East Wing for Cleveland Musuem of Art / RVA
Critically acclaimed international practice Rafael Vinoly Architects recently announced their addition to the Cleveland Musuem of Art (CMA) in Ohio. The museum is currently undergoing a multi-phase renovation and expansion project. RVA’s 139,200 sq foot East Wing addition, which unites the historic 1916 Beaux-Arts building and the 1971 Marcel Breuer addition, is the first of three planned wings.
More about the expansion after the break.
The CMA contains one of the largest collections of art in the United States. Over the years, due to the musuem’s growing collection, the 1916 structure has undergone several expansions. Each new addition has added a new identity to the structure rather than working with the original Greek revival pavilion style. When RVA won the commission to design the new wing, the architects needed “to resolve these elements with an expansion and renovation program, creating a coherent sequence of galleries that accommodates projected growth and unifies disparate architectural vocabularies into a singular composition.”
Rather than create even more disjointed spaces, the addition aims to focus the attention back on the original 1916 building by reorganizing the entire museum. An indoor piazza topped by a gently curving glass and steel canopy will serve as a central meeting space that draws visitors into the complex. From there, new gallery wings to the east and west will border the piazza and taper toward the 1916 building. The fully transparent galleries offer unobstructed views of the sides of the historic pavilion and slowly, the RVA addition leads the users to the “real jem”, the original building.
Stone cladding of alternate bands of granite and marble illustrate the differing styles of the 1916 original and later Breuer buildings. “In this manner, the distinctions between “modern” and “historic” are preserved, yet integrated into a cohesive whole” explained RVA.
By reorganizing the museum, RVA has expanded the gallery space while not adding yet another style to the building. Connecting the new with the old, RVA’s wing creates one unified space that connects the once divided areas.
Photo Credit Brad Feinknopf
very nice, I love how open it is compared to museums in general.
robie house anyone??
Robie house indeed. Wonderful project. It reminds me a lot of the mood you get being at the SANNA glass pavilion in Toledo – very peaceful, very natural, very contrasty with the rest of the town.
It’s interesting that doing forward-thinking, modern work of current materials and methods does just as much to support and compliment the adjacent traditional architecture. Great project – thanks for getting it on our radar.
Looking at this project, at least as it is represented here, I am thinking how strongly I disagree that this addition enhances the original architecture in any way.
There are so many ways that modern architecture can compliment and enhance its context, when the protagonists remain mindful of the environment in which they are operating. Here, however, there is no visible dialog nor seemingly any pretense of interest in the original beaux-arts museum.
In thinking of examples of masterworks of museum architecture that actually do take into consideration the historic buildings to which they are grafted, one that comes immediately to mind is Carlo Scarpa’s Castelvecchio in Verona Italy. Actually, all of Scarpa’s museums (Querini Stampalia, Accademia, Uffizi, and Nat. Mus of Sicily) handily accomplished their programs while paying maximum respect to the context.
Likewise, Gwathmey Siegel’s addition to the Guggenheim (controversial as it was) comes to mind as a well-contextualized intermediary between the scale of the neighborhood and the museum.
The striped socks of the plinth of Vinoly’s addition stand over the balustrade of the “old” museum in a really unnecessary way. Had anyone cared, a more sensitive integration could easily have been made. Sensitivity doesn’t appear to have been the point. This looks like a competition that Vinoly was dead-set to win.
Terry Glenn Phipps
http://web.me.com/tgphipps
mentioning that it’s a museum, it seems to be a horrible inefficient architecture. rooms with huge glass fassades cannot be used for exhibitions with painted art, where you need sensibel light conditions. in the rooms, where paintings are showen, there is no natural light used. museums like the lentos in linz and the kunsthaus bregenz, with high efficient natural light ceilings, are perfect examples for realy good museum architecture…
A simple gesture of putting scale and mass at the street level junction of old and new back on the old would have done the trick a lot more eloquently.
Scarpa is big shoes to fill, many have tried, most if not all have failed since.
Museums are about movement through as much about quality of light/display. Need plans.
Despite the relative lack of press surrounding this project (e.g., compared to Steven Holl’s addition to Kansas City’s large art institution), I think this project deserves whatever it gets. It is well done and sensitive to the original project; at the same time, it isn’t too boring or so trendy that it will look tacky in 10 years.
Open and Elegant
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6:22 PM Jul 19th
beautiful Musuem of #Art http://bit.ly/15RyOE in Cleveland