Recent arts coverage:
- Evolutionary biology. Aesthetic determinism. Live action role playing. The Rude Mechs are making a new play again
- Suburban battlefield: Women fight invisible foe in Amie Siegel’s ‘Black Moon’
- In eerie paintings by Ana Fernandez, a house isn’t just a house
More arts coverage | Follow this blog on Twitter @artsinaustin | Read recent arts reviews
Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > January > 02
Friday, January 2, 2009
Austin Museum of Art cancels downtown project
While revelers and arts patrons were busy preparing for New Year’s Eve festivities, the Austin Museum of Art quietly dropped a ball of its own Wednesday. Talk about finishing up 2008 with a bang — or really, a bust.
Museum officials and representatives of Houston development firm Hines Interests LP announced Wednesday that they were postponing their plans to build a 30-story office tower and a new $23 million Austin Museum of Art facility downtown on the museum-owned block at West Fourth and Guadalupe streets. Both the museum and Hines cited the grim economic climate as the reason the project is on hold.
Did they think no one was looking, announcing it New Year’s Eve? Well, we were.
Plans had called for the museum to occupy the east half of the prime downtown block with a three-story 40,000-square-foot building facing Republic Square Park. Hines was going to purchase — for an undisclosed sum — the west side of the lot for its office tower. Both the tower and the museum were to be designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, the firm is responsible for the master plan of the redesigned University of Texas campus, with principal Fred Clarke leading the design team. Preliminary designs were unveiled in February and suggested that the museum would be clean modernist structure featuring plenty of transparent glass.
The project had been scheduled to break ground in 2009 and with completion slated for 2011.
Representatives of the museum and Hines both say the project is merely postponed, not altogether canceled. But a spokesperson for Hines said the company would not renew an option that expired Wednesday to purchase half of the prime downtown lot which the museum has owned since the early 1980s. The sale of the land to Hines probably would have covered almost half of the $23 million needed to build the museum. And now with no partner anteing up, that leaves the museum flat out of luck — and money. The museum’s board has not decided whether to put the land back on the market.
The museum, by the way, selected Hines after 14 developers submitted proposals.
At 40,000 square feet, the proposed new museum would have more than double the museum’s existing space at 823 Congress Ave., where it rents the first floor of an office building. The museum, which has a $4.3 million annual budget, also has the historical 12-acre Laguna Gloria site in West Austin, which includes a restored 1916 villa that hosts small exhibitions and studio buildings for the museum’s art school.
This is the third time in nearly three decades that the museum and its leaders have tried — and failed — to build a downtown museum.
The first time the museum, then known as Laguna Gloria Art Museum, proposed building in downtown Austin was in the early 1980s. In 1985, voters approved $14.7 million in tax-supported bonds for the project. But the real estate bust of the late 1980s sent the project into a tailspin. Also, bickering among major arts groups caused the City Council to rescind its support of the then public-private venture.
Plans by famed architect Robert Venturi were shelved after $3 million was spent on design and administrative fees.
In 1995, the museum moved to its current location on Congress Avenue and made another bid to build downtown. In 1998, architect Richard Gluckman was selected to design a sleek, modern 140,000-square-foot building. A $64 million capital campaign was launched. At the same time, the museum returned $13.7 million in city bond money after museum leaders said they wanted control of their project and its land.
However, in 2001 museum officials decided to build the project in stages and settled on a $43 million first phase.
But then Austin’s high-tech economy fizzled even more and after the abrupt departure of then-director Elizabeth Ferrer in 2002, supporters of the project retreated. By early 2004, the Gluckman design had been scrapped. Of the $14.25 million the museum had raised for the project, all but $860,000 was spent on architect fees and fundraising and marketing expenses.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment
Got a favorite theater?
Got a favorite theater company in town? Given our plethora of thespians in Austin, picking a fav may hard. But give it a try.
This week, vote on austin360.com’s A-List for your favorite. Deadline is 11 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 6. Vote here.
