Looking Back / Looking Forward

2000 - 2010: 10 Years of Collalborations:

WHO'S WHO

2x4 Acconci Studio Adjaye Associates Allied Works ArupLighting BBB Barkow Leibinger Petra Blaise Boucher Landscape Buro Happold CSA LERA Michel Desvignes Takashi Murakami Diller + Scofidio Exploration Architectures FMSP Front Hood Design Innovision Jean Nouvel Max Fordham MGMT Design Mosbach Paysagiste Paratus Group I.M.Pei Repérages Dominique Perrault Renzo Piano RFR Richard Smith SANAA SAPS Studio Rodel Tillotson Design Associates Tod Williams + Billie Tsien Tombazis Transplan Transolar Vanguard William McDonough

WHAT’S WHAT

When not doing our own design projects - many of which may be familiar to you, from the Rubin Museum of Art (RMA) to the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum (SAAM) - we prepare a steady stream of shorlist RFP’s, of which a sampling is found on this poster.

These demonstrate our efforts to forge new collaborations with other architects or engineers we have not worked with before. By initiating each of these RFP’s and creating the team specifically for a given site or museum type, we remain faithful to the reason why we started our studio in the first place: making architecture in collaborative teams that can bridge two design firms and various partners on a single project.

Now in our tenth year, the museum list below, from new construction to expansions, feasibility to exhibit installations, is the result of many of the or our RFP proposals, a list that remains inevitably incomplete and open to new collaborations.

MUSEUM LIST

Asian Society & Museum
New York, NY

Centre Pompidou Paris, France

Dar Al Bacha, Patti Cadby Birch Morocco Palace of Arts Marrakech, Morocco

Guggenheim Museum
New York, NY

Institute for the Study of the
Ancient World New York, NY

Institute of Contemporary Art
Boston, Massachusetts

Japan Society & Museum
New York, NY

Kuwait National Museum
Kuwait City, Kuwait

Miho Museum of Art
Shiga, Japan

Morgan Library & Museum
New York, NY

Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée Marseille, France

Musée Dobrée
Nantes, France

Musée du Louvre-Lens
Lens, France

Musée Européen de la Photographie Paris, France

Musée National des Beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec, Canada

Museum of Arts & Design
New York, NY

Museum of Modern Art (mudam)
Kirchberg, Luxembourg

National Museum of the
American Indian New York, NY

New York Public Library
New York, NY

Peabody Essex Museum
Salem, Massachusetts

Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles
Bangkok, Thailand

Rubin Museum of Art
New York, NY

Saint Louis Art Museum
Saint Louis, Missouri

San Antonio Museum of Art
San Antonio, Texas

Sheikh Zayed National Museum
Abu Dhabi, UAE

Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) Washington, DC

The Jewish Museum
New York, NY

Toledo Museum of Art, Glass Pavilion, Toledo, OH

World Trade Center Memorial Museum New York, NY

Yale Art Gallery
New Haven, CT.

ARTISTS COLLABORATIONS

Vito Acconci

Anthony McCall

Daido Moriyama

Takashi Murakami

Yoko Ono

Dennis Oppenheim

Mike & Doug Starn.

For more on the Louvre-Lens ground-breaking, go to:• www.dezeen.com/2010/01/08/louvre-lens-by-sanaa• www.bustler.net/index.php/article/musee_louvre-lens_breaks_ground

Renovation and expansion of an archeological museum in Nantes, France

Imrey Culbert in the role of museum architect and gallery designer, in association with architect Dominique Perrault (DPA) of Paris (Mandataire), have won the competition for the expansion and renovation of the Dobrée Palace, a campus of 14th to 19th Century structures and an enclosed garden within the historical centre of Nantes, in North-West France. The team bested five invited firms from a pool of 131 submitted RFPs. Kengo Kuma of Tokyo placed second in the final jury decision based on submitted design proposals on November 24th, 2009.

