Course Syllabus

GSAPP - ADVANCED STUDIO - SPRING 2024

 

INSTRUCTOR: JUAN HERREROS

CoTeacher: TBA

Adjunct Assistant: TBA

 

THE INSTITUTIONS WE NEED III

BEYOND MUSEUMS: DE-MONUMENTALIZING MODERNIST BIG CONTAINERS (of Madrid)

 

 

S Y L L A B U S

 

 

THE INSTITUTIONS WE NEED: BEYOND MUSEUMS; DE-MONUMENTALIZINZ MODERNIST CONTAINERS IS THE THIRD EDITION OF THE RESEARCH PROJECT THAT SETS OUT TO REVIEW, RETHINK AND REDESIGN THE CONTEMPORARY MUSEUM IN RESPONSE TO CURRENT CONCERNS········THE VOICES THAT CLAIM THAT THE MUSEUM IS THE INSTITUTION RESPONSIBLE FOR RE-WRITING HISTORY, FOR DISCOVERING WHERE WE COME FROM AND WHAT WE WANT TO BE, ARE GENERATING A NOTABLE IDENTITY CRISIS AMONG THE BODIES IN CHARGE OF THESE CENTERS········SOME HAVE ATTEMPTED TO RESOLVE THE CRISIS THROUGH ELEPHANTINE EXTENSIONS WHICH HAVE MOVED THE INSTITUTION EVEN FURTHER AWAY FROM ITS LOCAL COMMUNITIES········OTHER, MORE RESPONSIBLE, HAVE FOCUSED ON UPDATING THEIR FACILITIES DEVOTED TO CITIZENS AND THE REVIEW OF SOME DISCRIMINATORY AND COLONIALIST CONTENTS HISTORICALLY ACCEPTED WITHOUT DISCUSSION········THE THIRD OPTION IS TO GO BEYOND THE MUSEUM AS WE KNOW IT TODAY TO FOCUS IN A NEW KIND OF INSTITUTION THAT INVERSTS THE PROPORTION OF SPACE DEVOTED TO TRADITIONAL EXHIBITIONS IN FAVOR OF DIVERSIFICATION OF PROGRAMS GIVING THE PROTAGONISM TO EDUCATION, RESEARCH, SPECULATION, ARCHIVES, PUBLISHING, ARTISTS’ RESIDENCES, NEW PERFORMING ART FORMTAS, AND OTHER PROGRAMS THAT WILL ENRICHING THE LIFE OF THE CONTAINERS INSCRIBING XTHEM IN THE EVERYDAY LIFE OF THE CITIZENS········THE CONTAINERS TO BE INFILTRATED WITH THOSE PROGRAMS CAN BE THE MONUMENTAL HUGE OBSOLETE BUILDINGS OF THE MODERNIST TIMES TO BE TYPOLOGICALY ADAPTED TO THESE NEW INSTITUTIONAL DEMANDS········OUR PROPOSAL CALLS FOR A CRUICAL ROLE FOR ARCHITECTURE IN THIS TRANSFORMATION OF EXISTING STRUCTURES THAT WOULD GO BEYOND PRODUCING SPECTACULAR IMAGES AIMED AT GLOBAL TOURIST IMPACT········THE PLAN NEEDS: AN ACTIVIST ARCHITECTURE NOURISHED WITH FREEDOM THAT OPENS THE DOORS TO FANTASY AND SINGULARITY; AND A VISION AS PRAGMATIC AS FLEXIBLE, MORE CENTERED ON THE ACCEPTANCE OF UNCERTAINTY THAN ON HOMOGENEITY OF CULTURE, IN THE COMMON USER THAN ON THE ELITIST AUDIENCE········IN SHORT: IF WE ARE CONVINCED OF THE NEED FOR OTHER INSTITUTION MODELS, WE ALSO NEED ANOTHER ARCHITECTURE THAT WRITES A NEW PAGE ON THEIR RECONFIGURATION, ASKING THE PERTINENT QUESTIONS ABOUT THE DESIRABLE PROGRAMS, THE LOAD-BEARING CAPACITY OF THE EXISTING STRUCTURES, AND THE CONSTRUCTION TECHNIQUES, TO INCORPORATE TODAY’S ENVIRONMENTAL, SOCIAL, AND POLITICAL CONCERNS·····

INTRODUCTION

In 2022, the assembly of UNESCO’s International Council of Museums (ICOM), after a very discussed process of years, approved the new definition of “museum”:

“A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection, and knowledge sharing.”

