London-based artist Goshka Macuga is, to say the least, uninspired by the architecture of Walker Art Center's 2005 addition, where her first U.S. museum show opened this month.
The $136 million expansion, designed by the Swiss firm of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, "was an extremely unsuccessful attempt to create a place people could actually use," Macuga said during a recent interview.
Macuga, photographed by the Star Tribune's Joel Koyama
She found especially problematic the addition's sloping hallways, its ice-cube-glass chandeliers, and the "totally terrible and interfering " lace-filigree screens that serve as gallery doors.
"Those hallway spaces are an extremely difficult and overdecorated part of a building that is very hostile to art," she said.
On the other hand, Macuga said the Walker's staff and crew are so helpful that "from an artist's point of view the place is amazing, a dream situation."
She also loves the minimalist elegance of the original 1971 building, designed by the late American architect Edward Larrabee Barnes, so much that she had the museum's staff recreate Barnes' gallery steps in her installation "It Broke From Within," which runs until Aug.14. (For a review of Macuga's show, click here.)
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