Dia Center for the Arts is a New York foundation which has long supported the kind of expensive and expansive contemporary art projects which traditional museums have been unable to show, due to lack of space, funds, or commitment. Dia recently announced that they would build a new museum in an abandoned factory in Beacon, New York, a depressed city on the Hudson River. Oddly, this announcement theoretically ties Dia, one of our most visionary and free-spending art institutions, to Guggenheim director Thomas Krens, probably the most entrepreneurial, business- oriented museum director in America.
Krens is famous for spearheading the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Frank Gehry-designed museum which opened in a gritty Spanish port city in 1997. Krens is also the prime mover behind MassMOCA, the ambitious contemporary art museum housed in a vacant millworks in North Adams, Massachusetts, opening this May.
The three institutions come together in the idea that much contemporary art, particularly large-scale sculpture and installation work, is no longer suited to traditional museum spaces. Where they diverge is in their architecture. The Guggenheim Bilbao is a piece of virtuoso design, while Dia and MassMOCA use quaint old industrial buildings; the Guggenheim cost over $100 million, while Dia plans to spend one fifth of that on its new museum.
What's more exciting about Dia's new museum is how it flies in the face of current museum-building trends. Museums are asked to do so much in contemporary cities: to revitalize downtowns, entertain children, sell tchotchkes, give rich people a place to hold parties, and then, of course, show art--that is, if the celebrity architect's fee and outlandish construction budget leave any money to buy it. Dia's new building is being pitched as a way to help revive the depressed community of Beacon through intelligent, economical re-use, not by building some modern-day cathedral of culture. Seattle has plenty of large vacant buildings, from South Lake Union and Ballard to Sand Point, and plenty of cultural gaps--including a lack of space to show large-scale sculpture. What's missing is people coming up with decent ideas for re-using these sites.
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All you need to know about the horridly flawed plans for the King County Convention and Trade Center expansion is this one word: Galleria. That's the moniker being attached to a monumental glass canopy, high above the ground, which the Convention Center plans to erect over an entire block of Pike Street. Amazingly, it's seen as a public amenity, to reward us for putting up with two massive, light-blocking skybridges also crossing the street. Galleria: that's an upscale mall in Houston, right? Fortunately, the new, architecturally savvy City Councilmembers, particularly Nick Licata, are now working to improve the center's impact on Pike Street, a crucial link between Capitol Hill and downtown. With luck, Allied Arts' calls for reduced skybridges, no Galleria, and human-scaled canopies will be heeded, and you won't end up feeling like you're walking through the set of Logan's Run every time you head downtown.
