Defying Gravity

By: Michael Allan Torre

June 2008

The British Museum in London, established by an act of Parliament in 1753 and opened to the public January 15, 1759, claims to be the world’s oldest structure built as a museum. For the next couple of centuries, museum buildings seemed to follow the same pattern—imposing, Greek Revival architectural monuments carved in stone, with symmetrical windows and doors.

Since then, museum design has evolved in dramatic fashion. With his hugely successful Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Frank Lloyd Wright turned museum design upside down—literally—with his rounded wide-at-the-top, narrow-at-the-bottom design completed in 1959, the year of his death. Rather than reinforcing the notion of gravity, as museums traditionally had done, it defied gravity. Round in both exterior and interior, it seemed to issue a challenge to the rectangular buildings that surrounded it.

Nonetheless, the Guggenheim, improved by the early 1990s Gwathmey-Siegel renovation and addition, remains one of the world’s most intriguing and visited structures.

Today, museum design is largely in the hands of architects whose headline-grabbing works and public relations skills have morphed them into "starchitects." Their bold designs often challenge the public to expand its understanding of the integration of architecture, art and urban development. All of today’s architects consider movement, intensity and vitality to be essential ingredients in successful contemporary design.

One of the most dynamic and artistically sited museums is the National Museum of Australia at Canberra, which opened in 2001. Designed by Howard Raggatt, it integrates the many stories of Australian culture, including the founding of Sydney by the British and the history of the indigenous Australians, such as the Aboriginals and the Torres Strait Islanders. Its location at Acton Peninsula on Lake Burley Griffin offers spectacular vistas and allows an approach to the museum’s entry through a now-iconic 30-meter-high sculptural loop. Splashes of color lend lightness, life and energy to this postmodern edifice.

Lightness in defiance of gravity is apparent in the expressionist Museo Oscar Niemeyer in Curitiba, in the southern Brazilian state of Paraná. Designed by its namesake, winner of the AIA Gold Medal (1970) and the Pritzker Architecture Prize (1989), the museum was originally founded as the Novo Museu in 2002. It was renamed after the architect in 2003 to commemorate his 95th birthday during completion of the new addition. Museo Oscar Niemeyer appears to float in space, reinforced visually in several ways. It is built of a large volume shaped like an eye sitting atop a relatively small pedestal. This arrangement allows the surrounding sky and topography to be seen around the building in all dimensions. Although it is known as the "eye museum," it seems designed from a cross-section of an aircraft wing. This also adds lightness and a sense of impending takeoff to the composition.

Frank Gehry’s 1997 Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, is one of the most important integrations of art and architecture. Its bold design was a point of departure from traditional museum design in the same way that Wright’s Guggenheim was during the 1950s. It contains one spectacular permanent exhibit: "The Matter of Time," a series of weathering steel sculptures designed by Richard Serra and housed in the 430-foot Arcelor Gallery.There are, in essence, two major parts: the titanium surface and the structure’s forms and proportions. Bilbao is a moving, living, dynamic museum. Called, "the greatest building of our time," by Philip Johnson, its surfaces undulate in every dimension (and probably in some unseen dimension known only to Gehry himself). Its organic freedom recalls garden ground cover—as if titanium could grow like pachysandra. The choice of surface material speaks volumes in this design. Titanium, when alloyed with other metals, becomes corrosion resistant, boasts the highest strength-to-weight ratio of all metals and a 100-year life span. It is a sophisticated strategic material that for decades was stockpiled by missile makers, aircraft manufacturers and governments in the event of war. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, architects and builders would not have been able to acquire enough to build a building, and Gehry’s use of it just a few years after the end of the Cold War is a nod to the end of that conflict.

On the other hand, the success of Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao has created a new term in the museum business—the "Bilbao Effect," or worse, the "Disneyfication" of the museum. "Some warn that new buildings give only short-term benefits," wrote Andrew McClellan in The Art Museum From Boullee to Bilbao (University of California Press, 2008), "that without a strong collection the crowds will visit once and not return and that the new architecture diminishes art and cheapens the museum experience."

For many years the Baghdad-born British architect Zaha Hadid, winner of the 2004 Pritzker Prize, labored in obscurity and resorted to sending unsolicited design drawings to government officials in other countries. Today, her spectacular Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati and her upcoming Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University demonstrate the breadth and depth of her talent. According to Director Curator Raphaela Platow, the building has already attained "landmark status." It not only adds new life to its own urban center, it also transcends its time and place as a world-class museum.

The Rosenthal Center seemingly punches at onlookers with concrete fists. Like Wright’s Guggenheim, it is non-contextual: While the adjacent buildings have uniform vertical corners edges, the Rosenthal Center has broken horizontal and vertical lines. While the neighboring buildings have uniform window and floor patterns, Hadid’s Rosenthal Center lacks such uniformity. Windowless angled volumes project out toward the street, while its lowest level consists of a glass wall. The concrete volumes above the glass wall seem to defy gravity. It is a new visual experience within its streetscape.

Hadid’s rendering of the tri-level 41,000-square-foot Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum illustrates a futuristic point of view in architecture. The aluminum and glass exterior is at once at odds with and in harmony with nature, as represented by the adjacent sculpture garden. The low lines do not intrude too much into the natural surroundings, while the museum’s metallic angularity says, "humans have built this."

A most imaginative resurrection of an abandoned building was created with the help of Italian-born architect Renzo Piano, the 2008 AIA Gold Medal winner. His Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli in the north tower of the Lingotto Factory Conversion (also known as Turin’s "jewel box in the sky") displays 25 works of art by Canaletto, Manet, Renoir, Modigliani, Matisse and Picasso, which are owned by Gianni Agnelli, head of the Fiat conglomerate.

