Art Palaces of the Mid-West, 2008 David Jenness October 2008
Indeed they are palaces, these new museums and museum additions by famous architects. They are expensive, made to dazzle, and intended to signal that the institutions and communities that created them are to be reckoned with. These buildings bespeak pride, glamour, distinctiveness, and a form of urban competition. Two or three decades ago, with such goals in mind, communities built performing arts centers. Four or five decades ago, establishmentarian interests built ambitious new churches. In this country, Calatrava’s museum addition in Milwaukee began the recent trend. Since then, dozens of cities have gotten onto the bandwagon.
In public building generally, in Western societies, there tend to be three evident claims. First, we are not beasts of the field, we are sophisticated, cultured, and powerful. Two, we in this community are just as rich and tasteful as they are. Three, I -- the benefactor -- am richer and more philanthropic than my peers.
One contextual trend is that the enormous run-up of personal wealth in recent decades has found explosive expression in the acquisition of a lot of expensive art, bought in a highly competitive market at huge prices. The phenomenon, in America, is comparable to the period between about 1880 and 1930, when those with enormous industrial fortunes began to assemble collections of “great masters” from Europe -- the collections that made museums in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and elsewhere such fabulous institutions. But the number of collectors then were far fewer than the new multimillionaires of the late 20th century; lots of “old masters” were available, relative to the number of buyers, and the market was largely conducted sub rosa: after all, part of the fun for a Lehman was snapping up a Leonardo before Mrs Gardner could. Nowadays, the “old masters” are gone, and collectors set their sights on new art, whose prices are bid up astoundingly by public auctions. They buy in bulk, and they focus on periods and genres of art that were “collected,” prior to World War II: folk and vernacular and outsider, “primitive,” photographs, installations, and so on.
Accordingly, most of the recent new buildings are intended, typically, to show -- and show off -- either contemporary art or “world” art, and the assumption is that such art will need a new approach to exhibition. [In practice, some new buildings do not actually “show,” but will be sites for art or art activities, an aspect I shall touch on later.]
Another relevant background factor involves the technology of architecture. Museums are no longer made of rectilinear blocks of stone, but of glass, steel, light metals, often in strange volumes and shapes. This is partly an aesthetic choice, keeping in mind the nature of the newly acquired art to be displayed, but it also reflects what builders can do. In constant-dollar or square-foot terms, today’s building is no less expensive than in Cass Gilbert’s day, but today’s builders believe that they are getting more bang for their bucks. In step with this, and as a necessary condition for it, computer-assisted design has meant that what once could only be an architect’s design dream can now be realized.
This essay is an interim report -- interim, because we are at mid-period of a major architectural, sociological, and aesthetic shift as concerns museums -- on a number of outstanding structures from the last fifteen or so years. [“Outstanding” need not mean excellent, but simply that, by intention, they stand out.] It reflects a long road trip Ken and I made in September 2008 through a vast extent of the American Middle West. For reasons of itinerary or timing it omits reporting on certain new museums -- in Chicago, Fort Worth, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and elsewhere -- that we have not seen, are not yet finished, or that we saw some years ago with a different mind-set. The focus, as stated, is on “art palaces,” but from time to time I shall mention other contemporaneous structures as well.
The Joslyn Museum in Omaha has long been one of my favorite small museums, both for its strong and well-focussed collection and for the appearance of its original building, a chunky pink marble candy box with 1930s Art Deco details. The exterior pilasters are so flat and broad that they amount simply to a rhythmic sectioning of the marble surface. There are low-relief carvings thematically reflecting the agricultural Midwest. Inside, there is a beautiful marble vestibule and central court, with a pretty tessellated fountain, high pierced alabaster balconies, and gorgeous bronze doors. The galleries are traditional, gray-walled with fine wooden floors. The art holdings include a fine El Greco and a fabulous Titian, the best collection of Karl Bodmer, and very good regional American paintings: Wood, Kent, Benton, Bellows, Glackens, Taos School, et al. I describe the original museum in a bit of detail, because it is one of the least pompous, most pleasing lesser American museums I know. It is a rose among thorns, in this gritty city.
The new addition, very large in volume but kept low on two sides, wraps around three sides of the original building, and is faced with a striped rosy stone just a degree darker than in the old building. For a passage to the main, full-height portion of the new building, Norman Foster has created a vast connecting atrium, a huge glass canopy over a broad pedestrian bridge to the new galleries and, on the ground level, a stone and glass pavilion, for looking at two enormous shimmering Chihuly hanging glass pieces or for sitting and relaxing with a cup of tea in a spacious, flexible café area with moveable aluminum chairs and tables. At the ends of this open area there are pretty translucent shades against sun. The space is like a rail station shed without trains, or a gigantic solarium without plants.
The galleries in the new section are huge, probably scaled too high even for displaying large contemporary art, but beautifully lit by louvered clerestories along one curve of concrete half-dome ceilings. Foster’s work is fine, but it is in no way innovative. Louis Kahn did vault ceilings more dramatically at the Kimbell, and though the vast glassed connecting hall is pleasing, it has become the standard way to join two building complexes of contrasting character. Since the Joslyn addition, Foster has done much the same thing to cover the courtyard of the British Museum and the courtyard between the Portrait Gallery and American Art museums in Washington. It is the way the Met handled its passage into its redesigned, enlarged American and 19th c. European galleries, and it is the way Viñoly plans to handle joining his new addition to the old art temple in Cleveland. A large airy enclosure is practical, since it gives the effect of going outside without exposure to weather, and visually pleasing, because inevitably the space looks like an architectural maquette with little humans placed to scale.
