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Contextual content might not rely for eachfactor in artwork. However as underneathscored by eachone from Marcel Duchamp (or Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven) to the journalists who occasionally convince virtuoso musicians to busk in dingy public areas, it certainly counts for somefactor. Whether or not or not you consider that artistic endeavors retain the identical essential value no matter the place they’re beheld, some environments are certainly extra conducive to appreciation than others. The question of simply which design elements make the difference has occupied museum architects for centuries, and in New York Metropolis alone, you may directly experience greater than 200 years of daring exercises and experiments within the type.
Within the Architectural Digest video above, architect Michael Wyetzner (previously featured right here on Open Culture for his exegeses of New York’s asidements, bridges, and submethod stations, in addition to Central Park and the Chrysler Constructing) makes use of his professional knowledge to disclose the design choices which have gone into the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, the Museum of Modern Artwork, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Frick Collection. No two of those well-known artwork institutions have been conceived in fairly the identical period, none look or really feel fairly the identical because the others, and we may be reasonably certain that no single piece of artwork would look fairly the identical if it have been moved between any of them.
Occupying 5 blocks of Central Park, MoMA is much less a constructing than a collection of constructings — every added at a different time, in a method of that point — and certainly, much less a collection of constructings than “a metropolis unto itself,” as Wyetzner places it. (No gainedder Claudia and Jamie Kincaid might run away from dwelling and go unnoticed living in it.) The comparatively modest MoMA has additionally grown addition-by-addition, startning with a “stripped-down type of modernism” that stood effectively out on the West 53rd avenue of the late thirties. It opened as the primary of the numerous “clear white fieldes” that would seem throughout the counstrive — and later the world — to point out the artwork of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The original MoMA constructing stays striking as we speak, nevertheless it’s now flanked by expansions from the arms of Philip Johnson, Cesar Pelli, Yoshio Taniguchi, and Jean Nouvel. A lot much less likely to have anyfactor hooked up to it’s the Guggenheim, with its promptly recognizin a position spiral design by Frank Lloyd Wright. Primarily based on an concept by Le Corbusier, its narrow atrium-wrapping galleries do current certain difficulties for the proper display of large-scale artworkworks. Wyetzner additionally malestions the oft-heard criticism of Wright’s having “created a monument to himself — nevertheless it’s one hell of a monument.”
Final comes “the original constructing for the Whitney Museum of American Artwork, which later turned the Met Breuer, which now has change into the Frick. Who is aware of what it’ll change into subsequent.” The second of its names refers to its architect, the Bauhaus-trained Marcel Breuer (he of the Wassily chair), whose muscular design “slices off” the museum from the brownstone neighborhood that surrounds it. With its “open, loft-like areas,” it professionalvides a contextual content meant for the artwork of its time, a lot because the Met, MoMA, and the Guggenheim do for the artwork of theirs. However all these institutions have succeeded simply as a lot by carving out contexts of their very own within the open-air museum of architecture and concreteism that’s New York Metropolis.
Related content:
Architect Breaks Down 5 of the Most Iconic New York Metropolis Asidements
The 5 Innovative Bridges That Make New York Metropolis, New York Metropolis
A Whirlwind Architectural Tour of the New York Public Library — “Hidden Particulars” and All
A 3D Animation Reveals the Evolution of New York Metropolis (1524 — 2023)
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the ebook The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video sequence The Metropolis in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceebook.
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