Library of Congress Photographs and Prints, HABS MO,96-SALU,96B-1
What do we talk about when we talk about art? We often begin with those elements that we can touch, like the way paint is applied to canvas, or the differences between bronze, wood and milled aluminum. We talk about color, or composition or placement or scale. But these are only components. They’re just weigh stations we pass through as we close in on the really good stuff.
What does it look like? Or, how about: how does it make you feel?
There is no doubt that both Hieronymous Bosch and Gerhard Richter both created large-scale works with paint, but the feeling of standing in front of one is wildly different than standing in front of the other. Richard Diebenkorn and Claude Monet may both have been inspired by life near the water’s edge, but their work conjures very different emotions. Warhol, Serra, Sheeler and Judd all rely on industrial processes to execute their work, but these four distinct artists pull a viewer in four very different emotional directions.
Shouldn’t we expect the same of architecture?
We discuss buildings in purely objective terms like materiality, site, square footage and cost, but again, those are only the bits and pieces. Taken only as fragmentary elements, all you’ll end up with are fragments, and possibly four walls and a roof. But that’s not really the extent of truly making a place. Shouldn’t architecture amount to more than just physical mass?
Architecture, like art, ought to make us feel something. We should have an emotional reaction, substantial, subtle or otherwise, when we see or enter a designed place. A building can instill confidence and sense of safety, or conversely, a manipulated perception of space and anxiety. A particular place may invite an internal state of cool reserve, may contribute to a sense of prickly conflict, may overwhelm you with awe or leave you unsatisfied and disappointed.
A place can elicit oohs and aahs, as well as oh hell, nos.
So what can we expect to see, and more importantly, what will we possibly feel, when the new addition at the Saint Louis Art Museum opens in 2012?
The hole in the ground adjacent to the existing Cass Gilbert designed building doesn’t tell us much about the expansion that will eventually stand there, but some reasonable assumptions can be made by taking a good look at the body of work of the project’s design architect, Sir David Chipperfield, and by studying the carefully curated images of the future addition that the museum has released.
David Chipperfield comes from a long line of devout British Modernists and is well aware of the seductive power of austerity. Like his contemporary, David Adjaye, he dexterously pairs contradictory notions of transparency and opacity, of solid and skeletal. Like his predecessor John Pawson, he adeptly conjures spare, uncluttered spaces, which are fastidiously lit by daylight and little else. And like Peter and Alison Smithson, who are perhaps the root of this family tree, Chipperfield deftly offsets the monumental with the human scale, employing opposing heavy and light elements sheathed in course and refined surfaces.
On paper, Chipperfield can read a bit like a mess of contrived opposites, but in reality, his buildings really do embody these seemingly irreconcilable qualities. Both the temple-like Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, Germany, for which he was awarded the RIBA Sterling Prize in 2007, and the copper-clad Des Moines Public Library attest to the designer’s sensitivities.
Looking at the renderings or the museum expansion, though, one might initially be tempted to wonder about the origin of the sprawling collection of black boxes, and why they landed beside our iconic Beaux Arts treasure. It may appear as though a misplaced, strangely sited shelter were merely plugged into and filling the empty space around the original building. At first glance, there is undoubtedly a disconnect between the soaring pitched roofs, the statuary standing above the heavy pediments and the classical Corinthian columns of the original museum and the low-slung, unadorned reductivism of the expansion.
But look longer, look more intently, and the disconnect slowly becomes something more than a mere Felix and Oscar mismatch; it is a purposeful, contrapunctual composition. It is simultaneously an audacious juxtaposition and a deferential obeisance. Again, we will see Chipperfield layering rough and smooth and light next to dark. He installs sweeping expanses of glass that allow views deep into the galleries next to unflinchingly stoic limestone walls. Where the Gilbert building rises high, the expansion dips into the park’s verdant landscape, and where it is compact, the expansion stretches widely. The Gilbert building flails and flaunts its ornaments, like calligraphy and trombones. The expansion is measured and sharp, like an Olivetti Valentine and snare drums.
This uneasy pairing is reminiscent of the combines of Robert Rauschenberg or the collaged paintings of John Baldessari, two artists whose work is riddled with contrasting, often discordant physical and conceptual components. Rarely do they fail to evoke an immediately visceral emotional response.
And while the exterior of the new building addition is a provocative pose, all joyfully anxiety and ecstatic dissonance, the interior appears to willfully bow in serene repose to the primary intent of this place, which is, of course, to house and display extraordinary art. Natural light will wash the galleries via deep concrete-coffered ceilings. The plan will be both enormous, at 200,000 square feet, and highly flexible, allowing the museum to serve the art, rather than the other way around.
When it is completed, the expansion will redefine what it means to see work at the St. Louis Art Museum, and it will require a redistribution of the impressive collection. It will provide new curatorial and events opportunities, and most importantly, it will give us all a new excuse to argue about things as important as art and architecture, and what could feel better than that?
For more information on SLAM's expansion, or to see renderings of Chipperfield's design, visit www.slam.org/expansion.