The project includes new underground skylight galleries and public facilities and the renovation of the existing galleries geared to new display and media strategies for the largest collection of archelogical artifacts in the region, covering 75,000 square feet. Perrault's overall design strategy has been to conceal all new construction under an expansive horizontal glass roof that literally becomes the plinth of the historical manoir building. This scheme resembles an un-built project by Perrault from the mid 80's, where a circular glass roof becomes the plinth of an historic villa. Culbert was a draftsperson more then 20 years ago at Perrault's 6-person fledging office, when early competitions were marked by what has since become his signature design move: excavated or concealed building volumes such as the Berlin Velodrome and Olympic Swimming Pool and the recent Ewa University Campus in Soeul. This project is DPA's first museum project despite having built major public buildings on three continents. Our firm's role and experience with museum expansions in landmarked sites, was key to the team selection for pre-qualification and in the winning design.

Our interventions in the 3 storey Palace, are to place archeological artifacts in rooms that are far from the standard materials and tonality of enthnographic installations. Taking references from artists Anish Kapoor, James Irwin and Rachel Whiteread the design features free-standing plinthes made of booring in the existing brick, concrete and site fill; circular casework, double-tiered in reflective materials; reverse casting of damage features of historical rooms (fireplaces and door features), and rooms sheathed in scrim unifying the rooms and allowing for diffused backlighting from the numerous and oddly sized existing windows. In this way, the sequential experience of the galleries in small and confied spaces will be appear more expansive and the viewer challenged to see the objects out of "context", first as individual aesthetic objects, then as culturally linked to a greater storey line defined by the curators.

Competition Design Concept Text (in French)

Le concept de Trace :
"L’idée conceptuelle générale repose sur la notion de conservation du Palais Dobrée et la notion de trace.

Dans cette perspective, la trace comme lieu d’un croisement entre passé et présent et la question du rapport (des individus, des sociétés) à la trace constitueront des objets privilégiés de réflexion.

Le concept de Transversalité :
« Un Parcours a l’attention de tous les Publics »
Notre culture consumériste nous insiste a chercher différemment. Notre comportement change, nous développons une attitude séquentielle. Il faut donc répondre par un modèle de flexibilité. Refléter un changement culturel dans la perception narrative. La nouvelle génération de visiteur, habitue à l’utilisation de l’internet ainsi que d’autres media de recherche et de savoir électroniques, expérimentent le mode de façon moins chronologique que leurs parents. Sauter d’un point à un autre, revenir en arrière, raconter l’histoire sans ordre particulier. La culture s’adapte à une forme de consommation plus personnalisée. Donner le choix au public ou plutôt aux publics (familles, touristes français et étrangers, scolaires, spécialistes) est l’une des composantes majeure du procédé scénographique proposé.

Le concept de « Carottage » et couches sédimentaires:
Forées verticalement à travers un mille-feuille de sédiments, elles permettent une lecture directe du temps, de bas en haut. Une mémoire du passé. Compression de couches successives, elle contient en réduction les effets de la puissance tectonique et de la transformation au fil du temps. Principe fondamental de la stratigraphie, branche de la géologie qui étudie la succession des couches sédimentaires.
La notion de superposition, de stratification, de surimposition et à la façon dont ces procédés permettent de marquer le temps, en le compressant ou en le dilatant.
Ce carottage temporel, c’est aussi doter l’objet d’une valeur d’échantillon, ignorant toute forme de hiérarchie sociale, enregistrement-témoin des transformations de la société, enclenché au temps zéro de la modernité.

