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Williams and Tsien design their first public building in New York.
By Paul Goldberger
June 2002
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Tod Williams and Billie Tsien's American Folk Art Museum, among the
finest new buildings in New York, makes ingenious use of its limited
space.
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Photos: Michael Moran
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It is rare that a profoundly important building slips in under the radar,
especially in New York. The American Folk Art Museum isn't entirely a surprise,
of course. This small institution has owned land on West 53rd Street adjacent
to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) since the 1970s, and in the '80s commissioned
Emilio Ambasz to design a new museum with a high-rise office tower
above it. That project was widely admired but never got built. It was ambitious
beyond the reach of the institution, which in 1997 hired Tod Williams and
Billie Tsien to design a different building that would contain only the
museum and be not much bigger than a town house. Williams and Tsien's design,
like much of their work, involved a great deal of spatial intricacy. It
was not easy to visualize the finished building, except to note that
it would be surrounded by a vastly expanded MoMA. Because Williams and Tsien
didn't have room for much exterior architecture except a street facade of
white bronze-alloy panels that would not be installed until the very end
of construction, there was all the more reason not to pay too much attention
to the building as it rose slowly on 53rd Street.
But now, here it is. If this is not quite the finest piece of architecture
in New York since the Guggenheim, as one critic stated, it is pretty close.
Williams and Tsien have been waiting a long time for the chance to design
a public building in New York; they have practiced here since the 1970s,
but like so many architects of distinction they have been prophets without
honor in their own land. Their important work--the Neurosciences Institute
in La Jolla, an indoor swimming pool at Cranbrook, a residential college
at the University of Virginia--is far away and involves different kinds
of problems. The firm's only previous freestanding New York project
was an Upper East Side town house for developer Jerry Speyer.
Williams and Tsien work slowly and with a passion for the most basic realities
of architecture: space, light, proportion, texture, materials. They are
not ideologues, despite their deep and unwavering belief in Modernism, and
they are not the kind of architects who think in terms of theory. I don't
think they have a theory, which makes them unusual these days among architects
of such intelligence and discipline. They believe in something quite traditional,
which you might call experiential architecture. Their architecture is not
traditional, of course, but their determination to see architecture as sensual,
and tectonic, is. The building, and the way it feels to experience it, is
the thing. To Williams and Tsien, the idea is in the reality of the building.
It is a way of looking at architecture that owes more to Mies and Kahn than
it does to Eisenman or Libeskind.
It's curious that the American Folk Art Museum uses the same building type
as Williams and Tsien's other completed New York building, an actual town
house. It is tall and relatively thin, and you know from the moment you
enter that the space will be tightly compressed, that Williams and Tsien
will have to struggle to open it up and make something of it. They succeed
brilliantly--so much so that I am tempted to say that this building belongs
on the short list of truly original spatial exercises within the town-house
volume. It's a list that begins with Sir John Soane's Museum, in London,
with which Williams and Tsien's building has every right to be compared,
and goes on to include Paul Rudolph's house renovation on East 63rd Street
and his own residence on Beekman Place.
Williams and Tsien have made monumental space here, at no cost to intimacy
or the usefulness of the museum as a gallery. There is a grandeur of scale
that you would not expect in a building of less than 30,000 square feet,
and somehow the small spaces do not feel arbitrary or left over. There is
natural light, city views, openness, and enclosure. The building has multiple
stairways and yet does not feel either overwhelmed by circulation or as
if its design has been determined by it. The Williams and Tsien layout is
exceedingly clear, even though the place is complicated. I would call it
a Chinese box, except that it seems so wrong a metaphor for a museum of
American folk art and there really aren't any hidden elements. In fact,
my favorite trick of all here is that there aren't any tricks.
You enter by slipping under the hanging facade panels into a high vestibule.
Beyond, projecting out into the rear, is the largest single gallery, and
the closest the building comes to a flexible white box. Most visitors
take an elevator from the entry hall to the fifth floor and walk
down level by level, but it can work going up as well. The feel of each
floor is different, although the basic exhibition areas, which run
along the northeast side and the front, are roughly similar. (The elevator-service
core is on the west.) But Williams and Tsien have done interesting things
like inserting a spectacular, tiny hidden stair of wood treads between the
fifth and fourth floors; you come upon it behind a wall as a total
surprise, like a secret passage, and it is nearly impossible to resist following
it down. The third and fourth floors are connected by a much bigger
monumental stair, which is just as anomalous in its way: you do not expect
to see a grand staircase in the middle of the building. Opening up two floors
in the heart of the structure, the stair is concrete and runs through what
passes for an atrium, slipping below a great weather vane in the form of
a larger-than-life-size Indian. Its underside, visible from around the other
side of the third floor, is as sculptural as the stair itself.
I am tempted just to go on listing wonderful details--the concrete wall
on which other weather vanes have been mounted (one of the more successful
aspects of a not always successful installation); the main stair, which
runs from bottom to top in the northwest corner of the building and is framed
by a high panel of heavy, wavy green cast-resin fiberglass; the slivers
of views to 53rd Street and the Midtown skyline from in between the facade
panels on the south side of the building. But the whole is more than the
sum of these enticing parts: this fully wrought composition is an essay
in spatial intricacy that never seems fussy or overwrought and manages to
feel at once exhilarating and serene.
I wish I could say the same for the way the art has been installed by Ralph
Appelbaum Associates, who had the challenge of fitting more into this
building than it probably should contain. The place feels cluttered, and
Appelbaum's installation sometimes makes it seem busier than it has to be,
with some wall panels painted dark colors and a few pieces hanging half
on the panels and half off. The building feels less hospitable to paintings
than to three-dimensional objects. However they are installed, objects seem
to float in the space, and the space welcomes that. I felt here as
I always have at the Kimbell Art Museum, Louis Kahn's masterpiece, which
seems to welcome sculptural objects into its space more than two-dimensional
artworks onto its walls.
And the facade: the brooding panels look as if they are oozing and have
something of the look of fossils, cut and sliced. The color is a silvery
greenish bronze. Although darker than Williams and Tsien expected it to
be, it has more dignity than the color in their early renderings, which
is softer and almost yellowish. But the wonderful thing is the way in which
heavy pieces of cast metal have been arranged, origami-like, to make a folded-in
composition that feels like handcrafted sculpture. The magnificent
facade achieves a middle ground between being a piece of sculpture and being
street frontage in the tradition of New York town houses. The effect of
its 63 panels hung in three planes is to make it appear colossal, a small
building acting very large and very, well, not quite ominous but certainly
serious. This is not a casual facade, but you want to touch it and go in
and around it. And you do not have to look at it for long before you realize
that this is as sensual a building as New York has seen in a very long time.
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