MSU Chooses Design for New East Lansing Art Museum

Michigan State University (MSU) has chosen architect Zaha Hadid’s design for the new $26 million Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum. Hadid was one of five architects considered for the final design.

According to excerpts from the article:

The audience on-hand at the unveiling Tuesday was the first locally to learn who the winner was. (It was also announced earlier Tuesday in Troy.) An elite group, perhaps. Over the next few days, images of Hadid’s design will circulate through the general public. And only then, after people digest the design and Google Hadid’s other works to gain context, will a true reaction come.

Real estate magnate Eli Broad, whose $26 million donation is paying for well over half of the project, which is now estimated at $40 million, and who also served on the jury to select the design, lauded Hadid’s creation with hyperbolic praise. “In just the way the Eiffel Tower identifies Paris or the Guggenheim Museum identifies New York … it was a way to put this university on the map worldwide,” he said after the unveiling.

The winning design of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, was unveiled Tuesday

Broad predicted that the building would draw art and architecture lovers from around the world, furthering the claim that Lansing may have to build a bigger airport to accommodate art tourists.

Hadid, an Iraqi-born Londoner, and the first woman to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize, has designed a building that is, at the least, interesting. The building’s skin is made of interlocking pleats of reflective metal, giving it that 1950s diner feel — a diner created by extra terrestrials.

The 41,000-square-foot structure will house special exhibitions, modern and contemporary art, new media, photography, works on paper and the university’s permanent collection. The museum will be Hadid’s second in the United States (the other is the Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati) and her first on a university campus.

Read the entire article here.