Pitch_Museum Plaza.pdf - REX

TUCKY ARTS & CULTURE
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Art-Capital
by
William Smith
photographs by Jen DeNike
REX principles, Erez Ella [left] and
Joshua Prince-Ramus [right] with
Museum Plaza model, photographed by
Jen DeNike on 11 September 2007.
Museum Plaza in Louisville is the kind of sophisticated
high architecture that almost requires a folksy
nickname. Even before the official groundbreaking
in October, "Robot Hand" and "The Chair" have already
become shorthand in newspapers and blogs
for a building that wi ll be a city icon as much as it is
a daily presence for Louisvillians.
The free-form amalgamation of glass and steel
boxes wil l not so much dominate Lou isvi lle's otherwise
staid skyline as redefine its focal point, shifting
the center of downtown westward. The $480 million,
62-floor mega-structure wi ll be a city within a city: a
dense urban microcosm of interpenetrating spaces
for culture and commerce.
At a time when the art market is booming, the
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oundaries between the cultural and commercial are not always, clear. The contemporary
art center at the heart of Museum Plaza will attempt to negotiate this fluid border. The
striking images of the building's tiered sets of glass towers echo the equally unorthodox
mission of its developers to integrate commercial real estate with a space for art.
Joshua Prince-Ramus and Erez Ella, the lead architects on the project, are hardly
strangers to iconic- or iconoclastic-architecture. As a partner in Rem Koolhaas' Office
of Metropolitan Architecture in New York, Prince-Ramus designed the Seattle Central Library-the
city's beloved "Cbrseted Rubik's Cube." In 2006, Prince-Ramus and Ella split with
OMA to found their own firm, REX, taking most of the staff and open projects with them.
Almost a year and a half later, they claim that their relationship with Koolhaas remains
productive. Indeed, Museum Plaza testifies to the lasting influence of their time working at
OMA. The massively scaled, mixed-use building recalls Koolhaas' celebration of skyscrapers
and "congestion culture" in Delirious New York, his 1978 'retroactive' manifesto for Manhattan.
Museum Plaza's towers and platforms even bear an outward resemblance to Koolhaas'
proposed "hyper-bu ilding" for Bangkok. But Koolhaas's underlying legacy also permeates
the project in a more subtle way, stemming
from the architect's notoriously
ambivalent attitude towards the relation
between capitalism, architecture
and cu lture.
Unlike the other buildings REX
has designed for arts institutionsincluding
Ella's proposed Whitney
Museum of Art addition and the new
Wyly Theater in Dallas-Museum Plaza
will balance the requirements of an
art space with commercial demands.
The challenge, as Prince-Ramus said
in a recent interview from his office in
New York City, was not just to create
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an innovative space for the arts, but "to create it within the context of a
for-profit development."
Bourbon heir Laura Lee Brown and husband, Steve Wilson founded
the Museum Plaza development corporation with Louisville developer
Steve Poe and lawyer, Craig Greenberg. Their ambition was to endow
Louisville with a world-class space for the arts, but one that could be
financially solvent well into the future. Brown and Wilson collect contemporary
art and were inspired by art iostitutions they had encountered
while traveling in Europe. "We had seen in other cities how art
has inspired commerce, how it has mixed into daily life," Wilson said in
a recent phone interview. Expanding upon the success of 21 C, their hybrid
museum/hotel in Louisville, they decided to build the art space into
a mixed development of commercial real estate, including condos, lofts,
offices, a hotel, and the University of Louisville MFA program. Instead
of an art museum that might tangentially spur development in nearby
areas, they hit upon an all inclusive urban renewal package that, they
hope, will serve as a model for a new kind of urban entity.
But to call Museum Plaza an urban renewal project is to oversimplify.
Like 'cleansing,' renewal is one of modernity's great euphemisms
for violence. Developers armed with bulldozers and sledgehammers
renewed downtown Louisville in the 70s and 80s, clearing away Victorian
loft buildings to make room for a new, car friendly urban core.
Single use zoning laws segregated new development into commercial
and residential areas while parking lots filled the gaps in between. The
impact played out like a tragic urban cliche: better automobile access
did not so much draw consumers into the city as make it easier for them
to escape to the suburbs.
