Subtle Design Shines at Punta della Dogana

Photo by Graziano Arici

François Pinault and Tadao Ando

Charles Ray Rachel Whiteread Richard Serra Andy Warhol Agnes Martin Cy Twombly Willem de Kooning Mark Rothko

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Spectacularly. Stealing a bit of thunder from the opening of the 53rd Venice Biennale, the Punta della Dogana debuted under a perfect alignment of conditions — the right time and place, the right patron and collection, and the right architect — and will come to be seen as one of the most exciting art destinations not only in Venice but in the world.

In a high-profile competition in early 2007, the Pinault Foundation beat the Guggenheim to win a 30-year lease on arguably the best locale in the city — a 38,000-square-foot space at the mouth of the Grand Canal. City officials had suggested a collaboration between the two neighboring institutions (the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a gondolier’s push from the Punta Della Dogana, and Pinault's first Venice outpost, the Palazzo Grassi, just a bit farther), but the possibility was killed when Alberto Rigotti, founder of ABM Merchant Bank and the Guggenheim’s bidding partner, was quoted in Le Monde denigrating Pinault as “a private collector among thousands” who “reminds one of an artist or a wandering merchant who can’t find a place to show his goods.”

In fact, Pinault is not your average collector. The owner of Christie’s and the Gucci Group, he has been steadily purchasing art for over 30 years, amassing works by some of the most important artists of our time, including de Kooning, Mondrian, Rothko, Serra, Warhol, Twombly, Prince, Gerhard Richter, Agnes Martin, and Cindy Sherman. To make his collection available to the public, in 2000 he ran an international competition that produced a winning design by Ando for a $195 million contemporary-art museum on Île Seguin, just outside Paris. After five years, $24 million, and not as much progress as he wanted, he pulled out and acquired the Palazzo Grassi, where in 2005 the public got its first taste of the depth and personality of his collection with a three-part series of exhibitions organized by American curator Alison Gingeras, whom Pinault has since installed as the curator of his collection and who also, along with Italian-born, New York–based Francesco Bonami, put together the Punta della Dogana’s debut show, “Mapping the Studio.”

In sharp contrast to the bureaucratic delays that so frustrated Pinault in France, the Palazzo Grassi deal took less than a year to complete, and the Punta della Dogana took two years from bidding to opening (14 months of actual construction, with 120 workers logging 300,000 hours). It’s a laudable achievement in a country where everything — especially construction — moves bafflingly slow. And the two projects together cost about half of what Pinault was willing to spend in France. (In perhaps a subtle flip to the French, the Punta della Dogana flies, in addition to the red and gold flag of Venice, the black and white stripes of Brittany, long regarded as a separatist symbol. At the tip of the promontory, a Charles Ray sculpture of a young boy clutching a frog by its hind legs — fast becoming an icon for the museum — might also be read as a droll rebuke to Pinault’s motherland.)

Ando oversaw both projects. His intervention at Palazzo Grassi was minimal, almost imperceptible, and, at Punta della Dogana, subtlety reigns again, although the meeting of old and new is more palpable. His design is a measured response to the existing structure, which was painstakingly restored to its base construction, with centuries of partitions, passageways, and sundry additions eliminated. Outside, the pale stone and plaster facade was restored to the building’s original appearance, and the 20 glazed water gates, each topped by an arched window, were replaced. The interior was stripped to its bare brick walls and rough-hewn wooden rafters, and in perhaps the most complicated aspect of the reconstruction, a double-layered concrete shell was installed, waterproofing the entire structure up to a height of nearly 7 feet, a good 3 feet higher than the average aqua alta (flooding).