The Smithsonian Artists Research Fellowship supports artists during a period of research in the vast Smithsonian archives. When invited for this fellowship, I decided to pursue research on the architecture of the Hirshhorn Museum of Art, designed by Gordon Bunshaft and opened to the public on Washington’s National Mall in 1974. The museum building drew me in with its audacity. Although it fits logically into the oeuvre of Bunshaft – at that time he was exploring the new forms made possible by advances in building technology
(especially pre-stressed concrete spans and cantilevers) – the building’s floating concrete cylinder rises quite dramatically out of its context.When the building was planned in the late 1960s, the prevailing style of architecture in the US Capitol was the international government standard of classicist symbolism common to soviet, fascist and capitalist governments alike.The ‘concrete donut’ of the Hirshhorn made an extravagant break with this standard. I wanted to know if this break might be an indicator of some kind of ideological shift in American government – a
preoccupation running through most of my recent work – the possibility of form acting as a signifier of ideology. The following text brings together my research on the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington with my investigation of Joseph Hirshhorn’s earlier plan to build a Hirshhorn Museum as the centrepiece of a utopian town of culture in the Canadian wilderness.This second body of research formed the subject of my exhibition Terence Gower: Public Spirit at the Hirshhorn Museum, 09.2008 - 03.2009.
infrastructure | company towns by terence gower
Philip Johnson,
modernism unbuilt projects
ideology ambition research
architect. model of Hirshhorn, Ontario, 1955. Joseph H Hirshhorn Papers, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, DC
hirshhorn ontario
The planning of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC falls within the legacy of public building initiated by F D Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal. Originally viewed as make work projects during the depression, publicly-funded construction programs for schools, hospitals, housing and cultural institutions were soon recognised for their social and economic benefits. The atmosphere of public support for public works continued through L B Johnson’s Great Society of the mid-1960s. This public spiritedness began to give way after the 1960s until we were left with the mindset we live with in the United States today, where local governments can’t get enough public funding to bring public education much above Third World standards. Thus, in very reduced terms, the 1930s through 1960s represents a hiatus in an American government tradition of economic conservatism. The intersection of this period with a similar lapse in government aesthetic conservatism is what made the Hirshhorn Museum possible. The project started with a gentleman’s agreement – an exchange of letters between President Johnson and the donor of the museum’s collection, Joseph Hirshhorn. The president, under the aesthetic stewardship of his wife, set in motion a very rapid chain of events. A Congressional Act was passed, funds requisitioned, an architect found, a building designed and construction started. But by 1970, with the museum half-finished, a new political climate made itself heard with calls to cancel the project on both economic and aesthetic grounds. After a fruitless right-wing Congressional witch-hunt, the building, nearly starved for completion funds, was miraculously finished. Bunshaft’s building, a relic from an earlier, perhaps more open-minded era, had prevailed, and Joseph Hirshhorn, the self-described ‘Little Hebe from Brooklyn’ found his place on the National Mall, next to Abraham Lincoln (cue Conservative gasps of horror).
Joseph Hirshhorn’s place in this story is a peculiarly American one. The Hirshhorn gift (over 6,000 works of art) came with the collector’s name on the museum and the collection’s curator, Abraham Lerner, being named the museum’s director. This intermingling of public and private interests was common in the US capital – James Smithson’s Smithsonian Institution, Charles Lang Freer’s Freer Gallery, Andrew Mellon’s National Gallery of Art – and this collaborative model provided an efficient and elegant home for Hirshhorn’s collection. The collector’s original plans for his collection, however, were much more grandiose. After migrating to the United States from Latvia as a child, Joseph Hirshhorn made his way from the slums of Brooklyn to New York City’s Curbside Stock Exchange. He had made his first million dollars by age twenty-eight but managed to cash out of the exchange just weeks before the crash of 1929. Hirshhorn next moved his interests to mineral mining in the wilderness of Canada. His mining stocks funded the prospecting and processing of gold and copper across the country. Then, in 1953 Hirshhorn struck it rich in western Ontario with one of the largest uranium finds in North America. He became known as the Uranium King. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki announced the commencement of the Cold War. Hirshhorn’s timely uranium discovery was essential to US competition in the Cold War arms race, uranium providing the essential ingredient for nuclear fission. For security control and profit reasons, the government of Canada immediately set itself up as the sole client of Hirshhorn’s operation, acting as broker and clearing house to the Pentagon. Hirshhorn made over 150 million dollars.
39
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator