Minimalist art and minimalist museum spaces

How can minimalist art change and define a certain space, and which is the right type of space to shelter works of art? Would it be possible to create a parallel between those spaces and the modern “white cube” gallery concept of space? What are the lessons one can take from the perception and the experience of the viewer that minimalist architectural spaces promote, such as the architecture designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa?

This text is basically divided into three parts: the origins of the term and the spaces designed to shelter minimalist art; minimalist architecture and the white cube gallery space; and the viewer perception as a model for design strategies, focusing on the case of SANAA. This analysis can provide a useful framework for architects working in this arena going forward.
 

Minimalist art and the architecture that shelters it

In minimal art the object is pure in form and materiality and complex otherwise, in its perception. The wholeness is more important than the parts, and materials create clear definitions. The context is considered, and the large sculpture clearly relates to the environment in which it is inserted, in a phenomenon of spatial expansion of the object. These new sculptures allow the surroundings to be perceived and to be seen, and the work of art gains environmental dimension. Objects and perception tend to expand; an object starts to be part of the territory where it is located and consequently, this environment starts to be part of the work of art as well. The architectural space becomes part of the experience of the viewer. Also, the perception of the minimalist geometries is highly complex, and the object scale and seriality resemble the idea of industrial production. So what would be the best space to display those works of art?

In the 1960s, the minimalist art movement began to focus on warehouses and industrial architecture, and for good reason. Those spaces allow these works to grow in scale; they also speak a similar language, emphasizing the process of creation and installation in an industrial context. The fact that those objects are constructed and installed according to measured drawings, creates proximity with architecture again. Those objects are then a reflection of the space where they are. One can say that art and space are highly integrated in minimalist art.

Structurally, these spaces also offer a kind of engineering that can support a great span. The space is opened to clarify its structure, and this structure, in turn, helps to clarify the art (in a material, tectonic, formal and scalar way). One good example is Dia Center. Upon its founding in 1974, Dia supported a small group of innovative artists such as Judd, Walter de Maria and Flavin, artists who emerged from the Minimalism break in the early 1960s. Minimalist work created a gap with the existing institutions, due to the financial and physical limitations of collectors and museums. The space, directed by Charles Wright, was renovated by Richard Gluckman, who brought a certain “minimalist sensitivity” to light and space; this marked the birth of Chelsea as an art neighborhood. With art fitting the scale of those spaces, warehouses and old factories were transformed into large galleries. Soho, being a light industrial neighborhood, would have the ideal profile for rapid conversion into an art-gallery district. Minimal art spaces display would then have an urban impact in New York City.

On a different level, these spaces were created as a direct challenge to the existing white cube gallery space, discussed next.
 

Minimalism: architectural space and the white cube

“In the white cube gallery space, the exterior world is not allowed to come in,” writes Brian O’Doherty in “Inside the White Cube: Notes on the Gallery Space”. As a space with no windows, where all walls are painted in white, the ceiling becomes the only source of light. The space is turned into something sacred; any object, even an ordinary table, against the white background, can become a work of art due to the “silence” of that space. As a heritage of Modern architecture, what in a first moment is read as neutral and “nakedeness” is painted in white. “Even where the structure seems to be exposed, it is actually clothed in a layer of paint, purified,” says Mark Wigley in “White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture”. The white cube offers a false idea of neutrality, false nudity; it erases everything in order to make just the art to pop up; it attempts to take away the perception of that space, denying the experience of the viewer and making valid only the experience of the art itself. It neutralizes the viewer, instead of the space. One is supposed to experience only the art, which turns into something sacred. The viewer becomes an extra element that can bother its admiration.

Placing an object inside a white cube makes that work of art be perceived as an object, and that is the opposite effect expected by the perception of minimalist art, where there is the phenomenon of spatial expansion of the object. In a white cube, minimalist art would be mute; it would not be able to “expand”. The perception of the viewer would be annulled. A white cube, in pursuit of the misconception of neutrality, would instead drive the viewers’ perception to either the art or the environment, independently, neutralizing the art object experience.

