Modern Contextualism
Use contemporary design to preserve historic buildings.
By Christopher Hawthorne
August/September 2002
Deferential, subtle, and farsighted are hardly the adjectives we associate
with contemporary urban architecture, particularly of the Modernist stripe.
But Boston and New York--two aging cities where new buildings have not always
been kind to the urban fabric--are poised to benefit from an emerging
strain of stylish but preservation-minded Modernism. The new approach is
mature without being dowdy, thoughtful without being somnolent, and careful
to learn from history without feeling the need to strike a historicist pose.
These new designs not only cede the limelight to adjoining architecture
but also--in great contrast to the expansionist, even isolationist, attitude
of the International Style--seem to invite and gain energy from tight spaces.
At the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, a hugely ambitious new addition and
master plan by Foster and Partners promises to restore to prominence the
original 1909 building by Guy Lowell. A solidly handsome piece of neoclassical
architecture, it features a U-shaped main wing opening up to Huntington
Avenue and a T-shaped section at the rear, facing north to the Fenway and
connecting to Frederick Law Olmsted's Emerald Necklace. Various additions
over the years had gradually filled up the space between the two wings
and extended the museum out to the east and west, muddling Lowell's Beaux
Arts sense of circulation and hierarchy. I. M. Pei's 1981 addition on the
western side of the museum added much-needed space but moved the main entrance
to the edge of the parking lot, with all the grandeur that implies.
The Foster plan, which is mainly the work of Spencer de Grey, a partner
in the firm, will clear out the architectural muck that has accumulated
in the center of the museum, inserting a steel-and-glass spine running eastp;west
between Lowell's northern and southern facades. It will completely replace
a 1968 addition by Hugh Stubbins on the east side and, on the west, engulf
Pei's wing while keeping it intact.
Visitors will again enter beneath Lowell's proud portico; two new enclosed
glass courtyards filled with trees will create a kind of public square
inside the museum, and the neglected but fully articulated rear facade will
benefit from some new attention as the museum reconnects with parkland
to the north. The choice of granite blocks at the base of the Foster addition,
to match Lowell's building, should please die-hard contextualists. Still,
there's no mistaking the fact that Foster's new building, with its strong
profile and clean ornament-free lines, is proud of its place in the
Modernist tradition. The renovation will be done in phases and might take
at least 15 years to complete; the first phase is expected to cost
about $425 million, with $180 million of that earmarked for construction
and another $180 million slotted for the museum's endowment.
"There is nothing more dispiriting than a public building where you
don't have a sense of where you are," de Grey says, describing what
had befallen the MFA. "We're adding a completely new building, running
eastp;west, but at the same time bringing back the northp;south
axis that is so important to the classical symmetry of the building. It's
a dialogue. But we're trying to bring the center of gravity back where it
belongs."
At the same time, adds the MFA's director, Malcolm Rogers, "we wanted
a building that was clearly of our time, one that made a bold statement
and could itself be a landmark here in Boston. There is now a sense that
Boston, like any other major city, should be trying to achieve great contemporary
buildings. That has not always been the case here."
At Manhattan's Morgan Library a similar effort is under way on a smaller
scale. The Morgan's campus of three historic buildings--the Morgan House,
a brownstone from 1852 that was expanded in 1888; McKim, Mead & White's
1906 library for Pierpont Morgan, which was one of New York City's first
designated landmarks; and the 1928 Annex--will be spiffed up and reframed
by Renzo Piano, working with the New York firm Beyer Blinder Belle.
In a $75 million project set to break ground next year, Piano will add three
new starkly modern pavilions in glass and steel, including a courtyard.
There will be a windowless, far-from-shy steel cube balanced between the
annex and the library, a 20-by-20-by-20-foot room displaying medieval and
renaissance illuminated manuscripts.
The new scheme digs deep underground--43,000 of the 69,400 new square footage
will be tucked away below street level, including an auditorium seating
280 and a vault to store the museum's collections--as a way to add significant
space while keeping the modest scale of the campus intact. Like Foster,
Piano will relocate the entrance--in this case, from 36th Street around
the corner to Madison Avenue--in an effort to restore some clarity of movement
inside. "This institution, like many others, has over time evolved
in a sort of higgledy-piggledy way," says Charles Pierce Jr., the Morgan's
director. "The traffic pattern is a little confusing even to people
who know the library well--and very confusing to those who don't."
Piano's proposal replaces several twentieth-century additions with a single
unifying insertion of new architecture. "We were sitting at dinner
one night," deputy director Brian Regan recalls, "and Renzo literally
sketched it out on a napkin for us. He said, 'Look, you've got these three
very important buildings, and all the rest of the buildings simply don't
help. What I propose is to knit the three together with the addition of
three new buildings, light connections, and an excavation.'"