The Joslyn’s approach to periodization in art is today’s normative attitude. Thus the new building contains offices, services like storage and conservation and library -- and some very large galleries for contemporary art. “Modern” art is shown in the last-in-sequence galleries of the old building, and is taken to mean 20th century from Ashcan, American and European modernism, cubism and surrealism up through the New York School and early post-war European abstraction. Johns and Rauschenberg, color field, Pop and Op, German neo-Expressionism, “constructions,” and all that has come since about 1965 goes into the new space. It is a standard distinction these days in museology, reflecting a general assumption that art which is big, edgy, provocative needs a bold new architectural setting.
The delightfully named English architect David Chipperfield seems to be in vogue in the Midwest. He has a new library in Des Moines, a new museum in Davenport, Iowa, and has been chosen to build an addition to the St Louis museum. His strength seems to be that he is respectful of context and local habits. Although the design for St Louis is not yet entirely specified, it is clear that he intends to tuck a low structure, much of it underground, into the hillside next to the existing museum. This will let visitors approach the grand old masonry building, the one structure (by Cass Gilbert) left from the 1904 World’s Fair, as they always have -- by proceeding up a great landscaped terrace or through a wooded area of Forest Park. In other words, the addition will be just that, not an alternative.
The Des Moines public library is a long two-storey boat-like structure, with oar-like wings angled to fit a difficult site. The book stacks are set rectilinearly inside these mildly convex housings, well away from the curtain walls, so that discontinuous irregular spaces for reading, studying, and computer use are formed along the edges. The furnishings throughout the museum are gracious, e.g., leather chairs with footrests. My only cavil as to materials and finishes is that the stairs are ordinary black composite with no interesting detail. The distinction of the building is that the undivided exterior glass walls contain within them a fine mesh metal curtain. When sunlight falls on the walls, they are opaque and coppery from outside. You can see out but not in. In shade, the color goes to dove-gray, and you can see through. At night, lit from within, the mesh almost disappears, and the interior is fully visible. The mesh is never entirely invisible, however, so that viewing it is like looking through a nylon stocking.
In Davenport, a moderately prosperous industrial city (one of the “Quad Cities” on the Mississippi), the authorities have decreed a pleasure box on the river. It is glass, ethereal in its surface aspect but nevertheless boxy in shape. The river face of the building is splendid: you climb up a grand set of angled stairs and enter through a vestibule connecting to a café overlooking the river as well as to the main lobby of the museum. The official main entrance, however, is on the other side, on the level of the downtown streets, lying well above the river and any possibility of flooding. This official entrance is marked by a small plain concrete overhang, and is reached across a parking lot. It is far from welcoming. However, once inside, the atrium lobby is softened by sinuous swathes of cloth hung from above. In this building, Chipperfield has surrounded his basic glass box with a free-standing carapace of fretted glass and metal, with narrow horizontal connectors between the exoskin and the supporting walls. It makes a kind of delicate back-curtain, but there is also an interior layer of hanging mesh (reminiscent of that along the face of the State Theater at Lincoln Center) between the two glass curtain walls, presumably to soften light bouncing off the river. It all makes a diaphanous milky effect, but from inside you cannot really see out to what is happening on or down by the river. (You may be able to on a dull day, when inside and outside light levels are more equivalent.) The main aesthetic effect is one of neatness and delicacy, but in clouded form.
All the art in this museum, called the Figge, honoring the businessman who put up much of the funding and is a hoped-for major donor of actual art, is upstairs, in conventional straight-walled galleries, nicely scaled. There is good Grant Wood, an extensive Haitian art collection, a few trivial European old masters, several fine American modernists. When we were there, we were for quite a time the only visitors (four or five others showed up later),and the café was not operating, because the museum had not found a concessionaire to take it on. There is room off the lobby for a future bookstore, but what would it sell, specific to the Figge?
The Figge is certainly an attractive addition to the edge of a river-oriented city, with, nearby, a fine bridge, a riverboat casino, an elegant parking structure. But one wonders: was this museum necessary?
The fine but neoclassical / Beaux Arts Detroit museum has a large new wing by Michael Graves. It is very good, conventional and effective, well-organized. It makes no special statement aesthetically, but allows the visitor to wander repeatedly from old to new spaces. The new galleries are on the same scale and pattern as the old.
Down the highway is a more interesting new structure, now part of the art museum in Toledo, whose collection is as fine as that at Detroit -- though smaller, as befits a smaller city from the same great industrial era. It is Glass Pavilion, situated across the street from the old building, and created by the Japanese firm SANAA, the same firm that has done the New Museum in the Bowery area of New York City. A glass museum makes sense, for Toledo is the home of the Libbey Glass Company, whose corporate collection forms the nucleus of what the pavilion displays. It gives an extraordinary effect: an entirely glass structure, steel-framed at the edges, contains glass walled rooms and corridors, which in turn hold glass vitrines, in which sit pieces of art glass, ranging from antiquity to the current decade. The building itself is a long shoe box (i.e., a three-dimensional rectangular prism whose width and height are roughly equal, but with a much longer depth.) The bottom of the steel frame and the exterior glass walls touch the grass lawn directly, without a sill or platform. At night, the building must seem to hover above the ground. Seen from outside, the walls are occasionally interrupted by vertical off-white panels set irregularly behind the glass, made of something like drywall but standing free (that is, they are panels, not walls) or, at unpredictable intervals, floor-to-ceiling curtains placed also just behind the exterior wall.
