On a crowded weekend the narrow, cluttered, glassed-in lobby, roughly where the tub’s drain would be, was badly clogged. The galleries beyond flowed seamlessly into the museum’s old building. The collection looked great. But entering an oversize plumbing fixture to commune with classic modern art is like hearing Bach played by a man wearing a clown suit. Why a tub? That’s the $170 million (well over budget) question. Benthem Crouwel, the Amsterdam firm that designed it, hasn’t explained. At 130,000 square feet, the new Stedelijk (pronounced STEH-duh-lick) gloms onto the rear of the old one, a beloved red-and-white-striped, late-19th-century Neo-Renaissance brick pile by Adriaan Willem Weissman. The new building flips the museum entrance, so that it now faces Museum Plaza, a scruffy greensward around which the Concertgebouw, the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum are scattered. The ambition: update the old building and add exhibition space along with a restaurant and store on the ground floor facing the plaza. There the new Stedelijk, its jutting roof acting as an enormous canopy, is intended to activate the plaza’s northwest corner. All logical-sounding enough. But what transpired seems another case of civic icon-envy. The old Stedelijk pioneered the collecting of modern art and design in postwar Europe. Its white-box interior was widely imitated. The place became a people’s palace for contemporary culture. A wing was added during the 1950s to promote local and experimental art, and to be a host for happenings and cultural protests. It was a very Dutch sort of democratic gesture. I loved the old Stedelijk when I started visiting it 20-odd years ago. Its grand staircase, creaky herringbone floors, laid-back vibe and modish art mixed quaint and cool. But by then museums like the Pompidou in Paris were already overshadowing it. To get its mojo back the Stedelijk enlisted Robert Venturi, then Álvaro Siza; both of their plans proved unworkable. The project stalled. The Guggenheim opened in Bilbao, Spain, Tate Modern in London. Benthem Crouwel’s gonzo design suggests a kind of desperation in Amsterdam’s reaction to Bilbao. That said, this city has been suffering through a decade or more of disruptive and costly infrastructural and other construction, much of it unfinished and shortsighted. People here have been angry and frustrated. So the completion of the new Stedelijk, not long after the arrival of a spectacular new film institute, the Eye, designed by the Austrian architects Delugan Meissl, was greeted generously. The feeling was relief, a reaction notable for a capital previously unaccustomed to new architecture that declines to blend in. This is fine, even admirable, but it doesn’t mean the bathtub is too. Mel Crouwel, the lead architect for the Stedelijk, was government architect for years. His firm is normally reliable, with an industrial bent. He promoted the tub as a technological novelty, its aerodynamic exterior made of a reinforced synthetic fiber coated in white airplane paint to give the museum a shiny, enameled finish and to nod to the old Stedelijk’s white rooms, which still fails to explain the plumbing metaphor or other moves. The bathtub floats above the glassed-in ground floor. A few sealed porthole windows, stylish but stingy and soon to look dated, provide glimpses from inside the tub onto the lobby and street. A double-height escalator threads via an enclosed tube from tub to basement, a curious locale for galleries considering the cost and trouble of building below ground in the Netherlands, never mind the feng shui of bunkers for art.
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