The Jean Nouvel Extension to Madrid’s REINA SOFIA Museum
By Daniel Aubry
Imagine a cardinal’s red hat, painted by Dali in his "melting watches" surrealistic period, – a red hat the size of a football field. Actually, now that I think of it, perhaps more like a Chinese lacquer red beret, oozing out over an entire city block.
That describes the roof over French architect Jean Nouvel’s stunning new extensions to Madrid’s Reina Sofia museum of Contemporary Art. Unified under this one humongous red canopy are three separate glass-walled buildings housing, respectively: temporary exhibition space, an auditorium and a library- all surrounding a vast public plaza, intended to entice passersby from the highly congested Atocha train station area into a cool and soothing glass-enclosed world of culture.
The Reina Sofia museum is currently housed in an eighteenth century building, formerly a hospital built in 1788 by Sabatini. It was never ideally suited to its re-incarnation as a museum. Two hundred years later, back in 1988, when the Reina Sofia opened to the public, the idea of a major contemporary art museum in highly traditional Madrid was an untested notion. And the antiquated hospital, threatened by the wrecker’s ball, was the best venue the Reina Sofia could hope for.
Essentially made up of long, high ceilinged rooms in a quadrangle surrounding a central courtyard, the building put a straightjacket on all curatorial efforts. Ingenious solutions were found to bring it into the 20th century, such as the pair of striking all glass elevators attached to the fa�ade. Nevertheless, as the museum’s international stature grew, the spatial limitations of the exhibition and storage space clearly called for a more radical solution.
In 2002, the last year for which figures are available, over a million and a half visitors trouped through the Reina Sofia. A building that had always been unwieldy had now become totally inadequate to handling such a dense flow of people.
In 1999 the Museum’s board convened an international architectural competition for the proposed addition, to be built on a large vacant lot behind the existing museum. This coveted commission "drew such heavyweights as Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando, David Chipperfield and Spain’s ‘favorite son,’ Santiago Calatrava.
That Jean Nouvel, whose international renown rested primarily on the Institute of Arab Studies building in Paris, should triumph against such competition says a lot about the breadth of vision that went into his winning entry. His annex to the Reina Sofia can now lay claim to being one of the first truly great buildings of the twenty first century. It is bound to keep Jean Nouvel on everybody’s short list for future commissions of this magnitude.
Although the fa�ade of the extension is still unfinished, the temporary exhibition space just opened with a major Lichtenstein retrospective. The Reina Sofia is simultaneously showing Julian Schnabel’s mammoth paintings in the Velazquez Palace, one of its satellite facilities, and one of the few exhibition spaces anywhere with sufficient ceiling height to hang such giant canvases. When the Nouvel Annex will be fully functional in December the Reina Sofia’s capacities will expand to nearly double its current size. With this addition, the Reina Sofia, and by extension Madrid itself, is securing a reputation as one of the world’s pre-eminent venues for contemporary art.