The corridor through which the visitor moves bends, forming a glass-enclosed path leading to a main axis. Closed interior spaces open off this corridor: transparent spaces within transparent space. All these rooms are oval or lozenge-shaped, that is, rectangles with rounded corners. In fact, other than the small interior vestibules (themselves made of glass) leading into the galleries, there are no right angles or exact corners inside the building. Offices and service areas are pushed to one side, hidden behind off-white panels, or relegated to the basement.
Aside from a fleeting anxiety about how all this glass is kept smudgeless -- such concerns intrude on even the most exalted response to a building -- the feeling is one of great peace and elegance. Walking through is like paddling in clear water. The smallest glass item is the size of a coin or a fingernail; the largest glass item is the building itself. Inside it, you feel yourself to be in a moderately sized work of art -- an impression, unsettling, pleasant, that I have never had in a museum.
It is of course a specialized structure: a glass building for glass objects. The nearest equivalent is Philip Johnson’s glass and marble tempietto at Dumbarton Oaks, which displays small objects of glass, metal, stone, fabric, feathers. Neither structure could accommodate painting or large assertive sculpt-metal, any more than a Richard Serra piece could enclose a display of jewelry. In architecture, some materials are absolute; they show themselves; they are not conditioned by what they contain.
Nearby, next to the older museum building (which unlike Detroit’s is long and lowering pseudo-classical, with too many too-large columns on the facades) is a curious and pleasing building by Frank Gehry, an architect about whom I have mixed feelings. It is a small fine arts / studio arts building for the University of Toledo. It does not show art but accommodates the making of art. Being Gehry, the macro-structure is a jumble of boxes, pyramids, cylinders pushed up against each other; but there is a lovely small gravel courtyard, and the exterior cladding of the structure is of a thin dull-gray aluminum, a restful change of tone of voice from the architect’s favored effulgent titanium. The spaces inside are quirky but functional, with meandering corridors and an especially effective library. Clearly, someone said to Gehry, Your building must hold to a small budget. He complied, and did it well.
The magnificent Cleveland museum, one of the greatest Beaux-Arts temples, is just re-opening after a complete re-ordering and addition by Rafael Viñoly, which will be finished in 2010. Only the exterior treatment and the placement of the new building can be seen as yet, but it seems to be a well-bred amalgam of others’ recent work. That is to say, there is a huge glass-sided, glass-roofed connector area between the new and old structures, an inserted Crystal Palace -- like Foster at Omaha and London. The exterior of the new building, which will be long and low, is a sort of horizontal candy-box treatment of marbles in stripes of varying colors, sometimes gray and white, sometimes brown and white, rather like Siena’s Duomo in nature -- like Foster at Omaha. Judging from the modelo in the new lobby, the over-all effect will be lovely in its setting in the beautiful oval park of University Circle, which is ringed by handsome cultural institutions such as the Cleveland Institutes of Music and of Art or Severance Hall. It will not, I think, be path-breaking from an architectural point of view.
Gehry again. One of the great institutions that define University Circle is Case-Western University. Here Gehry has built the Peter B. Lewis School of Business building, awesomely expensive and aesthetically clamorous. It is a paean, inside and out, to a high-tech apocalypse of business and commerce. Inside, there are curved walls, hanging cylinders, ramps, geometrically left-over nooks or spandrels, deliberately cheap veneers that aren’t flat and that don’t come to the same edge; but, for all this, some enticing study rooms and lounges. Even the students’ billiards room is a fantastical take-off of an Edwardian den. But the glory of the building is the roof, and this one is indeed titanium. It swoops, soars, collapses; it flashes, glints, hums with reflected light. The shape is what you get when hold a handkerchief in the middle and shake it out. The roof is impossible not to fixate on, for the top of the Lewis building looks fabulous from all over the oval, whether in sunlight or shadow. It is a confection of clouds for gods at play within -- covering what is, after all, strictly business. This building is better, I think, than the Disney concert hall in Los Angeles; and though smaller, it must be as expensive on a cubic-foot basis. I include it in this discussion, because it shows that it is not only new museums that shoot for the sumptuous and the spectacular.
In Akron, the German firm Coop Himmelb(l)au has built a startling, extravagant new museum structure that has received much attention in the press. Akron is an interesting case. Its collection of pre-contemporary art is negligible, consisting mostly of third-rate regional work. I do not know why the wealthy of Akron never acquired art the way their peers in Toledo or Detroit or Cleveland did in the early years of the 20th century. On the other hand, for reasons also unknown to me, there is an important collection of post-World War II art, unusual in its focus. Unlike some contemporaneous collections, the principle has not been, one of everything. Famous names are represented, Kline and Frankenthaler and Twombly are not missing. But they are seen alongside work by artists of genuine quality, from all regions of the United States and abroad, who happen to not be “big names.” Some are upcoming artists, some achieved excellence in their careers, but not fame. This collection has been very well curated.
The building is composed of a core of large interlocking aluminum-clad boxes, set far back from the street. Originating at the sidewalk is an enormous glass pyramid that rises up and over, attaching at the back to the core. The closest analogue is the vast glass shelter over the Temple of Dendur at the Met in New York. Under this high canopy, on the ground plane, is what amounts to a large interior piazza between the entry and the core. Here are located the “lobby” (not demarcated), the shop, the café, the ticket booth; but all of them seem small and arbitrarily placed, since a great expanse of paved vacant floor is left. One would expect some sculpture here, but there is none (and there is also no room outside the building for a sculpture yard).
