- Sketch by Antoine Predock for the Tacoma Art Museum
I remember the days when we arts writers were continuously invited to press conferences that were not about the arts. They were about architecture. The building boom in the Seattle area alone was estimated to have cost $1 billion from start to finish—Robert Venturi’s downtown SAM to Allied Arts’s do-over of Robert Venturi’s downtown SAM—and it included dozens of buildings in both Seattle and Tacoma. The Edifice Complex, it was called. And it was inspired by The Bilbao Effect.
Last week, NYT architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff declared this epoch over. And that’s not such a bad thing. It was exciting, writing about all those buildings. But so much money was sunk into buildings that funders forgot that they were also supposed to pay for, you know, art and its plain old maintenance (not to mention, in many cases, for the care and feeding of buildings after they’re built).
But today comes the news that the Bilbao Guggenheim is considering trying to revive another depressed town using the museum-as-medicine treatment, this time near Guernica in a place called Urdaibai. It’s being sold as a “green” project, but not everybody’s buying it…
Allied Works, not Allied Arts.
Building a major tourist attraction away from a city is not green, no matter spiffy it looks or how many trees or whatever are around it. Transportation miles and single-story buildings’ heat loss and urban sprawl, are not green.
If they want green, they should put it in a skyscraper.