STEP 3: DESIGN & BUILD
Asked for their dream lists of potential museum architects, Hampe and Phua Gajardo both mention, among others, Tadao Ando. The aforementioned He Art Museum is the work of self-taught architect Ando, who has designed a plethora of institutions in his native Japan, the United States and Europe. He’s also repeatedly brought his brand of zen brutalism to Mainland China, with the Aurora Museum, the Shanghai Poly Grand Theatre and the Shanghai Design Centre among his other works there.
Working on commercial projects with construction costs in the tens of millions, architects generally charge a basic fee of between 6.5 to 8 per cent of the building budget. Yet starchitects like Ando, Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and David Adjaye are so in demand that they can pick and choose jobs and name their price. If, like the He family, you’re looking to spend in the vicinity of US$30 million constructing your museum, you’d be wise to put aside another US$3 million or so to secure the services of a marquee-name architect.
Also, as with any construction job, be prepared for the possibility of costs ballooning. Designed by Gehry, Bernard Arnault’s Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris was originally budgeted at €100 million. Reports suggest, however, that at the end of its eight-year construction, the final bill amounted to more than seven times that sum. (One hopes for Arnault’s sake that Gehry billed on the basis of the original figure.)
When plotting out your museum, learn from others’ mistakes, counsels Phua Gajardo. “The best thing to do would be to visit other private museums for reference points. In Mainland China alone, there are now thousands of private museums, with a large concentration of higher-quality, well-programmed museums centralised in Shanghai,” she says. “In the US, there are more than 35,000. There are many case studies that can inform this process and can help to determine scale, content, design and more. Likewise, these built references can also serve as references for what to do.”