The vicissitudes of the discussion before reaching the agreement, were not as important as the fact that more than a pragmatic definition what was finally approved is an expression of desire regarding the museums we dream about. in one hand, the only action that the definition grant to the museum is “to exhibit” giving all the other formats of art a secondary role, but, on the other hand, the proposal contains a set of adjectives -accessible, inclusive, sustainable, participative, educational...- that open a door to a diversity of audiences, programs and departments.

The complexity of setting a definition engaged with contemporary concerns reveals that the museum needs a new narrative specially focused in the reconfiguration of their attributes. From this point of view, it is even more surprising that in this definition no allusion is made to the fact that in most cases a museum is a physical container. It is evident that more than a building, a museum is first and foremost an institution, and that it is the institution that must be guided by the principles enunciated in its statements. But it is equally evident that these commitments will not be achieved unless the corresponding architectural types are revised, something which UNESCO’s board of experts seems to have overlooked.

Our conclusion is that the new museum, the one under the ICOM’s definition, needs a new architecture but also a re-programing of the buildings to give room and importance to the secondary programs that today are becoming essential to open the institutions to the citizens. Without that metamorphosis, it will be impossible to talk about a new generation of cultural institutions.

When museums program an incredible diversity of events beyond conventional exhibitions and many of them are not based anymore in the preexistence of a collection, what if we turn the sock inside out to place those activities in the front line and the exhibitions are just one more of those programmatic items?

SUBJECT

We are entirely with Dorothea von Hantelmann when she states that the museum is the ritual space par excellence of the early twenty-first century. Ritual space here means a place in which social realities are represented and a space of freedom for the political criticism that all communities need and that for centuries took the form of the theatre as the people’s epicenter for complaints against the stablished powers. Is not casual that Dorothea Von Hantelmann proposes the Cedric Price´s Fun Palace, a cultural institution in which the visitor plays the leading role, as the canonical reference for her non-elitist “ritual space.”In review, for some decades the museum has been criticized for giving a letter of nature to the official hegemonic history -imbued with diverse form of colonialism- that hides and cancels the minor episodes or those that are difficult to fit into a harmonized description of historical reality. The systematic consequence of this criticism has been the vindication of the museum as the institution in which to understand where we come from and what we want to be as a society. Consequently, the Museum is the privileged agent when it comes to rewriting history, shifting the focus of the stories to the traditionally fragile and secondary roles that have not had the space they deserve. The museum is also the place in which to discover otherness and to understand that we share a common sphere, replacing the traditional idea of “accepting the other” with that of “cohabiting in equality with others.” These demands redefine the museum as an institution needed by all, from the local communities furthest from them to global travelers whose financial capacity and elitist training make them a privileged group that cannot be underrated, but neither must they be allowed to be the preponderant public.In the midst of this struggle to constitute the ritual space of cohabitation between the local and the global, museum architecture has not evolved parallel to the statements of institutions. To be critical, we might say that museum design contests (take the Helsinki Guggenheim as an example) have insisted in respond to the demands of powerful tourist lures immersed in a global concourse of media impacts which have little to do with our discipline’s unavoidable social and political commitments. Generally speaking, intentions are geared toward consolidating formulations such as “museums seek to be public places” or “the museum forms part of citizens’ lives not merely as a place to visit exhibitions” and they focus on increasing the space given over to citizens’ uses without neglecting the traditional program of the museum as an art archive and exhibition center. Even so, the conclusion is that the exhibition rooms of museums of the future will occupy less than 40% of the space devoted to visitors, because the rest will be concerned with education, research, speculation, archives, publishing, collecting, artists’ residences, events, new theater forms and so many other uses minimalized today under the “back of house” label.So, the refurbishing of existing museums is already a reality. In just five years we have seen many institutions asking architects to design the transformations to make museums more accessible and democratic. The question is: what about the new museums? If most of the collections are already exhibited, the next generation will bring more Fun Palaces and less tourist attractions?

