Shining beacon: thinking big. thinking out of the box. thinking art. interview talks to the director of a brave new museum

Interview, July, 2003 by Ingrid Sischy

IS: What's interesting is how this project recalls and expands upon an earlier luminous moment in American art, the Hudson River School with painters like Thomas Cole and Frederick Church. Had that 19th-century work meant something to you when you were an artist?

MG: Oh, very much. And I knew this work from Dan Flavin as well. Dan had this beautiful collection of 1 9th-century Hudson River School drawings, which he'd shown me. In a way the Hudson Valley is the birthplace of American art--it was this incredible light-filled valley, like the Rhine in Germany.

IS: Instead of hiring a big name architect, which is what one would normally do in these projects--I'm thinking, of course, of Frank Gehry and the beautiful building he designed in Bilbao (Spain] for the Guggenheim-you went another way, asking an artist instead to design a master plan for the building, and work with the landscape outside.

MG: The story behind that is simple. First of all, this is a beautiful building. Some people couldn't see it originally, because it was filled with ducts and junk and the floors were torn up. But it is clear that the gentleman who designed it in 1929-Louis Wirshing, Jr., an in-house Nabisco architect--had imagined a factory that internalized all the lessons of the Bauhaus and of modernist architectural design, and had put it to use in a utilitarian space of incredible grandeur. The principles of the design were based on the idea that Nabisco box printers were able to see their handiwork without the aid of electric light--something that's ideal, of course, for an art museum. In fact, it is really one giant artists' studio with northern light.

What was required, then, was not the building of a new structure. Given that, as well as Dia's tradition of involving artists in considering the environment their work would be placed in, made it logical for Dia to think about an artist for this job--a precedent that had been established already with Donald Judd's museum in Marfa--an architectural modification that he oversaw and that was so successful almost every architect today looks to it as a model.

IS: And how did you all choose Robert Irwin for the job here?

MG: We had recently worked with Robert for his exhibition at Dia in Cheisea where he had created in a single 7,000-square-foot floor space 18 cubes--rooms that had semi-transparent walls that let in light. As you know, Robert Irwin's work is about perception, but perception involving the manipulation and organization of light and space, and this building in Beacon was all about that. Irwin had also, without any [architectural] experience, done a major master plan for Miami International Airport that was never executed, but which was well known. And he had just completed the Central Garden at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, so he was involved in building exterior environments as well as interior ones. Ultimately Robert made the choice to live in the region of Beacon while he was working on the project, to actually feel the building and, as he says, to run his hands over the whole place. When he would bring Lynne Cooke and myself to the building, we would have a kind of discussion that was more like a Socratic dialogue than a design process, It was that process that lead to his proposal of putting the building inside an artwork itself, so the exterior environmental landscaping that he designed was part of the project. In addition, of course, he gave us a master plan for the building in total, which Lynne and I were able to use in our own thinking about how to organize the collections. Several artists chose their own spaces, and others came to the museum and let their own ideas be known, so they had a big effect on the interior design. We hired a young New York City-based firm called OpenOffice, who are an arts-architecture collaborative, to work on technical aspects. And we hired an engineering firm called Arup to deal with the significant issues of mechanical and electrical engineering and all things key to making this old factory a modern building.