Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture critic for the Wall Street Journal, reacts to Burying Albert Barnes in the Philly MegaBarnes:
Whenever I planned to go to the Barnes, the trip got canceled for one reason or another. So I never got there, much to my eternal regret, and I have only followed its recent history in the press.
But of this I have no doubt: The new Barnes will be an entirely different kind of place, whatever rationales accompany its transformation. I simply cannot believe that anyone is seriously considering reproducing the old rooms in the wrongheaded assumption that this will somehow make it all okay.
The Met did that with the Lehman Collection when it built the Lehman Wing years ago, supposedly reproducing the rooms where the paintings hung in the Lehman home. It was faux then and it’s faux now—an exercise in patronizing and self-delusory sophistry that is supposed to lull us into thinking that we are keeping a place, or an ambience, already irretrievably lost. It never works.
Are no lessons ever learned?
CultureGrrl
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