The New Reina Sofía: Monumentality for Monumentality's Sake

Patty has taken to photographing every minute of her wanderings through Madrid and has some beautiful photos to show for it on her website. Like this one from yesterday's adventure, when we took a stroll through Lavapiés and stumbled across what, from a distance, looked like the set of Tron the movie. The giant red cube and surrounding glass structure was, to our disbelief, the new addition to the contemporary art museum, named after the queen: El Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS). The new addition is, for lack of a better term, ginormous and completely dwarfs the original building, complete with an internal patio that could easily fit a parking structure, or two. The sense of monumentality to the new addition is near impossible to describe-- rather, one gathers the sense that this architecture is designed to be experienced.

Yes, Patty and I had read about the new design; yes, we had seen digitally rendered images of what it would look like when completed; and yes, we thought, well, another celebrated "postmodern" addition to a museum. Qué bien. But clearly the architects aimed to construct a building that provokes the sense of overwhelming insignificance from its visitors in relation to this mammouth structure.

What sense of monumentality were the architects attempting to provoke in their visitors? One of insignificance in relation to modern art? Clearly this cannot be the case. To the State, then, who funded the project? To postmodernism? Or perhaps excessively just for the sake of monumentality?

In a country that in the past century has become witness to both the weilding of pharaonic economic interests by other Western nations, and to the monumentalism of a dictatorship that left its architectonic traces throughout the city, into what project does MNCARS inscribe itself by reproducing the sense of even more monumentality?

Here's a virtual tour of the new addition to the museum, which is worth the two minutes to take a look.