- Punch List Architecture Newsletter
- Posts
- A conversation with Max Hollein
A conversation with Max Hollein
The Met director on growing up with a famous father, his intense apprenticeship with Tom Krens, and why he’s chosen ‘a new generation of architectural voices’ to remake the museum

The Met’s Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, by Kulapat Yantrasast and WHY Architecture
Earlier this month, I returned to Venice to host a second batch of conversations at Speakers’ Corner, the grandstand Johnston Marklee, Florencia Rodriguez, and I designed for this year’s Architecture Biennale. For one of the discussions, on museum architecture, Max Hollein, the Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Metropolitan Museum, joined me remotely from New York. What follows has been edited for length and clarity.
Christopher Hawthorne: I should tell you, Max, that sitting here in Venice at this grandstand, which we call Speakers’ Corner, I’m very close to the spot where the Strada Novissima was located in the 1980 Biennale. Your father, Hans Hollein, was one of the architects who contributed a design to that installation, which featured a long row of facades lined up almost like storefronts, each one selling a different flavor of postmodernism.
Max Hollein: I was eleven years old, and I played around that whole installation. I still remember I put some of my Snoopy puppets on top of the columns that my father designed.
What are the museum buildings you remember making an impression on you when you were young? Museums by your father? Or maybe museums by anybody but your father?
My childhood certainly was very much connected with architecture and with museums, because that’s what our father lived for, honestly. I would say I didn’t do this voluntarily in the beginning—we were sort of schlepped to museums—but as you can see the influence worked its way through. The first museum I visited, since I grew up in Vienna, was the Kunsthistorisches Museum. But I really was excited to experience contemporary museums, museums that had a different feel to them. In addition to visiting my father’s museums under construction, we went to the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Pompidou—I understood that these buildings were architecturally relevant, thanks to my father, but also that these were sites of experimentation, sites of new expression, of community, in a very different way than you were used to seeing in museums like the Kunsthistorisches, where you always felt that you were a visitor and looked only at the art of the past.

Hans Hollein’s contribution to the Strada Novissima, part of the inaugural Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980
Did you aspire at any point to train as an architect yourself?
No, I never wanted to become an architect, probably by seeing how challenging it is to be an architect, and what that would entail. Maybe my father would have liked me to run his studio—
I was going to ask: How did your father feel about your career path?
Maybe he had that idea at some point, but no, I was not interested. Instead I did two master’s degrees, simultaneously, at two different universities. One was in art history, because that was something that came from growing up in a very artistic family, but the other was business administration. I have an MBA from the University of Economics in Vienna. So that was maybe a little bit my revolution against my parents, to become someone who was interested in business.
I also saw my father, who was at least in our circles a very well-known, respected figure—people recognized him on the streets in Vienna—I saw how he was financially struggling all the time, how it was really a challenge to keep up an office on that level. So I never could quite connect these two things, being such a famous and important architect on the one hand, and on the other hand economically everything always felt very fragile.
Your father was deeply involved in writing and architectural media, especially early in his career, and much of that writing, colored by the Cold War and the counterculture, was quite prescient about technology and other subjects. How should we think about the relationship of his writing to the rest of his work?
For him, and this may be true of some of his peers as well—I’m thinking about Archigram or Superstudio, all these very experimental architects of the 1960s—you needed to find ways to express your thoughts. And building them was, more often than not, not really an option. So you expressed them through your drawings, sketches, but really also through alliances and writing. Often they were called utopian architects, but I think the utopia was not that it was going in some unrealistic direction. It was really trying to find ways to manifest your artistic and architectural beliefs.

