September 2021 | Eyesore

Commentary on architectural blunders in monthly serial.

Welcome to the new annex (gray thing, right side) for Liljevalchs, Stockholm’s Museum of Contemporary Art, an above-ground version of Berlin’s Fuhrerbunker, (circa 1943). Notice how well-harmonized and proportioned (not) every element between the two structures is — scale, cladding, fenestrations, ornament. Stockholm is a fine city, partly cute and partly sturdy in a thoroughly bourgeois sense (and ain’t nuthin wrong with bourgeois, if you want to be civilized). Stockholm is no Paris, of course in the sense of saturating beauty, but it’s comfortably far enough from the dynamic hyperbolic savagery of, say, New York, too. In short, Stockholm is dandy… the new museum annex, not so much.

The annex was designed by the Wingårdhs architectural office. It contains the museum shop (gotta move the merch!) and the cafe (coffee = nice profit margin), plus gallery space. Below is one of the gallery spaces as depicted on Wingårdhs’ website. Is it blank or is there an exhibition of white art up? Who knows? — since virtually all contemporary art is a stunt of one kind or another, usually a joke on the public. But one must admire the sense of artistic purity that seeks to display… nothing… just empty space. That may turn out to be the essence of the contemporary condition, and we will know soon enough because we are leaving the Modern era as I type. Bon voyage to the next disposition of the human project!

Thanks to Ray Sawhill for the nomination