Quote of the Day: Joseph Giovannini
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| Orange County Museum of Art. Photograph: Tom Bonner |
"The effect on visitors, voluntary captives of this drama, is dazzling and even dazing, as if they were the wave-tossed survivors in Théodore Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa. More locally, the journey recalls the thrill rides at Disneyland, just up the highway in Anaheim."
—Joseph Giovannini on Thom Mayne's Orange County Museum of Art
Comments
The architecture critic for The Guardian got it right:
"Like many projects from the Morphosis stable, it has resulted in a very elaborate and expensive envelope, shouting its rollercoaster acrobatics at full volume, wrapping a sequence of interior spaces that have little to do with the performative shell. Almost a generation in the making, it feels like the final death rattle of a bygone age, the last gasp of an era preoccupied with novel form for form’s sake. Perhaps it is fitting that this flimsy, paper-thin architecture is held together with tape."
Giovannini doesn't even comment when the main benefactor (Segerstrom) tells him that OCMA is "the most interesting building in Orange County."
What about Neutra's Garden Grove Community Church or Johnson's Crystal Cathedral?
Is Giovannini as ignorant as Segerstrom? Or, is he just pandering to the rich guy? Given the rest of the article, I suspect it's both.
--- Joseph Garcin