Toward A New Museum

A Michigan State competition yields designs where much more than art is on display

Joseph Giovannini -- Interior Design, 11/1/2007 12:00:00 AM

Michigan State University gave Eli Broad his undergraduate education. The Los Angeles philanthropist wanted to give something back. In that gavotte of memory and pride, school and alumnus agreed on building the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum to accommodate a small but encyclopedic collection oriented increasingly toward contemporary art. Broad asked me to organize the competition.

If at one time the "contemporary" museum was simply a big warehouse, museums are now freighted with more ambitious social and cultural expectations. The truism about these buildings is that they have become secular cathedrals, but in fact museums play many roles beyond being civic-minded, symbolically significant repositories of art and engines to power a local economy. Provocative architecture can fuse with an engaging collection or even catalyze its growth. Perhaps most important, a building can shape our attitudes toward art. The museum is a lens for seeing.

Broad made his first fortune as a developer of tract housing, but he's honed his architectural sophistication in downtown L.A., on civic projects including Arata Isozaki & Associates's Museum of Contemporary Art, Gehry Partners's Walt Disney Concert Hall, and Morphosis's Caltrans District Seven headquarters as well as Coop Himmelb(l)au's High School for the Visual and Performing Arts, now under construction. His Broad Contemporary Art Museum by Renzo Piano Building Workshop opens in February at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. At MSU, however, it was actually administrators who proposed bringing a challenging level of architecture to campus, not a reiteration of something everyone already knows. In a pivotal remark, provost Kim Wilcox mentioned his desire for a "Sydney Opera House of our time—one that we can afford."

The highly contagious global fever for iconic buildings had spread to this land-grant college in central Michigan. The goal was parity with every other recent museum aspiring to a place on the international stage—and particularly with a web of Midwestern museums and university buildings that have emerged over the last decade as a pilgrimage route of cutting-edge design. Furthermore, MSU expressed a desire to turn the inward-looking campus toward the community via a gateway building that could catalyze urban regeneration in East Lansing. This was an outreach project.

With his Sydney Opera House remark, the provost took a position against comfort architecture, fitting its context—which in this case was collegiate Gothic. The notion of contextuality has carried over from the historicism that prevailed during the postmodernist interlude. When I first visited MSU, I realized that, although many of the redbrick buildings were elegant, they were so knit together through their fabric that the ensemble seemed all background and no foreground. Only the carillon tower merited a photograph.

I felt that the redbrick could serve best as a setting for an "outstanding" building with a spirited radiance that would draw people in, and this reverse contextual response set the course of architect selection. I culled a list of about 20 architects whose work might be called extroverted rather than introverted, active rather than passive. The museum needed to radiate beyond its site, not only to the community but also, in our media-saturated age, to the printed page and the computer screen. We know so many structures through images rather than visits.

Last spring at Broad's New York apartment, I presented my list to a gathering of university officials and donors. A consensus developed surprisingly quickly, and the final list of five was diverse and promising: Coop Himmelb(l)au, Zaha Hadid Architects, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, Morphosis, and a younger firm, Randall Stout Architects. All were enthusiastic about the prospect of the 27,500-square-foot commission, though several expressed doubts about the $30 million budget, with $500 per square foot for construction. During five weeks this past summer, the firms dived into the design, then presented their work to a jury of university officials, patrons, and other architects.

Deliberations were complicated by the tension between the notions of presence, which favored a shaped verticalized building, and efficiency, which favored a horizontal solution on one or two floors. The university pressed for an icon, edging the scheme toward verticality. However Broad, as a developer of single-family houses, had stated his preference for avoiding the cost of staircases and elevators, and I wrote the notion of efficiency into the brief without expressly calling for a single-story design.

Zaha Hadid seemed to intuit from the budget that she could achieve affordability only on one level. Her senior director, Patrik Schumacher, presented a dynamic museum clad in a crazy quilt of stainless-steel Issey Miyake pleats. Despite the horizontality, the design was iconic because of its singular skin and acute angularity. The work was also unique in her opus.

Coop Himmelb(l)au's Wolf Prix organized his museum very simply on two floors, with services, classrooms, and offices at grade and galleries in long, teetering volumes above. A staircase spiraled up from a conical lobby to the galleries, and the gallery floor's shifting tectonic plates eventually led to an outdoor bridge, which descended to a sculpture garden. The energy of the scheme came from the visual scissoring of volumes lifted off the ground, contrasted with the surrounding sedentary buildings.

Thom Mayne of Morphosis proposed much taller, sculpted masses connected by a staircase that meandered up, into, and then around the galleries, with perches and alcoves that offered accidental places for students to interact or simply be alone. He emphasized circulation as a medium for socializing the students and urbanizing the interior.

William Pedersen took a volumetric approach to the message of efficiency and the need for an icon. He presented an elegant architectural bubble in the Bucky Fuller tradition, enclosing the maximum amount of space in the minimum amount of skin. A circular ramp and staircase skirted a multistory atrium on the way up to the galleries.

Randall Stout, fresh from the Hunter Museum of American Art down in Chattanooga, Tennessee, responded to the trees of the MSU campus, landscaped as an arboretum. He lifted his galleries into the leafy canopy, floating them over a transparent glass lobby. The museum basically melted away.

The jury voted by ballot in July. Since then, cost estimators have determined that the projects are considerably over-budget, confirming the architects' initial impression. Some have made changes to reduce the price, and university president Lou Anna K. Simon, at the time of this writing, was deciding how to move forward. The architects were waiting for their phones to ring.

In the meantime, the competition has proved a barometer of current and future trends. MSU is emblematic of forward-looking clients calling on architecture to perform a variety of roles. With the aid of the ubiquitous computer, the firms responded to a demanding program with great complexity. None of the schemes are self-contained. Buildings are spatially and conceptually open to both their physical and cultural environments.

To judge from MSU, museum clients are not only unafraid of adventurous architecture: They also want it, for an extensive set of reasons. On the architects' side, the proposals for the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum are so diverse that they do not point to a single emergent style. The issue is not so much that taste has changed but that museums see architecture as a major ally to enlist in their mission.

From top: Members of the jury deliberating over models of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at July's public presentation. The scheme by Randall Stout Architects, with upper galleries clad in patinated zinc.

From top: A rendering of the Morphosis building in glass, concrete, and steel. The same design as a gypsum model. Circumferential elevations submitted by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates.

Clockwise from top: Entrance and campus views from the proposal by Coop Himmelb(l)au. The building as a model in polystyrene foam, paper, and wire. Zaha Hadid Architects's design, presented as an SLS-generated model made with nylon powder. A rendering of the building's stainless-steel cladding.