277 Parrish Art Museum

Pavilion Complex

The pavilion is actually the ideal museum type. Even in the late 1970s, Rémy Zaugg enthused about the advantages of the single exhibition space, which he later described in his theoretical treatise “Das Museum, das ich mir erträume” [The museum I dream of]. Apart from the perceptual qualities Zaugg attributes to such fragmented sequences of spaces, we found other factors that spoke in favour of individual units rather than a single building: the setting, the urban and natural features, as well other aspects connected with the history of East End’s artistic community. In terms of architectural typology, the individual units of the pavilion complex relate to the small-scale structure of Southampton with its simple forms such as the barns and other farm buildings often used by artists as studios. The landscape and the unusual light of Long Island were major reasons for the formation of the artists’ community in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Because of this, it not only seemed logical to make an architectural and urban reference to the working conditions of the artists themselves, but it also seemed potentially highly interesting from a curatorial point of view. The main focus of the Parrish collection is on artists who have lived and worked here, just as Chuck Close, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Bloom and Robert Gober still do. The museum has identified these four seminal artists, each of whose work will serve as a major focal point within the narrative of East End art from the 19th c. to the present: William Merritt Chase, Fairfield Porter, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein. Their decision gave us an opportunity of developing the concept of Anchor Spaces. These Anchor Spaces are both architectural and curatorial highlights, defining the museum spatially and intellectually and providing an artificial topography for the orientation and enjoyment of visitors.

Anchor Spaces

The first time we specifically developed an Anchor Space of this kind was when we were commissioned by the MoMA in New York for the 2006 Artist’s Choice project. After that, we also developed specific variations on this concept for the Espacio Goya (2005/06) and the Tate Modern extension (2005/06). In all these projects, the Anchor Spaces proved to be a very fruitful strategy in terms of thinking “out of the box” and going beyond the usual architectural conventions to create a museum complex in dialogue with the curators and the artists. Here at the Parrish, the Anchor Galleries are the reconstruction of the basic architectural elements of the studios of William Merritt Chase, Fairfield Porter, Willem de Kooning and Roy Lichtenstein. However, they are not reconstructions in a simulated, Disneyworld sense, nor are they frozen in time like the Brancusi studio outside the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Instead, they emulate the artists’ studio spaces in terms of their proportions, dimensions and specific natural light conditions. While these studios will be used initially to present the works of the respective artists and the documentation pertaining to them, they will also be used as exhibition spaces for other purposes, thereby providing the curators with an interesting alternative to the White Cube.

Herzog & de Meuron, 2007
Translation by Ishbel Flett