New York being what it is, our museums are vertical, not horizontal. That means the stumbling blocks to architectural clarity are unavoidable - but certainly surmountable.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
It's great that New York has large spaces for art. But the enormous immaculate box has become a dated, even oppressive place. Many of these spaces were designed for sprawling installations, large paintings, and the Relational Aesthetics work of the past fifteen years.
I think there is a new awareness in this 21st century that design is as important to where and how we live as it is for museums, concert halls and civic buildings.
The design of a city is like a strange archeology.
Museums are like the quiet car of the world. It's a place you can come to escape, where there's authenticity, there's uniqueness, there's calm, there's physicality.
And then, build a bustling wonderful city of the 21st century, with a restoration of a spectacular skyline, which Manhattan, of course, needs. So, that is really the design as a whole.
Museums are not normally presenting the works on the walls as provocations to work. It's more like going to a Jacuzzi.
Chicago's one of the rare places where architecture is more visible.
Museums are managers of consciousness. They give us an interpretation of history, of how to view the world and locate ourselves in it. They are, if you want to put it in positive terms, great educational institutions. If you want to put it in negative terms, they are propaganda machines.
Anyone who relishes art should love the extraordinary diversity and psychic magic of our art galleries. There's likely more combined square footage for the showing of art on one New York block - West 24th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues - than in all of Amsterdam's or Hamburg's galleries.
We have created indoor installations inside museums, like the Wrapped Floor at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1968, and not monumental at all by any standards.