Countdown to opening day

Designers tamed

Architects quit. Regents wrestled. But UT got a design that suits its style

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS WRITER
Sunday, April 23, 2006

Last year, when Central Texans were surveyed about their impressions of the Blanton Museum of Art, what was fixed in their memories? The dramatic episode from a few years back when an innovative design for the new University of Texas museum was swept away by a tempest of state and educational politics.

Things seemed rosy in 1997 when UT announced — not for the first time — plans to build a major new art museum. Millions of dollars had already been raised and university leaders had committed to raising millions more. Prominent campus locations were reserved as potential museum sites.

Fans of assertive architecture hoped that the university would break from its recent history of building bland, if reasonably practical, educational buildings.

After all, the 1990s saw architecture emerge as popular culture like never before. "Star-architects" — Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Tadao Ando, Santiago Calatrava — and their eye-popping projects grabbed headlines. Around the world, competitions for high-profile commissions, including scores of museums, received coverage akin to sporting events or political elections.

The Blanton was no different.

With plenty of fanfare, a design selection committee culled a long list of aspirants to seven prominent international architects, bringing each to Austin for standing room-only public lectures. When the risk-taking Swiss team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron was chosen in 1998, excitement stirred: Could Austin be the next U.S. city to claim an architectural landmark?

Herzog and de Meuron delivered, unveiling a sleek, one-story, landscaped structure with a flat roof — a "garden solution" as they called it.

The museum leadership rejoiced. Architecture critics applauded.

But to the hierarchy in a state-run university, none of that matters. Instead, the UT System Board of Regents exercises final say over design matters.

And that's when the tussle over taste ensued, with both sides citing Cesar Pelli's 1996 campus master plan, which argued for ambitious design and historical contextualism, as an almost constitutional document.

Regents Rita Clements (wife of former Texas Gov. Bill Clements, who had nixed an earlier version of a UT art museum in the 1970s) and Laredo businessman Tony Sanchez rejected Herzog and de Meuron's minimalist museum, demanding that the building instead mimic the traditional red-tile roofs and limestone façades of the Spanish Colonial Revival style of UT's signature buildings. "I have a big problem with flat roofs," Sanchez said at the time.

The architects were sent back to the drawing board. They returned, this time proposing a one-story building with an undulating tile roof.

Again, Clements and Sanchez balked. "I've never seen an undulating roof," Sanchez said at a heated meeting in October 1999.

A month later Herzog and de Meuron quit the project. Students and faculty rallied on campus to oppose the regents' decision. The national architecture press denounced Clements and Sanchez, calling them "anti-intellectual." Finally, School of Architecture dean Lawrence Speck announced his resignation in protest (he retained his position as professor).

For a while, it seemed that UT's hope for a new art museum might end with the millennium.

But by fall 2000, university and museum officials — acknowledging that they sought a designer who could blend in within the campus' existing architectural idiom — put together another search committee and whipped through the selection process. They chose Boston-based Kallmann McKinnell & Wood Architects, whose final design, a two-building complex of limestone buildings with pitched red-tile roofs that fit the scale and style of its surroundings, garnered unanimous approval by the regents.

A silver lining to the dramatic tale? Along the way, the museum grew. What initially started as a $30 million 100,000-square-foot building ended up a $83.5 million 150,000-square-foot two-building complex with a prominent 145,000-square-foot plaza.

In Texas, big usually wins.

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699