JAN SHREM AND MARIA MANETTI SHREM MUSEUM OF ART, UC DAVIS

At once tent and pavilion, diaphanous yet secure, the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art introduces to the Californian public an architectural language of transparency and tectonic investigation. California has previously, of course, been home to cosmopolitan dialects and direct exploration of construction technique: the work of Swiss emigré Albert Frey, for instance, in mid-century Palm Springs or that of Raphael Soriano, born on the island of Rhodes, in both Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. The DNA of the museum is similarly international: Dutch and Chinese in the case of Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu (founding partners of SO – IL, the lead designers); Japanese, as both worked for SANAA in Tokyo; Greek in the case of SO – IL colleague, Ilias Papageorgiou; American, as design partner Bohlin Cywinski Jackson has a long track record in contextual and sustainable architecture across the United States; and, finally, Italian and Lebanese/Israeli as the key patrons, Maria Manetti Shrem and Jan Shrem, were raised in Florence and Jerusalem respectively. And yet the museum building is specific to its place, an astute response to this flat, hot expanse of agricultural land and university campus at Davis, immediately adjacent to the freeway connecting San Francisco in the west to Tahoe and Reno in the east. In fact, the building could be nowhere else. Perhaps Idenburg and Liu brought some characteristically Dutch or Chinese interpretation of land and landmass to the project. And perhaps one can detect modifications of massing strategies and tactics of transparency associated with Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa in such works as SANAA’s Glass Pavilion at Ohio’s Toledo Museum of Art (THE PLAN 019). Whatever stylistic genealogies the museum might suggest in photographs, in reality, it is comfortably of its place. And comfortable in itself. A “signature building” that is nevertheless comparatively free of ego or gratuitous...

Proceed with your preferred purchase option to continue reading

Digital

5.49 €

Add to cart

Printed

15.00 €

Add to cart

Subscription

From 42.00 €

Choose subscription