developments in cork

http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/magazine/2004/1009/3640492252MG0910GLUCK.html

Amazing space

ARCHITECTURE: Cork’s new gallery is a work of art itself. Gemma Tipton meets Loretta Glucksman, who, with her husband Lewis, has given Ireland this extraordinary building.

Third-generation Irish-American, Loretta Brennan Glucksman divides her time between Ireland and the US. A prominent supporter of Irish cultural studies, she is in Cork to celebrate the opening of the new €10 million art gallery, which bears her husband’s name. I asked her why it is that, in Ireland, the visual arts have always lagged behind literature, music and theatre in terms of profile and international recognition. One of the reasons, she suggests, was purely practical. “It has to do with the ease of transmission, and economics; people could support themselves by playing an instrument or telling stories.”

Loretta is something of an expert when it comes to Irish culture and its economic basis. Chairwoman of the American Ireland Fund, she is also founding patron, with her husband Lewis, of Glucksman Ireland House, the centre for Irish Studies at New York University. Located at the bottom of Fifth Avenue, Glucksman Ireland House is a small Victorian mews house, sitting in incongruous defiance of the skyscrapers that rise up to define the avenues of Manhattan.

There is a disparity, too, between the kind of Ireland that Irish-Americans expect to find when they come to this country, and the reality of our rapidly changing culture. Irish Studies departments in American universities focus on literature, traditional music, and social and political history. Loretta describes the “ephemeral link that Irish-Americans feel with the land of their forebears, in many cases a land they have never even visited themselves. Irish culture provides Irish-Americans with a link to their own histories.”

In fact, it also represents a kind of cultural security blanket, an unchanging place of traditional values, and literary lyricism.

Contemporary visual art tends not to fit comfortably into this mould and is low on the Irish Studies agenda, despite the fact that artists such as Sean Scully, James Coleman and Patrick Ireland, for example, have attained such international status and acclaim.

So why have the Glucksmans now sponsored this new contemporary art gallery here? “The short answer,” Loretta laughs, “is that Lew had already done a library [at University of Limerick]. But seriously,” she adds, “in the past number of years, Lew has become increasingly interested in contemporary Irish artists, and visual art is a beautiful way to learn about the country and its culture.”

Set in a linear park on the banks of the river Lee, the Lewis Glucksman Gallery has been designed by architects O’Donnell & Tuomey. It will be opened next week by President Mary McAleese, nearly three months ahead of the official commencement of Cork’s year as European Capital of Culture.

It is an instantly striking building, and yet one which pulls off the tricky feat of both blending in with, and standing out from, its surroundings. So how have the architects managed it? How does this 2,000 sq-metre building not so much fit into, as belong to its surroundings, when so many other attempts at contemporary architecture seem to stamp so aggressively on their sites?

The traps into which many of our more recent buildings have stumbled, seem often to have been created by a lack of confidence. Complicated by a lingering ambivalence to the built legacy of the period of British rule here, we have struggled to define exactly what our architectural heritage actually looks like. Urban planning policies limiting the heights of buildings in our cities have also led to blocks which appear as failed skyscrapers, cut off at the knees, their heavy bases clumsy with nothing to support. In other instances, a misplaced urge to “fit in” results in façades which bear no relationship to the spaces behind them, or in pick-and-mix architectural features glued onto buildings – architraves, columns and cartouches. Architecturally speaking, we seem to have no more idea of what contemporary Ireland is really like than do those Irish Studies students who look to this country for a Celtic Twilight land of Riverdance made flesh.

The design of the Lewis Glucksman Gallery represents a more grown-up Ireland; a country where the first question is now “what do we want?” rather than “what do others want from us?”

Architects O’Donnell & Tuomey’s ongoing transformation of a former industrial school into the Furniture College at Letterfrack, Co Galway, is a project which has won them acclaim at this year’s Venice Architectural Biennale, where they are currently representing Ireland. Among their previous projects, they have also designed the Gallery of Photography and the Irish Film Institute, both in Temple Bar.

The new gallery is an instantly arresting construction. From the outside, it seems to be part a series of limestone and glass boxes, twisting around a central axis, and part a massive curving wooden structure, cantilevered out from the main building, and resting lightly on slender stilts. Ireland has never seen a space quite like it for looking at art.

One of the reasons it sits into its site so well is that it sidesteps the obvious route of building low along the river bank. As John Tuomey puts it, “if you build horizontally across the site, you extinguish the very site that you have chosen to protect.” Instead, the building occupies a relatively small “footprint”, and acts as a focal point for the park, rather than an obliteration of it.

The architects took the surrounding mature trees as a reference for the height of the building, and care was taken to preserve them, consequently avoiding that barren look that so many new developments suffer. Use of materials also works in the building’s favour, with the lower levels defined by limestone, and the upper areas in American oak. The same separation continues inside, and while this may seem like an architectural conceit, it actually works to give a harmonious sense of space and presence. Horizontally, a flight of steps leads to the podium on which the galleries stand and where the restaurant is sited, and then flows away again down to the river, where a bridge is planned to link the gallery to the road beyond the campus.