Descriptif des dispositifs architecturaux et muséographiques

Inspiré de l’intervention artistique de Robert Irwin, le dispositif détourne à son profit certains caractères propres au lieu. Une structure légère de membranes translucides blanches tendus entre lesquelles on circule s’installe le long des murs existant, créant ainsi dans un fonctionnement proche de l’autonomie, un espace dans l’espace, dans un dédoublement des parois existantes. Préservant à la fois la Trace d’un passé existant afin de mieux le détourner dans une redéfinition des lieux d’exposition.
Provoquant des phénomènes visuels il s’agit là de perception. Les voiles-écrans de tergal quasi transparent captent la lumière naturelle, absorbant ou au contraire renvoyant avec la netteté d’un miroir les images. Projection, diffraction, obstruction, superpositions... Le dispositif fonctionne sur plusieurs niveaux temporels échelonnés – on observe, on s’observe, enfin on observe les autres. Ce sont ces temps décalés d’un visiteur à l’autre qui permettent à l’expérience de fonctionner à plein. Processus de «dévoilement» progressif, dans cette performance qui positionne les individus tour à tour en sujet et en objet.
Chaque espace revêtu ainsi de leur voile-écran, explore les variations colorées de la lumière artificielle en retro éclairage et donne ainsi a l’espace son identité propre. L’impact lumineux permettant tout à la fois d’atténuer ou au contraire de dévoiler le traitement du mur existant (ex. plaquage de bois sculpté) selon l’abstraction du contexte des objets exposés. La couleur, quand a elle, sera utilisée comme repérage des différents espaces, créant un flux intuitif dans les lieux. La couleur sera définit pour une mise en valeur et une lecture de l’objet. Elle permettra aussi, par modification dans le spectre de couleur, une adaptation aux changements progressifs de la lumière naturelle extérieure au cours de la journée.

L’utilisation de la couleur ainsi que ces vitrines écrans introduisent ainsi la notion de Modularité.
Puis à la manière de Rachel Whiteread, c’est un travail sur l’empreinte que nous proposons de développer. Utiliser comme « moule » les éléments du Palais Dobrée afin de pérenniser « le vécu » et pour créer une sorte de « carottage négatif », une inversion du procédé." Ludmilla Cohen et Tim Culbert

Vito Acconci. Courtyard in the Wind,Darren Almond. A Bigger Clock, Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, 1999, Sophie Calle, Olafur Eliasson, 360° room for all colours, 2002, Tim Hawkinson, Damien Steven Hirst. Lullaby Spring, 2002,Robert Irwin. Excursu: Homage to the Square3, Anish Kapoor,Carousel 2004, James Turrell. Skyspace, 2006, Rachel Whiteread. Ghost (1990)

Buffer Space and Mobility: Defining parallel performative use in a singular structure

Centre Pompidou Mobile: A limited invited competition for a mobile art structure.

Concept Description: Our reading of the project, that may distinguish the potential design from those of three other competing teams, is to see the enclosure of the built project - architectural and engineering-wise – as distinct from the performance of the art display within it.

Though the performance of casework (vitrines), humidity control, artifact security, access to art works for rotation, as well as the design for new flexible format for display, much meet a high integrated performance – this does not mean that enclosure of the public and enclosure of the artifacts are equal and the same thing.

To distinguish our team’s future design work, and how to respond to the exigencies of the programme, we see the mobile structure as a climatic and environmental buffer, where low-energy means of comfort control, that would need to respond to a wide public use with widely varying visitors at various times of the day. Developing such a structure and its energy performance, to allow for both passive and active environmental controls, will be the challenge of this design: To create a performative space that at its scale and level of costs, will be iconic and demonstrative at the same time.

With certain art on display for shorter periods, or in materials that warrant natural light, we will consider a roof enclosure that is operable to respond to this need – operable as in stationary mobility. Equally this operable natural daylight source, should allow for controlled lower light levels, without resorting to a black-box performance, yet allowing for various projected or integral media that may be used in the galleries or adjacent spaces.

By “loosening” the environmental performance of the public spaces themselves, even within the galleries, without sacrificing comfort, security or other performative criteria requested, leaves us much larger room to focus on the casework (vitrines) as the focus of specific art/conservation requirements.

