Money Changes Everything

A few recent architecture developments loosely connected by the topic of cash:

Shigeru Ban will be doing his first American museum. The Aspen Art Museum, which has been housed for 30 years in a converted hydroelectric plant, has selected Ban to design its new 30,000 sq. ft. facility. (About the size of the typical Aspen ski chalet.) Ban hasn't worked much in the U.S., though his "Nomadic Museum", a temporary structure made from stacked boxcars, was set up a few years ago in Manhattan and moved from there to Santa Monica. He also has a condo project nearing completion in Manhattan.

Ban is often talked about for his use of cardboard as a building material. (There were cardboard columns around the inner perimeter of the Nomadic Museum, though in that case they weren't structural.) But I'm more interested in his devotion to Alvar Aalto, the Finnish architect whose curvaceous lines made him the odd man out of Modernism when it was all about Miesian boxes, but whose reputation keeps rising in the age of Frank Gehry's wavy walls. A few years ago I visited Ban's little Issey Miyake design gallery in Tokyo and even that small project had interior walls of cardboard columns, one of which made a suave little curve that you could take as a reference to Aalto. But hey, it could just as well have been a reference to Bernini's colonnade at St. Peter's. Or for that matter Stonehenge. My point is simply that Ban is interested in the expressive counterpoint of planes and curves. I'll be curious to see what he does with the Rockies.

And the money connection? The Aspen Museum claims to have commitments of $28 million towards the cost of their new building, but hasn't actually said what it expects the total cost to be. (UPDATE: The museum's press people have been in touch to tell me that the museum is conducting a $35 million capital campaign, $20 million for the new building, $15 million for the endowment.) It can't hurt to have all those rich vacationers as neighbors, but this is not a good time to be looking for big benefactors. Last year, even before the economy went in the tank, the Parrish Museum, which is located in South Hampton, the ultimate billionaire beach town, had to downsize its planned new Herzog & de Meuron building from a $100 million, 80,000 sq. ft. project to a more affordable 63,000 sq, ft. The Parrish also decided that the new museum would be built in three phases, the first of them expected to cost between $55 and 60 million. And even that amount may prove a challenge in, as they say, the current fund raising environment.

Revised proposal for Tate Modern addition, Herzog & de Meuron, 2008/© HAYES DAVIDSON and HERZOG & de MEURON

Speaking of which, earlier this week we learned that another Herzog & de Meuron project has been tweaked. The architects held a press conference with Tate Director Nicholas Serota to unveil a revised scheme for their forthcoming addition to Tate Modern. Out with the fractured glass pyramid. In with a folded brick polygon that still looks pretty interesting and may speak better to the Tate's former life as an electrical power station.

Everyone at the press conference insisted that the changes in the design weren't undertaken to contain costs. It's still expected to come in, as before, at 215 million pounds, of which the Tate has so far raised only 70 million. But as Farah Neyeri reported on Bloomberg.com, Serota did acknowledge that the building might not be completed in time for the London Olympics in 2012 and that if the remaining money couldn't be found ``we won't do the building. It's as simple as that.'' He also described the present as ``probably the most challenging time to raise money in the last 25 years.''

There's another Herzog & de Meuron museum project that's still in development, their evolving scheme for the Miami Art Museum. That one, which is scheduled for completion in 2011 — CORRECTION: make that 2012 — is budgeted at $131 million. But it starts out with the advantage of a $100 million bond approved by Miami voters four years ago. (The Museum also aims to raise an additional $89 million to cover "transitional expenses" and for an operating endowment.) And if the MAM has trouble raising the remaining funds, the Herzog & de Meuron design is so deliberately incomplete at this point that they could alter it significantly and no one would be the wiser.