S
SD2
Guest
I know...but still...
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Art Gallery of Alberta (formerly Edmonton Art Gallery) goes to Stout
I know...but still...
B
building babel
Guest
The building increases from 50,000 to 80,000 square feet. There will now be a total of 35,000 square feet of exhibition space.
It is a smallish regional gallery compared to the AGO, which will get 97,000 square feet of new space in their renovation.
The OCAD renovation added about 66,000 square feet of new space and cost $42 million.
It is a smallish regional gallery compared to the AGO, which will get 97,000 square feet of new space in their renovation.
The OCAD renovation added about 66,000 square feet of new space and cost $42 million.
3
3Dementia
Guest
Looks like the entrance to an employee cafeteria at Bilbao's Guggenheim.
N
nassauone
Guest
My SO's pops sits on the Edmonton Art Gallery's board and has told me that Alsop said some nasty stuff about Edmonton which probably cost him the job and that Hadid didn't even see the site. AE's plan was just too dates. All in all they are totally stoked that the competition has gotten folks in the big smoke talking!
B
building babel
Guest
Considering how low their attendance figures appear to be, they're probably thrilled when people in their own city talk about them.
C
cdl42
Guest
"When he travelled out west last week to make his pitch, Alsop began by telling Edmontonians their city is a mess. He said the same thing to OCAD officials when he gave his presentation here five years ago. They might have been shocked but clearly they liked what they heard. Just days after the session, Alsop found out he’d won the job. [...]
“You haven’t got a bloody clue what you’ve got here,†Alsop admonished his Toronto guests playfully. “But we’re here to help. We architects are not accountants or lawyers who deal in gloom. We deal in joy.â€"
------------------------
Hmmmm? Can Edmontonians not handle criticism and would rather be showered with shallow praise?
C
cdl42
Guest
From the Edmonton Journal:
For Edmontonians passionate about art and design, this was a true Stanley Cup playoff.
First up was British bad-boy architect Will Alsop.
"I have to say I hated Edmonton. Edmonton is not a great city."
You could hear a little wounded gasp from the room.
Into the hurt silence, Alsop added, "I will love this city, but there's a lot to do." No one, he told the audience, has ever heard of Edmonton or the Edmonton Art Gallery. "The existing gallery is clearly miserable, unapproachable and unimpressive."
Alsop went on to present an enticing vision of a fun and mischievous architectural space, a soaring, daring cathedral-in-a-bag that would connect directly with Churchill Square, animate the plaza and pull people inside to a carnival of art.
But Alsop himself admitted that his proposal went well beyond the art gallery's given budget and it was hard to tell from his presentation just how practical his design could ever be.
For Edmontonians passionate about art and design, this was a true Stanley Cup playoff.
First up was British bad-boy architect Will Alsop.
"I have to say I hated Edmonton. Edmonton is not a great city."
You could hear a little wounded gasp from the room.
Into the hurt silence, Alsop added, "I will love this city, but there's a lot to do." No one, he told the audience, has ever heard of Edmonton or the Edmonton Art Gallery. "The existing gallery is clearly miserable, unapproachable and unimpressive."
Alsop went on to present an enticing vision of a fun and mischievous architectural space, a soaring, daring cathedral-in-a-bag that would connect directly with Churchill Square, animate the plaza and pull people inside to a carnival of art.
But Alsop himself admitted that his proposal went well beyond the art gallery's given budget and it was hard to tell from his presentation just how practical his design could ever be.
B
BuildTO
Guest
Yike. That's a little harsh. Prolly made it really easy for them to pay attention to this:
G
GeekyBoyTO
Guest
Lisa Rochon on Stout's scheme, in the Globe:
CITYSPACE
A Gehry knock-off, but still needed
Edmonton's art gallery gets all dolled up, writes LISA ROCHON
By LISA ROCHON
Thursday, October 20, 2005 Page R3
Who can blame Edmonton for wanting to keep up with the Joneses, and commissioning some badly needed plastic surgery for its nearly invisible art gallery? The choice was painfully clear: Either doll up the place or permanently genuflect to the rebranded institutions of elsewhere.
