The Whitney Museum of American Art brags that it will soon have the largest column-free exhibition space of any museum or gallery in New York. The Broad Museum in Los Angeles claims that its own is unusually expansive. But as Christopher Hawthorne, the architecture critic for the LA Times, has pointed out, the Resnick Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) has one that is even bigger.
US museums have long been shameless about promoting the square footage of their exhibition spaces. But they are now vying for more specific bragging rights: namely, which institution has the largest “column-free” exhibition space.
In February, the $140m Broad Museum—a dynamic box of a building designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in downtown Los Angeles—reached a key moment in its construction: the third floor was structurally complete and art-hanging partitions had not yet been installed. A one-day public event was organised, well in advance of the official opening on 20 September, with light and sound installations designed to “highlight [the] museum’s architecture and vast, column-free gallery”, which spans “nearly an acre”.
A few months earlier, the Whitney reached a milestone in the development of its $422m Renzo Piano-designed building, which is due to open on 1 May. Staff tweeted an image of the exhibition space in progress, with the caption: “New York’s soon-to-be largest column-free museum gallery is starting to come together.” The gallery, which is dedicated to special exhibitions, will be around 18,000 sq. ft.
Size isn’t everything
What is all the fuss about? Most architects agree that “column-free” has become shorthand for “super-sized” and “mega-flexible”, two qualities that are highly valued in museums today. “It is a buzzword, and it’s not the be-all and end-all,” says Annabelle Selldorf, a New York-based architect who has created her own airy “column-free” spaces for gallerists such as David Zwirner.
The quest for high-ceilinged, wide-span spaces reflects changes in artistic practice over the past few decades, as more artists have begun to pursue sprawling installations, large sculptures and performance. As Selldorf notes: “From Richard Serra to Urs Fischer, artists are very demanding in terms of the kind of exhibition space they require. It’s got to be tall, it has to carry a heavy load and it has to be without obstruction. And columns, of course, are obstructions. We can’t yet make buildings supported by thin air… but we can try to anticipate works that you can’t anticipate.”
Kulapat Yantrasast, a Los Angeles-based architect, suggests that the trend is fuelled by a kind of futuristic fantasy or techno-utopian ideal. “Flexibility is such a key concept in our time because nobody wants to get stuck with one thing,” he says. “You buy a phone and you want the flexibility to upgrade, because we know that technology and experience are moving so fast.”
The problem, he adds, is that keeping their options open for the future means that architects might not be giving the building, or the art inside, the character or specificity it deserves. “Flexibility comes at a price. And you end up having to put up partitions and walls, anyway, so it never really works that well,” he says.
Piano’s inside-out design
Renzo Piano is probably the architect most closely associated with this trend, starting with his 1970s collaboration with Richard Rogers on Paris’s Centre Pompidou, which famously placed the building’s escalators, lifts, mechanical systems and more on the exterior to create a vast, uninterrupted space inside. The museum’s column-free expanse is considered one of its greatest strengths but also a flaw. As Yantrasast points out, the empty, “factory-like” nature of the beast gives curators the ability to reinvent within a given footprint—and puts pressure on them to do so constantly.
More recently, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (Bcam), which opened in 2008, and the Resnick Pavilion, both designed by Piano for Lacma, incorporated wide-open spaces that seem to speak to the horizontality of the Western landscape. While Bcam was under construction, Eli Broad, the businessman and philanthropist who funded almost all of the building costs, praised the flexibility of the space—especially the top floor, which is around 20,000 sq. ft. “I can’t think of another space, except portions of the Grand Palais in Paris, with this size without columns. We felt it was very important not to have columns,” he said.
Expensive to adjust
When it opened, Bcam seemed tailor-made for the largest pieces in the Broad collection. Now that Eli and Edythe Broad have reclaimed that material for their own, new museum, Lacma’s curators are considering how to make the most of the super-sized space. Its interior walls are reportedly extremely expensive to move and have not been adjusted frequently (nor, for that matter, has the configuration that divides up the 45,000 sq. ft of the Resnick Pavilion).
At the new Broad Museum, “column-free” was never part of the design mandate, according to the architect Elizabeth Diller. Rather, she says, it grew organically out of a desire to transform the top floor into a naturally lit exhibition space. Since their skylights require a certain depth of field (seven feet) to create even light, the architects had enough room to embed steel beams that would support the weight of the roof.
Diller says that most builders, “if they had their way, would have columns every 30ft, because that’s a cheap module”, although the standard today for large contemporary art spaces is more like 50ft or 60ft. In this case, the span of the building—200ft by 200ft—is column-free. “We did two large galleries at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, but this is a much, much bigger space,” Diller said during a tour last month. Looking across the length of the room, she added: “It does change when it starts to get populated by art and walls. There may be some time again when there’s nothing in here… that’s the dream, anyway.”