Posted Oct 4, 2023, 6:50 AM
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Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Portland
Posts: 7,421
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Quote:
Framing the Rothko Pavilion
The Portland Art Museum's redesigned, glass-ensconced addition, due to open in summer 2025, will make viewing easier and could be a boon to an ailing downtown.
Design rendition of the Rothko Pavilion looking east from the Eliot Tower Condominiums on Southwest 10th Avenue: The glassed-in pavilion, connecting the Portland Art Museum’s north and south buildings, is expected to be completed in Summer 2025. All design renderings by Hennebery Eddy Architects and Vinci Hamp Architects, courtesy of Portland Art Museum.
By the time the invited crowd of Portland Art Museum patrons and donors had gathered in the Mark Building’s ballroom on May 24 for the Mark Rothko Pavilion redesign unveiling, the museum’s director, Brian Ferriso, was more than ready to make his pitch. This wasn’t just about connecting two buildings or adding exhibit space, he argued, but writing a new chapter: for the museum, the city and more. And with construction of a new loading dock along PAM’s southern edge already under way, there was no better time to charm the check-writers.
“I’m going to give you 500 years of art history,” Ferriso said with a smile, “in two minutes.” It took a little longer than that, but he indeed set the table for PAM’s upcoming expansion as the kind of game-changer that not just the museum itself but the broader city needs, as well as a reflection of how art museums worldwide are evolving.
In the beginning, Ferriso told the audience, there were 18th Century institutions in palatial buildings of classical and traditional architecture like London’s British Museum (1753) and Paris’s Louvre (1793). Admittedly, their collections were born from colonial appropriation. Yet these institutions inspired America’s first art museum: the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia (1805). “It was about enlightenment, and bringing all these different cabinets of curiosities into a single place,” Ferriso said.
Although the Louvre was originally a 13th Century castle and its collection belonged to Louis XIV, that museum is particularly key to the Rothko Pavilion narrative — not the original architecture, but its iconic 1983 architectural addition by architect I.M. Pei: a pyramid-shaped glass entry leading to (and illuminating) a new underground ticketing area. Pei’s pyramid gave the Louvre a contemporary sense of transparency and accessibility. Yet in its relatively modest scale—not a building so much as a lightwell and a downward escalator—the pyramid ceded the lead architectural role to the original.
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...continues at Oregon ArtsWatch.
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