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Eyebeam's quest to house its new-media museum reveals that design competitions--for
all their pros and cons--can be good for architecture.
By Marc Kristal
November 2002
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Diller + Scofidio's winning proposal for Eyebeam's Museum of Art and
Technology is a two-ply ribbon (above) that interweaves spaces for
production and presentation, so that each group of users can see through
the other's space while navigating the building (below).
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Courtesy Eyebeam
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It was May 2001, and Hani Rashid, a principal at cutting-edge architecture
firm Asymptote, was reflecting on the competition to design nonprofit
new-media foundation Eyebeam's Museum of Art and Technology. "It's
very close, for our generation, to what the Chicago Tribune competition
[in 1922] was for the Modernists," he said, the excitement palpable
in his voice. "That brought together some of the most interesting architects
from around the world [among them Adolf Loos, Eliel Saarinen, and Walter
Gropius] and captured the imagination, and the story, of a time. I think,
for many of us, this has that potential."
Rashid's optimism was contagious. And yet--given the pathetic history of
architectural competitions in America--it played like an attack of the Pollyannas.
Whereas in Europe a tradition of competitions, often state-sponsored and
legally mandated, has nurtured pathbreaking architecture and innumerable
distinguished careers, the United States has never had a comparable culture--for
good reason, many believe. Competitions, their critics say, waste the resources
of the participants, traduce the architect-client relationship, and result
in design by committee, dysfunctional pseudosculpture, or frequently nothing
at all.
Yet when thoughtfully undertaken and executed, they can produce, as Rashid
suggested, epoch-making ideas, buildings, and careers. The Eyebeam competition
to design one of the first institutions devoted to new media represented
just such an opportunity. And as it played out over 19 months to reach its
surprising conclusion, Eyebeam's endeavor became a kind of X ray of the
competition process: it revealed many benefits, not a few pitfalls,
and much of what it takes to succeed.
The first requirement, without question, is a good client--one with
an understanding of a project's challenges and a willingness to take risks.
Enter John S. Johnson, Eyebeam's executive director. A 36-year-old film
director, Johnson conceived of Eyebeam after founding the Filmmakers Collaborative,
a New York facility that provides low-budget filmmakers with affordable
office and editing space. Growing disillusioned with independent cinema,
Johnson cultivated an interest in video art and, by extension, new media.
"I'd always liked electronic artists' work," he explained when
we met last year, "and I began to see that the problem was the same
for them as for filmmakers, in that resources were relatively inaccessible."
In 1996, with a grant from his family's Atlantic Foundation (theirs is the
fortune Band-Aids built), Johnson launched Eyebeam to support the creation
of digital artwork, encourage research, and expand awareness of new media.
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This illustration (above right) shows the public spaces a museum visitor
would see. Someone working in the building (above left) would use
different spaces.
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Between the structural "ribbons" is mechanical space (above)
for support systems.
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The library (above), will allow visitors to access a digital archive.
Diller + Scofidio's proposal also includes a programmable fiber-optic
floor (below) at the entrance.
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Courtesy Eyebeam
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To contain this agenda Eyebeam purchased a garage building in Chelsea--the
heart of the Manhattan art establishment--that Johnson renovated for immediate
use. Later he acquired an adjacent lot for more land on which to construct
a new building. But the more he attacked the task, the more it revealed
its complexity. First of all, the new-media museum was a nearly unprecedented
type of building--nobody knew quite what went into it. The institution's
three core programs--education, art production, and presentation--would
have to work both separately and in combination. Trickiest was the problem
of transformation, since as much as two-thirds of the 89,000-square-foot
museum would begin as rental space, to be phased out as Eyebeam developed.
After working with a team of architects for more than a year, Johnson realized
he'd be best served by a competition. "I needed to see more than one
thorough investigation of a really tangled problem," he explains.
Johnson's instinct points to one of a competition's chief benefits.
"The more complex the problem, the less likely it is that the framers
have even considered the ten best solutions," says Terence Riley, who
as chief architecture and design curator at the Museum of Modern Art oversaw
the competition to redesign MoMA. "A competition," Riley believes,
"is an extremely important stimulator of serious thinking and brings
out the best ideas." The reason is simple. "Competitions allow
you to take problems of architecture and explore them more freely than with
commissions," explains Preston Scott Cohen, an Eyebeam competitor.
"The sponsor is looking for vision, ideas--you can be more creative."
Consulting architects David Hotson and Craig Newick, together with Eyebeam's
special projects director Angela Molenaar, helped Johnson design a three-stage
invited competition: proposals would be requested from roughly 30 firms;
a shortlist of fifteen would then be asked to submit conceptual designs,
and three of these would be chosen to develop their entries more completely.
Johnson next faced the question of whom to invite, a make-or-break moment
that's often mishandled. Typically the board of an institution, faced with
fund-raising and dreading controversy, selects a handful of brand-name competitors
and then chooses either the most conventional scheme or the one that approximates
the Bilbao du jour--which means effectively that the game is rigged. It's
a mentality that works as much against clients as architects. "Piano,
Gehry, Herzog & de Meuron--it's the same group that's doing a hundred
projects right now," participant Elizabeth Diller says. "Wouldn't
it be better to get someone who hadn't done it before?"
In fact, Eyebeam did just that. The invitations that went out in September
2000 included marquee names such as Koolhaas and Ito (neither of whom submitted
a proposal). But Eyebeam also approached a number of Young Turks--first-generation
products of design's computer age--and advanced many to the semifinals.
Thus Johnson got precisely what a successful competition needs: architects
equipped to solve a problem and inspired to excellence by the opportunity.