The distinctly urban orientation of Museum Plaza arose out of Brown
and Wilson's dismay at the ensuing sprawl and its toll on Kentucky's horse
and farmland. Museum Plaza wi ll assume an entirely different stance
towards the city, acting as a corrective to the
zoned suburbanization of city life. Rather than replace
existing structures, it will inhabit a site on
the margins of downtown, literally at the physical
limit of Louisville. Sandwiched between an Ohio
River Flood Wall and the 1-64, the lot was considered
so poor that the city sold it for $1.
Even though Prince-Ramus described the
site as "pressed between a loud, arterial freeway
and the Berlin Wall," Museum Plaza will still
have a Main Street address. A steeply graded
elevator, called a funicular, will shuttle visitors
and residents to the building from a renovated
storefront near the corner of 7th Street. Main
Street will effectively get more than a million
square feet in virtual real estate. However, the
project will also include 1,100 additional parking
spaces giving easy access to suburban shoppers
drawn from the freeway to the building's
dazzling fa

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evocative of something from a Beckett novel, should not be misconstrued as an absurd devotion to
function over form . Instead, according to Ell a, it means that, "performance is everything." For the architects,
assessing performance means viewing the building holistically. Both form and function become
factors in deciding whether or not a building works within a context broadly defined in social, political,
aesthetic and economic terms.
The context of Museum Plaza includes market considerations as much as it does cultural ambitions.
The architects determined the scale of the structure in consultation with Poe by calculating the amount
of commercial space necessary to sustain the art space financially. Based on market research, they decided
that they required 1.5 million ft2 of commercial real estate, divided into offices, lofts, hotel rooms
and condos. Each of these commercial ventures wi ll occupy one of the five semi-autonomous towers.
Unlike a monolithic skyscraper, increasing or decreasing the size of any one of Museum Plaza's components
requires only minimal changes to the overall structure. Because of this flexibility, the developers
have been able to modify the ratio of hotel keys to condos to offices throughout the design process,
allowing them to maximize their potential profit in response to a fluctuating market.
Individually, the glass and steel towers are innocuous, even bland; Prince-Ramus describes them
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as "platonic." If Museum Plaza were dismembered, its components could blend in easily amongst the
rows of anonymous office parks adjacent to any highway in Phoenix. They were designed quickly, not to
make an architectural statement, but to make money. "The idea," Prince-Ramus said, "is to do something
simple that generates revenue in order to offset the cost of the complex thing."
That complex thing is the raison d'etre of the Museum Plaza: a 50,000 ft2 contemporary art space.
It forms the core of what Prince-Ramus and Ella call the "Island", a multi-story box that will float between
the commercial towers above and below it. Two 24' high art galleries wi ll be stacked in the
center of the Island, while an inverted lobby- called the Loop-will encircle its perimeter. The loop wi ll
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All photographs by Jen DeNike at REX, 11 September 2007.
traverse the various levels of the Island
like a mi:ibius strip linking the lobbies of
each tower. It wi ll also be the main retail
space of the complex, so that upon compl
etion, Gap outlets, Jamba Juice stores,
or whatever retai l outlets rent the space,
wi ll effectively frame the galleries and the
artworks inside.
Though all of the details of the
project's financing have not been made
public, in theory at least some of the
profits from the commercial towers and
retail will be poured back into the art
space in the hopes of eventually offsetting
its capital costs. Rather than a static
building, Prince-Ramus and Ella wil l have
designed a dynamic process, a nexus of
structural and financial arrangements
that wi ll literally and figuratively support
a space for the arts.
Despite the name, Museum Plaza will not
house a museum in the traditional sense
of an institution that cultivates and exhibits
a permanent collection of art. Ell a and
Prince-Ramus compare their conception
more to a European Kunsthalle, an art space that hosts a rotating slate of temporary
exhibitions. Nonetheless, the tension between art and consumer culture staged in the
Island will be a provocative shot over the bow to American museums.
