Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego Instagrammable San Diego
Art and Compages Get a Refresh on the California Coast
The Museum of Gimmicky Art San Diego has undergone multiple renovations in its lxxx-plus years. This spring it has opened later on yet another.
This article is role of our latest special section on Museums, which focuses on new artists, new audiences and new means of thinking almost exhibitions.
SAN DIEGO — The Pacific Bounding main surf steadily lapping at the coast non far from the newly renovated and expanded Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego serves every bit a metaphor for the successive waves of architecture that accept formed the establishment since it was founded.
High on a bluff hither in the affluent hamlet of La Jolla, it was established in 1941 in the Irving Gill-designed domicile of the philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps. The museum — which has had several different names over the years — was expanded three times over the decades by the firm then known as Mosher & Drew, and in 1996 received a major makeover from the former Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates.
At present, the New York firm Selldorf Architects has had its plow, coming upward with an add-on and overhaul that may be the almost transformative yet — and one that has incorporated the previous iterations.
Opened Apr ix, the $105 million projection doubles the overall foursquare footage of the museum, and quadruples the gallery space, transforming the institution and what it can do. The museum was closed for three years during construction, although its satellite branch in downtown San Diego, established in 2007, remained open.
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A space crisis had been hampering the museum for years, and was forcing the staff to make tough choices.
"We couldn't accept a special exhibition on view at the same time as our permanent collection," said the museum'south director, Kathryn Kanjo, standing in front end of the about-completed museum on a sunny March 24-hour interval. She added that the problem was exacerbated because "our collections take more than doubled in the last 40 years."
The museum is showing off its new amplitude with a special exhibition, "Niki de Saint Phalle in the 1960s," featuring 94 works, too as several galleries displaying permanent collection pieces.
Ms. de Saint Phalle (1930–2002) was a French artist who gained fame for colorful and daring works, as when she had a sharpshooter fire a rifle at sculptures she had embedded with paint-filled balloons. She lived the last stage of her life in La Jolla.
The expansion project here has had a long timeline. Selldorf Architects won a competition to design it in 2014.
"It seems like we've been waiting for this for years — and nosotros literally accept been," said the philanthropist Irwin Jacobs, a co-founder of Qualcomm. Along with his wife, Joan, he donated $twenty million for the project; the new building is named afterwards the couple. (They threw in a couple of sculptures, also, including a pumpkin by Yayoi Kusama.)
In improver to the need for infinite, Ms. Kanjo said that the museum's brief was, "Please try to respect our architectural legacy, but also bring some kind of clarity to information technology."
For the architectural firm's founder, Annabelle Selldorf, the project was appealing because it was squarely in her wheelhouse in ane way, but also allowed her to push her own limits.
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"People always think we do sensitive historical renovations, but that'south not all nosotros do," Ms. Selldorf said.
Her many high-profile cultural projects include the 2001 transformation of an Upper East Side mansion into the Neue Galerie New York, David Zwirner's 20th Street gallery in Chelsea and the forthcoming renovation of the Frick Collection.
"It matters a great bargain because it's new," Ms. Selldorf said of the San Diego museum. "It's my biggest new-built institution. And it stands on its own 2 feet."
The main addition is on the southern end of the museum, on a lot that was purchased to provide room for expansion. Ms. Selldorf used textured physical and travertine, among other materials, to create what she called "a space that is well-counterbalanced, well-proportioned, calm, focused and non about gesture" — pregnant that information technology doesn't take a hitting shape that calls attending to itself.
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Prototype
In that, she was in alignment with both current and former museum leadership.
"Nosotros were opposed to having a starchitect pounding their ain breast," said Hugh Davies, the museum'south previous managing director, who was involved in the initial phases of the projection. "Merely we actually did demand more infinite — it wasn't a gratuitous expansion."
Some of the new galleries supersede a former auditorium infinite, giving them dramatic, 20-foot ceilings, and the exhibition spaces are varied in shape throughout.
Mr. Jacobs noted that the apportionment through the museum is at present easier, too. "She gave us a coherent way for people to bout," he said of Ms. Selldorf's plan.
The architect also kept in heed the most obvious thing well-nigh the museum: its siting, a relatively rare seaside spot for an art institution. "It'due south a spectacular location, and the views are phenomenal," Ms. Selldorf said.
To connect the museum to nature, she turned a small-scale parking lot on the north cease of the campus into a sculpture garden, and she added terraces around the building. Skylights and vertical windows bring the site's distinct natural low-cal and coastal views into the new galleries.
Knitting together multiple iterations of the museum had its challenges, and one modify made by Ms. Selldorf ruffled a few feathers: She removed a line of thick columns that stood in forepart of the Gill building and were part of the Venturi Scott Dark-brown design.
A petition signed by architects and preservationists asked that it exist kept as-is, and said that changes would be a "tremendous error."
Paradigm
Ms. Selldorf — who didn't essentially change almost of the Venturi Scott Dark-brown design, including the striking Axline Courtroom, formerly the archway area — said that her intention in removing the columns was to achieve "greater clarity across the history of all the building types."
She noted that the columns were an intervention of sorts themselves, given that they were placed in front of Gill's much earlier structure, built in 1916. (For anyone who's curious nearly them, the columns are at present preserved next door to the museum, in the garden of the La Jolla Historical Society.)
"You can today run into the Irving Gill building completely unencumbered," she added.
Denise Scott Brown, who was a principal of Venturi Scott Dark-brown, was among the people who objected, and Ms. Selldorf fabricated a point of meeting with her in person.
"Ultimately, I was able to speak with Denise, and I'm then glad most that," Ms. Selldorf said. "My only regret is that I didn't speak with her right at the beginning of the project."
Now that substantially more art will be on view, museum visitors will be able to see the contours of the museum'due south collection more clearly.
"Our strength really is in art from this region, the West Declension," Ms. Kanjo said, particularly the California Light and Space movement of the 1960s and '70s, featuring artists similar Larry Bell and Helen Pashgian, both of whom take works currently on view.
The regional focus extends to the s, besides.
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"We're committed to the border, and so nosotros have strength in Latinx work," Ms. Kanjo said, calculation, "We're closer to Tijuana than to Los Angeles."
The opening roster includes collections by the artist known only equally Marisol (born María Sol Escobar); Celia Álvarez Muñoz; and Alejandro Diaz. Also on view is a broad assortment of well-known artists, including Robert Irwin, Jack Whitten and Helen Frankenthaler.
Ms. Selldorf said that her goal with the whole design, and especially with the transparent entrance pavilion, which is largely made of glass, was to brand people want to get within to see the fine art.
"I thought about how I can bring people in, and make them feel like they are welcome in that location," she said. "I know that sounds a piffling fleck trite, only I think information technology's really of import."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/27/arts/design/museum-of-contemporary-art-san-diego-expansion.html
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