The winning design is a Frank Gehry knock-off by Randall Stout, an American architect who learned the language of the big wow working beside the master in Los Angeles for seven years. There's little original thought behind the body wrap that Stout has imagined for the gallery, but that doesn't qualify as an indictment. Without this and more interventions that reach for the sublime, Edmonton dies.
The Edmonton Art Gallery, renamed as the Art Gallery of Alberta amid last week's competition hoopla, sits across from the City Hall and diagonally across from Sir Winston Churchill Square. In the $48-million redevelopment and expansion of an existing building, the gallery's public functions -- café, rental galleries -- are exposed to the street by way of enormous glass windows framed with ribbons of steel. If the gallery has long been missing in action, it'll be impossible to ignore the new edifice, gesturing loudly to draw attention to itself.
"We're trying to load up that corner facing Churchill Square," says Stout, referring to the need to animate the square given that it often sits empty and alone. "We enter the building on that corner. We've arranged the grand spaces of the gallery, the member's lounge, the grand staircase with a pair of public elevators, the boardroom, all in that zone of the building."
Notice in the above quote that there's no mention of art. That's because the repackaged gallery in the 21st century places a particular emphasis on consumption of edibles and nifty widgets over the contemplation of art. Apparently, satisfying our stomachs matters more than filling our brains. At the $210-million redevelopment of Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum, there's only an 18-per-cent net gain of new gallery space. Retail, restaurants and a café/bar will triple their current footprint at the ROM. In the case of the Art Gallery of Alberta, only about 9,000 square feet will be dedicated to new gallery space. More than 20,000 square feet goes to public space, retail and restaurants.
The permanent collection doesn't appear to matter much. Apart from large welded objects -- a particular fixation of Terry Fenton, the gallery's director during most of the 1970s and 80s -- there is a collection of abstract art, photography and aboriginal works. The emphasis will be on accommodating travelling exhibitions that come from elsewhere.
Stout leads a small office in Los Angeles where he "occasionally runs into Frank." His practice enters two or three competitions each year for art galleries in mid-size cities and towns. Often, because they're intensely focused on reimaging a community through architecture, they win. When it opens in 2007, the $46-million Art Museum of Western Virginia in Roanoke will showcase interlocking roofs in stainless steel and angled walls clad in panels of zinc. The hope is that Stout's design for the museum will do for Roanoke, Va., -- and Edmonton -- what Gehry did for Bilbao, Spain.
Among the competitors for the Art Gallery of Alberta, it was Stout who took the time to hang out in the city and learn its geography as if he were a long-time resident. The plan for the Alberta gallery is solid with an exterior sculpture court that extends the museum into the streets. As well, Stout integrated the city's light-rail transit into the gallery design.
What is unforgivable, however, is Stout's overworked use of the metaphor. Daniel Libeskind, the ROM's design architect, labours under the same pretension. Newly arrived in Edmonton from the hot Californian sun, Stout described his design not in terms of architecture and structure but of finding inspiration in the stacked rock compositions of inukshuks. Nice. The ribbons of stainless steel -- or whatever material they might become -- are inspired from the aurora borealis. Uh-huh. Not even the North Saskatchewan River was left alone -- it helps to explain the need for the building's undulations. Naturally.
In the end, Stout beat out schemes by three other firms. Alsop & Partners with Quadrangle Architects produced a building that appeared to be a brightly coloured parking lot. Zaha Hadid of London might have won the jury's attention with a building topped by a couple of large periscopes but having twice been rejected from building in Canada and failing to win recent competitions at the University of British Columbia and the Grande Bibliothèque du Québec in Montreal, her heart wasn't in it. She failed to show up twice for major presentations in Edmonton and was docked accordingly. Arthur Erickson/Nick Milkovich with Dub Architects resisted the temptation to produce loud, derivative schemes to offer something of civic gravitas and delight. But the team's graphics failed to communicate powerfully to the jury.
