Public Space and the 21st Century

Making a case for the "open museum"

This is a summary and review of a lecture I got to attend recently, given by Kazuyo Sejima, principle of SANAA (and winner of this year's Pritzker Architectural Prize) and Yutaka Mino, director of the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art 

            Recently I heard Kazuyo Sejima lecture on architecture and the environment. She was joined by Yutaka Mino, director of the Kanazawa Prefectural Museum. Together they posed the question: Can the Museum become a truly civic space? They argued for the success of the “open museum” of which the 21^st Century Museum of Art is the first example.

            The site selected for the museum was highly strategic within Kanazawa city, located between the City and Prefectural offices. Previously, a school, whose high walls raised an earthen obstacle to the flows of pedestrian and car traffic in the city center, occupied the site. SANAA’s design solution razed the walls to the ground, linking paths broken by the old school. The result is a single story cylinder binding cubes of different sizes. The cubes house places where people can have exchanges of various scales and storeys: auditorium, classroom, meeting room. Conceptually, if the city is an open filed with objects distributed within it, the museum is one object among many. However, upon entering the museum, one enters a second field full of free-floating objects. Inside the building, one experiences the city in a kind of miniature.

            If Sejima made the hard infrastructure of the museum’s architecture, Mino worked out the soft infrastructure of the museum’s function and programming. Mino described the museum as the city’s living room. The museum is meeting place, gathering space, event center, stage. The museum offers a site for the celebration of civic space. To encourage residents of Kanazawa to treat the museum as such, organizers led an enormous campaign inviting students to the museum. If students would come, they reasoned, parents and relatives might follow. Mino recognized that the success of the museum within the community will only become apparent after decades have worn away the crisp edges of its architecture. How to successfully program a museum so that local people will use it like a living room? Mino used the Hyogo Prefectural Art Museum as an example.

            Tadao Ando designed the museum, and construction completed in 2001. The museum was part of a much larger urban design led by Ando for the Hyogo Prefectural Government, in an effort to rebuild the Kobe waterfront where it had been most severely destroyed by the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake. Along with the art museum, paved courts, earthquake memorial museum, psychiatric hospital, and disaster recovery hospital border a thin strip of waterfront park.

            Inside the Hyogo Art Museum, weekly live music concerts have earned the museum a reputation as a cultural music center among museums in Japan. Adjacent to the museum, weekly contests, tournaments, performances, and other spectacles organized by local schools attract throngs of kids and families, enlivening the grounds skirting the museum. On a quiet afternoon, one side of the building slowly steps down to the water with a grand staircase offering places for groups of various sizes to gather or form spontaneously as people sit on the steps and look over the industrial landscape. The key to a successful museum as living room, according to Mino, is the perpetuation and overlap of activites repeated on a weekly basis, keeping the site occupied and active with a variety of uses.

            Sejima’s strategy and Mino’s synthesis are familiar and reasonable. A structure, which is centrally located and physically easy to access, must also be programmed to invite and entice the local population over and over if it is to become a lasting local institution and a meaningful public space.

student's massing model of 21st Century Museum

            But must a living room be a museum? Mino argued passionately for the unique value of the museum as a place where a child could develop taste (creativity, imagination, sensitivity, and understanding of culture). He also mentioned that when studying in the United States, he found refuge from the stress of English illiteracy in the study places of  museums and libraries. Finally, he suggested that the museum gives people a place where they can do things they can’t do at home or at work.

            Sejima supported this argument in an ambiguous way. She showed five museums that she has designed as principle of SANAA. Two were notable primarily for the way they figured into local context: their physical figure fragments into the city fabric almost completely at Inushima in the Inland Sea (between Honshu and Shikoku). In a museum designed in France, the volume fragments over a triangular site, foregrounding casual circulation through the park and the singular procession through the building.

