In the parched, windowless landscapes of contemporary exhibition halls, the void of setting has become integral to the artworks. Since Brian O’Doherty published Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space in a 1976 issue of Artforum, sterile contemporary gallery spaces have been evaluated and criticized many times over. Consciously blocking out reality, they rely on the lack of context to have autonomy and create their own rules.
The exhibit, White Cube, Green Maze: New Art Landscapes at the Heinz Architectural Institute, is a showcase of six museums that are challenging the boundaries of the cube. The Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, Stiftung Insel Hombroich in Germany, Benesse Art Site Naoshima in Japan, Instituto Inhotim in Brazil, Jardín Botánico de Culiacán in Mexico and Grand Traiano Art Complex in Italy are each featured with an area of the gallery floor. Through architectural models, blueprints, photographs, videos, and touch screen kiosks, this exhibit challenges the idea that a sterile “white cube” environment is in fact what is best for art. These six museums are exemplary of a growing trend in museum design that posits integration and inspiration from nature as favorable and fruitful for both the art and the audience.
So the psychological Ziploc of the museum has been ripped open to let the foliage in. But what exactly is the “green maze”? The term conjures images of pristine forests, green spaces that sprawl beyond human fingertips. However, that is not true in the case of these six sites. They’re all built on former brownfield or industrial sites, a fact that was perhaps not celebrated enough in the exhibit, considering the legacy of industrial cleanup for which Pittsburgh has become the poster child.
The sites chosen for this exhibit are unique and monumental, and require someone like the Julius Shulman Photography Award winning photographer, Iwan Baan, to document them. Although his focus in architectural photography only began in 2004, he has become well known for his ability to capture a building in a narrative manner that illustrates the function of a space, not just its form. In the glossy museum prints, children play with bright yellow umbrellas by Dan Graham’s mirrored work in the Jardin Botánico and the sun sets on families picnicking at the inlet at Olympic Sculpture Park.
Aside from the multitude of prints that document the sites, the meticulously crafted architectural models give visitors a sense of the museum space and physicality. At Benesse Art Site Naoshima the water droplet inspired Teshima Art Museum is nestled in between once fallow rice terraces, but the exhibit gives viewers the unique opportunity to see it stripped down to its basic form as the architects originally conceived it. Linked to increasing devotion to ecological issues and global conversations about sustainable and engaging architecture, this exhibit is a small but comprehensive sample of a much larger trend. With growing concern over messages of priority imbedded in museum architecture, this is a taste of the greener future ahead.
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