The debut issue of Bau, 1968. Tagline: “Everything is architecture”
Early on my father became a professor at a couple of universities—including Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where Joseph Beuys brought him over, and he was [at 33] actually the youngest professor in German history—and he was the editor and publisher of Bau magazine, which was Austria’s most important architectural magazine, a very experimental architectural magazine. He created this as a platform for his own ideas, his own writing, but also publishing a lot of his peers.
In terms of your own early career, you joined the Guggenheim Museum first as intern in the early 1990s and then as an aide to Thomas Krens. This is just as the Guggenheim is of course pursuing a strategy of establishing satellite locations around the world—beginning with an unrealized proposal by your father for a Guggenheim branch in Salzburg. What do you recall about the culture of the Guggenheim, and the director’s office in particular, when you joined?
Indeed had an internship there in 1992 and then I started as a curatorial assistant in 1995. It was my first job. After six months, Tom asked me if I wanted to join the director’s office as his assistant. And over the years I got all sorts of different titles—I was chief of staff at the Guggenheim, and head of international affairs—but really I was still his assistant, in the sense that we had a very close working relationship. I was very young, fairly inexperienced of course. What I had going for me was that I had a certain level of intelligence, which was good and all, but I basically provided 24/7 service. I was working around the clock. I would spend Thanksgiving at his house in Williamstown. We traveled together—I was at the airport on Christmas and New Year’s. Basically it was six years of a very close relationship, and I learned an enormous amount.
I think what Tom understood really early on was not only how important architecture is for the museum experience, but how architecture also stands as a symbol of an idea of the museum, and in his case an idea of the museum for the 21st century. And so the Guggenheim embarked on an ambitious initiative of creating other sites beyond the Fifth Avenue space and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection [in Venice]. So you had my father working on the Guggenheim in Salzburg. [In 1990, the New York Times described that proposal as “a museum with no facade, carved out of a gigantic rock called the Monchsberg, which soars up, pinning the city against the Salzach River.”] You had Arata Isozaki doing the Guggenheim Soho project [which opened in 1992 and closed in 2001]. You had Rem Koolhaas doing the Guggenheim Las Vegas, which had a very short lifespan but was well done, and, especially, Frank Gehry doing the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. It was an enormously invigorating, important time—a moment to expand the idea of what a museum is, how museums can operate, what kind of role they play in urban planning, economic development. And also how you can integrate architects into that process as important players, important collaborators, and make their voices heard.

A model of Hans Hollein’s unbuilt proposal for a Guggenheim satellite in Salzburg, Austria: “a museum with no facade, carved out of a gigantic rock called the Monchsberg”
That expansionist campaign is even now not quite complete, with Gehry’s Guggenheim Abu Dhabi still to open, perhaps by the end of this year, as the last of that breed. We now think of the Krens approach as very much connected to the rise of the celebrity architect. Which of the projects did you work on, and what lessons did you draw from them?
When I was there the Guggenheim Bilbao was in development, so Gehry was already chosen. What I experienced was the whole construction process, bringing it to fruition. But up until the opening, nobody, especially nobody in the New York architecture and museum circuit, thought Bilbao would be a success. A lot of people thought it was a crazy idea and would be a total failure. So it really needed, and I give Tom Krens all the credit, it needed his conviction. He went to the desert with this project, so to speak. The majority of the board was very nervous about it. Obviously now everyone talks about the Bilbao Effect and everything, but it wasn’t a logical move for a New York City institution to build a museum in Bilbao, and have Frank Gehry do it. The other project I was involved with was the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin [1997-2013], which Richard Gluckman did, kind of a kunsthalle project, and then the Koolhaas, two projects in Las Vegas for the Venetian Hotel.
And I’d say the idea of the neutral space, the White Cube, this was the period when this kind of eroded. You saw the emergence of highly charged, powerful spaces that could still be very inviting and interesting for art and artists to connect with, but spaces that created their own identity, their own idiosyncrasies, against any kind of monotony. And that was something that I always strongly believed in. In any brief that I give to an architect, for any kind of any museum project, I never only want an architect who builds a museum’s outer shell. And in the gallery spaces themselves, I have no interest in a flexible floor plan. I want spaces completely developed and defined by architects, because I totally trust that architects have a better way of doing that than curators. Or museum directors!
You arrived at the Met seven years ago, after running the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The Met is really an amalgamation of spaces added over time. What was your charge from the board as it related to the facilities, to architecture, to possible upgrades?
If you look at the Met, people see as it one museum, which it is of course. But from an architectural standpoint, from a building standpoint, it’s actually 21 different wings, somewhat squeezed together. And it is a pastiche of different architectural styles, which is true for any museum that has grown tremendously over time, as the Met has. I think that the high points of architecture at the Met are at the beginning, with the Richard Morris Hunt façade, and then of course the Roche Dinkeloo master plan, with some of the wings being quite successful and some more challenging. And then the question was for the Met, looking forward to new development, who are the voices that we want to make part of this?
A lot of people would have expected the Met to go for a very established group of architects who have vast experience in doing museums, and who have the highest respect: Renzo Piano, and others. But we thought no, let’s make sure the Met really engages with a new generation of architectural voices, people who we feel can push our approach as a museum. And so you can see in our selection of architects for various projects—including not just Frida Escobedo and Kulapat Yantrasast but also Nathan Rich and Miriam Peterson; Nader Tehrani; Michael Young and Kutan Ayata; and Mishi Hisono and Adam Weintraub—it’s a group of architects almost all of one generation. I think it’s probably true for each one of them that the work that they do for the Met is the most important work they’ve done so far. It’s going to be a defining part of their career. And this is what a museum like the Met should be about: It should foster creative expression, should help architects further develop their work. And we see ourselves in that role.

