however, the New Museum focuses
on one exhibition at a time to permit versatility and metamorphosis in organizing
interior spaces and manipulating circulation.
With the advancement of industrial materials since the
twentieth-century, the nature of the museum has evolved tremendously in the scenes
of design and architecture from being merely a public institution dedicated to
the display of valuable artifacts and exhibitions into a dynamic spatial
masterpiece, as worthy of appreciation and study as the art collections within.
Strategic choices of the site in relation to its urban context, alongside the
various artistic possibilities of expressing and fulfilling the role of a
modern museum, all work concurrently, like a living organism, to create novel adventures
of seeing the architecture from afar and upfront, then entering and moving
through the interior spaces. Of the three examples, the Guggenheim comes across
as the most successful in fashioning a unified and captivating journey,
relevant to and revolutionary in the experience of a museum.
Photography by Author, 6 Dec. 2013.
[1], [2] Guggenheim Museum Staff, Personal communication, 6 Dec.
2013.
