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 Steven Holl's new Bellevue Art Museum seeks to animate a core stuck between suburb and city. June 2001
Notwithstanding all this, and despite decades of painstaking efforts to create a true urban core, it is still a place hovering precariously between urban and suburban status. But now the new Bellevue Art Museum (BAM), designed by Steven Holl, may be a catalyst and harbinger of an emerging urbanism. During the last decade or so, the region has been busily commissioning major architects to design museums. These include Venturi & Scott Brown's Seattle Art Museum; the Washington State History Museum by Charles Moore, in Tacoma; Gwathmey Siegel's Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington; the Frye Art Museum, by Olson Sundberg (now Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen); Frank Gehry's EMP rock-music museum; and a pair now under construction in Tacoma, Antoine Predock's Tacoma Art Museum and the Museum of Glass, by Arthur Erickson. BAM is the first of these to be built in an urban-suburban setting and stands apart from all of them except Gehry's. Unfazed by the hybrid neighborhood, the museum is an unapologetically avant-garde design. The institution itself is also unconventional: BAM has no permanent collection, and before its new building opened it was housed in the top floor of a shopping center. Just as Bellevue is grappling with its ambiguous urbanity, the museum is working to develop a new institutional form that is part art museum in the usual sense, part artists' hangout, part educational institution, and part community center (with a 54-year-old art fair thrown in for good measure). Consonant with its environment, BAM also seems more inclined to blend art and technology than its peers. Holl, a Northwest native son who once worked for an architectural firm near the museum site, was acutely aware of Bellevue's suburban character and aimed--with an idealism bordering on improbability--to have his small building make a big difference. He calls BAM "a prototype for urbanizing suburban sprawling zones." This means that it is built to its lot lines and places its parking underground, arranged so that visitors must go outside, use the sidewalk, and enter through the front door rather than take an internal elevator. It is also sited along an officially designated pedestrian corridor--a one-lane thoroughfare far more humanely scaled than the downtown's typically wide auto-oriented streets. The museum's bookstore and coffee shop face that fledgling walking street, and on nice days chairs and tables will occupy the sidewalk. There are also glass canopies to shelter walkers from the legendary (but somewhat exaggerated) local rain. But in many ways BAM makes little concession to its surroundings--and rightfully so. It's a bold red concrete cube, irregularly cut into and leavened by marine aluminum panels, large windows, and greenish glass clerestories. Although most of its neighbors are much larger, this is the toughest and cleverest kid in the 'hood--and needs to be just to hold its own. With three stories and 36,000 square feet of floor space, it pales in the presence of its huge commercial neighbors. At night the aluminum walls and underside of the entry portal become screens for artist-created color projections, and the street tough turns into a refined after-dark boulevardier. BAM accommodates a wide range of spaces, including indoor and outdoor exhibition galleries, offices, a library, classrooms, workshops, an artist-in-residence studio, and an auditorium. Many of these are wrapped around a curved, ceremonially staired two-story skylit atrium (the Forum) that extends vertically to a visually superb outdoor gallery and terrace (the Court of Light). A prolific writer with poetic inclinations, Holl delights in devising names for his building parts and creation myths for the overall structures. This literary exercise may aid him in the design process, act as a welcome crutch for journalists on deadline, convince clients of the desirability of his vision, and help those clients in fund-raising efforts, but it may also divert energy that might otherwise be devoted to basic planning and design refinements. Holl rightly values--even worships--the sensory and metaphorical qualities of natural light, but his finishes and details often don't match the power or poetry of his conception. A gifted watercolorist, he uses the medium to envision his buildings, but often his surfaces and spaces are designed no further than what such sketches can register. It's a double-edged sword; Holl's environments can have the luminosity, mystery, or deft minimalism of a good aquarelle, but they can also be as oversimplified and unresolved as a broad and fuzzy brushstroke. This is also manifested in problems of workmanship and materials--such as cracked floors, inconsistent surfaces, misaligned joints--that a more construction-focused designer would have been able to avoid. BAM exhibits a problem common in modern art museums of high architectural ambition: the difficult-to-resolve tension between the perceived need for design originality on one hand, and the somewhat unpredictable exhibition requirements and need for workable art backdrops on the other. Although this is not his first museum, and he is very much a part of the art world, Holl can still put personal expressive values ahead of the needs of art. BAM's long, skinny, bent galleries exult in their own form and are spatially impressive when empty, but they are not shaped in a way that provides particularly good viewing conditions or proper wall space for exhibition. The artist's studio has a heat-trapping, south-facing window wall rather than steady northern light, and the galleries' clerestory windows, some of them also south-facing, will make light control an ongoing task. It will take BAM some time to learn how to work with its quirky new quarters. The two main galleries had to be retrofitted with an intervening false wall even before the building opened. Yet this may be appropriate to such an unconventional institution, and a difficult building may lead to inventive programming. Artists can certainly help here. The opening show, Luminous, included a monumental yet nearly weightless installation by sculptor Dan Webb that invigorated the atrium: two chains of normal-size lampshades that start out at eye level then expand dramatically as they rise two stories to meet the round skylights. This work celebrates BAM's grand space while making a visual pun about its illumination. Clearly there are potentially many other enlightening artistic commentaries on this idiosyncratic building that could be made over its lifetime. For all its difficulties, this is a very welcome building. BAM's administration was an ambitious and supportive client, bringing visual sophistication, an expanded cultural presence, and a bit of intellectual excitement to downtown Bellevue. Future downtown projects also promise to advance the city's urbanistic agenda. A nearly completed expansion of the immense Bellevue Square shopping center (BAM's previous home) includes sidewalk-oriented retail space. Lincoln Square, a huge project under construction across the street from the museum, will provide mixed use and activity of unmatched local scope: a low podium and two towers (one of them 41 stories tall) will contain offices, a hotel, condos, retail shops, restaurants, a fitness center, and a multiplex cinema. Capably designed by James Cheng, a University of Washington classmate of Holl's, it too will be street-oriented and will have welcome facade transparency at its lower floors. Through its size and diversity, the complex promises to become the city's most active element, which will surely work to BAM's benefit. There is also serious talk of a downtown performing arts center; should this proceed, one would hope that its backers will match BAM's aspirations. Might all these efforts coalesce to give Belle-vue a new identity, form a pedestrian-friendly down-town, and make it a model for similar edge-city cores? If successful, it will be due in no small part to the cheeky red building that was eager to stand up for urbanism and architectural imagination even though it was far from the biggest kid on the block. John Pastier is a Seattle-based architecture critic and design consultant. |