The Rockefeller Wing
The first of the major projects you’ve overseen to be completed is the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, redesigned by Kulapat Yantrasast and WHY Architecture. It holds a collection of art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas that used to be exhibited, in galleries by Roche and Dinkeloo, under the banner of “primitive art,” and it always had a fraught position within the larger museum. What was the charge that you gave Kulapat? And to what extent did you think that architecture might play a role in reintegrating these objects, as it were, into the larger collection, or change their relationship with the rest of the museum?
We had certain goals for the reinstallation. One, we wanted to make sure that the presentation feels entirely contemporary, modern, light-filled. So moving away from these Heart of Darkness installations that you often see. Two, create a much more open floor plan, while also creating distinct areas for these three different clusters in the collection. So we have the collections separated without creating tunnel-like galleries. Finally we wanted to make sure that the audience understands that some of the objects are contemporary or recent. People tend to go through these galleries, at the Met and elsewhere, and think that this is archeology, that these are all ancient works. But the reality is that a lot of this is art of the 20th century, just coming from areas that aren’t so familiar, at least from a Western perspective. We are also using the same approach for the art of Ancient West Asia and the Art of Ancient Cyprus Galleries, which Nader Tehrani is doing.
I’ve visited the Rockefeller Galleries on a couple of occasions now since they reopened. In comparison with some of Guggenheim projects that we were talking about earlier, Kulapat’s design strikes me as reserved, elegant, and deferential—perhaps not trending back toward White Cube neutrality, but certainly willing to cede the spotlight to the artworks. And maybe lacking some of that idiosyncrasy you mentioned earlier. Would you say that’s a fair reading?
I’m neither a traditionalist nor a conservative, but I have a very clear idea of how art and space and community come together. I think the spaces in the Rockefeller Wing are very clearly defined without being necessarily experimental to the point where they become architecturally sculptural objects, or where shapes and forms become a defining aspect of the experience itself. Rather it’s a charged spatial atmosphere I’m most interested in, and how that can connect with the selection of materials, of finishes and surfaces, of lighting, and of the placement of objects within that spatial environment.
Let’s talk about the major forthcoming project by Frida Escobedo, immediately adjacent to the Rockefeller Galleries—the Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art. Even more than Kulapat, arguably, she is an emerging figure, not widely known I would say in the art world when you selected her.
The board of the Met, when you take everyone together, it’s close to a hundred people. And of the hundred people, only one trustee, when we decided on Frida, only one knew who she was. She was certainly not a known quantity for the trustees of the Met. But they voted for her, and they felt that this is the right architect for our plans. It was a competition, and we asked all the people we invited to the competition—also Ensamble Studio, SO-IL, David Chipperfield, and lacaton & vassal—we asked them to engage with us in a process. We were not so interested in the end result. With each architect or firm, we worked with all of them for four months, simultaneously, as if we were already their client. This allowed us to see their working methods—Frida Escobedo versus SO-IL, versus lacaton & vassal, versus Chipperfield. So it was a competition that favored more the process and less an architect’s experience. If we had simply said, show us a proposal and show us the museums you’ve already built, the outcome would have been different.