Rising up from the piazza is an enormous aluminum staircase that climbs steeply up to the entrance to the gallery level, about a two-storey rise, I’d estimate. It begins well back from the street wall, providing a leisurely approach, but ends rather abruptly as it reaches the core, as if the designer had intended it to rise even higher but had run out of rise-ratio length. Overscaled grand staircases are common enough in museums; fairly recently, Gae Aulenta featured them, doubled, at the d’Orsay in Paris. Here it is all rather like a stage set for the final act of “Aida,” with a gigantic ceremonial stair and a chamber tucked beneath. In any large public space, the top of a grand stair should open outward to space beyond; the staircase is supposed to move you to a whole new plane. We’ll build a stairway to the stars. But this grand stair ends at a conventional double-panel glass entry doors perhaps eight feet high, set 30 feet up in a blank aluminum wall. The doorway, reached after such drama, could just as well lead to your dentist’s office.
One endearing detail in this triumphal but mostly empty fore-court is a modest cube, made of conventional concrete, which protrudes into the space from the gallery level above. It is a cozy video viewing room, reached by a short bridge from a catwalk along the galleries. To me, it’s the best thing in the entire entrance space.
Dendur, Aida … but wait, there’s more. Outside, cantilevered over the entire structure are several crossed broad Corten steel horizontals, the longest of which must be the length of a football field. The flat surface of these panels is aluminum mesh, to let through rain and snow. Attached to the top of the building, they look like flattened rotors[KC1] . The longest panel extends completely over the adjacent old museum building, a small masonry structure, c. 1900. Is the metaphor protection or domination?
Seen from nearby streets, the new building looks like an airport terminal. It is certainly striking, especially in a part of downtown that contains undistinguished pre-war commercial and government buildings. The original museum, since it possessed no significant art, cannot have been a notable cultural presence in downtown. Similarly, the contemporary collection, though excellent, is not world-class. I would suppose, therefore, that the new building must only attract contemporary art buffs (and how many of those are walking around downtown Akron?) or architectural tourists like us. I think it would be better sited on a campus, where it and its contents could invite repeated visits, and where the principle of art-container gigantism could be discussed theoretically.
I had not realized that the University of Cincinnati was on a course to becoming a major research university. The medical school and hospital complex is now in the top rank for research grants -- and it shows. The arts and letters campus includes a distinguished College-Conservatory of music and, I judge, a good school for the visual arts.
Someone has set out to make a crowded urban campus architecturally notable. The main campus has neat, orthodox contemporary buildings by Henry Cobb (of Pei Associates), Graves, Gwathmey-Siegel -- all the usual suspects. Some are so clearly assignable to the 70s or 80s that they seem dated, but none are failures. The visual arts building is by Peter Eisenman, and seems to me a distinct success. Like the Gehry building at Toledo, this is not a museum but an educational and studio environment. It is beautiful outside, low, elegant, pink and green and gray. Inside, as you would expect, there are few level planes or right angles, but the gently stepped hallways, off-true ramps, and small balconies and interior bridges all create unpretentious and useable spaces.
On the medical school campus, there is a Gehry molecular biology research building, once again modest and nonaggressive. When Gehry builds to a budget, and small, he is the brilliant architect his admirers claim. The exterior walls are rhomboidal, and are set at odd angles relative to each other. The finest feature is that, on each such surface, are set huge windows of a shape corresponding to that particular surface, which both emphasizes and softens the geometry of the walls. The windows are pushed out from the wall surface, so that each one forms a shallow hanging box. One interesting feature of the Eisenman and the Gehry buildings, on the different campuses, is that each is set directly into a terrain of grassy mounds and troughs. How drainage is handled at the building walls, I do not know. But, as Ken suggested, this siting reminds one of the prehistoric Indian mounds that are a feature of southern Ohio and its surrounding region[KC2] .
Smack in the middle of busy downtown Cincinnati is a new building, the Center for Contemporary Art, by the Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid, and it is well worth the visit. It too is not a museum, but a Kunsthalle, a place for exhibits that change frequently. For this reason, over and above its intrinsic merits, it evades the question I had about Akron: who, working or shopping downtown, would go to it more than once or twice[KC3] ?
The building is inserted into a crowded block. The building lines along the sidewalk and at the roofline almost, but not quite, match those of the surrounding structures. The building does not stand out; in fact, the only good vantage point is catty-corner across the street. Seen this way, the long dimension of the building is a tiny bit off-true. On the long and short sides, halfway up, are several modestly protruding, slightly trapezoidal elements, black boxes against the predominant gray concrete exterior walls. One is pushed out more than the others, so that its closest analogue is the overhanging element of the façade of Breuer’s Whitney Museum in New York, but the Cincinnati structure is less heavy. There are also, high up along the main surfaces, a few long recessed windows. Both the punched-out boxes and the recessed windows depart subtly from rectilinearity, reaching a bit further out or further in than expected. Even the entrance doorway is on a subtle slant, relative to the sidewalk, and the interior stairs have slanted treads.
This is a building with a rather small footprint, but it is seven stories high. Such a building poses a great challenge: how to move people easily through the spaces, and how will those spaces on each floor be fashioned so that they will not seem cramped, so that you will want to stop and look at art? Hadid has managed it: the finest aspect of the building is the sheer experience of pedestrian progress, of moving calmly through the various levels and spaces. Interesting, well-laid-out large buildings make architecture not just a spatial and visual experience, but a temporal one. Your progress through a fine building is moment-to-moment, but it is also cumulative, like well-formed music. You recall where you have been, and anticipate where you are going. As with music, this sense of temporal duration and harmonic progression does not result in “meaning,” but does yield a sense of significant order.