"It couldn't be a more perfect set of issues for us to wrap our heads
around," Diller says of herself and partner Ricardo Scofidio,
in a typical reaction. "We've been working in new media for a while,
and we would have been heartbroken if we hadn't been selected for the second
phase."
Eyebeam's strategy also raised the stakes, just as Rashid's evocation of
the Tribune competition suggests. The two shared key similarities. In 1922
the skyscraper--like the new-media museum today--was a new building type.
The Tribune tower offered a defining opportunity: to create an architectural
form that--again, like the new-media museum--owed its life to a world-altering
leap in technology (the high-rise elevator) and demanded an equally vaulting
response. Some of architecture's most forward-thinking minds accepted the
challenge. The results--as the Tribune predicted--made history.
The younger practitioners that competed for the Eyebeam project (including
Architecture Research Office, Neil Denari, Foreign Office Architects,
Thomas Leeser, Greg Lynn, MVRDV, Reiser + Umemoto, and Rogers Marvel) are
some of the brightest of the digital generation. Each firm resolves
the tension between the material and digital somewhat differently. "It's
interesting," Jesse Reiser says, "that these firms come together
in a project like this, where you have virtual spaces, and [the problem
of] how you would deal with the material aspect of architecture relative
to that immaterial condition." This rare confluence of theme,
project, participants, and moment added up to a signal architectural event.
"Eyebeam really put one out there for us," Denari says.
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In MVRDV's design, the building consists of a single large open
exhibition space (below) punctuated by beams that house production and
other internal activities.
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Courtesy Eyebeam
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Johnson's gamble paid off immediately: by harvesting a crop of ideas from
the initial proposals, he and his team were able to use the firms'
new-media expertise to improve their program. The shortlist was announced
in November 2000, and Eyebeam distributed the program brief to 13 firms
in January. (Steven Holl and UN Studio dropped out, citing overburdened
schedules.)
The program--the architects' marching orders--is arguably a competition's
most significant element. A good one must be thorough enough to convey
a structure's particulars, yet sufficiently fluid conceptually
to spark the competitors' imaginations. It's a hard balance to nail, and
Eyebeam's got mixed reviews. Almost everyone responded to the concept's
four themes: Adaptation (to technical change), Transformation (from mixed-use
to institutional), Interrelation (between programs and functions), and Intersection
(of public and museum space). But the architects also found the brief too
specific. "The demands went down to the tiny detail of every office,"
Cohen says. "It really wasn't necessary at this stage." This overemphasis
on details would prove less relevant than anyone imagined.
On June 13 last year, however, when the semifinalists' designs debuted
in Eyebeam's temporary space, the outcome was overwhelmingly positive. Though
a sameness pervaded certain schemes--perhaps because of the brief's specificity--the
architects had attacked Johnson's "tangled problem" with energy
and imagination. Many treated the building's skin as an active technological
representation--notably Greg Lynn, who created goiterlike extrusions and
intrusions in the building's skin, which was itself a screen for displaying
media projections. The problem of overcommitting to an evolving medium produced
solutions ranging from FOA and Chipperfield's blank slates to Asymptote's
renamed Flux Museum, a curvilinear form composed of fluid, flexible
spaces. Reiser + Umemoto proposed two clusters of open flooring--one
for tenants, the other for the museum--suspended dramatically from a superstructure.
And no one reckoned with the real/virtual dynamic more arrestingly than
Cohen, whose sculptural solution toggled together curves and beams to create
two spaces, each playing off the other: a vision, in architecture, of separate
equal realities.
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Flexibility is the key to Thomas Leeser's design. Like most of the
spaces, the lobby (below) is reconfigurable--bleachers and a screen can
be brought out for screenings.
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Courtesy Eyebeam
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But had the competition produced, like its fabled predecessor, a template
for a new kind of building? An answer could be gleaned from the finalists'
schemes, which were announced five days later. The firms all sought
to secure the individual's sovereignty within the shifting parameters of
the virtual realm. Diller + Scofidio presented a two-ply ribbon folded
over on itself, creating multiple levels. As the ribbon undulates--each
side intermittently acting as floor, ceiling, or wall--it interweaves,
sometimes joining, production and presentation spaces. The plan would also
allow visitors to use the institution's multiple interactive technologies
to customize their experience. The design posited a world in which real
and virtual might--like an ideal interracial couple--marry and multiply
without losing their identities.
MVRDV proposed a stunning interior void, pierced by hollow beams that encased
the museum's functions, all with a skin of perforated white polyurethane--a
galaxy of portals. Whereas Diller + Scofidio embraced hurly-burly,
MVRDV suggested a benign separation of the communal and individual, mutually
enclosed in the same structure.
Thomas Leeser's reconfigurable structure, catering to Eyebeam's evolving
needs, was the least inspired. What did excite him was the prospect of uniting
real and virtual communities in a building that wouldn't be entirely site-specific.
His installation ideas--such as a floor that would display both human
footprints and mouse movements from Eyebeam's Web site--brought the museum's
online visitors into the physical space, and vice versa.
Each reached for something larger than the task. Revolutions in technology
produce paroxysms, and all three firms instinctively seized on architecture's
job at such moments: devising appropriate new forms to accommodate change.
Considering the finalists' work--indeed all the competitors' work--in
light of this challenge, it seemed there was a template here. Not for the new-media
museum, but for a digitally infused multipurpose structure. Whether this
amounts to another Chicago, only time will tell. But it is certainly a contribution--one
that only a competition could have produced.
So who got the job? Not so fast.
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