Gluckman's art of display
Richard Gluckman considers the challenge of designing, and re-designing, the most difficult and iconic building of all: the art gallery.
Craft and fabrication
Richard Gluckman sneaked a preview of the restored Fine Rooms at Burlington House just before the formal opening. ‘These rooms are so well scrubbed. This clean and fresh look makes them sing.’ But there is also something in their basic architecture. ‘If you did breakdown of these rooms there would be a sense of proportion and scale… you find some consistency on the types of space that make you feel good. I tell students if there is something they like about a space, whether it is dramatic or quiet they should figure out its true dimensions and see what makes the room comfortable. Is it the way the light is coming in, the proportions or the dimensions? Recognising that space affects us in a lot of different ways makes it important to know how to craft it or fabricate it.’
View through the enfilade of the John Madejski Fine Rooms. Photo: Richard Bryant/arcaid.co.uk
‘Americans always compare Turner to Constable,’ he confessed while examining the Constables in the Council Room. ‘There’s presumably a climate control system. We have these idiotic discussions with conservators who don’t realise it’s all right to tolerate a little bit of moisture as long as it’s not in the wall. This stuff, condensation, you can deal with… In any case these paintings are crafted better and can tolerate more extreme conditions.’ While looking at Reynolds’s Self Portrait he said: ‘I wish I could develop this kind of self confidence!’
Remodelling a modernist icon
‘I wonder what Marcel Breuer knew about contemporary art when he designed the Whitney Museum in the 1960s?’ wonders Richard Gluckman of the architect who made his reputation at the Bauhaus in the 1920s and arrived in the US the following decade. In 1995 Gluckman won the commission to remodel the museum, one of New York’s premier showcases for contemporary art. Given the controversy of previous schemes it might have been a poisoned chalice. But, Gluckman explained, ‘ours was the non-spectacular approach, a simple renovation and addition’, made possible because of the qualities of the original especially in its insight into the way art would develop in the four decades since it was designed.’
‘Breuer anticipated all the stuff we did afterwards. It’s a giant barn of a building with two columns in it, an extraordinarily simple and elegant structure internally, with the spaces simply organised and divided about one third to two thirds on either side of the columns. One room on the fourth floor is among the largest unfettered single spaces for contemporary art in the city… if left open it would be spectacular.’
‘Both Frank Lloyd Wright (at the Guggenheim) and Breuer sort to distinguish the institution from its context. Wright hated art and did it in an egocentric way. Breuer did not hate art and with a slot on the northerly side of the building [made] a very subtle way of isolating it; it works as a piece of sculpture and as an object, framing space and being framed by it.’
Cook Night view showing the cone of Richard Gluckman’s Mori Museum, Tokyo Night view showing the cone of Richard Gluckman’s Mori Museum, TokyoThe myth of flexibility
‘Designing large-scale kunsthalle-type spaces with large scale envelopes that are intended to be subdivided is one of the fallacies of Museology’, says Richard Gluckman, one of the world’s leading designers of art galleries. ‘In a kunsthalle there is no brief or mission statement. It has to handle any object, from automobiles to decorative art of any century. It’s probably the hardest sort of building to design… The Mori Museum (at the top of the Mori Tower in Tokyo) might have been a pure kunsthalle, but I said “these are not happy spaces”.’
‘Some types of institution benefit from having the ability to shift around and change. The Whitney transforms itself on a case by case basis more than MoMA or the Guggenheim…. For the most part a good exhibition venue has a variety of space in it, a pleasant sequence, good natural light and it doesn’t really matter whether the building is 17th, 18th on 20th century.’
Art, archaeology and politics
Richard Gluckman’s Museo Picasso Malaga, opened in 2003, creates a new museum for the artist in the city of his birth stocked with donations and long term loans from his family. ‘Picasso’s relationship to it’, suggests Gluckman ‘changes the way the city might be seen… The city embraced the idea despite its raising all sort of political issues. The collection was donated to the Government of Andalucia which is socialist, while the city is ruled by the more conservative party. There might have been friction but they came together for the opening, realising it could transform the image of the city. Refurbishing an elegant Renaissance palace with its rooms arranged on two floors around a courtyard for the permanent collection, and adding new buildings for temporary exhibitions and other facilities effectively creates a cultural quarter for the city, alongside its Roman amphitheatre and in the shadow of its Moorish alcazaba.’
‘It crosses boundaries, from the archaeological to the contemporary and between architecture and art.’ Building works struck Moorish remains beneath the palace and then Roman without anyone getting excited. Even Greek artefacts hardly evinced concern. But when they hit 2500 year old Phoenician relics everyone sat up. The legendary Levantine traders had long been suspected of visiting Malaga but little evidence had turned up. Gluckman had to redesign part of the basement, scheduled for art handling and storage, into a display of the valuable finds, and somehow incorporate it into the intriguing routes he was weaving through the buildings above, with their subtle interplay between new and old, temporary and permanent.