I will attempt to paraphrase that experience here. When you enter the lobby on the ground floor, you see that the stairs and elevators are pushed to the back. All access to the floors above is from that zone. The stairs are made of matte black materials, like the protruding trapezoids on the exterior, and when you reach the stairwell, at the back, you can see that as they rise from floor to floor they criss-cross. You understand at once that, using these stairs, you will be tacking from one edge of the stairwell to the other. From below, it provides a primarily visual impression, a sort of Piranesi-like anticipatory view. From above, the effect is more kinesthetic, a bodily preview of how it will be to descend.
But there is something even more remarkable. As you come into the building, you realize that the patterned concrete from the sidewalk outside continues into and through the lobby, creating a path, an indoor sidewalk. The path flows gently onward toward the ticket desk and then toward the stairs and elevator well. The “sidewalk,” though, does not stop there: it now curves upward and flows into, in fact becomes, the back building wall abutting the building next door. This wall, of the same rough patterned concrete as the sidewalk, extends upwards for seven stories. There is a narrow vertical window on the short side of the building that allows you to see the stair treatment and the curving juncture -- a floor turning into a wall. Hadid has managed the slope of the curve just right: it is gradual enough not to startling, severe enough to discourage skateboarding, gentle enough for you to want to mould your body into the curve, as one sometimes wants to fit oneself into a Henry Moore sculpture.
There are no fancy materials in this building, just ideas used with utter freshness. Its distinction, as architecture, is that it makes you want to move into and through it, all senses alert.
In Tadao Ando’s Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St Louis, beautiful (and expensive) materials are indeed involved, as but one aspect of an over-all impression that centers in serenity and visual softness. It is an exquisite building, and Ando was the perfect architect for what Emily Pulitzer wanted. This is an unusual institution, in that it is neither museum nor Kunsthalle nor studio space. It is a meditation in physical form, into which art can be introduced, but never so as to detract from the structure. The Foundation “owns” only three pieces of art: a marvelous Richard Serra, set in a plain, gravel courtyard; a very tall Ellsworth Kelly painting, hanging at the end of an extraordinary long hall; and a piece by Doris Salcedo, which we did not see. The Pulitzers, of course, several generations of them, own or have access to a great deal of art; the original Joseph Pulitzer’s collection is the core of the St Louis Art Museum, and can be borrowed back. Each “show” is designed to set off the building in a new way. When we visited, on view was a retrospective of some of Dan Flavin’s light pieces from several eras. An indication of this building’s inherent quality is that I said to Ken, first: That Serra is magnificent there; then: That Kelly is fantastic, all by itself; and finally, I’ve never seen Flavin look so good. I suspect it would always be thus.
You enter the building gradually, either through a courtyard via an adjacent building or through a turning entry of baffled small walls. The basic form of the Pulitzer is like a trowel or comb with three tines, the “tines” amounting to very long pavilions, two enclosed, one open to the air. The handle, the crosspiece, is a small rectangular entry room, over which is cantilevered a small glass mezzanine; there are some chairs up there, but not in the entry itself, which is severely plain. Extending out from the mezzanine sitting area, on the upper level, is a long roof garden, a concrete box planted with thick ornamental grasses extending over the edge of the building, like an infinity pool. Underneath this “tine” is an area of closed offices and service areas, reached by a long side corridor. The second element, on the ground level, is a shallow Japanese pool, the water kept in gentle motion. The pool is the second tine, a negative pavilion open to the sky. The windows along the corridor on the ground level of the first long unit are set low to the floor, about at shin height, so that as you walk you view the pool only low-down and obliquely. More precisely, you infer a “pool,” but what you see is simply water moving quietly.
On the opposite side of the central pool is the third long expanse, an unbroken great hall that begins at lobby level and descends in gradual stages via shallow steps, pushed to one edge. At lobby level, as you start down this length, the windows onto the pool are at knee or thigh height: now you see a larger expanse of water, and begin to perceive the dimensions of the actual enclosure. As you descend the great hall, the windows raise to eye level, so finally you perceive the pool in its entirety, including its furthest “infinity” edge. At the end of the huge, beautifully proportioned hall, hangs the Kelly, lit from concealed roof windows above. As with your perception of the pool, at first you see only the upper portion of the painting; then, as you descend, it all comes into view. It is spectacular. It must remind one of a religious panel in a cathedral, or maybe a huge crucifix that takes iconic form only as you approach it. Behind the wall where the Kelly hangs, there is a small hidden room, a cube for, in some sense, cryptic art.
The distinct wall surfaces -- along the narrow corridor, off the lobby, and the various levels of the walls of the long hall – are numerous enough so that each of the Flavin light constructions has its own display space, according to size and orientation. Most Flavin’s make their point by horizontal elongation. As you step down in the great hall from level to level, the Flavins step up. I realized that whenever Flavins are shown in the close contiguity, they are compromised, because they need to be focussed upon one at a time, especially as regards their color tones. The potential for perfect placement would be true of any art displayed here: there will never be a massing or a jumble, unless that effect be intended.