In this way, the project will entail a two tiered consideration in design, on the mobile building structure itself, and the secondary interior enclosure to artifacts on display. This two-tiered system, though typically present in standard museums, is oppositional and strategic in our design proposal, allowing for far more creative and performative responses to both – separately and intertwined.

The mobility of the design, will be not be solely established by the efficient mounting and demounting of the structure, but in the mobility of the viewer in the volumes and the perception of the art, in an active role.

We see that “Mobility” will be best served by creating a buffer architectural and engineering enclosure, leaving the highest performing spaces to the art itself – the vitrines or other installations – and in the process giving the centre both its identity and its performative use.
In this way the Centre Pompidou Mobile will be a singular performative structure for art.

Conceptual competition text by Tim Culbert for the joint-venture team of Explorations Architecture (Mandataire) + Imrey Culbert. Three firms were selected to make design proposals for the mobile Pompidou structure in 2009.

UP-DATE : Expansion of the Musée National des Beaux du Québec

Agrandissement du MNBAQ International Architecture Competition, Quebec

We have been shorlisted for a design competition for a new pavilion for the National Beaux Arts Museum in Quebec City (MNBAQ) against OMA, Nieto Sobejano, Allied Works, and David Chipperfield, from a list of 108 firms. Phase 1 of the design by our joint-venture team, BarkowLeibinger Architecken + Imrey Culbert Architects, bested Kengo Kuma, Big, Adjaye Associates and Gigon Guyer among others to move on to Phase 2 of the design, which was recently submitted to the jury. The museum will make their final decision between the five finalists by the end of March. We are in good standing.

Though we cannot share the design proposal yet, we believe this on-going competition is another successful example of our approach to creating collaborative teams for international competitions (We similarly invited Sanaa to join us, as well as Tod Williams Billie Tsien on two other successful RFP shortlists in France).

Here’s an outline on how we approached the MNBAQ:
We believe our project reinforces a keen program directive of the museum committee for this competition: to create a coherent additive pavilion to a complex site of buildings and historical landmarks - from the small scale of the Wolfe fountain, to wide views of the Plaines d'Abraham; from the vertical height of the St. Dominique church, to the over-shadowing presence of the rehabilitated Prison - so that the new Pavilion neither dominates nor recedes in their presence.

The typological form of the building – a two-storey mat-building - acknowledges the very dichotomy of the design challenge: by creating a mineral form, above a light base it acknowledges that the pavilion is to be both additive and visible - the new face of the MNBAQ - while at times able to recede and fuse with its site. Designed equally from interior to exterior, it is everything but overpowering. The visible, open, public spaces at ground level are there to support the temporarily of art production or art display on the vast floor above. Temporality and Permanence meet. The two vocations of the art museum merge: presenting art (over defined periods) and conserving art (for future generations).

Our joint design is straightforward and keenly economical to build. It uses natural daylight saw-tooth roofs through-out, which defines the formal quality of the building. The sculptural effects of the facades - a solidified and facetted form - will allow the building to come to the fore, the transparency and reflectivity of the ground level, reflecting and connecting visitors approaching the building, the surrounding landscape, and responding to the unpredictable lighting conditions by week or time of day. In this way, then, the building operates on a very functional level, intended like a Dan Graham pavilion in a park, to instigate these encounters and frame a context - here, in Quebec, both historical and new.

Art commissioned works, will be challenged with this building and in the process the new or repeat visitor, will be made that much more aware of the art, their place in its viewing, how spectatorship is created and questioned, or just to rethink how one "does" art. This is a more immediate encounter with art: a jestering for attention.

Given the competition's ambitions - and to paraphrase Andreas Ruby - not to create a generic space for the experience of art, the potential here is for a project that aims to create different modes of relationship between art and the viewer than the encyclopedic museum or other art spaces do. Named a "pavilion", rather then an addition or a wing, as commonly done, the museum committee has taken a delightful risk: that the budget-conscious project is to be seen primarily as one of transitory experience. If we are not mistaken, says Ruby, the etymological origin of Pavilion, is the word papillon, French for butterfly, who's short life is so transitory. The reference is more than metaphor: in our design the pavilion literally takes flight above its base, taking the visitor with it. There is now an interior encounter to instigate, to curate and that is where the director and her curators come into play.