Frida Escobedo’s planned Tang Wing will include a combination of screened and open views of Central Park
My next question has to do with the full title of the Tang Wing, which includes the familiar pairing of modern and contemporary art. Is it time maybe to split the modern from the contemporary, in terms of where and how they are presented in a museum like the Met, and let them go their separate ways?
I think one uses nomenclature in a certain way that has a tradition within the museum, that has to do with certain departmental divisions. One of the biggest challenges in general at the Met is our traditional departmental organization, how we are organized into curatorial departments. We have a Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts. We have a Department of European Paintings. We have a Department of Islamic Art, and Asian Art, et cetera. My idea is that you as a visitor should not see this mirrored in the footprint of the galleries as such. Sometimes it makes no sense that the reason this object is here, and not there, is simply that a certain department takes care of it. It’s fine to keep the departmental organization, but the storytelling, the narrative flow that you create within the museum, needs to be changed and, really, departmentally disconnected. This is going to be a wing that shows the art of the 20th and 21st centuries, but in a much more global way than we did before, and much more connected to the past. And connected with different media.
I think of Frida’s work as very much finding its voice through materiality—
I agree.
How would say this project uses its materiality to develop its character, its architectural sensibility?
I see her as an architect who comes out of a very strong modernist tradition, but her spaces have a very charged environment. She creates spaces that give off a spatial feeling that is derived through light and materiality. She uses what she calls celosia, almost like a screen in front of the façade of the building, which filters the light. [Akin to a breeze block, the screen is to be made of a diaphanous limestone.] And sometimes the façade opens up completely and you have glass, looking onto Central Park.
We gave her a very specific architectural brief. We were very precise this time about what we wanted, how we wanted it, what role we wanted the architecture to play. Don’t give us flexible floor space! I told Frida, I’m not interested in having you think of this building in floors one, two, and three; I want within floors spaces that differentiate not only in regard to their square footage but also in ceiling height. The opposite of what we wanted, and this isn’t a criticism, would be the new Whitney downtown. Renzo Piano’s design is basically three, four floors with completely flexible gallery space, and on each floor you have one ceiling height.

Clad in limestone, the Tang Wing will anchor the Met’s southwest corner
What Frida has developed is the idea of light coming through and into these spaces, and how they connect, and bringing a certain materiality, with coffered ceilings, with stone in certain areas. You see some Mexican influences, and in other spaces it’s connected more directly to the long history of Modernism.
You mentioned the new Whitney. The Met was involved in helping keep the old Whitney, by Marcel Breuer, alive, at least for a time, as the Met Breuer. Then it became the Frick Madison, and now it’s owned by Sotheby’s. I think all of us in the architecture world feel very protective of that building. I’m encouraged to a degree by the choice of Herzog & de Meuron to work on the building for Sotheby’s, but there is probably still good reason for anxiety about what becomes of it.
I think it’s one of the great landmarks in New York architecture. It’s funny, given how much New York City builds, but there really aren’t that many architectural icons. I think we should all take good care of these. It’s great that it’s landmarked now. As a museum, as an art space, it certainly works. The issue with the building is more the operational model you need to apply to it. For the Met, it didn’t make sense for us to run permanently a satellite for modern and contemporary art a couple of feet away from the Met. The art of the 20th and 21st centuries needs to be integrated into the overall Met experience. As a satellite, as a standalone, there are other great New York institutions that do that: MoMA, the Whitney, the Guggenheim. At the Met, we need to give visitors a way to experience modern and contemporary art in concert with, and maybe intertwined with, the art of the past.
For the Whitney, it had more to do with the inability to expand that building, despite many efforts. The biggest issue for museum architecture is that museums are growing organisms, very different from opera houses or concert halls or theaters. A museum continuously grows, because it collects. So when you build a new museum, you always need to think, How can this architecture be expanded? How can the site still grow?
Punch List is published weekly. Subscribe free here, or sign up for a paid subscription, with bonus material, here.
Email: [email protected]
Tang Wing renderings by ©Filippo Bolognese Images/Frida Escobedo Studio. Hans Hollein images courtesy Max Hollein.
Reply