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Moving The Barnes To Philly Literally

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Sep 24 2007 12:00am EDT

Moving the Barnes to Philly, Literally

It's too bad this architect lost out on the Barnes Foundation commissison:

Thom Mayne of Morphosis took a maverick approach that bordered on sly irony. He proposed transporting the entire Barnes collection, room by room, to the new site, leaving even the corridors and interior paneling intact...[it would be] shielded from the street by a long rectangular building housing the lobby, bookstore and auditorium.

Nicolai Ouroussoff, the New York Times' architecture critic, talked to some of the firms that were being considered for the project along with Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, who won the commission.

Not that I've been an opponent of the foundation's move from suburban Merion, Pennsylvania to the center of Philadelphia, but Mayne's proposal would've been a way to do this while giving a nod to the move's detractors. (Although, I'm not sure they would've been likely to see the transplantation of the idiosyncratic galleries as an acceptable solution.)

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