Leading cultural figures in America and around the world are watching intently to see if they can beat the deadline.
We’ve got to get the funding to prove we can build, and the rest will fall into place, in my opinion.” “Unlike most major museums, because it’s the government, the Hirshhorn is woefully understaffed, with just one development person,” says Paul Schorr, the board treasurer. The museum has set itself a May 31 deadline and, as this issue was going to press, Koshalek estimated that he was $5 million short of the $12.5 million goal. But fund-raising is now at a crucial point. The project attracted several large donors early on, and several members of the Hirshhorn’s board have stepped up to the plate. Artists of all disciplines, says Koshalek, can leverage their art for social purposes, and the programs should be driven by artists themselves.īut the biggest challenge remains the funding. Philharmonic director Gustavo Dudamel, who has created orchestras for disadvantaged youth, to foster their skills and self-confidence. Though it’s too early to detail any specific events that could take place in the Bubble, Koshalek cites the “cultural diplomacy” of Daniel Barenboim, who brings together young Palestinian and Israeli musicians in his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, and L.A. In the past three years, Koshalek and his team have been working through the engineering problems, studying target audiences and conceptualizing the programming. Richard wants to put history in contemporary terms, to play it forward through modern devices, through a modern lens.”
INSIDE OUT THOUGHT BUBBLES GAME RECENT CHANGES SERIES
“There’s a certain complacency in that series of institutions, a long acquiescence to history. “He’s a flame thrower in a gray suit,” says Thom Mayne, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect who collaborated with Koshalek on several projects in L.A.
Trained as an architect at the University of Minnesota, he is a former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and former president of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Koshalek is, literally, a decorated veteran of many culture wars: The gray-haired, 71-year-old director can wear the chevalier of arts and letters pin from France’s Légion d’Honneur on the lapel of his deceptively conventional, pinstriped suit. But this is how museums are going to have to evolve in the future.” So the uproar for and against it didn’t land in the Big Surprise Department. “Thinking different,” it said.īut would the design fly in a strait-laced city like Washington-where other charismatic architectural ideas had been defeated before (notably Frank Gehry’s 1999 proposal for the Corcoran Gallery of Art)? “Washington is a city that needs a jolt,” says Koshalek, “but it has a long history of rejecting unusual projects. If buildings define the institutions they house, the inflatable (commonly called the Bubble) promised to be a daring, innovative, puckish signal that bright, unconventional minds are crackling inside. The brainchild of Hirshhorn director Richard Koshalek and New York architects Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, the off-kilter dome, jaunty as a beret, represented an invasion of asymmetrical architecture-even asymmetrical thinking-into America’s most symmetrical city. The design was described as a “seasonal inflatable structure” that would house pop-up think tanks about the arts around the world, transforming the nation’s contemporary art museum into a cultural Davos on the Mall. An architect’s rendering depicted a glowing, baby-blue balloon bulging up through the doughnut hole of the Hirshhorn Museum, with another smaller balloon squished out to the side, under the concrete building’s skirt. For more details, read our post on Around the Mall.Ī little over three years ago, what looked like a droll New Yorker cartoon landed in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. As a result, director Richard Koshalek resigned from his position, effective later this calendar year. UPDATE, May 23, 2013: The Hirshhorn board of trustees was unable to reach a decisive vote on the fate of the museum's bubble project. For more details, read our latest post on Around the Mall. UPDATE, June 5, 2013: The Smithsonian Institution announced today that it will not proceed with the "Bubble" project.
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