Touring the Site

Architourism has for centuries concentrated on ruins of great old buildings, but now we could turn it around so that we travel to sites to experience how buildings are constructed.  The first example that springs to mind, of course, is the World Trade Center site where for the last nine years visitors have stood to watch the slow progress in rebuilding the destroyed Towers.  Lately you have been able to see actual buildings emerge and I remember a particular thrill last time I was there just chatting with three construction workers leaving the site. 

Sometimes you stumble across construction sites by accident. There are maps of Antwerp that list the Red Star museum, with exhibits about the history of emigration through the port. If Ellis Island stands at one end of the Atlantic migration, then it would make sense that European harbor cities would build museums recounting the process whereby emigrants left their homes behind.  Fittingly, there have been conferences and publications on the topic, and I have even spoken with a professor who took a tour through the old Red Star ship line facility for processing emigrants. So when you are in Antwerp, and you're from New York, you might want to visit this historic point embarkation.

Alas, the maps are deceptive and the story about the tour not conclusive, because when you stand at the site of the Red Star museum as indicated by your official museum guide to Antwerp, you quickly discover that it is but the shell of a facade and a big muddy construction zone.  Sure, there is a giant placard with a computer generated image of what the museum is supposed to look like in two years, but the thing itself is just a husk of a building.  So when you get over your dismay, you realize there is another level of tourism, watching to see how an old, run down, relatively modern structure is transformed into an interactive cool space.

  

The construction site is porous, it allows you to wander through the empty lot, thereby revealing just how thoroughly historic buildings are stripped down before they are renovated.  Indeed, throughout Antwerp you can find late medieval buildings under historic renovation where nothing stands except the four outside walls.  The interior has presumably been catalogued so that it can be rebuilt wholly anew.   The historic character thus resides solely in the exterior walls and not at all in the high tech interior spaces.  A visit to the construction site makes all too clear how little history remains in contemporary preservation projects.  The creaky old floors, the tacky tiles, the moldy corners, the dim light, the labyrinthean layout have been replaced with a space that allows large groups to shuffle through an exhibition.

The latest architectural sensations foster in this fascination with the construction of museums.  The MAS, Antwerp's striking new city museum, has a book available for 20 euros that depicts its own construction.  The folks in Antwerp have learned plenty from Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin.  When the Libeskind museum first went up, a variety of books were published recounting its design, yet these were published while the success of the museum was not yet obvious.  The folks in Antwerp have take a more aggressive approach.  They had a book recounting the construction of the MAS available on opening day, as part of a rather over aggressive strategy to turn the building into a Frank Gehry/Daniel Libeskind icon.  Pictures of its construction have become a necessary component in creating the myth of the building's uniqueness.  In won't be long before the next innovative museum project offers cognoscenti guided tours of the construction site just as you can tour the Roman forum to learn about what once stood there.  In Lower Manhattan, the lines would be too long and the large crowds would interfere with the construction work, to say nothing of the insurance and legal issues involved.  So for now, it is best to just walk onto an unsuspecting site on your own.