Purpose-built contemporary art galleries are relatively rare in Ireland. In Dublin, there are the Douglas Hyde Gallery, the Royal Hibernian Academy, and various spaces in Temple Bar. Then there are the multi-use venues, such as Draíocht in Blanchardstown, An Grianán in Letterkenny, and the Island Arts Centre in Lisburn, where the galleries share space and facilities with theatres, workshops and studios. When it comes to building art galleries and museums, however, many of our spaces (such as the Irish Museum of Modern Art) are conversions, dictated to by the templates of historic buildings.

In fact, our idea of what art galleries ought to look like comes from the original meaning of the word gallery: the connecting apartments and offices in such grand buildings as the Louvre, the Uffizi and the Vatican, which even before their conversion to art museums were decoratively hung with portraits, paintings, and sculptures. These sequential spaces allowed museum curators to hang their collections in chronological order, telling stories of art history or antiquity which generally led the visitor to the conclusion that the present society represented the culmination and apotheosis of civilisation.

In terms of the history of art spaces, the first great breaks from this tradition came in Vienna with the Secession Building (the original “white cube”) at the end of the 19th century; and then with the spiral rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum in New York in the 1950s. The Guggenheim is exciting, as is its much younger sister, the Guggenheim Bilbao, but while they may pull in the tourists, innovative shapes and spaces just aren’t as conducive to hanging, and looking at, works of art as are the plain white cubes.

Here, O’Donnell + Tuomey’s building is different again. Apart from a pair of central cubed spaces (two jewel boxes which are climate-controlled to facilitate the showing of the most valuable pieces), the larger galleries, one on each of the building’s two upper floors, wrap around the core of the structure. In each, the external walls are curved, their sweep being punctuated with windows.

The reactionary in me asks: why change something that works? And yet, the nature of art has changed from that which was shown in those early galleries, the ones that defined how we think art spaces ought to look. We inherited the form of an art gallery, without ever really questioning how it should, or may, change over time.

Loretta agrees. “I love the National Gallery, and I do think there’s so much to be gained from that model, but I don’t think it’s the only one.”

At the Glucksman, there is a mould-breaking flavour to the architecture which encourages you to think: here is a place where I can see things differently, here is a place where my ideas about art – or how I relate to it – will be challenged; an un-boxlike gallery, where one can think outside of the box.

In many ways, I will always love pristine art spaces where there is nothing to see but the art itself, and yet I welcome this experimentation. The Glucksman allows visitors to make their own routes through, and associations within each exhibition; it won’t always be perfect for looking at all kinds of art, and yet when it does work, the particularly beautiful qualities of light and movement in the galleries will really sing.

The different form of the Lewis Glucksman Gallery creates a place in which the ways we read art and culture can be examined and reassessed. This is an idea which the gallery’s director, Dr Fiona Kearney (wrongly described as curator in last week’s Irish Times Magazine), plans to exploit for the programme, offering the opportunity for artists to work on collaborative projects with the various academic departments at UCC. “One of Lew’s dreams,” says Loretta, “was to help create an institution where ideas could be fully explored.”

The opening of the gallery, next Friday, will feature a series of Dürer etchings, as well as an exhibition of American painting drawn from the New York University collection. These include works by Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Grace Hartigan, Ad Reinhardt, Jim Dine and Robert Rauschenberg. The show intends to challenge accepted notions of American contemporary art history.

Next year will see 40 Shades of Green, a reassessment of Irish art and design; while curator of exhibitions and projects René Zechlin, originally from the Frankfurter Kunstverein, will be working on Investigations, a series of projects with six international artists.

Supported also by donations from generous sources, including the Sisk family, the Lewis Glucksman Gallery is an intellectually as well as architecturally challenging place. It has already been nominated for the prestigious European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture, the Mies van der Rohe Award.

The Lewis Glucksman Gallery opens on October 15th, on the UCC campus

will post up picture of the mallow/dariygold venture tomorrow. pretty impressive from images on front of echo on tuesday nite.

can it be ugly and un-noticed at the same time?!?

A report on yesterday’s Examiner stated that the busman’s hut on Patrick Street will remain there until at least September, as new plans for it’s replacement were not yet ready. It was described as an ugly eyesore.
Can anybody out there tell me why we need a hut on Patrick Street at all? Surely these busmen could have been housed at the redeveloped bus station at Parnell Place, which must be all of 2 minutes walk from the Statue. What value is it adding, by having it in the middle of our most prestigious street? Any time I walk past, the lads are having a chat and making tea. I can’t recall seeing a similar farce on O’Connell Street, Oxford Street or the Champs-Elysees. Someone at City Hall should have the balls to stand up to these busmen, and just demolish the thing.

Does anyone have any civic pride left??

sorry, should replace :confused: with a 😎 you’ll need ’em to read last message!

and any dates for pc world and currys?

Looks nice, I love the modern contemporary look. And I know it was announced weeks ago, but I don’t think that Grand Parade should be done in the same style as Patrick St. It should be made to look different, those lights will NOT suit that area! 😡