The Menil Collection and Today’s Art Museum Architecture

Triple Bond: Art, Architecture and Museums, Amsterdam: Valiz, 2017 [ISBN 978-90-78088-49-3], 2017

Triple Bond is not a book about museum architecture. That is, not only. While the fourteen essays gathered in this volume focus on the architecture of museums built over the past five decades, they also concentrate on larger developments in art within that same timeframe. Likewise Triple Bond is not exclusively about art and architecture either. Even though it deals with the dialogue between the disciplines and practices of art and architecture, it contemplates just as much the changes within that very institution where the dialogue has been taking place most intensely: the museum. With this collection of essays Wouter Davidts advances the tenet that art, architecture, and the museum are engaged in a complex yet inevitably historical relationship with one another, that is, they are triply bound to each other. The book is divided into four parts: Platforms, Artists, Buildings, and Exhibitions, and contains case studies of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, Temporary Contemporary, p.s. 1, as well as the Antwerp Museum aan de Stroom (mas). It offers in-depth analyses of the understanding and use of museum and exhibition space by such widely acknowledged artists as Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Robert Smithson, and Gordon Matta-Clark. Finally, it critically assesses contemporary responses to the spaces of the museum by the artist collective superflex at the Van Abbemuseum and by the assorted artists participating in the Unilever Series at Tate Modern.

Paper presented at the International Conference City Futures in a Globalising World, Madrid, 2009

Over the second half of the 20 th century, museum architecture achieved an unprecedented popularity, assuming a central role in the redefinition of urban iconography. Compared with cathedrals, museum buildings often became landmarks with the capacity of attracting crowds of visitors. But the impact of museum architecture goes far beyond the symbolic dimension, once that many of these buildings effectively changed urban dynamics. The aim of this paper is to discuss the processes of urban renovation promoted by museum architecture: How did the museum building create new public spaces and new accessibilities? How did it contribute to the renovation of heritage architecture? How did it stimulate new uses of pre-existent public spaces? These questions will be answered through the analysis of paradigmatic projects, such as the São Paulo Museum of Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the MuseumsQuartier, in Vienna.