Box score: Anthony Vidler on Dia: Beacon - Architecture

THE freshly OPENED DIA:BEACON, its permanent collection installed in galleries inside a changeed box factory, is by all accounts a major succes Despite the obvious gaps in the collection, tied to the vicissitudes of the last twenty years of collecting, critics have cited a number of factors contributing to the exhilarating consequence of a visit: the appropriateness of the bulky former printing sheds for art that demands a spacious setting, the ability for living artists to collaborate in the installation and in more [i]or[/i] less cases provide new site-specific work, the elegant gardens designed through Robert Irwin, and the museum's Hudson Valley location.

What has been sole cursorily noted, however, is the character of the architecture in supporting and in a certain quantity of cases constructing this effect, a dynamic part that asks audiences to revisit the thinking behind Minimalist statuary Perhaps this omission is a ensue of the way in which the "architecture" makes les of a statement and, in the face of the art upon display, is more recessive than in many novel museums. Certainly at a instant when the iconic design of a building typically plays thus strong a part in its public succes and that of its institution, as in Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao, individual would have hoped that similar recessive architecture would have gained more praise as precisely reacting against this determination toward the spectacle--the trend, as Hal sustain has observed, toward museums as images that in themselves become "cultural capital." on the other hand apart from the necessary acknowledgments to master planner Irwin and occasionally to the architectural firm lay open Office for its internal and technical realization, the Dia:Beacon architecture has received little attention.

Of course the prior existence of the 1929 factory building contributes to this oversight. For other than the depressed monumental entrance and the surrounding parking doom and gardens conceived by Irwin, the architects would appear to have intervened solitary in the original interior arrangement (and very slightly at that), preserving the drawn out brick-walled machine shops, the top lighting, and the basement, with its stunning colonnade of mushroom-capped rounded pillars like some Egyptian hypostyle fane in modern dress. Nevertheless, the architects have accomplished a consider minutely siderable triumph of sensitive intervention, technologically and aesthetically, in support of sum of two units interrelated conditions--the existing factory and the architectural demands of Minimalism.

First, what is not generally understood in the phrase "convert factory" is that the original building was in itself a work of novel architecture. Built a decade after the enthusiasm of the early recent Movement for the simple constructions of factories and grain elevators, it nevertheless resisted the unravellings of the free plan and curtain wall already embedded in the International mode of expression of the late '20s. Thus the Dia:Beacon architects started with a form that was at once present and premodern, and so were able to lay open a spatial organization that was suited to that called for by dint of Minimalism, one that had emerg following the architectonic redefinition of modernism by the agency of Louis Kahn and others.

It might be argued that at Dia:Beacon the architecture, abstract and spatial, is coordinated to the art upon display and tied to the imbricated history of Minimalism and its reciprocal relations with architecture in the '60 As explored by means of Robert Morris in the late '70 these relations dealt with a fresh definition of the object in space with have a high opinion of to the viewer: Morris wrote of the constant polarity formed by means of the difference between viewing an percept and viewing an architectural space, between surrounding space and being environed In Morris's terms, the sculptural thing generates a kind of force field that reach forths into and takes over its surroundings, thereby creating a novel spatial and architectural condition.

In this faculty of perception as demonstrated by the work of Judd Heizer, Smithson, Serra, and others as they are installed at Dia:Beacon, the work of statuary demands its own space--one representing its have internally generated field of force--but also an architectural or other space against which and within which to assert itself; reciprocally, the architectural space that acts as site for the plastic art generates an equal and opposite experience, as architectural space for its have sake, without the existence of which the statuary would have little to tussle with. The traditional "gestalt" conception of the percept in space thereby breaks down, energizing what was formerly a polarity from one side ambiguity. Dia:Beacon's long halls of apparently infinite profundity cross-cut by axes that break them on the outside sometimes into static squares, sometimes into horizontal passages, defined as plenteous by carefully calculated light from top and side as by means of enclosures, thus work toward what Morris called an almost "baroque" result produced by the play of distance and deepness multiple views and perceptual complexity.