Pleasing the purist, not the tourist (National Post)
Bilbao, begone! With a stunning new museum, architect Moshe Safdie bucks a trend -- by designing a building that doesn't upstage the art
The defining moment of the current golden age of museums is easy to pinpoint: On the evening of Oct. 18, 1997, along the banks of the Nervion river in Bilbao, Spain, the upper crust of the international art scene were at the opening of the Guggenheim Bilbao, nibbling on tapas and craning to catch a glimpse of the titanium building's architect, Frank Gehry. The countless magazine spreads that followed showed the world that a signature building by a famous architect could, nearly in itself, revitalize a city. The "Bilbao effect" was born. Art became the oracle for a new kind of metropolis -- fill the lofts with artists, it said, turn the power plants into galleries, transform the docklands into "waterfront." Bilbao carried a clear message to mayors and museum directors everywhere: If you build it, they will come, and if you build it big and bombastic, they will come in droves. Soon, all museum directors were Medicis, their architects Michelangelos. It was only a matter of time before third-tier cities such as Milwaukee and St. Louis hired internationally famous architects to design their new museums.
Today, no museum Web site worth its salt is without a section on its imminent, or just completed, "expansion," "renovation," "renaissance" or "transformation." The rhetoric is eerie in its uniformity: The new building will display the museum collection in a "fundamentally new way." It will provide the public with a "richer and deeper experience." It will be an "exciting new public space." And, of course, the cafe and bookstore will be expanded.
Toronto is playing the game late, but well: The Art Gallery of Ontario has commissioned an original Gehry, to be unveiled in 2007. And ground will be broken later this spring for an addition to the Royal Ontario Museum designed by the white-hot Daniel Libeskind, fresh from his win in New York's World Trade Center competition. His "crystal" design for the ROM sticks close to the Bilbao playbook, with a bold, easily recognizable form -- the kind that looks really good in photographs. A scene stealer.
But in the sleepy Boston suburb of Salem, an old museum with a lot of money has hired a famous architect to design a building that is, well, quiet.
The venerable Peabody Essex Museum hopes its new US$125-million building, designed by renowned architect Moshe Safdie, will get noticed, but not by standing out. Call it the anti-Bilbao. As Dan Monroe, executive director and chief executive officer of the museum, explains in his office one Monday morning in December, "We didn't go after Frank Gehry -- intentionally."
A plain-spoken man in a grey suit, Monroe is unusual among museum directors for being neither a tweedy Harvard PhD nor an aesthete in Corbu glasses. But then again, the Peabody Essex is unusual among museums. With roots dating back to 1799, it is a museum of "art and culture" and a place of many personalities: Exhibitions over the past year have included contemporary Korean photography, Chinese and Japanese ceramic figures, American folk art and one that featured work of native and non-native art from such places as Alaska and Hawaii.
This eclecticism, combined with the Peabody Essex's location in Salem, Mass., kept the museum's profile low -- at least until 1993, when Monroe arrived. Since then, he has proven his skill at persuading people to part with their money (that most important of contemporary museum administrative tasks), raising more than US$140-million with nary a Monet or Tyrannosaurus in sight.
Sitting in his newly renovated corner office overlooking the Peabody Essex's unfortunate 1970s addition, Monroe explains the current thinking among museum directors: "People seem to fall on one of two sides of a divide: They go for the signature building, which becomes the major draw and is, in a sense, the museum; or they go for ... architecture designed to really expand and amplify the museum and its programs. Some museums have made the building the collection, but that's not a strategy we're pursuing. The challenge is a little steeper, frankly." If there's a trace of defensiveness in Monroe's voice, he has good reason: In the museum world today, a conservative gesture is a daring move.
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A client once asked Moshe Safdie, "Will you give us a modern or traditional building?" Safdie replied, "If I succeed, you will not be able to tell the difference." It is a frequently repeated anecdote, if only because it captures Safdie so well: his quiet arrogance, his intense sympathy for people and the buildings they inhabit, the exceptional skill with which he approaches the creation of three-dimensional space.
In 1995, near the dawn of the age of Bilbao and hundred-million-dollar museum-capital campaigns, the Peabody Essex went looking for an architect, winnowing an initial field of 30 candidates down to a few world-class finalists, among them Safdie, Japanese architect Arata Isozaki and American Robert Venturi, considered the father of post-modernism. Monroe and the other members of the selection committee knew any expansion at the Peabody Essex was bound to be an exercise in politics, both civic and aesthetic. Salem made its name by sending witches to the gallows, and, in the years following the American Revolution, it made its money through international trade. Today, it is a low-key, somewhat depressed commuter city a half-hour from Boston, with tarot-card readers and Wicca supply shops lining its pedestrian main street. But Salem's 19th-century urban fabric is remarkably intact, and the Peabody Essex lies smack at the centre of it -- indeed, its architecture collection includes some of it. "We were looking for an architect who could do a contemporary building," Monroe says, "but do one that was resonant with traditional Salem architecture and would fit in with the urban fabric here." And do that without, as Monroe puts it, "Disneyfying Salem."