The materials themselves are also art. Inside, light gray concrete panels are lightly scored, with darker gray railings and light fixtures set upon them. There is also some off-white drywall, very simple, which can be lit so as to appear as color fields against which a work of art can float. The exterior walls are also made of sensuous dove-gray concrete made of long panels with handsome recessed rivets -- this bringing to mind Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute exteriors. The lighting inside is complex and perfectly contrived; for example, the hanging canister lights in the entry are enclosed with same-color flanges, so that no bulb is ever seen and the light is directed just to one spot. But the building is altogether a temple to daylight. Light comes in from multiple angles and levels, spilling with varying intensity and spectral color -- varying with time and brightness of day -- onto the gray concrete or painted off-white walls and onto the stone or composite floors. I am sure it would be equally moving and serene at night. When you are in this building, you breathe differently, and are at peace.
Adjacent to the Pulitzer is a Contemporary Art Center, a studio facility with display areas by Brad Cloepfil. It makes for a sobering contrast. This is a serviceable contemporary building with a confusing layout, crude materials, and unremarkable finishes. Perhaps that is what was needed. I have not seen anything by this architect that seems cogent. The only touch that I admired was how the architect, erecting a building whose street line would be continuous with the Pulitzer’s, also used exterior panels of gray concrete, but bonded onto them a fine steel mesh. This is pleasant in and of itself, and a sufficient departure so as not to draw comparison.
There remains one final museum, and it is a breathtaking one. In St. Louis, with Tadao Ando, you catch your breath; in Kansas City, with Steven Holl, you find yourself constantly catching your breath. Holl, a German, has created a structure that continually surprises one, but always convinces. Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins is one of the great second-tier museums, housed in yet another Renaissance cum Neoclassic building -- not a very good one and not very workable in its non-gallery spaces, but beloved in KC. It also sits, like the St Louis and Cleveland museums of art, at the top of a fine park that offers a majestic approach, in this case up through beautiful groves of old trees dotted with sculpture -- Henry Moore, Rodin, Jeff Koons. Wisely, Holl decided not to hook the new building, a very large one, onto the old museum, and not to compromise the two main colonnaded facades, the grand entries from the past. The new building looks free-standing, set apart from the old, but in fact there is an underground connection: from the central information point in the new building, you can enter directly through what had been the columns and bronze doors of one of the narrow dimensions of the old structure (now under grade), and immediately find yourself in the old space among the old masters. Actually, the tops of those columns and the upper portion of that façade continue above ground. Underneath, the old façade gives a Petra-like effect: what you still see of the old façade no doubt looks more impressive now, because truncated, than when it was the base of one of four faces of a not very remarkable traditional structure.
As is now customary, the new building houses contemporary art and temporary exhibition areas, together with certain nontraditional categories of art, like fiber or plastic. “Modern” art, up through Matisse and Picasso and Pollock, remains where it has always been in the old building, close at hand for reference or enjoyment. The contemporary or nontraditional collection is good but not remarkable. However, there’s lots of room for expansion; since KC, a prosperous city, has a distinguished professional school of art and committed donors, the collection will surely grow.
Seen from above ground, the Holl addition is in fact four distinct shoebox-shaped buildings, which serve as non-gallery space and also act as “lenses,” in Holl’s term, to bring light into the subterranean areas. When you first see the Holl units above ground, you assume the art is there, and worry about control of light. The surprise is that all the art spaces are below. As it turns out, all four buildings are continuous below grade. One of the notable features is a 650-foot “art speedway,” a wide continuous corridor off which the various galleries and exhibition halls (and a small Noguchi courtyard) open. This comfortably wide corridor is filled with light from above (the galleries may or may not be, depending on what is shown), and it twists and turns gently, so that the rooms lying off it can vary in depth. There are a number of ramps that lead upward and out, so you are never far from an exit.
The floor of the subterranean interior is a handsome composite, while the finish of all the walls is an exceptionally beautiful hand-trowelled plaster. This finish is not just something you notice on close inspection. All the wall surfaces sing with a kind of pale beige or taupe, and a texture that encourages you to touch. They are glossy and deep simultaneously. The hard finish reflects, the hand trowelling creates shading and pattern and minute recesses.
There are other assertions about beauty of texture and finish. One such, especially forthright, is that the entire length of the first unit, underground, is empty of art. From the main entry, at ground level, down a long ramp, and into the information hall, a distance of at least 100 yards until the art speedway begins, there are no art objects. It is an arrogant claim, in a way: We have so much space, and it is so beautiful, and our operating budget is so high that we can leave the first of our buildings vacant. On the other hand, it makes an astounding effect, bodily as well as visual.
The four discontinuous pavilions, viewed above ground, are blocky, and a bit arbitrary looking, set as they are at slight angles from each other. The uniform outer surface is a regular glass wall divided in an exact rhythm by very narrow metal mullions. An early critic said that looked like a set of Tuff-Sheds. But the exterior cladding, once you come close, is a most glamorous double hang of tempered glass, in daytime a pale aqueous green. (They are not load-bearing, the supports are just inside, and remarkably thin.) Midway up the glass walls are a few very large rectangular windows, with conventional framing set absolutely flush into the wall, so that the windows are not added features to a surface but simply discontinuities in it. Most of the glass prisms veer slightly at one end, yielding, in a head-on view at the narrow end, the odd association of the engine of a train starting around a gentle curve, the rest of the train not yet turning. All the prisms nestle, at bottom, directly into undulating green lawn that is contoured into hollows, swales, and mounds that sometimes reach a third of the way up the exterior wall. A very narrow French drain separates the building from the sinuous lawns; you do not perceive this until you get up to the surface wall. Because the greensward undulates, the vertical dimension of the prisms, which you know to be uniform, seems to alter from spot to spot. The over-all effect is of glass shoeboxes installed on English downs.
