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).

The building is a sharp triangle, with a small colonnaded portico at the tip, followed by a series of parallel rectangles, each corresponding to a vaulted, sky-lit roof. Ando’s design respects what exists; new galleries follow the arrangement of the original bays, with Ando’s trademark silken concrete surfaces providing calm contrast to the brute beauty of the centuries-old masonry walls. The architect has called concrete “the marble of the 20th century,” and no one has imbued the brutish material with as much tactility or variety.

In the space, floors are a polished concrete and resin mix, while the doorways that puncture the meter-thick walls are framed by thin, smooth concrete panels that float ever so slightly away from the brick structure. This is classic Ando: The narrow gap dramatizes the meeting of old and new, for those who are looking. The more obvious example of the same idea is the floating hollow cube that the architect placed at the center of the structure, a double-height space formed by poured-in-place concrete. A cortile of sorts (a nod to the courtyards of traditional Italian buildings), the space is the only autonomous part of the building, emphasized by the stone-block floor, a traditional pavement called masegni that is seen in virtually all of Venice’s outdoor spaces. The room, which houses a series of large-scale black-and-white photographs by Rudolf Stingel, acts as a pivot for the museum, to which all circulation paths lead.

The Punta della Dogana’s other significant architectural gesture is the replacement of grills on all the exterior doors with a woven metal screen Ando designed in homage to Carlo Scarpa’s geometric motifs in the Olivetti showroom on San Marco Square. The move was in part a response to Mayor Massimo Cacciari’s request for some outward expression of the building’s inner transformation.

Unlike the uniform spaces one often finds in museums, the Punta della Dogana’s galleries feel wonderfully varied, because the historic elements, such as the irregular, laboriously restored brick walls, are so singular, and the views of water and city beyond the arched windows are constantly changing. Interior sight lines shift too, with the upper level affording views of the loftlike double-height galleries, or into the spare central cube, for example.

Much of the art on display, such as the grouping of eight massive dark canvases by Sigmar Polke (from the series “Axial Age,” 2005–07), feels site-specific, a compliment to the curators, who rose to the challenge of choosing art that married well with the architecture while standing strong on its own. The inspired placement of a floor-to-ceiling, red-and-white-plastic-beaded curtain by Felix Gonzolez-Torres, Untitled (Blood) (1992), at the entrance to the first gallery gives visitors a pleasing, tactile introduction to the museum, leading to the quirky combination of Rachel Whiteread’s Jolly Rancher–hued casts Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) (1995) and Maurizio Cattelan’s headless stuffed horse (Untitled, 2007). Particularly clever arrangements include the pairing of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s black-and-white couture studies, Stylized Sculpture (2007), with Cattelan’s elegant, draped corpses carved from white Carrera marble, All (2008); and Jeff Koons’s self-referential, Baroque-kitsch marble Bourgois Bust-Jeff and Ilona (1991) with Cindy Sherman’s 2007–08 series of herself as an older woman in age-inappropriate party garb.

Because the building’s latest incarnation as a museum is just one chapter among many in its long history, it has the sense of calm or quiet one often feels in places where time seems to have been arrested. It’s hard to imagine a more fitting backdrop for the intensity that characterizes so much of Pinault’s collection.