You know that a city's architecture is in serious trouble when competent is the highest form of flattery. And, though Edmonton's mayor Stephen Mandel condemned the pervasive ugliness of the city last year and insisted in a formal speech that "our tolerance for crap is now zero," a funny thing happened in May: Cohos Evamy Architecture, the Alberta-based makers of much that is competent but only just, were selected to design the $150-million revamp of the Royal Alberta Museum, beating out a stellar roster of competitors led by Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg; Moriyama + Teshima Architects with Manasc Isaac Architects; and Diamond + Schmitt Architects with Rockcliff Pierzchajlo.
If Mandel is serious about recasting the image of Edmonton, ensuring that serious competitions with expert juries are organized for all public buildings is but one step in the right direction. Or do nothing at all, and condemn the city to living life as the ugly sister.
There was a time when North Americans would travel across the Atlantic to inhale European culture. This is the intent of the refashioned Art Gallery of Alberta -- to offer a taste of bravado architecture as a restorative measure within the architectural desert of Edmonton. Framed anew with monumental licks effectively banishes the concept of the sober modern house originally designed by the Edmonton modernist Don Bittorf in the late 1960s.
Now, however, the corset has come undone. The revelry has begun. If swoopy bands of steel manage to lure people out of the West Edmonton Mall and into the gallery then, by all means, bring it on, baby, bring it on.
_________________________________________________
Fortunately for her, I suspect Martin Knelman doesn't give much of a hoot about EAG as he does for Asper's Museum of Human Rights (in which he chastized the "Torontocentric" media for the "biases", in the Toronto Star, no less).
CITYSPACE
A Gehry knock-off, but still needed
Edmonton's art gallery gets all dolled up, writes LISA ROCHON
By LISA ROCHON
Thursday, October 20, 2005 Page R3
Who can blame Edmonton for wanting to keep up with the Joneses, and commissioning some badly needed plastic surgery for its nearly invisible art gallery? The choice was painfully clear: Either doll up the place or permanently genuflect to the rebranded institutions of elsewhere.
The winning design is a Frank Gehry knock-off by Randall Stout, an American architect who learned the language of the big wow working beside the master in Los Angeles for seven years. There's little original thought behind the body wrap that Stout has imagined for the gallery, but that doesn't qualify as an indictment. Without this and more interventions that reach for the sublime, Edmonton dies.
The Edmonton Art Gallery, renamed as the Art Gallery of Alberta amid last week's competition hoopla, sits across from the City Hall and diagonally across from Sir Winston Churchill Square. In the $48-million redevelopment and expansion of an existing building, the gallery's public functions -- café, rental galleries -- are exposed to the street by way of enormous glass windows framed with ribbons of steel. If the gallery has long been missing in action, it'll be impossible to ignore the new edifice, gesturing loudly to draw attention to itself.
"We're trying to load up that corner facing Churchill Square," says Stout, referring to the need to animate the square given that it often sits empty and alone. "We enter the building on that corner. We've arranged the grand spaces of the gallery, the member's lounge, the grand staircase with a pair of public elevators, the boardroom, all in that zone of the building."
Notice in the above quote that there's no mention of art. That's because the repackaged gallery in the 21st century places a particular emphasis on consumption of edibles and nifty widgets over the contemplation of art. Apparently, satisfying our stomachs matters more than filling our brains. At the $210-million redevelopment of Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum, there's only an 18-per-cent net gain of new gallery space. Retail, restaurants and a café/bar will triple their current footprint at the ROM. In the case of the Art Gallery of Alberta, only about 9,000 square feet will be dedicated to new gallery space. More than 20,000 square feet goes to public space, retail and restaurants.
