The Disposable Museum: Wal-Mart Heiress’ Crystal Bridges Opens

Architizer News

The Disposable Museum: Wal-Mart Heiress’ Crystal Bridges Opens

November 8, 2011

Image (c) Moshe Safdie, via Architectural Record.

Figure out your smug, canned sound-bite on this story now, you’re probably going to be using it a lot this week: Crystal Bridges, the over-endowed Museum of American Art built by Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton in Bentonville, Arkansas — will officially open on Friday.

Walton has been the subject of much criticism (and fawning) over the last few years. An insipid New Yorker piece from earlier this summer detailed how the billionaire heiress’s rapid buy-up of huge numbers of American masterpieces destabilized the art market, and praised Walton (whose company is the subject of a class action lawsuit alleging gender discrimination against 1.5 million female employees) for acting as a “maverick” woman of the people.

We realize that not everyone is going to agree with our thinking on this one, but architecture should be considered in context with the economic and cultural forces that led to its construction.

Read on.

Image (c) Washington Post.

Intentionally or not, the Museum operates on an engineered organicism shared by much of the American naturalism gracing Crystal Bridges’ walls. The “ponds” that validate the Museum’s name were dammed up so that the Museum could appear to dance over them. The creek that once stood on the site has been expanded after being lined with plastic. Many will criticize Moshe Safdie’s design as a banal piece of institutional regionalism (one commenter on Architectural Record compares it to “a nicer suburban community college campus”). Someone will undoubtably say that Crystal Bridges looks like a museum built by RyanHomes, the most ubiquitous suburban home developer in the United States in the last sixty years. A Ryan Home, with a few swoops thrown on for good measure (it is a museum, after all!).

The building looks like it has some really beautiful spaces within it, a tribute to Safdie’s long-acknowledged brilliance. Humor me for a minute as I pursue the comparison between Wal-Mart and Ryan Homes. Both companies rose to prominence through a repeatable kit-of-parts development model that asked consumers to accept a certain level of “same-ness” in exchange for lower prices. Both companies colonized whatever natural landscapes existed in America after the war. Both companies trod over any regional differences that existed between, say, Bentonville Arkansas and Shaler, Pennsylvania. Both companies asked Americans to spend (or borrow) more money than they had.

So when critics say that Crystal Bridges looks like a prefabricated home, they have reason beyond the grey slate of the facade or the plastic-lined water elements. It doesn’t matter who designed the museum, because it is a repeatable, object; and in this sense, we’re defending Safdie with this argument. Crystal Bridges is a big-box museum, built by a (very talented, etc.) architect who has no more connection to Arkansas than he might have in Shaler, PA. That’s ok: The architecture is no more than an afterthought, in the semiology of Walton’s project-with-a-capital-P. She has applied “lean manufacturing” (a definitive 20th century business concept where all resources in a company must be spent on producing a value-added product on the consumer end) to architecture, and to art. Mass-produced goods — bought in perpetuity by millions of credit-addicted Americans — are the currency of the museum.

So what does it mean to stand in an $800 million dollar museum filled with American art by the likes of Asher B. Durand, funded by the sale of disposable goods to a group of Americans who almost categorically can’t afford anything else? I’m pretty sure Wal-Mart sells a mudflap version of Durand’s “Kindred Spirits” (1849) for about $7,999,86.99 less.