Critique

By Robert Campbell, FAIA

A critic is supposed to stimulate a
dialogue, not be one. So wrote the
great Clement Greenberg.
I seem to be one of only a
few critics around who isn’t crazy
about the new Museum of Modern
Art in New York. Maybe I’ll change
my tune after a few more visits—
Greenberg reversed his judgments
sometimes, and it’s greatly to his
credit—and if I do, I’ll perform a
mea culpa. But for now ….
It isn’t that MoMA’s bad. There’s
nothing bad about it. It’s just that it
isn’t good enough. It’s elegant, but it
lacks life and imagination, and those
are qualities we used to associate
with Modernism.
New museums often open with
a blizzard of hype. It’s hard for critics
not to be caught up in the excitement.
Years ago, that happened
with I.M. Pei’s East Building for the
National Gallery in Washington,
D.C. More recently, it happened with
Herzog & de Meuron’s Tate Modern
in London. I didn’t like either of
them at the time, and I still don’t.
And I think a consensus opinion,
over the years, has borne me out.
I say this despite the AIA’s recent
Twenty-five Year Award to the East
Building. I recall when the East
Building opened, the architect Jean
Paul Carlhian, who founded the AIA’s
Committee on Design, said: “It is an
airline terminal.” It was and it is, with
most of the art crammed into residual
spaces around the edges of a
Robert Campbell is the architecture
critic of The Boston Globe and
received the 2004 Award of Honor
from the Boston Society of Architects.
vast, self-regarding, nearly empty
concourse.
Anyway, here are my problems
with MoMA:
There isn’t any architecture.
The design architect, Yoshio
Taniguchi, was quoted more than
once as saying that if MoMA gave
him enough money, he could
make the architecture disappear.
Unfortunately, he’s succeeded.
Most of the museum consists of an
endless rabbit warren of more or
less identical white-walled galleries
with track-lit ceilings. Every attempt
is made to remove any sense of the
presence of architecture. A typical
gallery wall, for example, appears
not to touch the ceiling, the floor, or
the adjacent walls. Instead, all surfaces
are divided from one another
by a thin recessed shadow line. The
effect is to make the wall appear to
be floating, without substance. It
looks not like a wall, but like a white
projection screen. The paintings
on it, as a result, begin to feel like
projected images. You are in the
placeless, timeless world of the slide
lecture. Because the wall doesn’t
feel real, neither does the artwork.
You begin to feel unreal yourself.
Architecture has failed to create a
place that either the paintings or
you yourself can inhabit with a
sense of presence.
MoMA argues that it was trying
to avoid creating a “destination
building,” like Frank Gehry’s Bilbao,
the kind of building that can upstage
its contents. “It’s all about the art,”
one curator told me. But this is a
false dichotomy. The choice is not
between no architecture and too
much architecture. What’s wanted
is the right amount of architecture.
Many museums—to cite a few, the
Kimbell and Mellon by Louis Kahn;
the Maeght and Miro by Josep Lluis
Sert; the De Menil, Beyeler, and
Nasher by Renzo Piano; the Bregenz
by Peter Zumthor; the Pulitzer by
Tadao Ando; the Dia:Beacon by
Robert Irwin and OpenOffice—all
find ways to articulate space clearly
enough to give the artworks a place
within which to exist. And they all
do it without overwhelming the art.
Lost in space
Besides the walls, a similar game
is often played with the floor.
Sculptures, chairs, or other objects
stand on white platforms that seem
to float above the floor like rafts or
ice floes. Like the projection-screen

walls,
the floes remove the objects
from the world and the viewer and
make them a kind of disembodied
media experience.
There’s no parti. There’s
nothing wrong with white-walled
galleries up to a point. It’s fine to
step off the sidewalk in Chelsea or
57th Street, wander through three
or four gallery rooms, and return to
the street, the trees, and the cars.
Something happens, though, when
you multiply those few rooms into
a few dozen. The change becomes
not merely one of quantity, but also
one of quality. At that point, you
need a new and bolder architectural
idea to generate order. It’s
lacking at MoMA. The only attempt
to create a center that can magnetize
the galleries into some kind
of perceptible whole is a multistory
atrium that begins at the second
level and stops short of the roof.
Holes are cut into the sides of theatrium, so that you can sometimes
overlook it from a gallery. It’s a
sort of miniature, rectangular
Guggenheim. It’s wholly inadequate
as a parti idea. It’s insufficient to
orient you in a museum that at
times feels like a trackless waste
of white tundra. The museum’s
curators and architects have taken
the old MoMA and multiplied it
sideways and upward, without
feeling the need to for an organizing
concept.
The air-to-art ratio is too
high. The volume of empty air is
enormous in places like the entry
lobby, the atrium, and the secondfloor
and top-floor galleries. As a
result, artworks intended to confront
or absorb you with their bold size
and scale—Pollocks, Miros, Kellys,
Monets, and others—now find
themselves in spaces that are tailored
to fit them. In proportion to the
space they occupy, these big paint

