A new art museum is always a good news for any progressive city, but a museum dedicated to one single artist might be even be a better news, especially if there hasn’t been anything like that before. This summer one of such museums was opened in New Plymouth, and it is known as the Len Lye Centre – the first single-artist museum in New Zealand that is devoted to the pioneering filmmaker, kinetic sculptor and one of the most original artists of the twentieth century Len Lye (1901-1980). The Centre is adjacent to the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand’s leading contemporary art museum, and it offers greatly improved facilities for the display and archiving of the great artist’s work.
Another impressive fact, definitely worth mentioning, is the museum architecture in a form of curtain-like exterior that articulates Len Lye’s own philosophy on the relationship between art and architecture. Created by Auckland’s award-winning firm, Patterson Associates, this modern day temple’s curved facade of reflective stainless steel is a celebration of the Taranaki region’s innovative steel industry. The museum architecture transfers light in a holographic effect, creates different reflections during each day and season and is at the same time a striking and provocative expression of movement itself.
Patterson Associates developed the museum’s architectural design in a holistic or adaptive way, using what the company director, Andrew Patterson, calls a ‘systems methodology’. Rather than following classical proportion and aesthetics, they used patterns in the ecology of the project’s environments to drive design elements. Inside of the impressive 3000m building there are two large exhibition galleries, cinema, archive, education suite, lounge areas and various other facilities.
The new Len Lye Centre, with its sculptural steel exterior and subtle kinetic interior light shifts, embodies and personifies Len Lye and his body of work. The facade itself is worth $2 million and has been especially created by Taranaki company called Rivet. Viewed from above, the top edges of colonnade create a koru form, displaying the Museum’s Polynesian influences as the meeting house, or wharenui, for Len Lye. It was Lye himself who once said that “great architecture goes fifty-fifty with great art,” and he would most certainly be very pleased to see that it really does – in a place that is dedicated to none other than himself.
The new museum is open six days a week and warmly welcomes every passionate art, culture and museum architecture lover from around the world.
