Offhand I can’t recall seeing a more ridiculous looking building than the new Stedelijk Museum, which recently opened in Amsterdam. Shaped like a bathtub, of all things, it arrives years behind schedule at the tail end of the money-fueled, headline-hungry, erratically ingenious era of indulgent museum design that began to peter out with the global economy. Compared with no-frills, cost-effective, almost penitential, post-meltdown designs like Herzog & de Meuron’s stylish Parrish Art Museum in the Hamptons, it’s a throwback.
The bathtub is above the ground floor of the new Stedelijk Museum. The lead architect says the tub is a technological novelty that gives a nod to the old Stedelijk’s white rooms.On a crowded weekend the narrow, cluttered, glassed-in lobby, roughly where the tub’s drain would be, was badly clogged. The galleries beyond flowed seamlessly into the museum’s old building. The collection looked great.
But entering an oversize plumbing fixture to commune with classic modern art is like hearing Bach played by a man wearing a clown suit.
Why a tub? That’s the $170 million (well over budget) question. Benthem Crouwel, the Amsterdam firm that designed it, hasn’t explained. At 130,000 square feet, the new Stedelijk (pronounced STEH-duh-lick) gloms onto the rear of the old one, a beloved red-and-white-striped, late-nineteenth-century Neo-Renaissance brick pile by Adriaan Willem Weissman. The new building flips the museum entrance, so that it now faces Museum Plaza, a scruffy greensward around which the Concertgebouw, the Rijksmuseum, and the Van Gogh Museum are scattered.
The ambition: update the old building and add exhibition space along with a restaurant and store on the ground floor facing the plaza. There the new Stedelijk, its jutting roof acting as an enormous canopy, is intended to activate the plaza’s northwest corner. All logical-sounding enough. But what transpired seems another case of civic icon-envy.
The old Stedelijk pioneered the collecting of modern art and design in postwar Europe. Its white-box interior was widely imitated. The place became a people’s palace for contemporary culture. A wing was added during the 1950s to promote local and experimental art, and to be a host for happenings and cultural protests. It was a very Dutch sort of democratic gesture.
I loved the old Stedelijk when I started visiting it, twenty-odd years ago. Its grand staircase, creaky herringbone floors, laid-back vibe and modish art mixed quaint and cool. But by then museums like the Pompidou in Paris were already overshadowing it. To get its mojo back the Stedelijk enlisted Robert Venturi, then Álvaro Siza; both of their plans proved unworkable. The project stalled. The Guggenheim opened in Bilbao, Spain, and the Tate Modern in London.
Benthem Crouwel’s gonzo design suggests a kind of desperation in Amsterdam’s reaction to Bilbao. That said, this city has been suffering through a decade or more of disruptive and costly infrastructural and other construction, much of it unfinished and shortsighted. People here have been angry and frustrated. So the completion of the new Stedelijk, not long after the arrival of a spectacular new film institute, the Eye, designed by the Austrian architects Delugan Meissl, was greeted generously. The feeling was relief, a reaction notable for a capital previously unaccustomed to new architecture that declines to blend in.
This is fine, even admirable, but it doesn’t mean the bathtub is too. Mels Crouwel, the lead architect for the Stedelijk, was a government architect for years. His firm is normally reliable, with an industrial bent. He promoted the tub as a technological novelty, its aerodynamic exterior made of a reinforced synthetic fiber coated in white airplane paint to give the museum a shiny, enameled finish and to nod to the old Stedelijk’s white rooms, which still fails to explain the plumbing metaphor.
The bathtub floats above the glassed-in ground floor. A few sealed porthole windows, stylish but stingy and soon to look dated, provide glimpses from inside the tub onto the lobby and street. A double-height escalator threads via an enclosed tube from tub to basement, a curious locale for galleries considering the cost and trouble of building below ground in the Netherlands, never mind the feng shui of bunkers for art.
That the new ground-floor and upstairs galleries flow imperceptibly into the old Stedelijk’s rooms goes a long way toward making up for any lapses. So, of course, does the century-spanning collection of art and design, although I’m sorry the grand old staircase now feels like a dead end when you descend it; and ditching the herringbone parquet for generic pale planks— to cede the floor to the art, I would imagine— is a scandal.
Museum Plaza isn’t the Washington Mall or Museum Island in Berlin. It has long been a public afterthought, a monument to bad planning. The city’s main park is only three blocks away. That’s where everybody hangs out. Protesters rallied at Museum Plaza against cruise missiles during the Reagan presidency. At one time a highway was run through the middle of it. A parking garage and supermarket have been carved out of it.
A horrific addition to the Van Gogh Museum by Kisho Kurokawa, a Japanese architect, forced on Amsterdam by Japanese patrons of the museum, added a major eyesore and wreaked havoc on that part of the plaza. Sven-Ingvar Andersson, a landscape architect, tried to clean the site up some years ago, but with prissy benches, an out-of-scale fountain, and a graceless grassy lip or “dog ear”— “donkey’s ear” is the Dutch phrase— to shelter the supermarket.
Now the new Stedelijk faces the blank wall of the lip. Even if the city someday comes to its senses, moves the idiotic supermarket, and undoes the donkey’s ear, the damage will be hard to fix. Benthem Crouwel, presumably to preserve the tub’s sleek profile, has shunted the museum’s mechanicals into a hulking black tower beside the lip, in effect cutting the museum off from the plaza and making the new Stedelijk’s forecourt with its cantilevered roof look, as Tracy Metz, the architecture critic here put it to me the other day, like the loading dock for the supermarket.
The truth is, the Bilbao effect is largely a myth. Frank Gehry’s museum alone didn’t turn around that city. It capped decades of civic renewal. Flashy, even brilliant buildings rarely rejuvenate neighborhoods or guarantee crowds and cash just by virtue of their design, any more than restoring disused rail tracks guarantees the High Line.
Sadly, museums, like cities, have squandered fortunes praying to this false idol. They still do.
Rico says he may see it when he and his father visit his friend Rob in the fall.
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