Art and commerce
‘Can we transcend the crass and the commercial?’ asks Richard Gluckman. ‘We have for Helmut Lang and to some extent with [other projects for] Versace and Yves St Laurent. Lang thinks more like an artist than a retail merchant, and working with him was a real joy. I’ve been in enough fashion stores to want to challenge conventions… Lang said he wanted something different, so I said “no clothes on the walls… nothing on the wall. Just float it.” I remembered an installation of Tony Smith’s work, two 8 ft cubes painted black and set in space, as one of the most architectural installations I have ever seen. I am also influenced by Serra, taking a space and starting to challenge it with a mediating device.’
‘Lang came up with three black bars that would challenge the dimensions of the space. When you come in you see three black spaces, not the clothes. There is a deliberate ambiguity to what the space is. I knew immediately that I wanted to divide it into three parts and that coincided with Helmut’s ideas. One review commented that you couldn’t tell whether it was an art gallery or a store… that’s exactly what we were trying to do. Bringing Jenny Holzer into it added another component.’
Collaboration
‘The only true architect/artist collaboration I’ve ever had,’ claims Richard Gluckman, whose galleries and installations of contemporary art are legendary, was with Jenny Holzer in the perfumerie at Helmut Lang’s store. It is ‘a problematic space. 2000 sq ft dedicated to selling two four ounce bottles of perfume. My approach to the narrow entrance was to make it narrower, to split it… I wanted a Serra-like piece of steel 80 feet long, one end to the other in raw black steel.’
‘Jenny comes in working with fantastic white pieces. I thought it could be a new cornice or base board. She wanted to put it on top of the wall… it’s going to be a thin piece of steel an inch think. “I’ll think about it,” I said…’
‘Finally something came from a comment Helmut had made and from a memory of Dan Flavin. Helmut liked white enamelled steel because it reminded him of early apothecaries’ shops in Vienna and Flavin’s fixtures came in white enamelled steel boxes. I was on the phone with Jenny and said “what if we made the whole wall of white enamelled steel?” She said “perfect!” It was enormously successful and great fun.’
Art in the sky
In Japan, says Richard Gluckman, ‘there is a conceptual grasp of multi-use tall buildings’ and ‘a culture of giving things back’ to the community. The two urges came together at the Mori Tower in Tokyo with an art gallery at its summit. Its architects ‘Kohn Pedersen Fox are brilliant designers of tall buildings, able to represent different programmatic components in very large buildings.’ When designing the gallery ‘we knew we would have to do something to exploit the condition on top of the building. We couldn’t build a closed-in box.’ The symbolism of putting the art gallery above the viewing gallery ‘is not lost on the client’ and suggests an experience beyond gawping at the skyline.
‘The client insisted there were no partitions… he wanted spaces a big and open and flexible as possible. had to push the walls out to maximise every square metre and designed the L-shape so it could be divided into two different arrays of rectangles, either a long one with a small one next to it, or a square one with a rectangle next to it. We hope that most installations will use either of those two arrays. It proves that insane decisions [such as putting public galleries at the summit of very tall buildings] can turn out to be good ones’ though what happens ‘after the initial year will be the real test.’
Or in the sky
‘I spent the first part of my career trying to uncover the strengths of particular buildings and used early 20th century American industrial architecture as an example. When we do new buildings we do the same kind of analysis in reverse. We try to discover the strengths of the spaces we create which might be subdivided and still provide well proportioned rooms.’
‘In the Fine Rooms of Burlington House the paintings are literally framed and the room has got a frame so you get reductions of scale. If you turned one of the rooms into a white box and put the same paintings in it without their frames, there would be a weird relationship between the paintings and the room. All the different devices that were conventions such as room frame, door casing, cornice, base and painting frames allow the space of the paintings to recede into the space of the room, and the spaces in these paintings are recessive.’
‘After World War II, when artists like Pollock and Barnett Newman started concerning themselves with the space in front of the picture frame… the painting started to go beyond the frame and affect the quality of the space. Sculpture at the same time was transformed from an object in space to an element that transformed the space, that pushed the limits of space. And 15 or 20 years ago, when video monitors appeared in the gallery with the camera mounted elsewhere, it took you electronically outside the room.’
‘The desire for institutions to become more transparent figuratively has led them to become more transparent to some degree literally…’
On the street
‘It is not necessarily a new idea’ to make art visible from the street, says Richard Gluckman. Several artists ‘use exteriors and facades… even Flavin used the outside of several buildings in Basle or Houston. We did a project in Pittsburgh with (theatrical designer) Robert Wilson.’ It identified a ‘cultural district of 16 blocks in downtown Pittsburgh. I knew the area because we had designed the Warhol Museum; it’s a typical American industrial city with main avenues in the commercial district and alleys which supported it. Everyone used the alleys as short cuts between parking areas and theatres.’
‘My idea was to animate the alleys. As the streetscape was taken care of with furniture, trees, bus stops, kerbs and signage, I thought ‘what nicer way to do that than with light?’ because there were lots of people on their way to the theatre or going home from work. We made a couple of alley pieces and one was actually built… the concept worked well and the piece was okay.’
‘Bob Wilson was interested in taking the outside of the theatre or the back of the theatre and that started me thinking about using another medium or another symbolism for setting conditions viewing art.’
