Kulapat Yantrasast, who is
designing the expansion for San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, prefers his
museum designs to “take a backseat” to the art and visitors.
Emily Wilson
wHY pavilion exterior
design for the Asian Art Museum, day view (image © wHY and Asian Art Museum)
SAN FRANCISCO — The Asian
Art Museum in San Francisco is currently undergoing a $38-million expansion for
a pavilion and art terrace, set to open in 2020. The architect chosen for the
project is Kulapat Yantrasast, whose designs are known for being modern, open,
and elegantly restrained.
This expansion, which will
add 13,000 square feet of exhibition space, is one of many projects that
Yantrasast’s firm has done for art spaces. The architect grew up in Thailand
and became interested in buildings on trips with his family to cities like
Paris and London. When he was a child, his house was renovated, and he thinks
he might have become an architect because of his fascination with that process.
After studying at the University of Toyko and working for eight years with his
mentor, the self-taught Pritzer-winning Tadao Ando, Yantrasast came to Los
Angeles and started his own firm, wHY. Yantrasast has worked on a range of
projects, but he’s known for his design of museums and galleries, including the
Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, Michigan’s Grand Rapids Art Museum,
Harvard Art Museums’ galleries, a collaboration with artist Yoko Ono on the
installation “Skylanding” in Chicago, and the Marciano Art Foundation in Los
Angeles.
Yantrasast sat down with
Hyperallergic at the Asian Art Museum to talk about how three months with Ando
turned into eight years, how he sees himself as a matchmaker between artists
and art lovers, and how he envisions the Asian Art Museum as an inviting temple
to art.
Emily Wilson: Why did you
go to Japan to study architecture?
Kulapat Yantrasast: When I was growing up, Thailand was full of
these Western buildings, like glass buildings, which completely don’t belong in
our tropical place. Even in my own house, a rather traditional house, we had
black leather sofas, which don’t fit at all — it’s sweaty and humid. I felt
like we’re so obsessed with the image of civilized environments that come from
the West, but we’re not part of that Western culture. We didn’t create modern
culture — we adopted it, but we have to be good at adopting this Western
modernized design to fit with our own culture and habits. So I started to look
at cities or cultures that do that well, like Japan. It adopted modern
architecture and design, but it was integrated so well into the culture that it
became theirs.
wHY, Harvard University Art
Museums (image © wHY)
EW: How did you meet your
mentor, Tadao Ando?
KY: He was giving a lecture
in Thailand, and I was asked to do the moderation because I spoke Japanese. We
became friends quickly. It was like love at first site with him and his wife,
and they asked me to take them around to see buildings in Bangkok, which I did.
Then he invited me to Japan, and he was working on this competition in Fort
Worth Art Museum for three months he said, “Why don’t you come work with me?”
And I thought, “Wow, this is a great opportunity.” We won the competition, so
he asked me to come work for him, and I went. It was supposed to be three
months, and it was eight years.
EW: Why did you decide to
stop working with Ando?
KY: I started working with
him when I was about 28, so I felt like I was already late — my friends had
already designed buildings. Even though I was going all over the world with him
and had amazing clients, I felt like this was not my party. I was just a plus
one. Even though I respected the work, I started to feel like, well, if it were
me, I would do it this way.
In Japan we have a saying,
“Nothing grows under big trees.” I left when I was around 35 years old, and I
started feeling that my Thai habit kind of kicked in because everything in
Japan is so tightly controlled, which I loved, but sometimes I felt like it was
lifeless. I missed the smell and the vibrancy and the diversity and everything
that is casual and open in Thailand. I didn’t want to go back to Thailand
because I felt like it’s my parents’ home, and I was already working in
America, so I thought I’ll come to America. I didn’t want to go to New York
because I felt like I’d have to work for someone else and I’d be doing lofts
and boutiques and interior work. I thought LA is very open, and I started wHY
in 2004 with another classmate of mine from Japan who’s American.
EW: Why do you love working
on museums?
KY: I’m one of few
architects, I think, who really hangs out with artists. Artists represent a
completely unknown world to me, and there are not a lot of things left where
you can be completely shocked and inspired by something different. I think
artists work very hard to bring that vision out. Architecture is the opposite
of that — we’re kind of in a gravitas business. We’re about creating stability
and a sense of place — we’re about identity. Art is about allowing you to see
the world in a different way, so art gives me such amazing joy, and because of
that when I talk to museums, it comes out. I feel like my work is to create
this beautiful experience where people and art meet. I always think it’s like
being a matchmaker because one is your friend, the artist, and one is your
friend, the art lover, and they didn’t know each other before, and once you
introduce them, you stay in the background. Most architects design museums
like, look at me, look at me, look at me. It’s kind of not confident. If you’re
confident in your work, you don’t have to always be present. You can take a
backseat, and let people enjoy their life.
EW: What are you excited
about working on at the Asian Art Museum?
KY: This collection is one
of the best in the world of this material. I’m blown away by how many
masterpieces there are. At the same time, it fits within this way of what you
think an Asian art museum would look like. I’ve always wanted to kind of free
it up and allow people to be a part of it, which is something the museum is
interested in. For this project, we started inside out. We didn’t plan on
making any big renovation in the beginning. We thought, “Let’s focus on the art
objects and let’s make the most meaningful, transformational moment between
people and art,” which is kind of what I always want to do. We thought maybe we
can have a variety of densities, so not everything looks busy all the time, and
we can single out the masterpieces, change the lighting, so there’s kind of a
temple that people feel like they’re invited to be part of.
EW: You’ve talked about
masterpieces. What do you consider the masterpieces here?
KY: I love the Chinese
collection here. I love bronzes. I love the three-legged vessels. Those big
bronzes are just insane, they’re so beautiful, and they’re so difficult to
make. I felt like if you have them, you have to flaunt them. We need to be able
to show these 10 things that are all masterpieces, so you see the diversity and
that each of them is unique on its own. That’s the challenge of having too many
masterpieces!
wHY, south court for the
Asian Art Museum (image © wHY and Asian Art Museum)
At the pavilion we’ll be
able to open the museum out to the city, so that will change how people
perceive the museum. The museum is a little like a hermit crab because this
Asian spirit came in and occupied this shell. It’s this Italian beaux-art
building that was built as a library. This pavilion is the first addition to
this ex-library space, and it will be a large-scale, very flexible space that
will connect to the Civic Center in a meaningful way. And people walking up
from Union Square, that will be the first thing they see, so we hope that will
be a little window, a gateway.
https://hyperallergic.com/465871/a-museum-architect-sees-himself-as-a-matchmaker-between-artists-and-art-
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