Fortunately, there are cases that indicate the path toward other more diverse and participative models as the old industrial state transformed in the SESC Pompeia by Lina Bo Bardi, a non-passive way to activate the discovery of art and its multiple formats among the working classes, granting herself the liberty to mix cultural programs with hedonistic body worship or family leisure; Or the Lacaton & Vassal’s Palais de Tokyo, recycling an existing building to host an unlimited diversity of programs with no collection; or even the transformation of the public space into cultural enclaves open by cases as the Crenshaw Boulevard, which proposes an open-air museum which is in fact a tribute to the Black culture of Los Angeles superimposed on a historic urban thoroughfare.

Such refurbishments were conceived as “typological corrections” of existing buildings or as extensions onto adjacent sites; although needless to say, the most interesting ones are those based on re-definition of objectives rather than obsession with unstoppable growth. What is clear is that the design of these new museums is a laboratory of experimentation which allows us to ask ourselves:“How social is our architecture?”“How can architecture transform the theoretical discourse that institutions have embraced when they declare themselves to be transparent, inclusive, anti-colonialist, anti-machist, anti-racist and eco-friendly into a physical reality?”The work program calls for the consideration of active fun and the use of free time as moments of meeting, learning and conquering freedom. The association between culture and pleasure is one of the keys to sustainable urban leisure on which to base an inclusive social contract and induce conscious consumption full of discoveries and far from the capitalist bias that globally homogenizes the concept of leisure, reducing it to a business in which museums, restaurants and landscapes are treated as economic assets with no value other than the benefits they are capable of providing. 

DE-MONUMENTALIZING OBSOLETE MODERNIST CONTAINERS OF MADRID

After the first series of explorations on the Metropolitan Museum (the most visited in the United States); the Salomon Guggenheim by Frank Lloyd Wright; the (Latin) Museo del Barrio; and the private Frick Collection; and the second on The Museum of Modern Art MoMA, the MET Cloisters, The American Museum of Natural History (the second more visited in the city); and the Brooklyn Museum; Our quest for a set of well documented cases that allow us to plan an exercise both speculative and realistic concludes in working in the refurbishing of four existing structures and their open spaces around in Madrid, Spain, among the next list:

The Hydrographic Institute by Miguel Fisac

The Parking of the Government by José M. Sainz-Aguirre

The Chrystal Palace in the Casa de Campo de Francisco A. Cabrero

The National Postal Service “CentroCentro” by Antonio Palacios

The Research Center of Metallurgical Sciences by Alejandro de la Sota

The National Museum of Archeology by Francisco Jareño and Antonio Ruiz

The work will start in four groups of three students, each group working on one of the four buildings selected.

 

THE ROLE OF ARCHITECTURE

What is the role of architecture in an issue that requires a significant transformation, both intellectual and physical? Where are the limits of scale, amount of architecture and technification of culture’s rituals? What are the pertinent typologies, construction systems and preservation protocols?

We have already seen enough astonishing high-impact constructions that add nothing to the need to write a new page on museum’s architecture. We want to see ourselves as committed architects far removed from any form of fascination for singularity that does not reflect on the human needs to which we are obliged to respond. We also want to offer ourselves as experts capable of analyzing and making unexpected diagnoses about the cultural structures of the moment. Lastly, we believe in architecture’s ability to favor, through design, indeterminacy, and the ability to negotiate contingencies that the future may bring.