Internal to the pavilion, is the former Cloister, recreated as a triple height multi-faceted, user-directed, "auditorium". There is no "cloistering" of programming here, but one of multi-tasking experience by the visitor. This is the transitory, non-curated encounters that the museum as a whole – four interconnected pavilions from various periods - desperately needs. But why?: for the risk-averse, it is harder to make our case. For those keen on expecting non-prescribed uses and needs for a museum-come performance/lecture/production space in the future - then this is indeed where it will happen, how the pavilion will remain competitive and relevant.

We will have to wait and see if the Jury – chaired by Xaveer de Geyter (Bruxelles) and Nasrine Seraji (Paris) – agree. The project was designed with the excellent support of Buro Happold, ArupLighting, CSA Agency among others. Imrey Culbert initiated the RFP and established the complete project team.

Artist Andreas Ruby’s reference above is from a moderated talk by Daniel Birnbaum on the Thyssen-Bornesmisza Art Pavilion by Olafur Elisasson and David Adjaye.©TBA21.org

Viewer and the viewed: Defining visual and social encounters in the museum.

The Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles, Bangkok (second of two posts)

“My projects are born in the course of encounters. This fits with the principle that the museum or exhibition is a specific site for encounters. Each day, I imagine the organisation of potential encounters, in museums, in different countries, in political or religious institutions, at historical sites, etc. I sometimes reorganise their spaces, imagine what might be done to encourage people to look and make thamoment individual. It is also a matter of scale and means, you can’t approach encounters with individuals and vast audiences in the same way. I enjoy being challenged on different scales.”©

A major focus of ours for the Museum of Textiles in Bangkok, which defined much of our internal design debates, was centered around the very nature of the costumes on display in the permanent galleries – ceremonial, formal and Royal – that would establish a strong hierarchical relationship of the viewer and the viewed. Embodied in the costumes themselves, is this very relationship, an inter-subjective experience, one that should not pose any challenges or uneasiness in the viewer. To produce an equal amount of respect and deference, in the viewer as confronted by an image of the Queen herself (or her rare but possible physical presence), necessarily requires a display approach that will activate these emotions.

Perhaps, in paraphrasing the artist/curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, if the viewer initially perceives the costumes as objects on display – when they first declare themselves to be on show - we then need time to recognize them as subjects ©. The viewer as a subject to the Queen may require ample time or space for him/her to see the artifacts as other then embodiments of HRH. This dynamic works in reverse as well, where a visitor or group of visitors, first recognizes the “on show” presence of costumes as the Queen herself, requiring time – or some form of constituent elements of the exhibit design - to recognize them as artifacts, unique, fastidious products of specialized weaving and design. With this in mind, we were aware that the display would necessary have to confront this dichotomy (This will not necessarily be the case in the temporary or thematic galleries showing tribal costumes).

At the early stage we tested these thoughts focusing primarily on the central Queen’s Gallery, where her formal wear, most designed by Pierre Balmain in the 70’s to 80’s using traditional Thai textiles, are to be displayed. The design of a central vitrine in this space, accordingly an object of unusual scale and form, allowed us to define multiple views of HRH costumes on mannequins, while reinforcing a frontal relation to them. Never is the visitor allowed to be fully “behind” the costume – in deference to the hierarchical construct – while simultaneous allowing for framed or reflected “rear-views” of these same costumes, when visually or aesthetically valid.

The vitrine acts in this way as a highly functional structure framing various angles, reflections and positions (both of the objects on display and the viewer themselves) while simultaneously asserting social hierarchy. The scale of the vitrine, the curvature of singular panels of glass, while others facetted in non-reflective glass, the internal lighting, the tinted dual-vision mirror glass partially behind the costumes, assures the visual complexity and functionality of the display. One creates visual movement in this way, with “frozen” works of art.