Safdie lacks the megalomaniacal quality that often seems a prerequisite for famous architects. On the day I meet with him in Boston, he is sitting comfortably at a big desk surrounded by family photographs, dressed in his trademark collarless white shirt. Born in Israel and educated at Montreal's McGill University , Safdie got famous fast for his design for Habitat '67, an innovative apartment complex in Montreal. Then, in 1978, he relocated his family and his architectural practice to Boston, where he became the director of the Urban Design Program at Harvard. While he continues to serve on the Harvard faculty, the 50 employees of Moshe Safdie and Associates keep busy in an ivy-covered former industrial building near Harvard Yard. The firm's list of current projects worldwide includes new airport terminals in Toronto and Tel Aviv; government buildings in Washington, D.C., Alabama and Massachusetts; museums in Jerusalem, India and Savannah. There's also a master plan for a new city of 200,000 in Israel. The Peabody Essex may be far from the biggest of these, but it embodies a question that has long been at the heart of Safdie's work: What is the architectural embodiment of compromise? Whether in Israel, India or the National Mall, in Washington, Safdie's buildings are monumental, but their monumentality has a subtle symbolism that is often more humanist than nationalist. Salem's political terrain may seem like a park compared to Jerusalem or Washington. But the Peabody Essex still had to navigate the cultural-political minefield of the contemporary museum. The new building will attempt to display art and supporting cultural materials together, an idea more radical than it sounds.
Museums began as outgrowths of people's homes, with the art often chocked to the ceiling. By the time modernism reached full swing in the years after the First World War, art was being presented in austere, white-walled galleries, isolated from time and place as if to emphasize the individual genius of the artist. At the same time, cultural artifacts -- and often non-Western art -- were relegated to "natural history" museums, a move that carried a thinly veiled judgment on the people who made them. By now, historians and curators have accepted that every decision they make -- not only in which museum to place a work of art, but also how and next to what it is presented -- can be freighted with political significance. At a place such as the Peabody Essex, these decisions can be especially tricky. And yet when Monroe says the new Peabody Essex will bring "art and the world in which it's made together," he speaks with the weight of recent museum scholarship behind him: In a post-modern world, the lines have blurred. A trash can may teach us as much about a culture as a painting.
Taking out a fountain pen and beginning to sketch, Safdie explains his approach to the museum building. "I saw that the problem was one of scale. Salem is very delicate in scale, very domestic. So I broke the building down to the idea that these are pavilions that are like houses, and added to that the idea that light is coming between the pavilions." On a blank sheet of paper he draws what has become the Peabody Essex's most recognizable feature, subtle as it is: a line of five connected house-like buildings, their varying shapes plucked from the profiles of Salem's cemetery tombstones. It is the sort of reference that in other hands might seem morbid, but Safdie makes it playful. "There was a wonderful charm about these shapes," he chuckles, "and they were domestic, they were like architecture in small scale." While no one would mistake the pavilions for actual houses, they aren't abrupt on the street, and Safdie does not reduce the reference to caricature. On the contrary, their monumentality projects a sense of timelessness, a characteristic Safdie once described as "the most meaningful quality one can ascribe to a building."
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It has become an unwritten rule for new museums that, aside from a bookstore and caf�, they all must include two features, the yin and yang of contemporary museums: natural light in the galleries and a grand indoor space. The first is mainly technical -- a subtle spatial game that, when done best, museum visitors never notice, except perhaps when they remark upon how pleasant the galleries are. In comparison, the atrium demands high drama. As architectural historian Victoria Newhouse puts it in her book Towards a New Museum, the museum atrium has become the sacred space of our age, the church nave of a secular society. And, not coincidentally, it is also the part of a museum most likely to look like a shopping mall. For Safdie, this was the explicit challenge at the Peabody Essex. "I realized how critical it was to transcend the kind of glass-roofed commercial atria that our world has proliferated with," he says. "Some of the geometry should be evocative." The roof he came up with resembles the inside of a whale, or perhaps the hull of a ship -- forms that echo the marine tradition of the museum. (Although, as Safdie notes, "They're trying to play that down, I'm not sure why, but in fact it's a powerful part of the museum.")
When I visit, the museum is still filled with construction workers, but the subtleties of Safdie's design are becoming visible. After entering along the former city street, now covered by a glass spine, the space opens up to the atrium, which feels like an Italian piazza -- simultaneously bright, airy, contained and intimate. It is a cold, bright day, with low, passing clouds casting shadows on the brick and stone. Wearing a hard hat, Dan Monroe raises his voice over the rumble of construction equipment: "We're taking a line that a museum should be a place where lots of things occur," he says. "Yes, the building is an attraction, we hope, and we believe it will be, but the biggest attraction is the sum total. The museum that we're unveiling is not a museum that's been seen before, here or anywhere."
Our walkthrough is making Monroe late for his next appointment, with donors. When we exit the unfinished Safdie building, their car is already out front -- a sleek black Lincoln Town Car idling on the empty streets of Salem.
