Portland critics find much to praise in the new Seattle Art Museum
Two Oregonian writers focus on the cunning interplay of narratives and architectural styles at the new SAM.
Two of the most discerning reviews of the new Seattle Art Museum, which opened over the weekend, come from critics D.K. Row and Randy Gragg, both writing for the Oregonian.
Gragg, the dean of Northwest architecture critics, calls the design by Portland architect Brad Cloepfil a "brilliant remodel," especially for the interaction between the old SAM, a post-modernist melange by Robert Venturi in 1991, and the new SAM, with its more modernist austerity of form. In working out these complex harmonies, Gragg writes, each building gets "wonderfully freed" from its theories, producing an exciting "duet" of old and new. Gragg also recounts the scheme for each floor, with four interlocking room structures with different qualities of light and ceiling heights that give curators lots of choices. He worries, though, that as this scheme is repeated on each subsequent floor above as the museum expands, it will seem too "relentless."
D.K. Row looks at the way the enlarged collection is displayed and finds "strikingly imaginative" narratives in the contrasting displays, some of which are subversive and off-hand, some of which release streams of ideas. He admires lots of the new art that the curators have to work with, particularly contemporary American work of a high order. But what really impresses him is the intelligence of the juxtapositions in the display, where SAM truly becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
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Comments:
Posted Sun, May 6, 11:17 p.m. inappropriate
It's very good, maybe better than very good.: The new SAM succeeds in all the ways which the Seattle Public Library fails.
SAM is a city comfort, a fine urban design which meets the sidewalk in a friendly and open way. Folks who were hoping for a piece of "iconic" self-reverential "freaky-tecture" will be disappointed. Those of us who believe that museums are about displaying art and about supporting a walkable city will be happy.
Posted Mon, May 7, 1:09 a.m. inappropriate
Its corporate.: The new SAM is a tribute to the universal utility of coprorate spaces. With little work, SAM could easily transmogrify should, lets say, Amazon or Msoft decide they wanted a downtown headquarters.
In a way, SAM continues Seattle's tradition of boring public buildings. It as if we were immunized by the Koolhaus library and the molten blob of an EMP NOT to try anything like that again.
Is this bad? Well ... traditionally art museums have celebrated architecture. I have seen the Louvre and the Guggenheim and Balboa .. and SAM is none of those. As a building, SAM's new home is unique in its lack of any statement. Without signage, no one would guess this was ab Art Museum.
In one way this is an improvement. After the beauty iof SAM 1.0 (the Volunteer Park version), SAM 2.0 was an abject failure. Utilizing a xerox machine instead of creativity, Venturi cloned his other buildings. The result made me eager to visit Southcenter's southern entrance to see something original! The trite piece of wind up toy design out front was a fitting cap to Venturi's mass produced mediocrity.
To make matters worse, SAM's collections are hidden behind a curtain of flotsam and jetsam ... miscellaneous acquisitions of Pop art, nice silver services, quaint oils of Mt. Rainier, or Mercury cars with light tubes pointing out set up as chandeliers. The impression is that Seattle has some rich folks who can afford to hire consultants to buy art.
What is neat is what one sees behind the boring entry and donator art ... several great collections ... African Art, Jacob Lawrence, Coastal Art, Pollack and Rothko, Tobey and Graves ..... The crow's screen alone makes one happy we have a place to see such things.
Better yet, the space meanders, one gets lost and then finds oneself amidst some neat work you didn't know or in one of the omnipresent workrooms for kids to play art or adults to play with puters.
Still, I find it hard to imagine that one of the gigarich won;t at some time decide that Seattle NEEDS a trophy museum! Or maybe we could move SAM into the Koolhaus and let the library move to a more usable space?
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