Origins of the Broad Contemporary

The Center for Land Use Interpretation, as is their style, interprets the new BCAM as "more than an immediate housing for cultural artifacts...[but] engaged in an unspoken interaction with far away places, connected to the rest of the landscape of the world through the translocation of its physical constituents." Which is to say, the new museum required natural resources from various places and created refuse in others. CLUI went out and documented the sources of BCAM's materials, including at the Azusa quarry pictured above.

By tracking down the terrestrial sources for the building's primary construction materials, we find that the museum has touched the ground in a constellation of places. Material trucked off site helped to make mountains in landfills, and excavation sites in a number of states and two countries were altered and enlarged for the raw materials that make up the building's floors, walls, and roof. In its construction the museum has engaged in a dialogue with the ground, forming a network of incidental earthworks across the land. For every pile there is a pit, for every pit, there is a pile. For every heap of architecture, there is a terrestrial void.

Hat tip: Modern Art Notes