Blanton Museum of Art

Review: Function over form

Art museum's first building is a hodgepodge of styles, but its galleries are a comfortable setting for the collections

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARCHITECTURE CRITIC
Sunday, June 04, 2006

At first, it's hard to understand how the new Mari and James A. Michener Gallery Building — the first and largest building of the two that make up the $83.5 million Blanton Museum of Art — is an important building.

It's not pretty, it's not creative and it's not even very friendly.

Four weeks ago, when the 124,000-square-foot building opened, the record-breaking crowd that lined up outside the University of Texas museum acted as a beacon, drawing others in, signaling the entrance.

Take away the crowds, however, and it's hard to read the function of the hulking red-tile-roofed institutional structure. Indeed, viewed from just any nearby vantage point — from east and west along traffic-heavy Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, up from the sun-drenched north stretch of Congress Avenue, down from the shady University of Texas campus core — not much about the gallery's low-decoration exterior drops a clue. Indeed, the massive limestone panels cladding the exterior project an upright austerity, not refined simplicity.

A library? An auditorium? A natatorium?

Where to enter? Where's the front?

The UT regents might have wished for a museum that echoed the best of the elegant Spanish Colonial Revival style introduced to the campus in the early 1900s by Cass Gilbert, then continued by Paul Philippe Cret. But brutal modernist buildings (Jester Center and the Sanchez Education Building) frame the Blanton site, not historic gems. What Michael McKinnell of Kallman McKinnell & Wood Architects of Boston added to that mix is an oversize mishmash: a Renaissance palazzo fronted by an almost Romanesque loggia and topped by an overhanging roof that seems oddly pagoda-like.

From any view, there's none of the pleasing proportions or distinguished articulation of details found in Gilbert and Cret masterpieces, such as Battle Hall or the Texas Union. Nor is there any gracious ceremony to what is the most important element of any public building — the front entrance.

Instead, once you wander the perimeter, you slip into the museum through a double glass door articulated on top by a same-width arch projecting nearly to the roof line.

The inside, however, reveals a little more verve.

The focal point? The soaring, white-walled, two-story atrium with its dramatic, zig-zagging skylights. Conceived mostly as a stage for large public programs and parties (the fundraising realities that underlie all modern museums), the atrium proved its service well during the 24-hour grand opening April 29-30. Demure classical soloists and blasting rock bands alike sounded fine from the atrium stage, not suffering from a preponderance of echoes. And the overlooking walkway ringing half the second floor offers people what they like best about large public settings — a perch from which to watch the crowd.

Of course, such watching is a bit of a challenge when, at certain times of the day, sunlight acts with the vast white walls to overwhelm the eyes with brightness. And, unfortunately, a fragment of the outside arched loggia shows up along one side of the atrium's first floor — a decoration that smacks of theme park.

Still, the atrium is not all bad. Its slightly trapezoidal shape keeps the whole space pleasantly in motion. Right-angle corners can trap the visceral circulation around a room; reduce them and people keep moving.

Beyond the atrium, the galleries do what good galleries should — offer inviting, undistracting settings for art. On the second floor, enormous sky-lit barrel-vaulted rooms house large modern and contemporary works of art. Delicate prints and elegant Renaissance and Baroque paintings find a perfect home in smaller, more formal galleries that flow from one to the next with easy procession. Pleasant pauses and welcome outside glimpses are found in the four corners of the second floor, each of which is marked with its own windowed room.

Three are galleries (one currently has its windows covered because of the delicate nature of the artwork). The southwestern corner — with its postcard-perfect view of the Capitol — is a comfortable library and computer lounge.

Downstairs, a vast tall-ceilinged blank white box of a gallery offers a good flexible home for temporary exhibits. And if the interstices — the landings, corridors and hallways — don't inspire, they function logically and pleasantly.

Sure — the sum of the Michener Building's parts don't add up to great architecture. But it is an important building nonetheless in the way it helps anchor a public place of emerging civic consequence.

It's the green spaces surrounding the Michener Building — the currently not-quite-finished plaza designed by landscape architect Peter Walker — that give the site ceremony and offer a hint, even from a block or two away, that it's a public destination.

Arguably, there isn't a more symbolic intersection in Austin than where Congress Avenue flows up from downtown to the Capitol and then on to UT. Along that route there's an implied shift of power from city to state government to the flagship seat of higher learning. Until now, though, the seam in the urban fabric between city and university has been mostly ignored.

Even if it's not complete, the entire Blanton complex hints that it might just erase the town-and-gown divide.

Perhaps tellingly, at a press conference before the museum's opening, McKinnell side-stepped an exact explanation of the style he employed, instead proclaiming that it's not the individual buildings that one remembers about a campus, but the outside spaces those buildings create. McKinnell's way of passing the torch to Walker?

Certainly Walker took up the charge. And delivered.

He keyed the proportions of the plaza to those originally identified by Cret in a campus master plan. The Michener Building forms the east side. Currently under construction, the smaller Edgar A. Smith Building (which will house offices, a museum cafe and shop) will mark the west side.

Knee-high walls of perforated metal — lit from within — entice visitors up three gentle, low steps from the public sidewalk along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and into a grove of cedar elms neatly arrayed into two axes: one on center with the grid ordered by Congress Avenue, the other set a bit askew to be aligned with the campus grid. Flagstones in irregular shapes scatter across the grass-covered alley to form paths.

Texas redbud and Mexican plum trees sweep around the southeast corner of the Michener Building and shade a slate circle by British artist Richard Long. Mature live oaks — transplanted from the new building site — shade a long grassy area on the north side of the building that's ripe for more sculpture.

Universities in the United States aren't typically in the habit of commissioning landmark museums by signature architects. To be sure, there are exceptions, not surprisingly at private universities that aren't subject to the same politics of state-run institutions.

Last fall, Duke University opened the sleek, minimalist 65,000-square-foot Nasher Museum of Art designed by Rafael Viñoly, and this fall, Washington University in St. Louis will unveil its new Kemper Art Museum by Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki.

In the end, however, stewarding a brave new design past UT regents, who rejected several innovative design proposals from the Swiss firm of Herzog and de Meuron before settling on more conservative, Boston-based Kallman McKinnell and Wood, proved too difficult for those behind the Blanton.

What we now have is not aesthetically spectacular, but it does provide a perfectly decent home for the art it holds — a home that is surrounded by a public place of emerging importance.

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699