A giant bubble for debate - Liz Diller

We conventionally divided space into private and public realms, and we know these legal distinctions very well because we become experts at protecting our private property and private space. But we're less attuned to the nuances of the public. What translates generic public space into qualitative space? This is something that our studio has been working on for the past decade.

We're doing this through some case studies. A large chunk of our work has been put into transforming this neglected industrial ruin into a viable post-industrial space that looks forward and backward at the same time. Another huge chunk of our work has gone into making relevant a site that's grown out of sync with its time.

We've been working on democratizing Lincoln Center for a public that doesn't usually have 300 dollars to spend on an opera ticket. So we've been eating, drinking, thinking, and living public space for quite a long time, and it's taught us really one thing: to truly make a good public space, you have to erase the distinctions between architecture, urbanism, landscape, media, design, and so on. It really goes beyond distinction.

Now we are moving on to Washington, DC, and we're working on another transformation, and that is for the existing Hirshhorn Museum that's sited on the most revered public space in America—the National Mall. The Mall is a symbol of American democracy. What’s fantastic is that this symbol is not a thing; it’s not an image; it’s not an artifact. It’s actually a space.

It’s kind of just defined by the line of buildings on either side. It’s a space where citizens can voice their discontent and show their power. It’s a place where pivotal moments in American history have taken place, and they’re inscribed in there forever—like the march on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and the great speech that Martin Luther King gave there, the Vietnam protests, the commemoration of all that died in the pandemic of AIDS, the March for women's reproductive rights, right up until almost the present.

The Mall is the greatest civic stage in this country for dissent, and it’s synonymous with free speech. Even if you’re not sure what it is that you have to say, it may just be a place for civic and miseration. There is a huge disconnect, we believe, between the communicative and discursive space of the Mall and the museums that line it to either side.

That is that those museums are usually passive; they have passive relationships between the museum as the presenter and the audience as the receiver of information. So you can see dinosaurs and insects and collections of locomotives and all of that, but you’re really not involved—you’re being talked to.

When Richard Kirsch Aaalac took over as director of the Hirshhorn in 2009, he was determined to take advantage of the fact that this museum was sited in the most unique place—the seat of power in the US. While art and politics are inherently and implicitly together always and all the time, there could be some very special relationship that could be forged here in its uniqueness.

The question is, is it ultimately possible for art to insert itself into the dialogue of national and world affairs? Could the museum be an agent of cultural diplomacy? There are over 180 embassies in Washington, DC; there are over 500 think tanks. There should be a way of harnessing all of that intellectual and global energy into and somehow through the museum. There should be some kind of brain trust.

So as we began to think about the Hirshhorn and as we evolved the mission with Richard and his team, it's really his lifeblood. Beyond exhibiting contemporary art, the Hirshhorn will become a public forum—a place of discourse for issues around arts, culture, politics, and policy. It would have the global reach of the World Economic Forum. It would have the interdisciplinarity of the TED Conference. It would have kind of the informality of Times Square.

For this new initiative, the Hirshhorn would have to expand or appropriate a site for a temporary deployable structure. This is it: the Hirshhorn. A 230-foot diameter concrete donut, designed in the early '70s by Gordon Bunshaft. It’s hulking, its silent, it’s cloistered, its arrogant. It’s a design challenge architects love to hate. One redeeming feature is it’s lifted up off the ground. It's got this void; it’s got an empty core.

Kind of in the spirit of that facade, very much corporate and federal style. Around that space, the ring is actually galleries. Very, very difficult to mount shows in there. When the Hirshhorn opened, it’ll always Huxtable, the New York Times critic, had some choice words: “neo-penitentiary modern, a maimed monument and a maimed mall for a maimed collection.”

Almost four decades later, how would this building expand for a new progressive program? Where would it go? It can’t go in the Mall; there is no space there. It can’t go in the courtyard; it’s already taken up by landscape and by sculptures.

Oh, there’s always the hole, but how could it take the space of that hole and not be buried in it and become invisible? How could it become iconic, and what language would it take? The Hirshhorn sits among the most monumental institutions. Most are neoclassical, heavy, and opaque, made of stone or concrete. The question is: if one inhabits that space, what is the material of the Mall?

It has to be different from the buildings there. It has to be something entirely different. It has to be air in our imagination. It has to be light; it has to be ephemeral; it has to be formless, and it has to be free.

So this is the big idea: it’s a giant air bag. The expansion takes the shape of its container, and it loses out wherever it can, the top and sides. But more poetically, we like to think of the structure as inhaling the democratic air of the Mall, bringing it into itself the before and the after. It was dubbed the bubble by the press.

That was the lounge. It’s basically one big volume of air that just oozes out in every direction. The membrane is translucent; it’s made of silicone-coated glass fiber, and it’s inflated twice a year for one month at a time.

This is the view from the inside. So you might have been wondering how in the world did we get this approved by the federal government? I mean, it had to be approved by actually two agencies, and it was. One is there to preserve the dignity and sanctity of the Mall.

I blush whenever I show this. It is yours to interpret, but one thing I could say is that it’s a combination of iconoclasm and adoration. There was also some creative interpretation involved. The Congressional Buildings Act of 1910 limits the height of buildings in DC to 130 feet, except for spires, towers, domes, and minarets. There’s pretty much exemptions for monuments of church and state, and the bubble is 153 feet.

That’s the Pantheon next to it. It’s about 1.2 million cubic feet of compressed air. So we argued it on the merits of being a dome. So there it is, very stately among all these stately buildings in the Mall.

While this Hirshhorn is not landmarked, it's very, very historically sensitive, and so we couldn’t really touch its services. We couldn’t leave any traces behind, so we strained it from the edges and held it by cables. It’s a study of some bondage techniques, which are actually very, very important because it’s hit by wind all the time.

There’s one permanent steel ring at the top, but it can’t be seen from any vantage point on the Mall. There are also some restrictions about how much it could be lit. It glows from within; it’s translucent, but it can’t be more lit than the Capitol or some of the monuments, so it’s down the hierarchy on lighting.

So it comes to the side twice a year; it’s taken off the delivery truck, it’s hoisted, and then it’s inflated with this low pressure air. Then it’s restrained with the cables and ballasted with water at the very bottom.

This is a converse strange moment. We were asked by the bureaucracy at the Mall how much time would it take to install, and we said, well, the first direction would take one week— the very first. They really connected with that idea, and then it was really easy all the way through. But so we didn’t really have that many hurdles, I have to say, with the government and all the authorities.

But some of the toughest hurdles have been the technical ones. This is the warp and weft; this is a point cloud. There are extreme pressures. This is a very, very unusual building in that there’s no gravity load, but there’s load in every direction.

I’m just going to zip through these slides. This is the space in action—so flexible interior for discussions just like this, but in the round, luminous and reconfigurable. It could be used for anything—for performances, films, for installations.

The very first program will be one of cultural dialogue and diplomacy, organized in partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations. Form and content are together here; the bubble is an anti-monument. The ideals of participatory democracy are represented through suppleness rather than rigidity.

Art and politics occupy an ambiguous site outside the museum walls but inside of the museum’s core, blending its with the democratic era of the Mall. The bubble will inflate, hopefully for the first time, at the end of 2013. Thank you.