Glenstone: Immersive Pro-environmental Expansion Larger Than The Whitney Museum

Glenstone Museum

The Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland, which is currently undertaking a major expansion into its rural landscape of Washington, DC, has announced that it will open to the public on October 4, 2018, offering a meditative integrated environment in which to experience its collection of over 200 artists.

The viewer will experience site-specific works by the likes of Andy Goldsworthy, Jeff Koons, and of course Richard Serra

With rooms providing vistas of the surrounding landscape, fusing interior and exterior; eight rooms will be dedicated to single-artist exhibitions, including an evolving presentation of works by Charles Ray, and displays by Roni Horn, Brice Marden, Michael Heizer, Martin Puryear, and Cy Twombly; while three rooms will host rotating displays from a collection that includes the likes of John Baldessari, Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Dan Flavin, Willem de Kooning, Eva Hesse, Barbara Kruger, Bruce Nauman, and Jackson Pollock.

Image: Glenstone Museum expansion, courtesy of Thomas Phifer & Partners and the Glenstone Museum © 2018.

The highlight of the expansion will be a new 204,000- square-foot building, called the Pavilions, embedded in the landscape. These buildings will create a meditative aesthetic, forming a relationship with the slopes and vistas of the surrounding countryside as if rising out of the earth.

The centrepiece of this new environment for art – or environmental art space – designed by Thomas Phifer of Thomas Phifer and Partners – is a large central water court, projecting natural light into the Museum’s exhibition spaces of varying sizes and configurations, through which its collection will rotate.

Glenstone originally opened in 2006 with a 30,000-square-foot building designed by the late New York architect Charles Gwathmey. In preparation for the next phase of the building, the museum’s founders, science and technology billionaire Mitchell Rales and his wife, art historian Emily Rales, visited some 50 museums around the world looking for inspiration, resulting in an expansion of indoor space from 9,000 to 59,000 square-feet – making Glenstone larger than the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Broad in Los Angeles – and expanding the restored woodlands and meadows from 100 to 230 acres.

The new expanded site is designed to be an inclusive and immersive experience where visitors can participate in ‘shinrin-yoku’, originally the Japanese concept of ‘forest bathing’. The viewer will experience site-specific works by the likes of Andy Goldsworthy, Jeff Koons, and of course Richard Serra, while enveloped in a natural environment: ‘bathing’ in the glories of nature.

“Throughout this transformation, we’ve maintained a single mission: to create a seamless integration of art, architecture, and landscape and make it available free of charge to all who wish to visit”, said Mitchell Rales, laying out his seemingly ambitious philanthropic plans to increase visitor rates from a mere 10,000 per year to some 100,000.

Mitchell began collecting art in 1990s, but the billionaire’s philanthropic bent grew out of a near-death experience in 1998, when the businessman survived a helicopter crash in Russia that killed a fellow passenger. Mitchell returned home and reevaluated his priorities with wise words from his father: did he want to achieve something meaningful in life, or just become ‘the richest guy in the cemetery’, from which the first iteration of Glenstone was born.

Glenstone has not released the cost of the project, but a 2013 New York Times article calculated it at upwards of $125 million.

Words: Paul Black @Artjourno, lead image: Glenstone Museum, courtesy of the Glenstone Museum/Scott Francis © 2018

Tags

, , ,