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 The quintessential Southwestern architect completes his first building in the Northeast. May 2001
Against that backdrop the Tang reads like an advertisement for modesty. This is especially true if you're familiar with the oversize scale of much of Predock's work from the 1990s. He is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and all his best-known buildings are in the Sun Belt, in places like Tampa and Phoenix: sprawling cities with soaring populations. There seems to be room in those projects for Predock to stretch out. By comparison the Tang, Predock's first public building in the Northeast, appears somehow reluctant and huddled against the cold. In form the museum resembles a theater Predock designed in the mid-1990s for the town of Ruidoso, which sits on the high plains of southern New Mexico. It has the same gently sloping, humpbacked silhouette and dramatic central space. But the Tang is a junior version, covering 39,000 square feet, a little over 7,500 of which is devoted to galleries. If you barge into the museum after following a route straight out of Manhattan--without taking time to adjust--the place looks almost miniaturized. The other way to approach the structure requires a much shorter trip: the brief walk a Skidmore student can now make from the center of campus to the new museum. It begins amid college buildings that are not the stately colonial lecture halls a visitor from out of town might expect, but instead a dismal collection of fiat-roofed brick designs by O'Neil Ford & Associates, a San Antonio firm. They were built in the mid-1960s after Skidmore decided to relocate from its 1903 campus in the heart of town to the outskirts. This means that the Tang is not in competition with traditionally handsome nineteenth-century collegiate architecture, as a new museum at nearby Colgate or Hamilton would be. It is instead a conspicuous new presence on a campus that has reason to be wary of newfangled architectural solutions. The museum is named for Oscar Tang, a donor whose late wife and daughter graduated from Skidmore, which was a women's school until 1971. Set away from central campus, the building doesn't bump into other pieces of architecture. Yet this is a small college, with just 2,200 students, and the site does offer Predock a new kind of location to test out his theory of how buildings ought to get along with their surroundings. Predock thinks about context in an active, expansive, even environmental way. "Contextualism is a word I rarely use because it has been trivialized by nostalgic readings," he wrote a few years ago. "It has to do with a larger arena, a deeper arena. You have to spin around 360 degrees and imagine what has evolved and will evolve on the site, figure out what the platform is that is now available to ground a building on." The main nod to that thinking at Skidmore is Predock's decision to place the museum within a snug semicircle of existing white pines. He plays off their forms as much as he echoes them: the building has little of the trees' natural verticality. An exception is a small tower that rises from the top of the building as an extension of the elevator shaft; it was originally supposed to be higher and more pronounced, a wry representation of the proverbial ivory tower. But in the end it is a tower with a small t, an excuse-me feature. Elsewhere Predock has done exactly the opposite of what a traditional contextual reading would seem to require. Thanks to its unusual shape--created by three main wings that extend out from a central atrium--the museum has multiple facades. Predock has put the most muted and conservative of these, covered with subtly rough cement block and punched through with thin windows covered in dark glass, on the sides of the building that greet visitors arriving from off-campus. From these angles the building could pass for a senior center by an unknown architect in Tempe. The more unconventional and inspired facades, covered in shimmering and slightly dimpled steel panels, are turned toward the center of the campus. The most daring feature is a pair of stairways--one made of cement and the other of steel--that rise from the ground level and intersect on a small roof-deck. The stairs are supposed to act as a metaphor for a university that prides itself on the interdisciplinary nature of its curriculum, with the museum standing as a kind of architectural crossroads. Maybe in summer, when visitors will be able to walk up to a gathering on the roof, the stairs will feel a more natural part of the building; in cold weather they are purely symbolic (in fact one of them was closed off for the winter), lonely and oversize ornamental touches atop an undersize building. Although the idea of a crossroads may look somewhat heavy-handed on the exterior, Predock addresses it more deftly inside, where an airy two-story atrium is the dominant feature. The building's three wings hold the main gallery, an auditorium and classrooms, storage space, and a multipurpose hall. Here the interdisciplinary intersection becomes a clearer idea, but ironically in reverse fashion: the atrium suggests a coming together in negative space, an interchange hollowed out. Given the small size of the museum, the interior spaces are complex. The galleries are hardly adventurous in themselves, but it's easy to lose your bearing in the connective spaces of the upper fioors, where light pours in from both above and below, and there are dead ends where you expect a stair and vice versa. This is not an unpleasant experience, and it seems to be part of Predock's plan. "I like to think of my buildings as pinball machines," the architect has said, "advancing the participant unexpectedly from one possibility to the next... It is never 'here's the front door, here's the back door, here's the most efficient route in between.'" Predock, who turns 65 this year, has designed everything from a cookie jar modeled on the radar-eluding Stealth fighter to an ambitious new baseball stadium for the San Diego Padres (with HOK). (Its construction has been held up because the bonds used to finance it are now at the center of a political scandal.) But he is known primarily as the leading architect of the American Southwest--so much so that when the Euro Disney planners decided in the late 1980s that they wanted a hotel with a Santa Fe theme, they called Predock. Predock's buildings in New Mexico and Arizona are heavy on horizontal lines hugging the earth, and borrow freely from Wright and Kahn as well as Native American and Hispanic styles. In a new book Catherine Slessor has linked the architect with Tadao Ando and Ricardo Legorreta as a leader of what she calls "concrete regionalism." However, Predock doesn't use concrete as heavily as he used to (unlike Ando, who can't seem to get enough of it these days), and at Skidmore the material makes only a fieeting appearance. The Tang reaches abstractness through economy. Having dispensed with the adobe references and brightly colored refiective cladding he's used frequently before, Predock is left with a latter-day Charles Moore homage, heavy on sloping forms with enough edges sliced off to give the architecture some chunky geometric fiair. The result is thoroughly accomplished and altogether friendly. It certainly represents a significant step forward for Skidmore and Saratoga Springs, both of which can now boast not only a piece of architecture worth a visit in its own right but also a major new cultural resource for the region. What the museum means for the reputation of Predock is not so clear, though it is at least consistent: with a modest scheme for a modest budget, he's achieved a modest success. |