The new spatial concept for display of minimalist art “pushed further into the space of the museum, in order both to engage the viewer and to articulate the architecture,” writes Hal Foster in “The Art-Architecture Complex”. With its grids and modules that can go on indefinitely, this serial extension starts to become a guideline for current museums. Refashioned factories or power stations provided these new spaces, spaces to exceed the “old studio, salon, and white-cube models” Foster says.

So what is the implication if we consider minimalist spaces designed to be museum spaces? Could we look back to minimal art and architecture as a uniquely human experience, the experience of the viewer in that particular space? Architecture that is considered minimalist can be experienced from “inside”. One can dress it like a skin, as Peter Zumthor states: “Architecture is a membrane, a fabric, a kind of covering, cloth, velvet, silk, all around me. The body! No the idea of the body- the body itself. A body that can touch me.”
 

Case studies: the Toledo and Kanazawa museums, by SANAA

In SANAA’s architecture, form becomes object, which becomes program, which becomes space. “Containers are multiplied creating ambiguous zones of enclosure instead of sharp demarcations”, says Stan Allen in “Sejima’s Theater of Operations”. Examples of this are the Toledo Art Museum and the Kanazawa Museum. Both spaces have a similar plan. The programmatic forms are separated by cavities, which serve as highly technical and functional envelopes for those museums. These cavities, beside being circulation spaces, are used by the mechanical system as a temperature buffer, reusing the chilled air of the galleries to cool the hot shops, and recycling the heat generated by glass ovens to warm the cavity in the winter through coils embedded in the topping slab. Maybe here one can argue that no architecture is minimal per se. A building is a combination of many layers of complex systems.

In both projects, the exhibition spaces are fragmented into numerous galleries that are all embedded in the circulation area. Light enters through the courtyards that punctuate the plan and is diffused throughout the rooms in different levels of illumination within the programmatic museum spaces, from bright daylight through glass ceilings, with a black-out possibility, to spaces with no natural light source.

In the case of the Toledo museum, the building is located on a site surrounded by a dense growth of 150-year-old trees in a historical neighborhood. Even from inside the building, due to the choice of materials, visitors can still feel like they are walking under the trees. The Kanazawa museum, as an object, has multiple entrances in multiple directions, allowing multiple explorations. The design allows the visitor to decide on the route through the museum and, when combined with the flexible gallery rooms that can adapt to every type of media, guarantees the diversity of the programs held in the space. An object interrupts the visitor path; but, because of its materials and program, it becomes an extension of the existing environment, just like a minimalist work of art.

Courtyards are made of glass as well, allowing the sky and the exterior to come in, breaking the interior organization but providing integration with the exterior. In SANAA’s work, framing and a controlled exterior space emerges in the interior space in the form of reflections; the glass provides then the blur of the view and softens the boundaries. Transparent corridors encourage a “coexistence” in which individuals remain autonomous while visually sharing personal space with others. The many layers of glass, featuring various grades of translucency instead of transparency, plus its shape (curved), creates another optical effect, a more “tactile experience of vision”, writes Beatriz Colomina. The building becomes an “ephemeral play of light, shadow, and translucency”, according to Allen. SANAA's architecture has a compelling message, even if their choice of materials could mistakenly suggest otherwise.
 

The way forward

Minimalist art might have had its biggest impact in the 1960s, but the lessons for architects remain just as valid today. The architecture built to house minimalist art was not designed around the art itself but around the human experience of that art, just as the elements in SANAA’s are intended to stimulate the visitor’s emerging awareness. Could these ideas inform museum and exhibition design? The answer is yes. As the history suggests, these are not necessarily new ideas, and yet the white box too often prevails in museum spaces even today. Architects should abandon the sacred space for art and prepare it for the experience of the viewer in a more intense spatial way. We should allow art and architecture to blend together into a single experience, recognizing that the spatial neutrality is a misconception. In this way the experience of art and the art space happens in a more complete way. More than simply viewing a work of art, the visitor should be able to sense, that he or she is part of that space.