The museum, with its industrial appearance, seems to float above a rectangular office box atop the renovated 1917 Fiat factory and has its own rooftop automobile test track. In the tradition of Wright’s Guggenheim, Piano’s roof museum defies gravity, and it lets the natural context filter in from above, below and through each side in a manner similar to that of the Museo Oscar Niemeyer. New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman reminds us that "Piano’s buildings display art well."The British Museum’s glass-covered Great Court, created by Sir Norman Foster, has a geometric structural surface. This pattern is apparent in other Foster designs: Hearst Tower in New York and his renowned Swiss Re London Headquarters, also known as the "Gherkin" for its rounded and tapered shape resembling a pickle. Andrew McClellan characterizes the design as a "transcendent global embrace…the domed courtyard unites visitors from disparate lands with elemental sculptures from the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Rome, India, Assyria, Europe (Celts) and Oceania (Easter Island)."

The classical structures housed under the Great Court glass roof are bathed in shadows. Covering an area of 6,000 square meters and weighing 800 tons, the glass roof is supported by 12 kilometers of steel. It is composed of 3,312 individual panels of glass, each one a unique triangle. The 3,312 panels of glass are screenprinted with small dots on 50 percent of their surface, a technique known as "fritting" that filters ultraviolet rays and reduces solar heat gain.

Museum architects sometimes charge themselves with creating designs that can serve as immediately recognizable symbols for the institution. An example of this approach is Robert A.M. Stern’s International Quilt Study Center and Museum, at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, which was dedicated in March 2008. The 2,300 quilts constiute the largest collection in the world, spanning four centuries of quilting. The stitched-together glass wall at the front elevation of the structure is a reference to the artworks and activities within. Although purposely designed as a quilt museum, the building’s precise forms, proportions and overall design would allow it to house any type of art. One effect of the architect’s design is to elevate a "folk art" form to the level of fine art. Maureen Ose, the museum’s communications coordinator, points out that quilts, just like more mainstream art media, tell stories of their place and time.

The Akron Art Museum embraces not only the 21st century but the 19th and 20th, as well. The original building is the city’s former main post office, a 21,000-square-foot brick and limestone structure designed in 1899 in the Italian Renaissance revival style. In the mid-1980s, when it was converted, it won awards for adaptive reuse as a museum.

In 2007, Coop Himmelblau Architects, a recognized Viennese firm founded by Wolf D. Prix and Helmut Swiczinsky, created the design for the spectacular glass and steel addition. The "Crystal" lobby—three stories of glass and steel in the new John S. and James L. Knight Building—soars toward the heavens, integrating shards of space and defying gravity. Prix reinforces my own sentiments about gravity and current design: "The dream of the architect is to get rid of gravity." A 52-foot cantilever floats over the "Gallery Box," while "Roof Cloud," a 327-foot-long steel cantilever, marries the old building, the street and the new building.

The Akron Art Museum addition is Coop Himmelblau’s first public project in the United States and received a 2005 American Architecture Award from the Chicago Athenaeum. "Although the new facility has a hefty lighting bill each month and could have been bigger, it is both functional and glamorous," says Mitchell Kahan, the museum’s director and CEO. "It is worth a special trip to view the collection of art from national, international and regional artists, folk artists and outsider artists, as well as masterpieces by Chuck Close and Donald Judd."

The new Institute of Contemporary Art at Boston, by Diller Scofidio + Renfro with Perry Dean Rogers Partners, and the Milwaukee Art Museum, designed by Santiago Calatrava, employ different methods to achieve the same result, the one pioneered by Wright: defying gravity. The ICA, winner of the 2007 Harleston Parker Medal, features an almost solid rectangular museum box not only supported by a glass wall but also cantilevered over it. It forces visitors to suspend their disbelief and deal with the fact that you cannot see the underlying steel structure that supports the cantilever. They are constantly reminded that something massive hovers above.On the other hand, Santiago Calatrava’s first building in the United States, the award-winning Milwaukee Art Museum, is mechanical and almost aircraft-like in its design. Elements from his popular suspension bridges have worked their way into the concept. The original museum, the War Memorial Center, designed in the 1950’s by Eero Saarinen, and the new Quadracci Pavilion by Calatrava have both received Time magazine’s Best Design Award, in 1957 and 2001, respectively.

The composition is light and dynamic, and is reinforced by the Burke Brise Soleil movable wings, which were designed partly as a sunscreen and partly for crowd entertainment. These mechanical wings rise each day at 10 a.m., when the museum opens. The wings close and reopen at noon and close for the evening at 5 p.m. The museum is open until 8 p.m. Thursdays, and the wings follow that schedule.

The wingspan of the Burke Brise Soleil compares to that of a Boeing 747–400, and with that in mind, they were designed to close automatically when the wind speed reaches 23 miles per hour in order to avoid wind damage. And although traditionalists have taken issue with the wings over the need to announce their operation and their potential to distract from the museum’s artwork, other critics have given it at least qualified praise. Paul Goldberger wrote in The New Yorker that "the Quadracci Pavilion is a spectacular building that has nothing to do with the display of art and everything to do with getting crowds to come to the museum."

Daniel Keegan, the director of the Milwaukee Art Museum, says, "This is world-class architecture holding a world-class art collection and worth a special trip." These mechanical wings are a first in American design, and this kinetic structure has brought museum design to its current, albeit temporary, pinnacle, as upcoming generations of starchitects continue to reinvent the concept of museum design, fulfilling the challenge set forth by Wright: "Every great architect is—necessarily—a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age."

Michael Allan Torre is an architect and a contributing writer to The Modern Estate, an architecture magazine. For his first professional project, he turned an abandoned railroad switch tower into a railroad museum.