If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and architecture about art is like Lego about crayons, then writing about architecture about art is like dancing about Lego about crayons. Let’s give it a scribble.
ADFF: VANCOUVER film fest touched down in 2024 like a Concorde concrète, its victorious visual voyage piloted by Anne Pearson & Leah Mallen (YVR), and Kyle Bergman (NYC). Among its combustible cargo is the riveting Rotterdam art gallery doc “DEPOT – Reflecting Boijmans” by Sonia Herman Dolz.
Art gallery architecture hangs humid in the Vancouver cultural air. Patkau Architects just aced two surgically-sited, tectonically articulate galleries, in their Audain Art Museum and Polygon Art Gallery. Leah Mallen’s film “Arthur Erickson: Beauty Between the Lines” widescreens the cinematic clarity of his 2002 Museum of Glass. Arthur’s 100th anniversary evokes also the 1983 Vancouver Art Gallery, that sensitive recontextualization of Francis Rattenbury’s 1912 provincial courthouse, as part of the radical and muscular Robson Square. And now, we moist Metro metropolitans salivate Pavlovian in anticipation of our haute New Vancouver Art Gallery with its Swiss-Pritzker pedigree. Surely Herzog & de Meuron & Perkins & will generate a masterwork.
Dutch director Dolz’ DEPOT continues the current civic conversation concerning art architecture.
For Vancouver, Herzog & de Meuron’s Simon Demeuse and Christine Binswanger weave art materially into the gallery, stacking multiple masses of copper and wood, a contemporary reference to West Coast Indigenous bentwood boxes. In Rotterdam, MVRDV’s Fokke Moerel, Arjen Ketting, and Winy Maas’ shiny mass is a compact reflective ovoid that stores art like a scaled-up Droog file folder.
Rotterdam. There must be something in the waterdam. Dual point of origin for the creativity of OMA/Rem Koolhaas, and the urban wit of MVRDV. As architects MVRDV are not neutral, they’re bluntly unconventional, yet precisely conscious of urban and cultural context. Witness the heterogeneity of their art galleries (Depot Boijmans, Sotheby’s Maison), libraries (Book Mountain, Tianjin Binhai), pavilions (Expo 2000, Stairs to Kriterion), housing (Balancing Barn, Valley, Future Towers), and civic mixed-use projects (Markthal Rotterdam). MVRDV has a method, not a style, and under their apparently gestural boldness lies a precise analytical eye for the site.
DEPOT follows architect Winy Maas and museum director Sjarel Ex, informal tour guides through the 2017-2021 build of “Depot Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen”. The world’s first fully accessible art depot, it’s designed to store irreplaceable art during the 10-year renovation of flood-plagued Municipal Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. The existing 1935 Museum is a major Rotterdam art gallery, with art by El Bosco, Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Mark Rothko, Yayoi Kusama, Titorento, Rembrandt, Monet, van Gogh, Hieronymous Bosch and more. Serious water ingress has rendered it hostile to art. “The building is on life support” exclaims exasperated Ex, and there’s something Cronenberg about the old museum’s wet walls and ventilating umbilical cords.
As architecture, Depot Boijmans is a maximal minimal statement. A Kubrick monolith, a mute yet activating form, similar in effect to Anish Kapoor’s mirrored Cloud Gate in Chicago. Its convex reflects and genuflects. Salad on the bowl is a roof garden, upper floors are generous art storage, and at plaza the populace prove primary. Artists John Körmeling and Marieke van Diemen design the interior, and main entry is marked by a quirky sculptural projection tower for the video art of Pippilotti Rist.
A typical art depot is a basic storage facility for fine art; at Boijmans the twist is total public access to the 154,000-piece collection for the decade-long museum renovation. On public request, curators roll out sliding steel-mesh collection walls to reveal paintings hung centimeters and centuries apart. Old pieces require art storage as hermetically climate-and-moisture-controlled as a space station, so to humanize, the architects carve out a generous atrium through the centre, spanned by glass vitrines to showcase key works, transforming cross sections into mood escalators. Maurizio Cattelan’s iconic self-sculpture, freed from his hole in the museum floor, now swims in an aerial vitrine like a Damien Hirst shark.
A joy of the film is the amiable architect-client relationship between mighty Maas and ex-director Ex. Decision made, they laugh. Construction phase complete, they laugh. Was the 1930s team of city architect Adrian van der Steur and museum director Dirk Hannema this casual? Depot is audacious, and Maas and Ex are pushing it. “Only in the Netherlands” they mutter, like brothers conspiring to pull off a cheeky prank. There are two kinds of people in this world: People who compromise, and the Dutch.
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Check out “Depot”, “Erickson”, “6 Points”, “Stardust” and more at…
… ADFF: Mumbai Jan 9-12, 2025 and ADFF:Chicago Jan 29-Feb 2, 2025
… ADFF: ONLINE April 3-Aug 4 2025, tix https://adfilmfest.com/adff-online/
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Derek DeLand has designed the architecture of tall towers, urban tech hubs, entertainment, hotels, art schools, theatres, residential, Passive Haus, seniors housing, master plans, skateplazas, skateparks, public art and competitions. • Vancouver-based, with built work in BC, Canada, Seattle, UK, Mexico and even Paris, Derek has collaborated with a wide range of clients, from municipalities to high-profile developers to BC Housing. • Educated at U of Calgary and UBC SALA, Derek has been featured in Migrating Landscapes for the Venice Biennale of Architecture, has an award from IOC IPC IAKS for sport architecture, awards for concrete design from BCRMCA and Ontario Concrete, and a Certificate of Recognition from the AIBC. • Also a writer, he’s been published in Architizer, Spacing, Canadian Architect, and international design books and magazines, and has done public speaking in Los Angeles and the UK. • Derek’s architecture is idea-driven, highly creative, sculptural, movement-oriented, tectonic and experiential.
