ANTWERP & ROTTERDAM 115
Rainwater is collected to reduce the building’s water consumption. Te building’s most striking feature is its mirror facade, comprised of 6,609 sq m of reflective glass subdivided into 1,664 panels. Tese were adopted by inhabitants and cultural institutions of Rotterdam for €1,000 each as a gesture of support for the depot. No less exciting, inside, surrounded by art, visitors are led upwards through an atrium via five large zig-zagging stairways reminiscent of the etchings of Piranesi.
Te €94m 15,000 sq m building was the brainchild of Sjarel Ex, the museum director, an idea that came after a devastating flood in 2015, when after 13 hours of relentless rain, he had to choose between the library and the collection. Firefighters could not save both. By a miracle the art was saved, but Ex decided never to store priceless works underneath a museum again. Combined with exhibition halls, a rooftop garden and a restaurant, another innovation is that the new facility is also home to some private collections that are occasionally open to the public. In conjunction with the customs authorities a freeport exists inside the depot. Ahead of the curve, the whole idea is way out in front of a new trend. Te Centre Pompidou has announced an “art factory” to be established by 2025 in Massy, a 30-minute train journey from Paris at the same time as the V&A will open its archive in a new building by O’Donnell and Toumey in the Olympic Park in east London. Meanwhile, Moscow has unveiled a project to store the collections of 27 national and municipal museums in a new facility in the suburbs.
Things are very different elsewhere. In Sydney, the Art Gallery of New South Wales has gone full-on Bilbao. Thanks to Sanaa, Japan’s Pritzker-prize-winning architects, walls of glass show off the big blue skies and the harbour in a marriage of art, architecture and landscape that echoes Louvre Abu Dhabi, New York’s Whitney and Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. As to whether Sydney Modern will meet its objective of changing how this sporting nation sees itself is another matter. Condemned when it opened in December as an expensive set of boxes that took away valuable green space, the $230m addition to the 1909 neoclassical original has the feel of a corporate office or an airport lounge.
Te conflict over the side entrance to the National Gallery, the remodelling of the Sainsbury Wing, is also on the lines of “an airport lounge” according to some, and not a recipe for permanence as most commentators have pointed out as befits a national treasure. And yet, and yet. In London the battle of Trafalgar Square has been raging again ever since Annabelle Selldorf unveiled her alterations to the postmodern mash-up that is the Sainsbury Wing. Complications and disputes led to its architects resigning. It had been a story of problems, interference and compromise. Classical, contemporary, contextual the Wing may be, but successful it is not. While Scott Brown thought it was fun for ‘Palladio and Modernism to fight it out on the main facade’ and the new picture galleries called ‘practically perfect’ by the current director, Gabriele Finaldi, the building has always been a compromise. And yet, ever
since Selldorf’s proposals were first unveiled “nostalgia for a reinvented and reimagined past” criticism from a gaggle of forgotten former RIBA past presidents gathered pace. Tey went rogue, forgetting that the Venturi Scott Brown extension emerged from the ashes of a competition, and a winning scheme that had not been not universally well received was later interfered with and eventually rejected. Stephen Bayley was not exactly breaking new ground in 2011 when he wrote that the Sainsbury Wing was ‘a pitiably ill-proportioned and architecturally illiterate dollop of pious schmaltz’. It’s easy to criticise. However, Margaret Tatcher (who along with Prince Charles was seen by David Chipperfield as ‘one of the twin towers of negativity towards the architectural profession’) once said, ‘standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides’ – a metaphor apt for the manner in which the Sainsbury Wing was received upon completion. Te totalitarian viewpoint of both the traditionalists and the neomodernists rejected Venturi Scott Brown’s design as compromised and untrue to tradition on the one hand, and as pastiche “picturesque mediocre slime” on the other. A fine building had nevertheless somehow emerged only to make clear how the vagaries of fashion inhabit architectural closets as much as they do any other. In 2024 we shall see how this turns out.
What KMSKA in Antwerp and the Depot Boijmans have shown is that you do not have to stand in the middle of the road to succeed. It is not either or, it can be both.
Left In the Rubens Gallery, children are shown an installation by Christophe Coppens
SANNE DE BLOCK
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