Our answer to these statements imagines a new generation of institutions conceived as an extension of urban space of recurrent use, inserted into the life of the city. Such projects will have to take into account the diversity of expressions and formats of contemporary art; the impact of global warming to guide the construction of a second-chance for the existing buildings; and the new ingredients of urban culture, from gender policies to the most advanced forms of socialization, from the positive incorporation of new technologies to concerns for labor conditions.

Furthermore, we want to look at what exists as valuable support from which to develop programs of recycling in the literal sense of the word. Concepts associated with prepositions (before, below, with, between, without, on…) will develop into architectural operations of occupation, superimposition, infiltration, delimitation and so on.

The projects to be produced in the studio will be enriched by a strong critical position and realistic constructability. Intellectual speculation and realistic construction will be the two sides of the same coin. Engagement with the present topics and contradictions, elaboration of the narratives, choice and/or design of instruments and methods of representation -graphic materials, models, audio-visual resources- are design operations in themselves. In this context, especial emphasis will be laid on the communicative capacity of the portfolios as documents through which to convey the suitability of the project to third parties.

 

AGENDA FOR THE FIRST PART OF THE SEMESTER

MON. JAN. 22^nd. PRESENTATION AND CLASS ON THE EVOLUTION OF MUSEUMS AND THEIR CURRENT CHALLENGES.

THU. JAN. 25^th. GRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF THE BUILDINGS. Ideological and architectural configuration of each proposed institution.

FRI. JAN 26^TH. SESSION AT AIA on democratization of Museums

MON. JAN. 29^th. DIAGRAMMATIC REPRESENTATION OF THE DIAGNOSIS. Amount of architecture required to achieve a model complex.

THU. FEB. 1^ST. FINAL IMAGES

MON. FEB 5^TH. COLLECTIVE PIN UP AND DISCUSSION

THU. FEB 8^th, FEB. 12^th, FEB 15^th, FEB 19^th. STRATEGY AND KIND OF ARCHITECTURE. Three days of class to develop a strategy on the correction of the current building that must include at least a part of the reconditioning of the existing one and some type of extension on the public space around the current venues.

MON. FEB. 21^ST. MID-TERM REVIEW. The mid-term review will be reached with a set of images of the current conditions and a proposition for the transformation of the building which will not set out to be an incipient architectural project but rather an architectural view of its future presented to the museum board in the form of a performance.

 

STUDIO TRIP

Th studio trip will be to Spain. Madrid will be the base of one-day journeys to Extremadura, León, Bilbao and Santiago de Compostela… visiting the back of house of many museums designed by Alvaro Siza, Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Mansilla&Tuñón, meeting the directors of different departments and maintenance staff, and other historical and contemporary architecture masterpieces significant by virtue of their risk and innovation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AAVV, “Making a Museum in the 21^st century”. Asia Society and Museum, Hong Kong, 2015.

AAVV, “Lambda Files: Design and Construction of the New Munch Museum in Oslo”. Spector Books, Leipzig, 2023.

https://www.elconfidencial.com/el-grito/2023-09-19/munch-libro-oslo_3726785/

Clementine Deliss, “The Metabolic Museum”. Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlín, 2020.

Sarah Ganz y Andrew Martínez, eds.: Why Art Museums? The Unfinished Work of Alexander Dorner. MIT press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2018.

Cristina Garrido, “The Art of Documenting Art”. Caniche Editorial, Madrid, 2019.

Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden”. 1884

 Amanda Reeser Lawrence y Ana Miljacki ed., “Terms of Appropriation: Modern Architecture and Global Exchange”. Routledge, 2018. London y Nueva York.

Dorothea Von Hantelmann, “What is the New Ritual Space for the 21^st Century?”. The Shed, NY.

https://www.theshed.org/program/series/2-a-prelude-to-the-shed/new-ritual-space-21st-century

 

https://publication.place-plateforme.com/place5/sacchetto-von-hantelmann/