The new site of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art opened to the public on June 12: let us remind you that this is the reconstructed Soviet restaurant “Vremena Goda”. Speaking to reporters two days earlier, OMA founder Rem Koolhaas noted that this project had a special meaning for him from the very beginning. Why did he say that? Is it because it was with a trip to Moscow in the mid-sixties that his interest in architecture began? Or because he finally managed to build something in Russia? Or is it just politeness? In search of an answer to this question, let's turn to the OMA portfolio.
Koolhaas has relatively few completed museum projects - eight or nine (it is difficult to determine more precisely, since Garage and the Prada Foundation are still listed on the OMA website among those under construction, and among the built museums include, for example, the Museumpark in Rotterdam, which is not a museum in itself).
The first museum building designed by OMA was the Kunsthal, which opened in 1992 in Koolhaas's hometown of Rotterdam. At first glance, the Kunsthal is much more complex than the "Garage": it is one and a half times larger in area, its facades are more varied, and inside it is completely sloped floors and irregularly shaped holes in the walls and ceilings.
But this is where the similarities begin. Both buildings can be called “museums without a collection” - the Kunsthal calls itself so almost officially, while “Garage” has its own collection just being formed. At the same time, the interior spaces intended for exhibitions in both buildings are by no means neutral. They have a very different shape, sometimes not too high ceilings, and the decoration of the walls, both here and there, can hardly be called calm. It is for this "tightness and fussiness of space" that some commentators now criticize Garage. But Koolhaas seems to have a different opinion: he believes that places for exhibiting art should not be monumental in and of themselves.
His own taste for contemporary art, Koolhaas says, was shaped by curator Willem Sandberg, who headed the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam from 1945 to 1963 (Koolhaas himself lived in Amsterdam from 1955 to 1968). Exhibitions of contemporary art, Russian and European avant-garde, concerts of contemporary music and screenings of contemporary cinema in the Amsterdam Museum were held in an unpretentious two-story building built in 1954 measuring only 24x10 m, which, according to Koolhaas, looks more like a “small school”. This modest shed under a gable roof housed, in addition to exhibition halls, a library, a printing house, a cafe and an auditorium for concerts and lectures. The Sandberg wing successfully introduced contemporary art to the inhabitants of Amsterdam until 2004, when it was decided to replace it with a more modern and large-scale extension.
Speaking of most contemporary art museums, Koolhaas emphasizes that they primarily “provide gigantic volumes of empty space for use” and cites as a key example the famous “Turbine Hall” of the Tate Modern in London, which “has become practically a symbol of our time.
As a result, Koolhaas continues, “the artists are forced to perform in a kind of apocalyptic manner,” because only the strongest emotions can compete with spaces of this scale. There is no place for nuances. "Art is becoming more and more authoritarian." In OMA projects, on the contrary, the variety of spaces, according to Koolhaas, allows artists and curators to work with more subtle matters.
The Kunsthal differs from most art museums also in that its architect not only offered the visitor a set of various premises with exhibits, but strung them on a certain route of movement. Koolhaas, himself a screenwriter in the past, believes that the architect must think over the scenarios for the use of space in advance.
Perhaps it would be easier for curators to work with volumes that are neutral in design and simple in form, with a neutral environment that does not impose their own scenarios? But contemporary art, which is polemical in nature, must respond to its surroundings. If you have nothing to react to, you just have to limit yourself to techniques that evoke the strongest emotions.
The same principles of scenario programming of the museum space and its formation from premises of various sizes and proportions, which were applied in the Kunsthala, can be traced in other museums built by OMA, for example, in two projects for Seoul (Leeum Museum, 2004 and Seoul National University Museum of Art, 2005). We meet the same principles in Garage.
But, perhaps, not all the ideas that Koolhaas came up with while working on museum projects have already been implemented in the constructed buildings? It looks like it is. “Participation in the big museum boom was not very successful for us,” Koolhaas admits, and shows a slide from which it follows that the unrealized projects of contemporary art museums issued by OMA are equivalent in size to thirty-four football fields. What other interesting thoughts can you find in these open spaces? In particular, they relate to methods of working with historical material.
In the 2000s, while advising the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Koolhaas was impressed by the neglected interiors of the General Staff and some of the premises of the Hermitage itself, which are not shown to the public. He asked questions: “Does every museum need modernization? Perhaps inaction is sometimes required? Could the reluctance to change become a tool that would heighten the sense of authenticity that is often lost during modernization? Shouldn't an architect act as an archaeologist in certain cases?"
Talking about the Hermitage Project in his speeches, Koolhaas demonstrates collages in which masterpieces of world art are exhibited against the backdrop of dilapidated palace interiors. The idea was that the combination of the most outstanding works with the most miserable and neglected (but at the same time old and genuine) environment multiplies the effect of these works on the viewer. Thanks to this, subtle, delicate matters become equal in strength of influence to the primitive effects of "authoritarian" art.
For the first time, Koolhaas was able to put into practice this instrument for enhancing emotions, proposed within the framework of the Hermitage Project, in the Garage. Of course, the ruin of the "Seasons" is slightly weakened by the restoration. The shabby walls seem to have been varnished, and the crumbling plaster does not crunch under the feet of the visitors, as it seemed when looking at the sketches. But the tool is still powerful.
There is a significant difference between the Hermitage and the Garage: the first exhibits recognized masterpieces, and the second, after all, will focus on new, contemporary art. Will Koolhaas' magnifying glass work in this case? It will work if there is something to increase. Working with such a space is a serious challenge for both artists and curators. Strong emotions are guaranteed to them for sure. ***
In the work on the article, materials of lectures given by Ram Koolhaas in
Museum of Modern Art at (Moderna Museet) in Stockholm in March 2013 [see. video of the lecture] and at the Fondation Galeries Lafayette in Paris in July 2014 [see. video of the lecture].