The museum as we recognize it today evolved from the aristocratic clutter of 17th
century Wunderkammers. Noblemen housed their collections of exotic artifacts in these
'cabinets of wonders,' which could contain everything from peacock feathers to curiously
shaped gourds to landscape paintings. Few distinctions were made between natural
history, art, and archaeology. Those institutional subdivisions would come later, as part
of an Enlightenment program to elevate the museum from a site of irrational delight to
one of serious scholarship. As art historian Douglas Crimp writes in On the Museum's
Ruin, "A history of museology is a history of all the various attempts to deny the heterogeneity
of the museum, to reduce it to a homogenous system or series." The ultimate
expression of this teleology for art can be seen in modernism's iconic white cube, an
exhibition space that separates art from everything else, acting as a barrier that seems
at once impenetrable and invisible. The apparent neutrality of such a space obscures
what Brian O'Doherty, (a.k.a Patrick Ireland), identified in his seminal 1976 Artforum article
as the "ideology of the white cube," the social and aesthetic assumptions imposed
by the gallery space onto the works inside.
Since the 1960s, artists and curators have rebelled against the purity of the modernist
paradigm by moving art outside of the gallery, or deploying artworks designed
to expose and critique its ideology. Still, what might be called the relative whiteness of
the cube-the degree to which the external environment, including the architect's hand,
intrudes onto the sphere of art-remains the fundamental design decision for contemporary
museum architects.
When Yos hio Taniguchi planned the new MoMA, he stated his intention to make
the architecture "disappear," ostensibly respecting the masterpieces inside by getting
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out of their way. On the other end of the spectrum,
Frank Gehry's flamboyant gestures at
the Guggenheim Bilbao deliberately inflect
the experience of the art by enforcing upon
the viewer a continuous awareness of the
built environment.
Ramus and Ella see the split between these
two poles representing a false choice for curators
and museum directors [who are forced
to spend effort and money either hiding the
architecture when it has over articulated, or reinventing
for each exhibition a space that has
disappeared]. Working with Chris Durkon, the
curator of Munich's Haus der Kunst, they reconceptualized
the gallery as a versatile tool
for exhibiting art rather than a static space
with fixed limits.
Museum Plaza's gallery wil l offer the curators
the possibility of "~eling away of the
white cube," a conscious process that in some
cases will happen quite literally. The walls of
the gallery will be composed in part of glass
panels that have been treated with an elaborate
system of tinting and ceramic inlays. Depending
on the position and intensity of lights
inside and out, the walls could appear either
clear or opaque, almost at the flip of
a switch.
The white cube wi ll become one
option, one gallery configuration,
amongst many others. And some of
these options will be radically 'other'
from traditional art-going experiences.
The interior mock-ups that REX
has released imagine a young bikiniclad
woman watching video art from
an indoor swimming pool. Bars and
restaurants seem to flow seamlessly
into the art space.
Curators will be forced to take
a position on how the art should relate
to the heterogeneous world of
the Island. If they choose to disassemble
the white cube, curators can
open the work onto a landscape of
shopping and recreation defined as
much by a developer's need to make
a profit as the architect's aesthetic
sense. With this flexibility, comes a
heightened responsibility. As Prince­
Ramus said, "even the conservative
position is a position." He continued,
"If you come and you see work with the
swimming pool opening up, and the next
time you come and there are Rothkos in
a white cube, you recognize that there is
a position being taken."
Ella and Prince-Ramus refrain from
commenting on what these various positions
could ultimately mean. "That," Ella
said, "is the job of the artists." On the one
hand, their gallery offers a vision of utopian
capitalism where financially solvent
art institutions can pursue their mission
unhindered by a constant reliance on big
handouts. At the same time, the possibility
of confronting a Barbara Kruger col ­
lage and a Starbucks logo in the span of
a single glance has the potential to intensify
art's capacity to critique the market
while deepening our understanding of art
as a commodity in its own right.
The complex potential of these in ­
teractions will play out in the microcosm
of the Island the macro-scaled balance of
cu lture and economic development Museum
Plaza means for Louisville. As the
project progresses in the coming years,
the outcome of these relationships will
be debated and reassessed .
But for now, Ella and Prince-Ramus
project measured optimism about the
ming ling of art and consumer capitalism
at Museum Plaza. The effect, according
to Prince-Ramus wi ll be two-fold, "It will
elevate the life of the people in the com ­
mercial elements, and it will elevate the
significance and voice of the art because
it's actually commenting on real life." 'if
Museum Plaza groundbreaking, October
25th at 7th and Main Streets, Louisville.
Completion date scheduled for 2010. For
details go to museumplaza. net
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