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Foreign Office Architects reveal designs for contemporary art museum…
London based Foreign Office Architects reveal their designs for the $26m Cleveland Museum for contemporary art.
This bold design reflects Cleveland’s new direction, embracing its vibrant service industry and shrugging off the remains of its heavy manufacturing origins. The city has worked hard on its regeneration programme and is now considered an exemplar for public-private partnerships, downtown revitalisation, and urban renaissance.
At 34,000 sq ft, the museum is still small, in fact less than a tenth of London’s Tate Modern which weighs in at 371,350 sq ft but the bar has been raised on this building type since 1997 with the opening of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum which launched Bilbao onto the world stage.
The site is suitably dominant, wedged between the corner of Euclid Avenue and Mayfield Road, where it will act as the gateway to the Uptown project, a $150 million-plus development aimed at revitalising an urban dead zone with shops, restaurants, apartments and culture.
Iranian Farshid Moussavi, principal of FOA said this week, "As FOA's first museum and first U.S. commission, this is an especially meaningful and inspirational project for us. Museums today are not just homes for art, but serve multiple functions and host a variety of activities. Our design for MOCA Cleveland aims to provide visitors with a museum that is a dynamic public space in which to experience contemporary art in its infinite manifestations."
Winning a museum commission today, is one the holy grails of architecture and a contemporary art venue now increasingly serves as a magnetic hub for a city’s cultural community. Positioned within University Circle’s academic life, art school activity, and cultural offerings, MOCA will aim to infuse this new district with energy and life, day and night. The building is designed to showcase a program of internationally emerging art in flexible gallery spaces. The lobby is designed as an urban living room, a place for visitors to mingle, eat, shop, attend events, over the course of hours, or for brief interludes in a busy day.
This building is an opportunity to provide a 21st century model of an art museum that anticipates dramatic shifts in how we learn, how we see, and how we socialise.
Michael Hammond
Editor in Chief
WAN
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