design

Path is pretty in the same designy way as our modern museums. They are shaped like battleships and grain silos and crumpled souffles. There is much said about flow and fatigue and how one of these has been optimized and the other one reduced. These museums are very exciting when they open. You show up and marvel along with all of the other fans of architecture. Maybe you return for one of those nights where they stay open late and there is a band and drinking. “A great space,” you think. Maybe one day you’ll be rich and rent out the atrium for a private party. The art doesn’t get talked about so much at these museums. The museum itself is the “social object,” as it were. Eventually the particulars around which the museum was designed fall out of fashion. A fresh crop of architects finds it to be too flashy, or too dull, or to have been guided by faulty principles. There is congestion where there should be flow. Certain rooms are simply exhausting. Maybe it is even an eyesore. This is good for the museum. Now they can really fuck up the place. Fill a room with a thousand cubic feet of lead. Let Matthew Barney dangle from a rope and scribble some shit high on a wall where no one can see it. Or: just let their rooms be dull rooms filled with rousing art. Path is a monument to Path. It is no place to scribble in. I wish it longevity so that it might find shabbiness.