The elegant Long Residence embodies Cutler

By Victoria Medgyesi

If architect James Cutler, FAIA, had his way, Orcas Island would be
nothing but blue and green—at least as seen from the air.
Cruising by helicopter over one of the most serene spots in the
Pacific Northwest’s San Juan Island chain, he managed to get his
message across despite the ear-splitting noise. “Look,” he shouted, as we
passed over a recently completed project. “Isn’t that great? You can barely
see the place at all.”
Honoring geographic conditions, responding to the integrity of
natural materials, and staying true to a romantic vision have long formed
the philosophic backbone of Cutler Anderson Architects. The firm’s
ability to translate that philosophy into sophisticated expressions of individuality
was what brought one couple to Cutler’s door.
Their site was steep but buildable, lush with second-growth
forest, and in possession of a sweeping view that overlooked a wide saltwater
channel and nearby Shaw Island. Just as fortuitous, says Cutler, was
the couple’s playful, experimental streak, which he shares. It was this set
of particulars and the relatively simple programmatic desires of the
client—a serious kitchen, truly private spaces, room for family gatherings—
that shaped the design of the vacation retreat.
Responding to the steep, wooded site, Cutler supported the
house on 18 sets of peeled-wood tripods engineered to provide enough
lateral stability to dispense with conventional shear elements. The tripods
were attached to western red cedar log beams by concealed steel plates
and bolts. Each was then visually punched through the floor and
extended down to a steel connection at the footing. A system of rafters
graduated in size relative to span resists the pull of gravity.
Cutler wrapped the building’s system of wooden bones in an
exterior skin of glass, aluminum, and cedar shingle. He then topped the

LIKE GOLDSWORTHY’S SCULPTURE,
CUTLER’S WORK MAKES A STRONG
STATEMENT ABOUT NATURE AND STRUCTURE.

shell with a layer of two-by-six spacers that support a large overhanging
metal roof and create an insulated cavity below it. Given the clients’
emphasis on privacy, the shed roof serves to visually insulate the structure
from the road above.
Each room in the 2,035-square-foot house opens to the expansive
cedar terrace through a set of 8-by-6-foot, custom sliding doors,
providing multifaceted views to all the interior spaces. A corridor running
the full length of the uphill side of the house provides access to all
of the rooms—the main living area, bedroom suite, guest room, and
two full baths.
Visitors to the house get their first peek of the building’s distinctive
wood tripods through low-to-the-ground windows along the
uphill entry side. The structural elements reach their full 15-foot-high
glory along the glass curtain wall facing the view. As was Cutler’s intention,
the tripods refer to the trees on the other side of the glass—an
idea inspired by Scottish sculptor Andy Goldsworthy’s installations
involving fallen trees.
Cutler credits his contractor, Lowell Alford, for executing an
unorthodox design that combines sophisticated engineering with
ancient materials. Alford even harvested the logs from land owned by
his father and hired a team of high school students to peel the logs prior
to off-site assembly.
Like Goldsworthy’s sculpture, Cutler’s work makes a strong
statement about nature and structure. It’s a soft/hard balance echoed in
the muted beech-wood floors, the whitewashed pine walls, and the clean
lines of the custom wood furniture and cabinetry, much of which was
designed by Cutler himself.