The permanent collection doesn't appear to matter much. Apart from large welded objects -- a particular fixation of Terry Fenton, the gallery's director during most of the 1970s and 80s -- there is a collection of abstract art, photography and aboriginal works. The emphasis will be on accommodating travelling exhibitions that come from elsewhere.
Stout leads a small office in Los Angeles where he "occasionally runs into Frank." His practice enters two or three competitions each year for art galleries in mid-size cities and towns. Often, because they're intensely focused on reimaging a community through architecture, they win. When it opens in 2007, the $46-million Art Museum of Western Virginia in Roanoke will showcase interlocking roofs in stainless steel and angled walls clad in panels of zinc. The hope is that Stout's design for the museum will do for Roanoke, Va., -- and Edmonton -- what Gehry did for Bilbao, Spain.
Among the competitors for the Art Gallery of Alberta, it was Stout who took the time to hang out in the city and learn its geography as if he were a long-time resident. The plan for the Alberta gallery is solid with an exterior sculpture court that extends the museum into the streets. As well, Stout integrated the city's light-rail transit into the gallery design.
What is unforgivable, however, is Stout's overworked use of the metaphor. Daniel Libeskind, the ROM's design architect, labours under the same pretension. Newly arrived in Edmonton from the hot Californian sun, Stout described his design not in terms of architecture and structure but of finding inspiration in the stacked rock compositions of inukshuks. Nice. The ribbons of stainless steel -- or whatever material they might become -- are inspired from the aurora borealis. Uh-huh. Not even the North Saskatchewan River was left alone -- it helps to explain the need for the building's undulations. Naturally.
In the end, Stout beat out schemes by three other firms. Alsop & Partners with Quadrangle Architects produced a building that appeared to be a brightly coloured parking lot. Zaha Hadid of London might have won the jury's attention with a building topped by a couple of large periscopes but having twice been rejected from building in Canada and failing to win recent competitions at the University of British Columbia and the Grande Bibliothèque du Québec in Montreal, her heart wasn't in it. She failed to show up twice for major presentations in Edmonton and was docked accordingly. Arthur Erickson/Nick Milkovich with Dub Architects resisted the temptation to produce loud, derivative schemes to offer something of civic gravitas and delight. But the team's graphics failed to communicate powerfully to the jury.
You know that a city's architecture is in serious trouble when competent is the highest form of flattery. And, though Edmonton's mayor Stephen Mandel condemned the pervasive ugliness of the city last year and insisted in a formal speech that "our tolerance for crap is now zero," a funny thing happened in May: Cohos Evamy Architecture, the Alberta-based makers of much that is competent but only just, were selected to design the $150-million revamp of the Royal Alberta Museum, beating out a stellar roster of competitors led by Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg; Moriyama + Teshima Architects with Manasc Isaac Architects; and Diamond + Schmitt Architects with Rockcliff Pierzchajlo.
If Mandel is serious about recasting the image of Edmonton, ensuring that serious competitions with expert juries are organized for all public buildings is but one step in the right direction. Or do nothing at all, and condemn the city to living life as the ugly sister.
There was a time when North Americans would travel across the Atlantic to inhale European culture. This is the intent of the refashioned Art Gallery of Alberta -- to offer a taste of bravado architecture as a restorative measure within the architectural desert of Edmonton. Framed anew with monumental licks effectively banishes the concept of the sober modern house originally designed by the Edmonton modernist Don Bittorf in the late 1960s.
Now, however, the corset has come undone. The revelry has begun. If swoopy bands of steel manage to lure people out of the West Edmonton Mall and into the gallery then, by all means, bring it on, baby, bring it on.
_________________________________________________
Fortunately for her, I suspect Martin Knelman doesn't give much of a hoot about EAG as he does for Asper's Museum of Human Rights (in which he chastized the "Torontocentric" media for the "biases", in the Toronto Star, no less).
ShonTron
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I got to see this new Art Gallery of Alberta design for myself. The Daily Show writers quip on "architecture inspired by, but cheaper than, Frank Gehry", holds true. The building just doesn't work for me.
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