ARCH 2220/2620

(re)Configuring Identity. Expanding the Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, New York

Faculty:  JEREMY CARVALHO, GUSTAVO CREMBIL, TED KRUEGER, ANDREW SAUNDERS (Cordinator), FLORENCIA VETCHER

“Mere size is something says Browning, and I never felt the significance of this unexpected declaration as much as I did in the presence of a tiny oblong panel belonging to Mr. Louis Hyde of Glens Falls, New York. For it lacks nothing that makes a masterpiece except size.
-Bernard Berensen, Art in America, 1924

Introduction

Those that make their way to the small upstate New York town of Glens Falls will be surprised to find an astonishing and eclectic assortment of masterpieces at the Hyde Collection. The Hyde Collection was started as the personal art collection of the Charlotte Pruyn Hyde. The Hydes accrued a large amount of their wealth through various industrial ventures at the turn of the century, mainly having to do with the paper industry. The collection was started and still remains in the Hyde estate located directly behind the paper mill. The Hyde estate was original composed of three separate, modest houses, one for each of the Hyde sisters, the Hyde House, the Hoopes House and the Cunningham House. These three villas designed by Boston Architect Henry Forbes Bigelow were connected by an extensive landscape design.

In 1952, Mrs. Hyde established an endowment to promote and grow the collection as a future museum for the purpose of art education. Since this point the Hyde Collection has been a major public museum. In 1989, Larrabbee Barnes designed a modest addition located between the Hyde and Cunningham House to accommodate the expanding collection and role of the Museum. Recently, the Museum acquired the Hoopes House and is currently in the master planning stage for another major expansion.

The second year studio will speculate on how to bring together this collection of buildings and form a coherent identity for the Hyde Collection in this next phase of building. This will include a multi-scalar analysis of the disparate buildings and existing conditions of the Glens Falls site, the role of the museum in the region and the larger vision of a museum in the 21st century post-Bilbao. The expansion will play a large role in reconfiguring the identity of the Hyde, an institution that suffers from lack

Performance and Affects

In the essay “The Function of Ornament”, Fashid Moussavi writes that architecture needs mechanisms that allow it to become connected to culture. Throughout its long history architecture has connected to culture in different ways in relationship to different paradigms. In short, Moussavi makes the argument that in order to connect to contemporary culture, architecture cannot rely on a common language or system of understanding to communicate. Furthermore, it is through the process of creating sensation and affects that buildings continue to effectively relate to current culture.

It is very important to understand a key shift in understanding from language and icon (static) to the production of new sensations (dynamic) that remain open to new forms of experience. In other words it is less important what a building looks like (style) and more important what it does, how it expresses (performance).

The AD2 design studio will focus on issues of analysis (interpretive and generative), material affects, tectonics, structural systems, landscape and environmental strategies and programming all through the lens of performance. The concept of performance encompasses a wide range of organizational relationships. Performance should absolutely not be limited to function and should engage both ends of the spectrum from the conceptual (ritual and sensational) to the functional (utility and efficiency).

Analysis

Given this focus, the studio will start with a rigorous recording, documentation and analysis of Hyde Collection at multiple design scales including master planning, buildings and the art collection. This will serve as an introduction to a rich context of design culture that each student will be responsible for not only becoming an expert, but more importantly, developing a speculative thesis through drawing and modeling. In the context of this design studio, analysis is understood as an operative design technique to identify distinguishing organizational and performative logics intrinsic to the spatial, material, and tectonic aspects of Hyde Collection. It is critical to understand analysis and design research as an exploratory process intended to penetrate beyond the simple addition of another building to the complex and instead present a cohesive design strategy the reconfigures the identity of the institution through a thorough reading of hidden potentials of the existing Hyde Collection.

Programming

It is in this historical and contemporary context that students will formulate a thesis to support a contemporary strategy for a built intervention to the Hyde Collection. As the next evolution of the morphology of the complex, the challenge will be to design a structure that maintains a dialogue with the existing structures and landscape and at the same time communicates to the current design culture of innovation.

The studio will be working with the curator of the Hyde Collection to speculate on new exhibition spaces for different types of artwork in the expanding collection that currently cannot be displayed in the existing galleries such contemporary and large scale work. The collection is currently exhibited in the Hyde House similar to the way that Mrs. Hyde had placed it. The museum draws heavily on not only the collection of masterpieces, but also the narrative of the Hyde family and the original complex. The Barnes addition is a more flexible exhibition area that is dedicated to temporary exhibits and traveling exhibitions.

In addition to exhibition and gallery space the museum will need to reassess its auxiliary programming requirements to include cross programming events and public spaces to open the institution to more communal interaction.

The scope and scale of the project will be defined as a 10,000 s.f. addition. Students will be required to define the nature of the program based on their initial analysis and design research on performance, knowledge of the Hyde Collection and engagement in contemporary architectural techniques and design strategies.