52837 New Forms Taschen 093

Page 101 Mario Botta San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

San Francisco. California, 1990-94

The central oculus of the SFMoMA building bnngs a considerable amount of light not only into the upper gallery levels, but down into the entrance area five floors below. This truncated cone form is rather typical of Botta's architeaure. having been used for example in a different manner in his £vry Cathedral in France.

The wealth of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, like that of other sim-ilar institutions across the United States, naturally depends on the formation of major private collections, which eventually find their way into the public domain. Southern California, with its film and electronics industries, has been an area where the colleaion of contemporary art, for example, has recently become quite fash-ionable. Of course few clients have the means to build a private museum of their own, but Frank lsrael's Art Pavilion, located in Beverly Hills (1991), is an outstand-ing example of what can happen in the United States when a talented architect and a major collector join forces. Located in an exclusive residential area, this 1,100 m² freestanding pavilion is next to the large home of the Client, and connected to it by an underground passage. Intended to house his art colleaion and two floors of studio space, the struaure is likened by the architea to a "great ark, containing an important colleaion of abstraa expressionist art, yet empowered by its contents to become a piece of art in the terraced scuipture garden.' The most speaacular space is undoubtedly the 8.5 m high top floor with its large timber trusses. The materials used are fiberglass-reinforced concrete for the upper, outside walls, with stucco below, chosen to create a harmony with the original house. The roof is covered in sheet metal and tile. A surprising exterior feature is a protruding boat-shaped balcony. As the architea says, 'A smaller version of the great ark, it is intended to appear as if it were being raised from the garden below.' Frank lsrael's reference to this building as a 'piece of art' is one that should be retained, because it is yet another bit of evidence of the strengthened links between the visual arts andarchiteaure.

Rarely are art and architeaure so intimately related, though, as in the Storefront for Art and Architeaure designed by Steven Holi and the artist Vito Acconci in New York. Located on Kenmare Street, at the eastern extremity of the Soho gallery area in Manhattan, this tiny wedge-shaped space stands out at once because it does not have Windows in any traditional sense of the word. Rather, pivoting concrete-and-wood fiber panels replace the old storefront. Cut into differently sized geometrie shapes, the panels open completely toward the Street, with the interior of the space being left much as it was, aside from a smali Office cubicle. The Storefront is a well-known New York location for rather politically oriented exhibitions, and the direaor of the space, Kyong Park, hopes to commission a redesign of the gallery every two years. Although this may not in faa be the immediate fate of Steven Holl's design, the point that much contemporary architeaure and design is funda-mentally ephemeral has been madę. The Pace Colleaion Showroom designed by Holi at the corner of 72nd Street and Madison Avenue (1985-86), for example, has already been replaced by a Ralph Lauren clothing storę. The Storefront, where art meets architeaure, is radical design for a new, unsettled era.

The significant development of art museums in the United States over the decades following World War II may in faa have reached a plateau. There are, after all, only so many masterpieces to be found, and with so many other museums around the world competing for them, it may no longer be very reasonable to expea to be able to fili new galleries, unless an institution has the means of the Certy Trust. A new trend in culturally oriented architeaure both in the United States and else-where is certainly toward museums that are oriented to history, society or to the performing arts. A significant example of such an institution in the United States is James Freed's Holocaust Memoriał in Washington, D.C.

Freed's former partner, I.M. Pei, completed the somewhat controversial Rock and Roli Hall of Famę in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1995. Pei may not have been the obvi-ous choice to build a monument to Rock and Roli, and he did receive a fair amount of criticism. As he candidly says, "I prefer jazz,' but the 14,000 m^J facility that he designed on the shores of Lakę Erie is a tribute to the idea of architeaure as 'f rożen musie." As the musie in this case is exuberant or even violent at times, Pei's surpris-