            In the other three examples: the 21^st Century Museum, the Toledo Museum of Glass, and the New Museum in New York, each treated the museum as a large empty container or field into which objects of various sizes, shapes, and textures had been arranged, balanced, or crammed. Circulation between these volumes becomes narrative and thread tying the whole together. At the New Museum, additional program was added on the penthouse: an atelier that can be rented for craft parties, birthdays or other gatherings, with a clear view of Manhattan. At the 21^st Century Museum, some of the volumes charge admission and others are more truly public. Because the museum wrapper can be entered free of charge, it is argued, the museum is a civic space.

Glass Pavilion Toledo Museum of Art

Asatte Asagao Project 21, summer 2007 installation at 21st Century Museum

            The ambiguity of this argument lies in the flexibility of the building’s purpose. It doesn’t need to be a museum. It could be a library. It could be a glass workshop. It could be a shopping center. It could be a school. The city wanted to provide its residents with a third place: a place where they can gather, plan, learn, celebrate, grieve, observe, perform. The title of this place is derived from local interests and funding sources. Similar goals derived the Seattle Public Library, the Sendai Mediatheque, the Faro del Oriente cultural center on the outskirts of Mexico City. To make a place where a selection of people feel comfortable is the sign of success.

            Sejima’s solution poses clean, blank surfaces within volumes within volumes. The compositions of her museum vacillate between playfulness and composure. Mino’s solution focuses in the foreground on events and programming. While in the U.S. this might fail due to the fragmentation of after school activities (I remember driving across town three times each afternoon to accommodate my extracurricular calender) according to Mino it works really well in Japan.

            It could be pointed out that the kid participating in the basketball tournament next to the museum can easily go home without imbibing any high culture. If he does wander inside (still sweaty from the court) how will his creativity and imagination be enhanced? Perhaps by enjoying the coolness of the Hyogo’s interior spaces and the play between the reflective polished concrete and absorbtive galvanized steel. Climbing the stairs, he can look down on the water from above. From inside, it seems less dirty and full of the gassy leaks of ships and bird poop. But if he goes into the gallery, is it not the same tired rarified experience of Western art viewing that artists and critics have been reacting against for most of the 20^th century? Do we actually become more creative by looking at strange objects out of context? Or is that kind of creativity always there? If it is nascent, then we don’t need the art museum, we can develop sensitivity by simply being more sensitive: to the smell of the rubber ball hitting the pavement, the bumpy feel of its skin, the slap of it against the hand, the quick flashing moves exchanged between our opponents body and our own. The museum is a house of objects interesting to erudite obsessives. Why does it need to be next to a basketball court?

            It is not that I am arguing against museums, but it is perverse to consider the museum as the centerpiece of civic life. The 21^st Century Museum will slowly turn into a community center: why would you go to an exhibit? It wouldn’t be the quiet, daylit space of a typical art museum, and it wouldn’t be the open, rowdy space of a sports hall or community center. It would be something in between. Would the mixing of spaces result in a change of behavior? Or would the museum-community center lack the distinctive character that one seeks out when one goes to the trouble of escaping from daily life? I’d like to go to a dark and smoky bar, or a light-filled and airy library, or a crowded and sweaty dancehall or to an open vista, or to a church filled with incense or a gymnasium filled with the noise of sports. Perhaps, however, the charm of the architecture, vacillating between sweet and sedate, makes its own character. The novelty and unique personality of the place might attract an audience seeking not a program* but a place.

*program : the use of a space, i.e. museum, community center, library etc.

http://ps2pm.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/21st-centry-museum51810260.jpg : axon photo of 21st c museum
http://compe.designtope.net/nextmaruni2004/ref2_2_e.html : plan of 21st c museum

http://flavorwire.com/80465/sanaa-takes-home-architectures-biggest-prize : toledo glass pavilion

http://snow-mag.com/2010/01/21st-century-museum-of-contemporary-art-as-blocks/  : massing model of 21st c Museum

http://www.japanfs.org/en/pages/026908.html : Asatte Asagao Project 21
http://www.homeexteriorinterior.com/category/books-magazines/ : interior of 21st Century Museum