ING ARCHITECTUREAND ART BUILDat Prairie View A&M in Texas

At first,we were afraid to ask the brick what it wanted to be,” says
Michael Rotondi, FAIA, of his design for the Architecture and
Art Building at Texas’s Prairie View A&M University.“What if it
still wanted to be an arch? But then the answer came: It wanted
to dance.” So, Rotondi; his partner, Clark Stevens, AIA; and their firm, Roto,
experimented with the material, creating a sheathing, with great rhythmic
pleats and gaping flaps, that billows like a huge, windblown garment.
Brick was a given, mandated by the campus planning guidelines.
But Rotondi, a seasoned educator,who had headed the Southern California
Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) for a decade, saw this requirement—and
the entire project—as an opportunity to challenge the conventions of materials
and spark the imaginations of architecture students.
In interviewing for the commission, Rotondi told Ikhlas Sabouni,
Prairie View’s dean of architecture, that he was ready to “download 30 years
of experience as an architect and educator.”He proposed not only to review
the curriculum, but also teach the students, as part of the design process.
With the search committee’s approval, Sabouni soon signed on, dedicated,
as she puts it, to finding “an architect of national renown, who’d create a
laboratory for design, a beautiful structure that students could learn from.”
Just as Rotondi had been eager to embrace Native American culture
when he built at Sinte Gleska University, on South Dakota’s Rosebud
Reservation [record, November 1999, page 84], he hoped to gain an
understanding of Prairie View’s culture. Historically, this 130-year-old
branch of Texas A&M University, sited 45 miles northwest of Houston, has
had a predominantly African-American student body. In 2000, the school
won a $190 million Office for Civil Rights settlement to compensate for
long-term denial of adequate financial resources. The university allocated
the funds for four new structures for the following disciplines: architecture
(which shared a building with engineering), nursing, juvenile justice, and
electrical engineering. In addition to the architecture school, with its 225
undergraduate and graduate students, Roto’s $20 million, 108,000-squarefoot
building would house construction-science and community-development
programs, as well as the Community Urban Rural Enhancement
Service and the Texas Institute for the Preservation of History and Culture,
with its focus on African-American contributions to the state.
Rotondi began interacting with the students through nonarchitectural,
almost meditative exercises aimed, he says, at “heightening
awareness, concentration, and focus,”while opening windows to their subcultures.
After getting his pupils to savor and describe the textures and
unfolding flavors of “a fresh food item that a grandmother would prepare,”
he asked them to bring in a favorite piece of music. They diagrammed what
they heard on 6-foot-long pages, tracing melodic lines and rhythmic structures,
and relating the drawings back to the body’s movement through space.
“From gospel and rhythm and blues to bluegrass, all the music had roots in
East or West Africa,” the architect says.“So, right there, in those incremental
rhythms and long melody lines, we found our building’s ordering system.”
Though Rotondi considered various partis, he settled on a long
configuration with a central space and linear arrangement of studios—a
diagram that had proved successful in SCI-Arc’s latest incarnation. Prairie
View initially offered him a site buried at the back of the campus, but
Rotondi convinced the university president (a man committed to architecture
as an educational tool) to place the building as a gateway to the school.
As realized (in conjunction with HKS), the three-story, 450-footlong,
concrete-framed structure presents its most eclectic face on its south,
or entry, side.Here, a curving shell of brick wraps the cultural center, at the
building’s west end, while a brise-soleil of painted, perforated steel veils

DESERT BROOM LIBRARY in Phoenix as

Whether the result ofWill Bruder setting a new standard for
library design with his 1995 flagship Phoenix Central
Library, the city’s 2001 move to make the Phoenix Public
Library (PPL) a separate city department, or the rainmaking
by Toni Garvey, the city’s dynamo of a head librarian, Phoenix
continues to build libraries that break the mold and redefine the building
type. With the completion of the 15,000-square-foot Desert Broom
Library, in north Phoenix, Richärd+Bauer takes the concept of redefinition
to another level, creating a striking yet harmonious addition to the
desert landscape, clad in weathered steel.
Phoenix, the nation’s sixth-largest city, with a population of
nearly 1.5 million, has given the PPL, with its 14 public libraries, the freedom
and support it needs to create its identity with new services, new
branches, and a new attitude about library design. “Cities can go in one
direction or another with libraries,” says Garvey. “They can go with a
cookie-cutter, or they can create libraries that make a statement.”
Richärd+Bauer had worked on several libraries within Phoenix
and nearby Scottsdale, including a renovation of a Bruder-designed branch.
Its latest project, which includes a park, was a chance for the firm to create
a destination that would qualify for LEED Silver status, sit gently on the
virgin desert landscape of its 45-acre site, and stand out without imposing
on the land. “Communities are erasing the desert,” says principal Jim
Richärd, AIA. “We wanted to build responsibly. Also, in this kind of site,
little cornices don’t mean anything.You need big gestures.”
For Richärd, building in the arid Sonoran Desert meant preserving
the authenticity of what was there. Desert Broom’s site, with its
braided streams, arroyos, and abundance of wild brush and saguaros,
offered a metaphor that gave the project direction. A young saguaro needs
the shade and nutrients provided by an older, stronger tree or shrub, and
the design of the library embraces the metaphor physically—the library’s
25,000-square-foot roof extends 60 feet from the building, to shade visitors
and provide comfortable outdoor spaces—and philosophically.
“Libraries nurture intellectual growth,” says Richärd. “We took that concept
a few steps further.”
The brain nourishment begins before you even get to the front
door of Desert Broom. The building and parking lot are nestled in desert
wilderness, and visitors approach the entrance from the northwest, crossing
over an arroyo on a perforated-metal bridge. Immediately, the right
angles of the building are contradicted by a random pattern of slender, 4-
inch-diameter steel columns that continue throughout the building and