However, from a design perspective, certain details of the vitrine will define a more ambiguous role of the enclosure – is it to protect, reflect, secure or separate us from the artifacts? Place them on a stage? The vitrine’s panels of glass, as we conceived one version, may not form a sealed corner, leaving a separation – not unlike a Dan Graham glass pavilion – reversing an expectation of complete protective enclosure of the objects (the museum building and gallery should perform this duty).

Staged this way, one compels the visitor, to be aware of what they are seeing and their movement (and of their own image, of being on show themselves). The Queen, physically absent, is present in maintaining the visitor’s distance and position as subject.. The visitor’s gaze is egalitarian, while the display maintains the necessary social hierarchy at work. The “choreographic tension” is there, and each viewer, in one instant of time, whether individual or in large groups, will feel this to some degree – to what degree will establish the effectiveness of our design – and then be free to move on to other galleries.

© The quote and term choreographic tension is from Olivier Bardin’s interview with Hughes & Obrist, 2008-12-07 Liverpool Univesity Press, as is his discussion of exhibitions as a specific site of encounters. Reference to the pavilions of Dan Graham courtesy of Hauser & Wirth Zürich.

Weaving Inside Out: A design process for a museum of textiles

The Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles, Bangkok. First of 2 postings

“Exhibition is, for me, the opportunity to create a physical encounter between myself and a spectator, and between spectators. In a context where experience dominates, it is left for me to construct the scene. What I create, the formal element which can be transmitted and reactivated, is the set-up itself. The system is fixed, it is an architecture. I don’t tell how it should be occupied, but the visitor is immediately subjected to its influence.”©

We defined the working strategy for this new museum project in Bangkok – a museum dedicated solely to Thai Textiles - from two opposing directions allowing a healthy tension in our design process.

We write tension in the best sense we can imagine – taught, not static, balanced as a creative device.

So this was our approach: to design from inside to out, and, conversely, outside to in. Conceptually we looked at an artifact to be displayed and proceeded backwards to consider the museum-goer outside in the public realm; and naturally we considered a standard route - another visitor, standing at the new museum foyer, proceeding from the exterior, inside to an encounter with an artifact in a defined gallery condition.

One of these two approaches helped us define the gallery architecture, lighting and ceiling designs, derived for example, from geometries found in classic Thai textiles. The other obliged us to consider very closely, multiple and potential viewer experiences in the galleries and to factor in the wide range of potential museum-goers and what their (pre)understanding of the artifacts might be.

Designing the project in this way, taking queues from opposing directions of influence, set the stage for both physical and conceptual encounters – between the architecture and gallery design, between viewer and object; between various spectators – young Thai school children or visiting tourists; between informal or highly constructed installations; between free movement in the gallery to the static positions of objects (finely dressed mannequins) separated and enclosed in glass volumes; and between singular and multiple viewing pleasures.

What we began to create from this approach, in the visitor’s future experience of the museum or the gallery is a direct response to these formal oppositions. The constructed spaces, gallery sequence, proportions, the ability to move freely or in a defined way (e.g. chronological movement), the scale of the vitrines and the materials in the space, became the “constituent elements” of the display environment and the tools we were to work with. Combined in the design and drawing process, they activated the design tension we hoped for. Combined physically in the galleries, they will activate the visitor experience, and in the process bring him/her into a greater awareness of her surroundings and of the visual narrative on display.

This is not an artifice of process, but a means to explore the duality in inherent in the museum – in any museum - weaving together very different expectations of the visitor, inside and outside the building and in the exhibition itself.

The quote above is by Olivier Bardin, Interview by Pierre Huyghe and Hans-Ulrich Obrist in The Fifth Floor: Ideas Taking. Image by Thomas Struth and the Queen Sirikit Support Foundation