Posted on Sun, May. 25, 2003
architecture
A crystalline cave, turned inside out
SJSU FINDS DRAMATIC DESIGN FOR NEW MUSEUM
By Alan HessFor its new museum, the School of Art and Design at San Jose State University searched for a design to transcend the ordinary. To find the right architect, it held an open competition among architects big and small, young and established, foreign and domestic.
It worked. The new Museum of Art and Design will be something like a crystalline cave turned inside out. The design promises to be more remarkable than Mario Botta's design for San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art and fresher than James Polshek's Cantor Center at Stanford. It could rival Herzog & deMeuron's de Young Museum, now under construction in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.
The San Jose State design -- by WW, a young firm in Somerville, Mass., collaborating with San Francisco's SMWM -- is infused with imagination and intelligence. It displays a caliber of creative effort that, if followed more often around here, would raise San Jose and Silicon Valley into international leadership in architecture.
Busy intersection
The 41,000-square-foot museum will sit at a busy campus intersection, across from the brawny 1972 Student Union designed by Ernest Kump, the inventive Bay Area architect responsible for Foothill College. The flat-roofed four-story block will close in the fourth side of the courtyard of the existing U-shaped art and design building.
WW adroitly responds to the site by carving out much of the ground-floor level in soft, curving forms and openings that invite you in. At the corner is a shapely cafe, with steps leading to a second-floor terrace tucked under the building's overhang. The west end opens in a large portal to the courtyard. The design wisely reinforces a major strength of the campus, where large quads are complemented by smaller, quieter courtyards.
But it's the museum's exterior surface that confirms its true originality.
Sunlight can play havoc with delicate artwork, and museums are wary of it. This building won't have many conventional windows. This challenge led WW to an intriguing result. The building will shimmer and glow with a marvelous skin of glass and concrete. The flat surfaces will be covered with terrazzo-like precast concrete panels, but instead of chips of colored stone, the surface will be strewn with small chunks of recycled glass, ground smooth.
Meanwhile, in the portals, voids and terraces cleanly sliced out of this monolithic block will run large, curving ribbons of laminated glass emerging from within. These laminated walls are up to a foot thick (with a vacant cavity at their center) and constructed of layers of glass, about a half-inch thick, one on top of the other like a tall layer cake. You'll be looking at the glass on edge, so it will take on a deep green color. Through these translucent walls, the interior will glow like a lantern at night.
Inside, the glass-laminated walls also define and wrap the museum's public spaces. Curving walls will lean inward and outward in places -- reinforcing the image of a cavern. And yet the walls' neatly cut radial corners and cleanly pared surfaces will also give them a machined appearance. The result will certainly be a public space unlike any other in Silicon Valley, if not California.
The galleries (including a 28-foot-high main gallery on the second level) will be more neutral in color and surface. As the architects turn this conceptual design into a real building, the challenge will be to retain the vivid image of the flowing ribbons and yet achieve a credible transition to the simpler galleries.
Aladdin's cavern
These astonishing surfaces tread a fine line between nature and artificiality. The ribbons of laminated glass echo the curving lines of nature but they have a constrained, almost mannered, mechanical regularity about them, like the bands of a fan belt. The terrazzo-like panels have the wondrous glint of Aladdin's cavern studded with gems, yet they also have the smooth sheen and manufactured proportions of sheets of Formica. This ambivalence is at the heart of the design's aesthetic, an inquiry into our era's distance from nature and dependence on machines.
It reflects trends in international architecture, seen especially in Dutch architecture by MVRDV, W.J.M. Neutelings, Rem Koolhaas and others (WW partners Ron Witte and Sarah Whiting worked with Koolhaas). Though revisiting the high modernism of the 1950s and 1960s, these designers are reinterpreting it with richer textures and eccentric forms.
WW's design is not yet official. The school is pushing for changes in the galleries to make them more practical. Will the strengths of the design be watered down? And will the rough points in the design be refined into a cohesive whole? We'll see. Opening day is four or five years away. First the school must come up with donors to pay for the museum. In fact, this would be the ideal building for an audacious Silicon Valley mogul to present to his or her home town.
But WW and the School of Art and Design have taken the essential first step to achieve great architecture. Maybe it will work out, maybe it won't. But they are to be applauded for taking risks that could pay off magnificently.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alan Hess writes about architecture twice a month in Arts & Entertainment. Write him at the Mercury News, 750 Ridder Park Drive, San Jose, Calif. 95190 or e-mail him at alhess@aol.com.