Stone pathways curving in unexpected ways lead through the lawns, from building to building, separating the Holl from the old. As with the Hadid building, it is impossible to move above ground, past the sheds -- or, underground, down the ramp and into the speedway -- without a remarkable sense of personal motion through space and time.
All the details are elegantly achieved. Railings are composed of framed fine steel mesh, with periodic uprights or endings that are not tubular or rectangular, but bevelled, as are the horizontal hand rounds (non-round) on top. Even the brackets are turned. Not only is it impossible to resist running your hand over the railing, it feels crucial to close your hand over the brackets, just for tactile pleasure. The dulled steel door pulls on the various doubled entrance doors are vertically offset relative to each other -- an effect that emphasizes the variation of the nearby lawn, and the pulls themselves are blazon-shaped, again for a satisfying tactile experience. (Why is this not done more often? it fits the hand most happily.)
In daylight, above ground, the buildings glimmer. By night, lit from the interior, they glow. They are like pulsating pools of soft light, you cannot imagine they will stay earthbound, but the effect is not glaring, since the tempered glass has an iron content that turns it a little greener at night than by day. It is wonderful to come up through the great old park and see them shimmering above you. When you emerge from the varied light and dark of the park and finally view them clearly, it is like walking up through the Plaka and seeing the Acropolis in moonlight.
I have tried to describe some buildings and my responses to them. Now I want to comment on some larger issues.
As noted, a curatorial solution to the periodization of art is to draw a line between Modern and Contemporary. The message is, The folks who’ve visited the old building have learned to appreciate de Kooning. So let’s avoid pressing our luck, and put the new stuff in a new kind of container. I happen to think that art in most museums looks best, and instructs best, when you can move from one period, one genre, one region, to another; when you can stand and look from early German painting on wood to African sculpture or Gerhard Richter and decide, for your own aesthetic or intellectual reasons, what to look at next. That may be an extreme view, but I do think there is a problem with the segregation of art on the basis of newness. [I have no problem with a museum that shows only Asian, or African, or glass or fiber or ethnographic art.] What will happen in 50 years? Will the curators move back what was “contemporary” in 2008 to rub shoulders with “modern,” leaving the newer space to house what is newly “new”? If, once, “contemporary” required new architecture, will that suit what is now avant-garde? Doesn’t this principle imply a pre-judgment about the interests and capacities of museum-goers: that the culturally conservative museum will head for the masonry temple of art on the hill, while the “with-it” folks always head for the new wing?
It interests me that, on this trip, we saw no new structure for art that did not, in the end, despite the architectural packaging and trimmings, involve rectangular rooms with careful localized light control for actually showing the artworks. [Except for a few willful designers like Liebeskind at Denver, museums have given up trying to install art on sloping or twisting walls.] But I would go further, at least sometimes. If I were commissioning a museum alteration, I would dedicate that space to offices, the departments (like conservation, library, research, storage), the café, the party space for donors, and other utilitarian areas into the new space, keeping all the art in the old building -- arranged to make whatever art-historical point or aesthetic effect was desired
Somewhat related are problems, to my mind, of pretentiousness and an extreme aestheticization of museum (and other public) architecture. With new buildings, one wants of course something venturesome -- but to what extent and to what goal? Thinking back over the buildings recently seen, I would make distinctions as follows. Chipperfield’s Iowa buildings are neat, well-bred, except for one mistake as to visibility in the Figge. The Figge, however, has not enough art to justify the building. The wrap-around additions at St Louis (Chipperfield) and Cleveland (Viñoly) promise to be pretty and efficient, and will not disturb the natural contexts in which those art buildings are set. Graves at Detroit did what was needed, but showed nothing new in the way of design. Foster at Omaha respected the old building, but overscaled the new spaces relative to the size and importance of the collection. (And how large a crystalline café area do you need, anyhow, for a relatively small museum?) The new Akron museum (Coop Himmelb(l)au) is certainly a spectacular addition to downtown, but it is to my taste absurdly grandiose. [I even deplore the preening German-language pun.]
The structures that serve as Kunsthallen or studio/teaching spaces -- Gehry at Toledo, Eisenman at Cincinnati, Hadid at Cincinnati, Cloepfil at St Louis -- are all appropriate to the purpose. They use ordinary materials well and create suitable utilitarian spaces. Hadid is brilliant, Cloepfil is run-of-the-mill, Gehry and Eisenmann are admirable.
The SANAA structure at Toledo would certainly seem relevant to my doubts about aestheticization, but it is hors-concours. An all-glass building for an all-glass collection is fine; I am glad it exists; I would not want it imitated.
As for the Holl creation in Kansas City, the new work that I admire most, I admit to a philosophical doubt. To decree that one-fourth of the space shall be without art lays it on the line: it’s the container that’s important, not what’s in it. In this case, the building is so beautiful -- the most beautiful new public building in America -- that I have to rejoice that it was built. To be sure, in the Akron case, if you love the building you’ll feel the same way. Tastes vary. For me, I would have preferred, in a place like Akron, that the city officials take a handsome brick warehouse, rehab it for practical purposes, contrive the appropriate traffic flow, and leave it at that.
Of course this is in part the old question of function versus form. I included a description of Gehry’s school of business building at Case-Western because it applies here. The interior of the building is quirky but delightful; it works for teaching and study; it is high-tech to the nth degree so as to meet the needs of business students in the 21st century. On the other hand, the roof is Gehry phantasmagoria, pure aesthetic coloratura; and, as I understand it, the building is about as expensive as a building can get.
