Stirring Men to Leap Moats

"Museums must create a mood of excitement and anticipation, of mystery," says China-born U.S. Architect Ieoh Ming Pei. "Fatigue is not just in the feet, it's in the mood." Seldom has an architect done more to enhance the sense of expectation for the visitor than did Pei in his Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, N.Y., which opens to the public this week. It is only the most recent in a series of exciting new buildings that add up to a museum explosion in 1968 (see color pages).

Pei's new structure (cost: $3,500,000) is indeed a dramatic addition to Syracuse's downtown Community Plaza. Its four main galleries loom theatrically over the concrete-paved concourse. Inside, visitors pass through a spacious 35-ft.-high central court, then climb to the galleries on a swirling, circular stairway. They can promenade from one gallery to the next without descending, thanks to glass-curtained, connecting bridges that overlook both court and outdoor plaza. Pei believes that such bridges give a "change of pace" between exhibition rooms. "Besides," he adds, "in a museum your eyes need a rest."

Running Scared Modern. Building today's museums is an expensive process, and few institutions can afford to start over again from scratch. Such is the case in Des Moines, where Pei was faced with another set of problems: primarily, how to add a wing to the existing building, in this case the Des Moines Art Center built by Eliel Saarinen in 1948. Pei's solution was to build a two-story structure behind the original, U-shaped building, thus totally surrounding a shallow reflecting pool that had lain between the two wings of the U. To further unify the two, he used rough-textured concrete to match the limestone facade of the Saarinen building. The result is so harmonious that Washington's National Gallery of Art has commissioned Pei to design a major wing to house its new Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.

In Atlanta, faced with the cost of separately housing a symphony hall, theater, museum, ballet studio and art school, culture-loving Georgians decided to pool their efforts and put them all under one roof in the new, $13 million Memorial Arts Center, the work of two local architectural firms. Dedicated to the memory of 122 Atlanta arts patrons who were killed in a Paris plane crash in 1962, the center opened last month with a splendid exhibition of 59 paintings and drawings loaned by Paris museums. Alas for good intentions, the building itself has a cold, pretentious look and is, in effect, a massive box with a portico of sticklike, white concrete columns tacked on to suggest the Parthenon--or a Southern plantation mansion. "The result is Caricature Classicism," wrote the New York Times critic, Ada Louise Huxtable, "or Running Scared Modern."

No Ordeal. The new Oakland museum, by Connecticut's Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, is a design of an altogether different order. It not only successfully incorporates many different civic functions but bids fair to become a landmark for city planners and architects. Chosen in 1961 to design a project in downtown Oakland that would combine three local museums with class rooms and a theater, Roche and Dinkeloo concluded that the busy area needed "a parklike environment, not just another monumental building." They were also touched by the fact that the construction would be financed by a voter-approved city bond issue. As they well knew, the average man at the polls tends to regard museumgoing as a duty rather than a pleasure.

Roche and Dinkeloo therefore set out to create a museum that would not be "an ordeal of physical endurance," but "a pleasant, relaxing, informative experience." The three museums (devoted to California ecology, cultural history and art) are buried, in three successive tiers, under interlacing steps, shady passageways, grass plots, trees and a reflecting pool. The result reminds its director, J. S. Holliday, of "a Mayan temple" and other observers of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The museum will be open to the public next spring, when its exhibits are installed.

Negative Space. American architects are becoming so accomplished at museum design that they are even winning commissions overseas. "We wanted the architect with the greatest experience," says Joachim von Moltke, director of the Kunsthalle in Bielefeld, West Germany, in explaining the selection of Philip Johnson, who has built six museums. Though working far from home, Johnson scaled the Kunsthalle to the small German park and six-story buildings of Bielefeld, and, for the facade, used red German sandstone, which lends a welcome note of warmth in Bielefeld's rainy climate.

"I think that the ideal museum is a negative space to make the works of art look good," says Johnson. Within the severe, almost mausoleum-like exterior, he has given Von Moltke plenty of space in which to build a collection. To West Germans, Johnson also made the museum revolutionary by adding such "American" features as a children's room, an auditorium and a cafe overlooking the park. "In the first four weeks, we have had 20,000 visitors," says Von Moltke. "In our old quarters, we used to get about 5,000 a year."

English Eccentric. No museum this year has drawn more fire than London's new Hayward Art Gallery, the fortress that opened this summer in the Greater London Council's South Bank Arts Center, across the Thames from Parliament. A jungle of raw "brutalist" forms, the gallery makes no attempt to hide its concrete components from the elements. Traylike open decks display sculptures--and afford fine views. Yet the building is not quite so practical as it seems. The outside stairs and ramps look as though they ought to lead up to entrances, but only one does. The rest are part of a labyrinthine set of walkways that connect the gallery with its neighboring concert hall and the Waterloo Bridge.

"Misplaced functionalism," snapped the architecture critic of the Guardian. The Daily Mail called the building "un-human." The Hayward Gallery is, however, intensely human--and therein lies its strength. It is not a classical structure but a romantic one, proclaiming its irregularities like an English eccentric. Architectural Review's Charles Jencks, for one, found himself "stirred to leap the moats, jump the cross bridge, and burst through those 15 in. of solid concrete to find out what needs so much protection and sanctity in the middle of the 20th century." What could be a more suitable answer than a gallery devoted to contemporary art, which so often inspires its viewers either to rage or defensive laughter?

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