Autonomy and Context The two next steps of the studio addressed the questions of autonomy and context. Students were asked to choose a typological reference from three different eras—before 1500, from 1500 to 1900, and from 1900 to 2000—which could echo the artist’s oeuvre in a strong way without infringing on its autonomy. Roman baths, aircraft hangars, baroque churches, gas stations, mosques, Parisian passages, underground cisterns, neoclassical residences, the Roman Forum, a Luis Barragán villa, barns, the Teatro Olimpico, greenhouses, cooling towers, anatomical theatres, furnaces, burial mounds, Hans Poelzig’s Schauspielhaus, Francesco Borromini’s St. Ivo church, shed-roof industrial halls, scaffolding, Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Altes Museum, and the Uffizi, among others, were investigated as suitable typological sources and opened up a field of possibilities. These spaces were built as large-scale models and great importance was attached to the illustration of the artwork within these different spaces, in order to evaluate their displaying potential. Some surprising combinations offered unexpected depth and allowed for new interpretations of the artist’s oeuvre, while others clearly broke the hierarchical balance that allows architecture to remain the art’s servant without taking over it. Obviously, these attempts went far beyond the common idea of the white cube that has been celebrated throughout the
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Emanuel Christ
Holzer’s light words; psychological environments by Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy; Pipilotti Rist’s video world; Roman Signer’s performative leftovers; Isa Genzken’s precise constructions; and Roni Horn’s frozen images. By getting to know the artists’ work, the students started to delineate appropriate spatial frames for an ideal museum. But: “To fulfill this ideal, a museum of modern and contemporary art would have to engage with two crucial—and at first sight contradictory—impulses of 20th- and 21st-century art: autonomy and context. Upholding art’s autonomy from political or social strictures in architectural terms means delivering enough neutral physical space for the objects themselves, and enough mental space for visitors to contemplate them.”1