In this context, that of balancing aesthetic and practical judgments, another building, seen on this same trip, comes to mind. Eero Saarinen’s John Deere world headquarters, set in a magnificent park on the outskirts of Moline, Illinois, was also, I daresay, a mighty expensive piece of building. But, visually, it is discreet, reserved: a vast but simple pavilion of Corten steel and glass whose glass is tinged by the forest green around it. It is a masterpiece of American Modernism in architecture. When I said, a moment ago, that a small collection of art could be put into an updated warehouse, I was envisioning something analogous. A brick warehouse can be a beautiful thing, and it could suitably contain the art of today, an art that employs industrial and neotechnical materials as artistic means.
Such considerations are not just aesthetic, they shade over into questions of public policy.
Who paid for Coop Himmelb(l)au’s indulgence in gigantism? What if the donor disappoints, and the Figge never gets any really important art? If I were a donor to Case-Western, would I be challenged or intimidated by Peter Lewis’s lavish underwriting of Gehry? If municipal taxes help support the operations of Holl’s work at Kansas City, as I assume they do, is it really up to the architect and the director to decree that part of the building be empty of art? A broader issue, as regards public support, is in every case in America where a city has built a spectacular new building (except possibly the first, in Milwaukee), the number of visits in the first year or two has fallen far short of projections. In Denver, the economic hit has been considerable: the museum is glamorous, but a third of the professional staff has been let go. Each time, the city power structure persuades itself that things will be different in their particular case, but the Bilbao effect is not something to count on. [There is a prior history here, in the financing and support of performing arts centers around the country, most of which proved to be economic burdens.] It may be fortuitous, but in all the buildings Ken and I saw, attendance was sparse.
The most difficult case, as regards public policy, is Ando’s Pulitzer Foundation. It is a sublime building. But, looked at dispassionately, it is Emily Pulitzer’s meditation site, into which she and her curator may insert a few pieces of appropriate art to heighten the calm and thoughtful appreciation of beauty. The Pulitzer is open only two afternoons and one evening a week, and attendance is restricted as to number. Although it charges no admission, the Foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization, that is, it depends in part on tax-protected monies. Since there is no collection (or art library or study facilities), and since only a relatively few sophisticated souls will come there, what is the social or eleemosynary basis for its tax status? I have no animus toward Mrs. Pulitzer, far from it -- but if she commissioned a great architect to create a residence, and opened it for visits every other Thursday, would that justify public support?
These are difficult questions, but I do not think art institutions and architects should ignore them. With regard to both “aestheticization” and public policy, I shall cite one more new building, a Center for Academic and Research Excellence at the burgeoning University of Cincinnati medical school campus. It is the most architecturally exuberant new building I have seen, no doubt on par with the new hotels and office buildings we see pictures of in Dubai or Shanghai. The design firm is Studios Architecture, San Francisco, the architect is Erik Sueberkrop. It was just opening when we visited, and the booklet I picked up says, boldface, “The Crawley Building signals to the world that UC will continue to be a PLACE OF DISCOVERY into the 21st century.” (Majuscule in the original.) Close reading, and a visit, reveals that the building is not actually a laboratory or research building, nor a place for instruction per se. It is, basically, a fabulously expensive medical-student center, including library, computer research, seminar rooms, and a location “where scientists and students can interact outside the classroom.”
It’s quite a building, an omnium gatherum of current techniques and visual styles. On the outside there is a concatenation of tilted rhomboids, truncated cylinders, angled dark glass walls, hanging pods. The core of the enormous building is surrounded by a pavilion of glass with a myriad of metal cross-braces, forming an atrium rising ten stories. Within this, the architects have situated entire buildings: a free-standing library, a number of Quonset hut-like study sheds on the lobby floor (well, the ground floor, I don’t know where a “lobby” might be), lounges and meeting rooms, and a host of other self-contained elements all of whose roofs can be seen from above. (That is to say, the roofs of one structure do not form the floors of another; there are no “floors.”) Reinforced glass catwalks, glass for the railings, glass for the walking surface, zip across this huge space at various levels and at diverse vertiginous angles: Instead of vents, fat pipes, painted red, run from ground to the top of the atrium, carrying heat and cooling that vents into the interior via dozens of vertically ranged nozzles, set into round membranes. They look like nipples and aureoles. Well, why not?
Exuberant, yes, technologically marvelous, indeed. But I dislike it aesthetically; it is just too busy, glib, and self-indulgent. It is intended to dazzle and awe, and I do not see why a place where scientists and students interact should be, first and foremost, awesome. I think this building will look ridiculous in 25 years. I also question it on sociological grounds. The structure depended, and depends, not just on tax-protected monies but on direct infusions of public funds – local, state, and university funds and, the booklet makes clear, lots of grant money from NIH and foundations. As a taxpayer, I object. And if I were a UC alumnus being hit up for donations, I’d bridle.
Obviously, I appreciate architecture that is executed with daring, with brio, with startling new materials. But I wonder: is there some architects’ porno site to which designers become addicted? CAD and modern engineering has made possible architecture that is, for lack of a better word, lavishly gestural in spirit. (Ando and Holl aside; they are at the opposite extreme.) I appreciate Calatrava’s retractable wings and Gehry’s cloud-capp’d towers. But as we go forward, a bit of modesty would not be amiss. Art may be the finest thing, but surely it isn’t everything.