A strong new axis will lead to the courtyard from the new entrance, which
will be covered in glass and painted steel panels (the color, like many
aspects of the Piano plan, has yet to be determined) and replace the Voorsanger
& Mills courtyard addition of 1990. From there visitors will be able
to orient themselves in the campus and to see the long-hidden northern facade
of the McKim library. The various additions over the years had, Regan says,
"cut off the McKim building, so that it seemed distant. It clearly
needed to be brought into greater prominence."
At the beginning of the process, the Morgan sought out Piano, who initially
declined their offer to enter an invited competition between three other
well-regarded firms: Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, Steven Holl
Architects, and Tod Williams Billie Tsien & Associates. But their work
left Pierce and the board lukewarm. Simply put, Pierce says, "none
of the three proposals was as respectful of the existing three historic
buildings as we felt was important." At the proverbial eleventh hour,
after a period of what Morgan offi-cials call serious soul-searching,
the competition was scrapped, and the museum again approached Piano. The
second time was the charm.
The city's Landmarks Preservation Commission approved the renovation plan
unanimously earlier this year. "Piano's proposal," says its chair,
Sherida Paulsen, "transforms the institution and still allows the public
to appreciate the truly historic buildings on the site as themselves. They
won't be blended or blurred by what's being added. They'll read the way
they were meant to. That's why this is an act of preservation, and why it's
contextual."
There have been some appealing uses of the Modernist idiom in additions
to prominent buildings during the last decade; quite a few of them, like
the Rose Center at the American Museum of National History, are the work
of James Polshek. Modernist museum additions are certainly nothing new:
they go at least as far back as Louis Kahn's new wing for the Yale Art Gallery,
which opened in 1953. But in those cases the new buildings have been showcases--unable
or unwilling to take a backseat to the architecture they were attaching
themselves to--or have pulled an existing building, sometimes uncomfortably,
in a new direction.
In the Piano and Foster projects--and in the case of Annabelle Selldorf's
terrific renovation of a 1914 Carrère and Hastings mansion on
Fifth Avenue in New York to house a small new museum called Neue Galerie--we're
seeing a different approach entirely, one where sleek contemporary design
is happy to act as platform or connective tissue. At least on a conceptual
level, the projects by Piano and Foster behave more like an accommodating
liquid than an unyielding solid, filling in gaps and allowing the older
buildings to float atop a pure, clean new surface.
Of course, the virtues of the Morgan and MFA plans have a lot to do with
the specific talents of the architects involved, both of whom have
the rare ability to combine elegance and a strong identity in their work.
It's no accident that Foster and Piano are veterans of a European architectural
culture that has been more successful than the United States at adding contemporary
buildings to snug urban spaces. Indeed both were able to win these commissions--and
help soothe the anxieties of preservationists and NIMBYish neighbors--simply
by pointing to similar projects they'd completed in Europe. In Foster's
case those include his recent Great Court at the British Museum and his
Carré d'Art in Nîmes, which adjoins a Roman temple; for Piano
it was his renovation of Constantin Brancusi's studio in Paris, just around
the corner from the legendarily aggressive Pompidou Center, which he designed
with Richard Rogers. The Brancusi Museum was carefully reconstructed in
a new location, and set off by a kind of Modernist protective coating, as
part of Piano's overall renovation of the Pompidou complex in the late 1990s.
"What we learned by looking at that project," Pierce says, "was
that Piano was capable of designing something quiet and elegant and unobtrusive--all
the things the Pompidou is not."
And, finally, it's no accident that Piano (b. 1937) and Foster (b.
1935) have nearly a century of architectural experience between them. For
this kind of project to succeed, Regan says, "you need a mature architect.
That doesn't necessarily mean mature age-wise. But you need a sensibility
that is not trying to prove itself." As Rogers, the MFA's director,
puts it, "If this is maturity, then I'm all for maturity." |
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MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON
By inserting a modern east-west axis between the original buildings of Boston's
Museum of Fine Arts, Foster and Partners's Spencer de Grey is actually restoring
the architectural virtues of the original 1909 Guy Lowell building.
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON
The MFA's new addition (above) will be completed in phases, the first being
the east wing--scheduled for completion in 2007--which can be seen in this
rendering (below) of the Fraser Garden Court.
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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MORGAN LIBRARY, NEW YORK
Much of Renzo Piano's planned addition to the Morgan Library campus in
Manhattan will be constructed underground, as visible in this cross section
(above). Above ground, the scheme (below) will eliminate distracting additions
and subtly connect the three significant existing buildings.
Courtesy Renzo Piano Building Workshop and Morgan Library |
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NEUE GALERIE, NEW YORK
Annabelle Selldorf restored the original architecture of the 1914 Carrère and
Hastings mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York--now the Neue Galerie museum--while
adapting it to display German and Austrian art.
Neue Galerie |
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