On a sunny and quite warm Sunday morning – when fortunately we had nothing else to do -, we decided to get out of the city and experience art in an entirely different way than anywhere else around.
Dia Beacon is the museum for the Dia Art Foundation’s collection of art from the 1960s to the present. The museum is situated on the banks of the Hudson River in Beacon, New York, on 160 000 (!) square feet.
Since Beacon is just a few hours away from NYC by the Metro-North Line, it absolutely worths the traveling. Regardless of which season you travel in, the train ride is spectacular, and being in the middle of nature feels extremely good living in a concrete jungle the rest of the year.
The museum itself is simply stunning. Even with New York standards, the size of it is shocking, and it finally feels like the art pieces here have their own required space. It also helps you to not feel too overwhelmed (like in the MoMA), because you have the space and the time to digest everything you see as you wander through the building.
As an architect, my favorite artworks were definitely Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses. These large-scale, almost building-like installations of contorted steel plates elaborate concerns with orientation and movement, destabilizing our experience of space as we attempt to comprehend each sculptural volume. Walking around and inside these sculptures are like moving around in full-scale architectural concept models, which is basically a dream come true for architects.
After a few hours though, you get tired only from walking that much, so we decided to end the tour in the Main Street of Beacon and have a coffee and something to eat before we got on the train to head back into the madness, with a beautiful day’s memory with us.
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